The Time-Traveling Outlaw (13 page)

Oh God
, he thought. This was how he wanted to wake up every morning for the rest of his life. 

Her mouth felt incredible, her tongue working against the bottom of his shaft, her soft lips gliding up and down, while the warm wetness made him glisten as she lifted up each time. 

A few more strokes and then she lifted her mouth off of him. “Good morning,” she said, smiling. 

“Good morning,” he said, careful not to move an inch. He didn’t want to disturb what she was doing. 

“I woke up and you were like this already,” she said, grasping the base and waving his own cock at him. “I wanted to see what you tasted like.” She moved her mouth down on top of him again and maintained eye contact while she moved up and down on him some more.

“I’m glad you did,” he said, letting out a nervous little cough. He was euphoric, this strong, beautiful woman from the depths of his past giving herself to him like this. He hadn’t thought much about the sexual habits of people on the frontier, about how often men received oral sex from their women. But this was clearly not the first time for Sally Macintosh. She knew exactly what she was doing, and she was highly skilled.

Maybe she somehow keyed into his thoughts, because she pulled her mouth up again. “You don’t think any less of me for doing this, do you?” she said. 

“No,” he said quickly. “God, no. I think the opposite.”

She smiled, that bright, beautiful smile of hers, still holding him, and he thought he just might explode right there, but he tried to hold it in. 

“That’s good,” she said. “I reckon we’re both enjoying this, but just right now I want to feel you inside me again. That okay with you?”

He nodded vigorously. The temptation of running away with her was so strong. She sat up in bed, pulling her nightgown over her head, the shafts of sunlight streaming in through the window made her breasts seem almost luminescent, the nipples glowing. 

She turned around, so that her perfect bottom rested on his belly. She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled. Then she sidled forward, and grabbed his manhood once more, guiding it up inside her as she straddled him.

Then, facing away from him, she began to undulate her hips, working herself up and down and back and forth in slow, rocking motions. Her blonde hair fell down her smooth back. Her shoulder blades moved up and down as she grabbed his thighs with each hand for support and began to rock faster.

It struck him that the name of this position was the reverse cowgirl. He didn’t remember where he knew that from, but the fact that he was being mounted by an honest-to-god cowgirl almost made him blurt out a laugh. Instead, he managed to hold it in, a smile spreading across his lips. Who had originally come up with that name? Now that he’d gone back in time, maybe he was actually the one who coined it. He hadn’t thought too much about the paradoxes of time travel, and now sure as hell wasn’t the time to start, so he pushed it out of his mind.

He reached up and took her by the hips, pushing himself up inside her as she rocked on top of him.

Her mouth had felt glorious, but this was even better. He got to see the round curve of her bottom pushing against his body, the line of her back, and her hair as it shook with each thrust.

She squeezed his thighs one more time, then lifted her arms up to grab her own hair and bunch it up on top of her head, exposing her long, white neck. He could see the sides of her breasts, bobbing with the motion, almost more tantalizing than seeing them in full view.

That did it for him. He felt the rush of pleasure and he pushed up into her and held it, arching his back and releasing everything he had. He grunted as he came, squeezing his eyes shut so hard tears formed at the corners.

Light exploded behind his closed eyelids, and he let out a long breath. 

“Ahh!” Sally cried out, continuing to grind on top of him. “Oh, yes.” She had still been holding her hands up on top of her head, but she lowered them again, one cupping him down below, the other grasping one of his thighs. Then she threw her head back and let out a long, heavy moan. She almost sounded like she was in pain. She squeezed his thigh so hard it hurt.

Then she stopped moving, sliding forward off of him. She turned around to face him, sitting up on the bottom half of the bed. She tossed her hair to one side and smiled.

“You’re incredible,” he told her.

“I reckon we’re kind of incredible together,” she said, crawling on top of him. She gave him a long kiss. Before pulling away, she licked her lips across his.

“I reckon you’re right,” he said. “I wish my evil jailors in the future had decided to experiment on me earlier.”

“Well,” she said, “now that you’re here, we can do a lot more experimenting on each other.” She lay down on top of him, putting her head on his shoulder and nuzzling under his jaw. “Do we really have to face him again?”

“I do,” Logan said. “But you don’t. In fact, I’d feel better if you were out of harm’s way.”

She sat up quick. “There’s no way in hell I’m not helping you,” she said. “Don’t talk like that again.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “It’s just…if something happened to you, I’m not sure if I could forgive myself.”

She looked down at his chest, seemingly thinking about the fact that he’d already lost one woman he loved, and realizing that she hadn’t considered he might lose another. But then she lifted her head and looked at him with eyes flashing with determination.

“We’re in this together,” she said. “I understand if you’re worried about me, but it goes both ways, mister. If I rode off and left you here to face Sturgess alone, I couldn’t live with myself if I could have done something to help you and didn’t. So tell me what your plan is.”

He laughed and shook his head. “You’re something else,” he said. “Well, like you said, Sturgess owns everything in town. He basically
is
Lockdale. So marching back in there is a terrible idea. We need to make him come to us.”

“You mean here?”

“Yeah.”

“How do we do that?”

“Well,” Logan said. “You still have something he wants, don’t you?”

She thought for a second, then her eyes widened. “My land.”

“Exactly,” he said. “You ask him to come here. Tell him you’re tired of fighting and you’re ready to sell.”

“But why would he come here?”

“To gloat. He’ll want to see what he won up close,” he said. “And he doesn’t know I’m here, doesn’t even know that I’m still in these parts. You still have that hunting rifle, right?”

She nodded.

“I’ll set up a sniper position on the roof of the barn,” Logan said. “When he rides up, I’ll kill him.”

“But surely he won’t come alone,” Sally said.

“No, but Sturgess is a bully. And one thing about bullies is, you take out their leader and suddenly they aren’t as brave. Even if he comes with four or five men, which I doubt, they’ll likely turn tail once he drops, especially if there’s a sniper firing from a position they can’t see. And I also doubt they’ll be back for retaliation. If he’s anything like
my
Sturgess, his men are loyal to his money, not him. And once that’s gone…”

She was chewing her lower lip. “Most of that seems sensible enough, I guess,” she said. “Where am I during all this?”

“I’d prefer you being three counties over,” he said. “But if you insist on being here, I want you safe, out of sight.”

“They took my shotgun,” she said. “But today I can ride over to Carl Jospers and ask to borrow his. Tell him I need to shoot some rabbits.”

“Good,” he said. “But we just need it for your protection. I don’t want you out in a firefight. In the meantime, I need to get some practice in with that rifle. You have some way of sending Sturgess a message?”

“The mail comes out here once a week,” she said. “They’re due tomorrow.”

“I think this will work,” he said. “We just have to cut off the head of the snake.”

But the worried look on her face made him think she didn’t completely agree. He was good with a rifle at long distances, though, and he felt like this was their best shot.

“We’re gonna have to run,” she said. “After it’s all done.” It wasn’t a question. He was still a wanted man, and killing Sturgess on top of that, in cold blood, was only going to make him more wanted. 

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s a wide-open country with a lot of places to settle down where no one will even think to look for us. It’s not like we have to worry about CSI or anything.”

“What?”

“Nevermind,” he said, leaning in to kiss her.

They had a plan all right, but Sally wasn’t sure just how much she liked it. She rode back from the Josper’s farm with an old single-barrel shotgun hanging from a sling on Maisy’s saddle. 

She’d never broken the law in all her life. Not once. And now she was going to help Logan shoot down a man in front of her house. Sturgess was a bad man, no doubt about it. He was foul. And with a small army behind him, maybe this was the only way to do it. But it just didn't seem right.

Logan was trying to change the future, a future she hadn’t seen and would never see. It was hard for her to care about the death of a man she didn’t know, who wouldn’t be born for over a hundred years. But she understood all the same. And she loved Logan.

If this was how it had to be, then she would help him. She just wished there was another way.

As she got closer to home, she heard the tinny echoes of rifle fire. Logan was practicing. They’d gotten the tall ladder out of the barn, and he’d climbed up to the roof carrying a piece of string tied to the rifle. He’d pulled it up, along with a leather pouch with all the ammunition they had, which wasn’t much. Thirty-four shells. He needed to practice, but that wouldn’t leave him much to work with for the actual fight.

Although, it wasn’t going to be a fight, was it? They were going to gun down a man from ambush. 

As she rode up the trail to the house, she saw the bottles lined up along the ground in front. She heard a shot, then the tinkle of broken glass as one of the green bottles shattered. He was a good shot. That made her feel better and worse at the same time.

She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled, waving her hand at him. She saw him stand up on the roof of the barn, holding the rifle in one hand and waving back with the other. 

He disappeared from view, heading toward the back of the barn and the ladder there. As she walked Maisy across the yard, she looked down at the row of green bottles. She counted nine of them, all broken. 

As she got near the barn, Logan came around the corner. He had a grim look of determination on his face. Maybe he was having doubts as well, but she didn’t bring it up. She got down from Maisy and fell into his arms, kissing him. 

“I see you got the gun,” he said. 

“Josper knew it wasn’t for rabbits,” she said. “But he gave it to me anyway.” She hugged him fiercely. She had a bad feeling about how this was all going to go down.

He hugged her back. “It’s going to be all right.”

She wanted to believe him, but she wasn’t sure she could.

Two days later, everything was in place. The postal carrier had taken her note into town, asking to meet at her ranch the next day at noon. Logan had kept out of sight. He said he didn’t need any more practice. He had eighteen rounds left.

Sally helped him with the ladder and the gun. She watched him climb up on the roof, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Once he was up there, he looked down at her. She squinted, shielding her eyes from the sun. 

From down here, he was just a dark shadow, outlined by light. She couldn’t see his face. Maybe that’s the way he had always been. Maybe in her grief she had latched onto him like a drowning woman. She’d always prided herself on her common sense, but now she wondered if she’d let her emotion get the better of her.

“Everything okay?” he said down to her.

I hope so
, she thought. “Yes.” She wondered what to say next. Good luck? Be careful? Instead, she said what was in her heart. “Logan?” She heard the urgency in her own voice.

“Yeah?” he called back.

“I love you.” Neither one of them had said it yet, but now seemed like the time. He’d gone up on the roof early, but soon enough Sturgess would be riding down the path to the house.

The shadowy outline of him was perfectly still. She couldn’t see his face, so she had no idea what he was thinking. Seconds ticked by, and then she heard his voice in the hot summer air.

“I love you, too.” With that, he moved away from the edge of the roof.

Her breath caught in her throat. She didn’t know what to feel. In an hour they could both be dead. The best outcome put them on the run. But she loved him with all her heart. Did anything else really matter?

She walked back around the barn and up to the door of her house, glancing over her shoulder once more to try to spot him on the roof. But she couldn’t see anything, which was good. If she couldn’t see him, then Sturgess and his men couldn’t see him either.

Sally went inside, closing and bolting the door behind her. Just as they had discussed, she took the shotgun and lay down in the empty tub they’d dragged to the center of the house. She checked the chamber, making sure there was a fresh shell inside. She had a pile of a dozen more shells in the bottom of the tub, though she didn’t think she’d have time to reload. If things went bad, she’d probably only be able to get one shot off.

She clicked the shotgun shut and lay the gun across her lap. 

The cicadas chirped outside. The chickens clucked as they moved around in their pen.

The next half hour was the longest of Sally’s life.

She gripped the gun in her lap and waited.

Time stretched out like a spoonful of molasses. Sally closed her eyes and tried to control her breathing. She was damn near panting, and she needed to get hold of herself. 

Her eyes were closed when she heard the horses. The difference between one or more was easy to tell, but after that, the hoof beats just became like the sound of drums and the numbers got lost. There could have been three or ten. She didn’t know. Logan had said the rest would scatter once Sturgess was down, and she hoped to God he was right.