Training Ivy [How The West Was Done 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (18 page)

“Wait a minute.” Ivy spread her hand out on the table. “Wait. Remember that letter that Rodney Shortridge wrote to my father? Where we discovered his Cow Palace brand on that piece of paper?” Her face screwed up as she tried to recall the wording of the letter. “He said some sinister characters approached him about selling his ranch.”

Harley said, “Probably this same Ace Moyer cove.”

Neil protested. “Ace Moyer, sinister? Hardly. He’s one of the upstanding pillars of this community. Just ask your father, Ivy.”

“I shall,” she said simply. “I can send him a telegram right now, asking him.”

“Anyway,” said Neil. “I can hardly see him wearing a derby hat. Look at him. He’s born and bred right here in Dakota Territory. I’ve seen him wearing a sombrero and a slouch hat same as we wear, but no derby. Hey, listen. I told Shortridge we’d let him out of lockup if he let us exhume Minerva, and he said fine.”

“Yes, your belle.” Ivy smiled. “I doubt she’d take kindly to it if you released him. She seems to have a holy fear of him.”

Harley said, “We should ask Shortridge for a photograph of her. That way you can at least get a mental image of the gal who’s quite nutty on you.”

Neil frowned. “Pshaw.”

“Don’t scoff at it!” said Harley. “You seem to be the only one she’ll talk to. And she did agree that her murderer wore a derby as well.”

“Well, listen here,” said Neil. “Minerva said all would be revealed after the fire tonight. So we should go back to the Elks Club. Act natural-like. Pretend we dropped a watch there earlier or something and are just looking for it.”

Ivy said, “I’ll pretend I dropped something feminine. That always stops men real short. They’ll just tell me to get on with looking for it because they don’t want to hear about it.”

“Some lip rouge,” suggested Harley.

“No, it should be something that will embarrass them to high heaven,” said Ivy. “Perhaps a feminine sponge, for the purposes of preventing pregnancy. Yes, that should mortify them sure as shooting.”

“If you’re going to tell them that,” Neil interjected, “then Harley and I should steer clear of you. Wouldn’t do to be seen together, looking for a sexual aid.”

“Nonsense!” declared Ivy. “In
this
town? Correct me if I’m wrong. But Harley, wouldn’t you say the customs and morals of Laramie City are much—well, let’s just
say
it—
lower
than the cities of the East?”

Harley didn’t have to think hard. “Your observation is correct. The ramshackle shanty towns of the Far West have a much looser code. With so few women available, it’s natural that men would fight over—and share—the few belles who made it that far west.”

Harley was glad that this made Neil smile and regard Ivy fondly. Neil had been acting much more generous and inclined to share the woman he considered “his.” The idea that their unconventional arrangement might actually work out, though, gave Harley an uneasy feeling. He wasn’t used to loving anyone. His affairs had always been temporary situations where he could easily walk away with no regrets. However, if he was forced to leave right now—if he was even sent to the end of the line at Dale Creek Bridge for a couple of nights!—his mind would be so preoccupied with this tantalizing couple he would get no work done at all.

The idea that he might love Ivy and Neil terrified him.

Still, it was good that Neil wasn’t currently viciously tackling him in a jealous rage, so Harley said congenially, “Let’s get back to the Elks Club to look for your feminine sponge.”

On the way out of the Bucket of Blood, Harley saw an odd thing that stuck in the back of his mind. Behind the bar, a wooden crutch leaned against a booze keg. Who was lame around here? Whose crutch was it? In the excitement of the moment, the crutch was forgotten.

At the fraternal lodge quarters, flames still blackened the rafters. The trio went down the line of the bucket brigade, men passing each other sloshing buckets of water from the Laramie River half a mile away. They each grabbed a bucket from a fellow and jogged with them into the building, spilling about half the water before running into Ezekiel Vipham.

Zeke was chattering eagerly, his arm slung across the shoulders of a chap Harley knew as Henry Zuckerkorn, a scribbler for the
Frontier Index
. The
Index
was the rag that printed a column on “Last Night’s Shootings,” and a fire was probably more unusual than the latest cold-blooded murder. Zuckerkorn was a very good journalist, from all reports.

“How’d the fire start, Zuckerkorn?” Neil asked.

Zuckerkorn’s eyes shone with almost religious zeal. “It’s the strangest thing, Tempest! Far as I can figure, ol’ Franklin Reeves was unpacking some boxes in the attic when a whale oil lamp overturned.”

Zeke interrupted. “But that’s not the strange part, Neil! No, sirree.” He spread his hands like a magician, squiggling his fingers as though he scattered fairy dust. “When the flames were extinguished in the attic, what was revealed but the burned, charred carcass of…” With bugged eyes, Zeke looked over both shoulders to ensure no local gossiping hens were getting an earful of his big talk.

“Well?” shouted Neil, rattling Zeke by the shoulder. “Out with it, man! Charred carcass of
what?
”

Apparently Zuckerkorn was of the same dramatic nature, for he leaned in and whispered theatrically, “Carcass of
whom
, you should be asking!”

“Carcass of
whom
?” Neil shrieked.

“J. Walter Weatherman,” Zeke intoned, as though the name alone was enough to rouse the dead.

This information evidently stunned Neil so thoroughly he was unable to speak, so Harley demanded to know, “Who is J. Walter Weatherman?”

Zuckerkorn replied enthusiastically, “Only the biggest landowner in Dakota Territory!”

“Another landowner,” Ivy breathed thoughtfully.

“Wait a minute,” said Harley. “Minerva said all would be revealed in this fire. Let’s take a look at the burned, charred body. Ivy, you stay here with Mr. Zuckerkorn.”

“I’m coming, too,” said Ivy, handing her nearly-empty bucket to a passerby.

“So am I,” said Zuckerkorn. “And how did Minerva Shortridge know about this fire? She died three months ago.”

The question was thankfully lost in the bustle of darting firemen dashing to and fro. Apparently the attic fire had been quenched before it had moved on to other rafters, so they were free to clamber up the ladder.

Harley held Ivy back from the still-smoking Mr. Weatherman. The less sensitive Neil and Zeke went to examine the body.

“I presume,” said Ivy, “that Minerva meant to tell us the same person who killed her and Whit Gentry also killed this landowner.”

“That’s what I’m guessing at,” Harley agreed. “Stay here.”

Zuckerkorn had brought a lantern up, which he now hung from a scorched and broken beam. The only thing that made Weatherman stand out from the other mummified, burned people Harley had seen before was his rather shiny ring. The ring gleamed like a lighthouse from a hand that had been reaching for something in midair when he was knocked flat on his back and consumed by fire. There was also a six-shooter in his left hand, but something looked wrong to Harley. The fingers didn’t grip it convincingly, as though it had been placed there after death.

Harley and Neil squatted near the body, and Harley asked, “Where’s this Weatherman own land?”

Neil held the cotton of his neckerchief over his nose and mouth. “He owns two thousand acres…some of them adjoining my ranch.”

Their eyes met briefly, flashing with significance.

Harley looked down at the blackened arm. “This ring.” He had to bend closer to view the ring, an entirely distasteful chore. Neil also leaned over, their heads almost touching, and both men simultaneously gasped and jumped back in shock.

“The Cow Palace!” Neil whispered.

Harley stretched his hand toward the ring, flinching to discover the metal was still hot.

Neil was right. The ring had been forged into the
CP
brand of the Cow Palace ranch, the home of Minerva and Rodney.

Harley asked, “Did Weatherman have anything to do with the Cow Palace?”

“Not at all,” said Neil. “Why would he? He owns a much bigger spread.”

Ivy said, “Then whoever placed it on his finger is trying to make us think he’s the one who murdered Gentry.”

Neil’s cornflower-blue eyes glimmered with understanding and an emotion Harley pinpointed as sorrow.

“I’d best get out to my own ranch posthaste,” he nearly whispered.

Harley wanted to comfort the poor cowboy when he realized what the sorrow was. It was sorrow that he had to leave his friends in Laramie City, even for one day.

Ivy was getting the creeps with Minerva Shortridge staring right at her.

Especially while she was on her knees unbuttoning Neil’s pants, facing his enormous erection that packed his crotch admirably.

“Um, Neil?” she queried in a small voice.

“Yes, my dove,” he murmured, caressing the back of her skull. His mind was clearly not on the photograph of Minerva Shortridge sitting on the mantel. Minerva glared down at Ivy with steely anger, her hands folded primly in front of her white apron. She had probably been a good-looking woman, “handsome” as it was often called, hair parted severely down the center, her jaw clenched tightly as though she chewed on acorns. They had brought the photograph here to Neil’s Serendipity Ranch thinking it might enhance their investigation, but it was only scaring Ivy half to death.

Harley, kneeling on the rug behind her, said, “I think I know what Ivy wants.” Standing, he went to the fireplace mantel and turned the framed photograph around to face away from them. He resumed his position behind Ivy with a satisfied grunt.

Ivy exhaled with relief and resumed fondling the erection that jutted in the gapped crotch of Neil’s ever-present rawhide chaps. With hands on his hips, Neil angled his proudly erect cock into her face, and she pleasantly nuzzled at it with her lips protecting it from her teeth. Undoing the first three buttons, Ivy snaked her flattened tongue down the plane of his pubic bone, delving into the steamy bush. The invigorating scent of fresh grass emanated from his crotch, and Ivy wagged her bottom against Harley’s insistent erection.

But as she yanked both sides of Neil’s pants asunder to admire the thick and humid trunk of his cock, Neil’s fingers dug into her shoulder. “Knock it off, Captain Park,” he said with authority.

“Knock
what
off?” Harley asked innocently.

“You know what I mean. You’re not burying your giant tool in my lady’s sweet canal.”

While Ivy enjoyed the feel of Harley’s stiff prick rotating against her silk-clad pussy, she agreed with Neil. Harley still struck her as an adventurer who would be off on a new journey tomorrow. She adored their romps, but Neil was the only man sticking around Laramie City. She was getting too old to be granting the sanctity of her “fleshy conduit” to just any man passing by.

She adored Harland Park and his worldly, educated ways, but gone were the days when she would lay herself wide open for a man who would be gone tomorrow. Perhaps it was growing up with a father who was constantly journeying off on some new moneymaking or spiritual quest. But now Ivy tended toward a man who would stick around. Living in a tent next to that bucolic and freezing pond with her family had given Ivy an appreciation for home and hearth.

“
El Dekhal
,” Harley said respectfully, referring to Neil as a housebreaker again. “I will honor your wishes.” But he continued to inch Ivy’s skirts up bit by bit as she plastered her mouth to Neil’s steamy crotch. “That’s good,
El Ladid
. Look at his member erect, and admire its beauty.”

“Oh,
yes
,” Ivy agreed, slithering her tongue around the base of the firm, pulsating cock. She pulled Neil’s pants down to his knees, and the big tool sprang free, nearly braining her in the face. Clutching it, she admired its beauty, but her mouth watered for more, so she sank it down her throat with gusto.

Neil sucked in a hiss of breath and held it while she devoured him. She laved it all over with her tongue, nearly choking on the bulbous head lodged solidly down her throat. She felt her skirts all up around her hips, and Harley was murmuring, “Let me come to you like one who brings drink to the thirsty.” His fingers delved into the slit of her drawers, and she flinched with sudden pleasure when he found her swollen labia.
Oh, my
. It was difficult to concentrate on suckling the girth of Neil’s prick while Harley’s nimble fingers diddled her like that. But soon Harley’s fingers were replaced with something cool and hard, something wooden.

Harley said calmly, “My whole ambition is in love and coition with women. No doubt or mistake about that!”

“Hey,” Neil protested weakly. But apparently whatever Harley was doing behind her met with Neil’s approval, and now Ivy felt the polished length of the wooden implement sliding up her wet canal.

The implement was just wide enough to stretch her unused pussy, and for that she was glad. Harley manipulated it with precision, as though the artifact was an extension of his cock, while continuing to diddle her clitoris as though tinkling piano keys.