“Okay. Sure.” Les made a mental note to ask somebody to suggest a restaurant in Dallas—one he could afford. He’d hate like hell to find out that dinner for two at a place Deidre might recommend would max out the only credit card he’d gotten on his own. He’d hate to use the one his father had pressed on him, because doing so would mean the bill would go to Papa, punctuating the fact that he’d made a poor business choice, coming to Caden. “Shall I drive out to the Bar C about noon?”
Deidre snuggled up against him like a friendly kitten. “I’d like that. You can meet Four before we go—if he’s home, that is.” She sneaked another bite of his sandwich but he didn’t mind. He liked the idea of putting his mouth where her pretty lips had been.
Chapter Two
Later on, after he’d seen five sick patients who were willing to trust him instead of waiting for Doc Baines, Les asked the old doctor where he should take a date in Dallas. “We’re going over there Saturday, spending the night and coming back on Sunday morning. I don’t know much about hotels or eateries there, other than fast-food joints along the highways.”
“We?”
“Deidre Caden and me.”
Doc Baines whistled. “She’s a pretty little gal, but from what I hear she’s gone wild in the last year. She’d set her cap for Jack Duval, but that never got off the ground before he took up with Liz Wolfe. On top of that, Mae Caden died—cancer that spread too fast to stop it—and that hit Deidre real hard. Not that it didn’t tear Four and Bye up, of course. Mae always kept the Bar C humming smoothly without anybody realizing all she’d been doing until she was no longer able to do it.”
Then Doc’s expression turned serious. “Everybody loved Mae, but nobody depended on her as much as her little gal. Losing her affected Deidre something awful and sent her off on a tangent, acting as though she was desperate to find some reason for staying alive. According to Four, she wandered around Texas all summer, taking up with no-good cowboys and then running crazy down in San Antonio and Houston. She came back home for good a week or so before Christmas. It will do her good to find herself a nice, clean-cut boy and settle down. You’ll be good for Mae’s little girl.”
So that was the reason for the hints of sadness Les had glimpsed in Deidre’s beautiful eyes over at The Corral. He wondered if Deidre might run “wild” during their Dallas overnight, and if the wildness Doc mentioned was her way of begging a man to take a strong—a dominant—hand with her. That made him want to protest at the nice, boring description Doc had just hung on him but he bit his tongue and just asked blandly, “Well, where do you think she’d like to go to eat?” He doubted any place his fellow members of the Neon Lasso BDSM club might suggest would impress a vanilla princess, and the idea she might be anything but vanilla was likely wishful thinking.
Doc mentioned a few places then snapped his fingers. “Don’t make dinner reservations. Take her down to the West End Historical District. You can probably get overnight reservations at the SpringHill Suites, and there must be at least fifty restaurants within a couple of miles, all with plenty of atmosphere. You can pick among chains like the Spaghetti Warehouse or famous landmarks like the Butcher Shop Steakhouse or Wild Bill’s. If I were you I’d leave my car down near Union Station and take the train in. Parking places are hard to come by, especially on weekends.
“I wish the Piper Cub could handle the trip to Dallas, but you’d have to stop somewhere to refuel. I used to take it over there once in a while, during the summer, but that was when I had dual tanks on it.” Doc sounded regretful and Les felt bad that his boss could no longer pilot his plane.
“Deidre is going to fly us over to Dallas.” If he was going to keep on dating Deidre—and he wanted badly to do just that—Les figured he’d have to lose his ego and just accept the fact that the Cadens were as rich as Croesus and he wasn’t—not anymore. Swallowing his Cajun pride wasn’t going to be easy to do but he’d manage.
“Then you’ll land at Love Field. That’s where Four always puts his planes down when I hitch rides to Dallas with him. He keeps a car there—says it’s cheaper than renting one every time he goes to town.”
“Cool.” Les deliberately tried not to sound awed to learn that Deidre’s father kept a car at a commercial airport in Dallas so it would be available whenever he or his kids took a notion to spend a day in the city. From Doc’s amused expression he figured that he’d failed.
“Don’t be too impressed, son. When a man spends as much time as Four does at the Fort Worth auctions, not to mention his monthly meetings with the moneymen in downtown Dallas, and when his pilot has to ferry parts for oil wells and Bye’s windmills as often as he does, it makes sense to have ground transportation handy. The car’s nothing special—a nondescript sedan that must be at least ten years old.”
Doc picked a couple of charts out of the cabinet and let out a sigh. “I’d better get going if I’m going to get over to see both of my patients and be back before sundown. It’s hell getting old and being told I can’t drive after dark. I’ll leave the office patients for you. Mike Dryden’s bringing little Johnny in at three o’clock to have his ear infection rechecked, and Diego Garcia—he’s the Bar C foreman—should be arriving in a few minutes with a couple of cowboys who got tangled up in barbed wire. From what Four told me when he called while you were having lunch, those idiots will need a few stitches as well as tetanus shots.”
After Doc had left, the reality of his chances for Deidre began to sink in. Who the fuck was he to think he had a shot at her? She couldn’t possibly see more in him than a fledgling family practitioner. He had no prospects of earning more than a modest living at what he was doing.
You’ve got precious little chance of getting control of your family trust fund since you blew off Papa’s plea to stay close to home. You’ve got to be insane asking out a woman who probably spends more in a week than you could earn in a year.
On top of that, Deidre didn’t strike him as being the least bit submissive, though one never knew about that. Maybe it wouldn’t matter after all.
When the bell above the doorway tinkled, Les got up to greet the first of the patients Doc had mentioned.
* * * * *
The few stitches was an understatement. The shallow but extensive lacerations on the two cowhands, neither of whom spoke a word of English, took Les nearly two hours to disinfect and sew up. “How did this happen?” he asked Diego after dressing the men’s wounds and administering a tetanus shot to each of them.
The swarthy ranch foreman shrugged. “They were trying to steal a reel of barbed wire that had been cut into lengths to string between fence posts and re-rolled so it was ready to be unrolled and stapled in place between posts in the pasture as soon as the weather improves. They had no clue how to handle the reel, and when the wire started to come loose they panicked and ended up with several segments of the wire wrapped around them. The harder they struggled to get loose, the more the barbs dug into them.”
Les shook his head, but the foreman’s explanation about the theft clarified why he was carrying that rifle and wearing a lethal-looking pistol strapped on his hip. “Why would anybody steal barbed wire?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. These two had come to the ranch office this morning looking for work, but they’ve got no papers. Four hires a lot of Mexican cowboys but he doesn’t mess with illegals. He wouldn’t have taken these fellows on anyway, even if they’d had green cards. Everybody who works for the Bar C has to be able to speak fluent English because not all of the hands understand Spanish.”
“I see. What are you going to do with them?”
Diego grinned. “Sheriff Atkins has already reserved cells in the jail across the street and notified ICE to come pick them up. They’ll be going back home, probably by the beginning of next week.”
“I guess the only occupant over there will appreciate their company.” Les had been called over to the third floor of the courthouse a few days ago to check out an infected cut on an accused rustler and killer’s right arm.
Diego laughed. “That’s not likely. Frank Williams doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. He hired only Anglos when he was the foreman over at the Laughing Wolf. I don’t imagine he’ll be in jail here much longer. The trial is set for next week. Once he’s convicted they’ll take him on down to death row at the prison in Huntsville.”
In his short time here, Les hadn’t heard anybody expressing sympathy toward the former ranch foreman allegedly turned killer and rustler. “Most folks around here act as if they think cattle rustling is worse than murder.”
“That depends on who gets murdered. The bastards Frank killed had been working for him in a rustling ring. As folks around here like to say, they needed killing. Rustling cattle means stealing people’s livelihood. I’d better get these guys over to the jail. Four said to tell Doc to send him the bill for patching them up.”
Diego switched to Spanish, punctuating whatever it was he was saying by pointing the rifle toward the door, and escorted his patients out just as Mike Dryden was coming in with his little boy.
“Daddy, why’s that man holding a gun on those other men?” Johnny asked, his eyes glued on Diego and his prisoners as they crossed the street to the courthouse.
“Come on, son, it’s not polite to stare.” Mike hurried Johnny inside, his own gaze questioning when he looked at Les.
“The men got caught up in some barbed wire and needed stitches,” Les said. “Hey, Johnny. Let’s go see what’s happening inside your ears.”
Les led the two into the other exam room and checked Johnny out. “Mike, it looks as though Johnny’s ears are healing up just fine. You and Melissa have obviously been taking good care of him.”
“Are you sure, Doc?” Mike sounded worried but not nearly as anxious as he’d been a week ago when he and his fiancée had brought the little boy in with a raging fever.
Les understood Mike’s anxiety, so he just smiled and nodded at the question he might have taken as a slur on his skill. Mike had reason to worry because he’d just gotten custody of his son back from his irresponsible ex-wife a few weeks ago, only to have the child come down with a severe ear infection just hours after arriving back at Mike’s ranch. “Johnny’s a healthy child. Kids come down with ear and respiratory infections, especially at this time of year. Take him home and enjoy him, okay?”
Mike looked a little sheepish as he ruffled his son’s baby-fine brown hair. “Okay, buddy. Can you thank Dr. Fourchet for taking such good care of you?”
“Thanks,” Johnny said. Then he shot Les an angelic-looking smile. “Can I have a lollipop?”
Grabbing a handful of the sugar-free treats Doc Baines kept on hand for good little patients, Les walked Mike and his son to the door, handing Mike most of the candies before holding one lollipop out to Johnny. “Your dad will give you the rest of them one at the time. You be good and tell Ms. Melissa hello for me.”
When he turned away from the door he told Martha that she could take off early. There was no need for the nurse to stick around for another hour when there were no more patients scheduled.
The rest of the afternoon passed quietly, with nothing happening to distract Les from imagining how Deidre’s pale silky hair would feel against his hands…his groin. His cock hardened at the thought of her full pink lips surrounding his flesh, her tongue darting over him as she fondled his scrotum with her long, slender fingers.
Someday I’ll take her to the Neon Lasso. She’ll go down on her knees and service me for everybody to see. I’ll frame her gorgeous face between my hands, let my fingers slide through her hair, securing her for her pleasure. And God help me, for mine. Not only in the club but in my bed, my home…my life. In a relationship that’s much more than play. That’s real and lasting.
Maybe that will happen, idiot. About the time when hell decides to freeze over.
At five o’clock Les got up and locked the front door before going back to his office, shuttering the single window and settling down in the high-backed chair behind his cluttered desk.
His balls felt as though they’d burst and there would be no club play for him tonight, since he was taking emergency calls for the practice. Besides, he was afraid no club sub could do it for him now that he’d met Deidre.
After turning the landline over to the answering service, he set his cell phone in front of him on the desk and soaked in the solitude that surrounded him. A soft early evening darkness enveloped the small community in a black velvet cloak. So far the phone was quiet. Imagining his hand was Deidre’s, he stroked his aching dick to full erection.
He’d booked them a suite for Saturday night. It had just one bedroom, which he hoped she’d want to share, but he also figured the couch in the living area would come in handy if he struck out with the subtle attempt he planned to make at first-date seduction.
Sighing, he gave up on the futile attempt to read the latest issue of
JAMA
. Opening the center drawer of his desk he took out a set of urethral sounds that he’d discovered back in medical school were the best cure for terminal horniness—other than a woman’s wet, hot cunt. He selected an eight-inch-long slender wand with a rosebud tip. It had provided many moments of self-gratification when he’d had no handy partner.
He’d also had them used on him when he’d been with Jessica. It had amused her to insert and remove the sounds, increasing their size to torture him, refusing as she did to let him come. Fuck, he’d sworn he had banished that woman from his mind.
Anticipating release, he freed his cock from his pants, took it in one hand and worked the sterile stainless steel wand carefully down his urethra until he felt its tip nudge his prostate. Slowly he wiggled the instrument, enjoying the stimulation, feeling his testicles draw up and tighten against his groin as his body readied itself for the inevitable climax.
As he slid the sound out and erupted in a rush of creamy ejaculate he imagined Deidre on her knees, her full lips surrounding his flesh while she ran her tongue over his cock head, lapping up the slick, salty fluid that kept spurting out. She’d play with his balls, her agile fingers coaxing out the sexual tension and bringing him to climax.