“Put on your gown,” he ordered now in a testy voice, “before every male with a lick of testosterone gets a whiff of eau-de-female.”
She bent over to tie her shoelace, thus giving him a fine view of her well-rounded behind. “Does that include you?” she challenged over her shoulder.
“In spades.”
He leaned against the wall of the stable and crossed his ankles lazily. His eyes roved over her body, from raised eyebrows to dust-covered boots. “Don’t push me too far, Helen,” he advised silkily. “You might get a helluva lot more than you can handle.”
After parking the two horses at the livery stable and Helen at a hotel, thus using up a sizable portion of their remaining gold, Rafe did the thing men who are royally pissed have been doing for ages. He headed for the nearest saloon.
By now, Helen, settled into their minuscule hotel room, had probably moved from whistling and ooohmmg to gargling and forms. After two days of watching her breasts move with every beat of her horse, he didn’t think he could stand forms, too. Her breasts didn’t exactly jiggle, he corrected himself. They swayed. And that was even worse. After a while, he’d found himself swaying on his own horse to the same rhythm.
Sometime soon, he intended to spend about two hours worshiping those perfect Vargas breasts of hers.
He would look at them. For a long time. Weigh them with his hands, molding them and reshaping them to fit his palms. He would resist kissing them or touching them with his lips for a long, long time. Only when he had brought the nipples to hard, aching points by rolling them and flicking them with his fingertips, only when she begged him to suckle her, only when she purred… Well, that’s when he’d take her in his mouth. Hard, at first, then soft. Wet. Oh, yeah, wet. Then –
“What’s yer poison, mister?”
Rafe blinked at the surly bartender standing before him, then shook his head hard to rid it of his fantasies. The woman is driving me absolutely honkers. “A whiskey. No, make it a double.”
The bartender bypassed the fine labeled bottle on the shelf behind him and reached for the keg on the floor. Probably rotgut.
“No way, buddy. I’ll have that,” he insisted, pointing.
“Mebbe you should take yer bizness somewheres else, greaser.”
The insult ricocheted through him like a lightning bolt. He did not need this grief tonight. “Give me the damn whiskey!”
The bartender straightened and cast his eyes over to the corner where a wiry, mustached man in a black suit and blue brocaded vest stood eying him with disdain — probably the owner. Finally, the fancy dude nodded.
Turning back, the bartender pinched out two huge thumbfuls of Rafe’s gold dust and poured the good booze reluctantly into a tin cup, sliding it forward. “Take it over there,” he ordered, pointing toward a corner on the far side. “We don’t ‘low no Mexs at the bar.”
Rafe stiffened and reached for the guns at his sides.
“I wouldn’t do that, senor,” the bartender said. Rafe peered over his shoulder to see two nineteenth-century bouncers cruising his way.
Weighing his chances, Rafe moved to the back of the room. But he didn’t like it one bit.
He joined a group of about two dozen men, mostly Mexicans but some Chileans, Hawaiians, and native Californians, too. They leaned against the wall, sat at rough tables playing monte, or spoke with a few of the Spanish prostitutes who’d dared to sashay over from the other part of the saloon. Apparently “foreigners” were allowed on the other side only if they were whores.
A band played raucously on a raised stage at the far end of the room — a fiddler screeching in competition with two guitar players and a trumpeter. Some of the miners were harmonizing in a drunken rendition of “Hangtown Girls.”
Hangtown gals are plump and rosy, Hair in ringlets, mighty cozy, Painted cheeks and jossy bonnets — Touch ’em and they’ll sting like hornets.
The miners immediately launched into another version, this one even more boisterous:
Hangtown gals are curious creatures, Think they’ll marry pious preachers, Heads thrown back to show their features — Hah hah hah! Hangtown gals.