“Cut out the talking and get on with the doing, lover.”
Their first time that night was over quickly, each taking what was urgently needed from the other.
The second time was slower, both concentrating more on giving than taking. Krysty slipped lower down the bed, but Ryan also wriggled around, leaving them head to toe. He used his fingers, sighing with his own excitement as she took him in her mouth. Then he repaid the compliment, licking and kissing her delicate moistness as she rolled on top, thighs parted to receive him.
After the loving they had fallen asleep, wrapped in each other’s arms. Ryan awakened first, feeling the pressure on his bladder from the beer they’d all drunk. He returned from the outhouse, seeing moonlight glinting on Krysty’s emerald eyes. He knew that she was awake.
“I thought you were triple pissed at me,” he said quietly, aware of eleven-year-old Dean sleeping in the next room.
“No. Not angry. Sad, hurt, lonely and worried. Those are the sort of words, lover. I won’t sleep a quiet hour until you get home safely.”
“I know that.”
“But it’s not going to stop me from sending you on your way with the memory of your body fresh in my mind. Let’s go for the third strike, Ryan.”
THE ROOM WHERE HE SAT carried the faint scent of the predark brass oil lamp that he’d lighted as soon as he closed the oak bedroom door behind him. But it was overlaid now with the wholesome smell of fried food.
The plate in front of Ryan held three eggs, over easy, with some strips of Jak’s home-cured bacon, mushrooms and hash browns with fresh-baked bread and salted butter. Nobody else seemed to be stirring, though he was sure he’d heard the sound of subdued conversation coming from the room shared by J.B. and Mildred.
His guess was that they were having a conversation something similar to the one he had with Krysty.
If they were to make an early start, Ryan knew that he’d soon have to rouse his old friend. But that meant waking the rest of the household.
For a few moments, sipping at a scalding mug of black coffee sub, he enjoyed the solitude, a time out of the perpetual war of surviving in Deathlands to sit and think and gather his private thoughts.
Fifteen hundred miles. They had the LAV-25 locked away in the large barn, and there was enough gas to take them a good part of their journey in the eight-wheeled light-armored vehicle. He and J.B. had checked out the few tattered maps available, trying to pick a good route that would keep them clear of any of the pesthole frontier villes that they knew from previous experience to be potentially hostile.
The reputation of having been one of the Trader’s lieutenants didn’t always mean a smiling reception. And when you looked like Ryan Cawdortwo hundred pounds of honed muscle and over six feet of one-eyed meanthen folks tended to remember you.
Ryan heard a floorboard creaking in the hall behind him, and his right hand dropped automatically to the butt of the big SIG-Sauer P-226.
“Only me, my dear chum,” Doc said.
“Join me in a cup of coffee?”
“I don’t believe there’ll be room in it for both of us.” He started to cackle, remembered the earliness of the hour and clapped a gnarled hand over his mouth. “Nothing like the old jokes, Master Cawdor. And that was nothing like one of the old jokes.”
Ryan smiled, feeling a sudden rush of genuine affection for the old man.
Old man?
It was a recurring puzzle, trying to work out how old Doc really was. With his mane of white hair and lined face, wearing an ancient frock coat with a strange green sheen across the shoulders, and cracked knee boots, he looked to be closing in on seventy. And the ebony sword stick with the Toledo-steel rapier blade, the hilt a carved silver lion’s head, gave him a nineteenth-century dandyish swagger.
Dr. Theophilus Tanner had been born in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14, 1868. So that would make him well over two hundred years old.