Desperado

  Rafe adjusted his hips against her rear, though. If nothing else, he planned to have some super dreams tonight.

  Beware of cats that purr . . .

  It was already dark by the time they reached Marysville the next day. Henry told them that the little town at the junction of the Feather and Yuba rivers was named for Mary Murphy, a survivor of the ill-fated Donner expedition four years before. Of course, the town flourished now with the Gold Rush.

  Every muscle in Rafe’s body ached. He smelled his own sweat. The mother of all headaches was doing a jig behind his eyes. And he had a hard-on with a mind of its own.

  Helen, on the other hand, looked cool, calm, and invigorated by their grueling eighty-mile trek from Sacramento City. She and Henry had been whistling and ooohming for four straight hours. And she and the bumbling kid had something else in common. They both liked to brush their teeth and gargle three times a day. Henry had practically salivated over the Franklin Planner Helen described for him.

  Rafe felt like puking.

  Thank God, Henry went off to find a cousin who owned a house in Marysville, promising to connect with them the following day.

  Rafe and Helen dismounted near a livery stable. He started to say something, then forgot what he was about to say. Helen was stretching languidly, making a purring sound of pleasure.

  Does she purr after she climaxes?

  She’d refused to put her gown back on this morning when the sun came up like a fireball. He hadn’t been able to argue with her logic about the blistering heat, but Henry had gaped at her T-shirt the entire day like a teenager at his first porno flick. Rafe noted dryly to himself that it surely took coordination on Henry’s part to gape and whistle and ooohm all at the same time.

  “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.”

  America might have talent, but Helen didn’t . . .

  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 ooohming 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 bonkers. “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, señor,” 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.

  Rafe raised an eyebrow at the Mexican vaquero standing next to him. He told him, in Spanish, that Hangtown girls were scarce and snooty. Then, with a smirk, he added something vulgar in English.

  Looking once again at the band, which was trying to make a louder noise than the singers, Rafe noticed a sign announcing that Felicia Mantero would be performing an operatic aria that night.

  He asked the same man if he’d seen anyone matching Pablo’s description. The guy mumbled “No,” but his friend said that Pablo and some fellow named Sancho had left town in a hurry that morning. “They said something about a hanging and stolen horses.”

  Rafe groaned with dismay. “Any idea where they were going?”

  “North, I think. Maybe Rich Bar. I dunno, really.”

  Great! More horseback riding. Well, I’m gonna stop and do some prospecting this time. Until we catch up with Pablo—

  Taking a huge swallow of the burning liquid, Rafe stared up at the stage to see the owner motion for the band to stop playing and the men to quiet for a moment. “Uh . . . I have an announcement to make,” the nervous man in the blue brocade vest tried to shout over the crowd, which appeared angry about something. “It is my misfortune to . . . uh . . . have to tell you . . . that, well, Felicia will be unable to sing tonight. It ’pears she’s indisposed.”

  Bellows of outrage greeted his words before they were barely out of his mouth.

  “We coulda gone to the Palace, you worm.”

  “I doan think he ever had Felicia. It were a come-on.”

  “Yeah, let’s string the bastard up by his toes.”

  “I ain’t dancin’ with no more men gussied up like ladies. The las’ time I got Buford fer a partner, ’n he belched the whole time.”

  “How ’bout one of them Mex gals? Singin’ and screwin’ comes natural to them.”

  “We want Felicia. We want Felicia. We want Felicia . . .” The drunken sots began to chant and stamp their he
avy boots on the dirt floor.

  The wily owner scrambled off the stage and out through the rear. The band started up again, more raucous than before.

  Rafe let his shoulders rest against the wooden support of the canvas wall. He closed his eyes against the stench of several hundred unwashed bodies, the ear-splitting din of music and gambling and now shouting, and the heart-squeezing pain of the racial bias he felt closing in around him.

  “You got some money, señor? Calina can show you a good time if you got gold.”

  He opened his eyes slowly to see a young Spanish tart waiting expectantly for his answer, hands braced on her slim hips. She stood so close he could smell her cloying rose perfume. Her eyelashes were loaded with black goop, her lips painted crimson, and her flimsy camisole blouse hung so far off one shoulder that half her breast was exposed.

  She was about fourteen.

  “Chica, go home to your madre,” he scolded her in mixed Spanish. “You should be playing with dolls, not men.”

  “Bebé,” she shot back at him, in broken English, “I ain’ got no madre no more, and mi padre sold me to a gringo sailor for fifty pesos when I was twelve. Hell, eet ain’ such a bad life. I eat good. I sleep on a soft bed. All I have to do ees close my eyes and hold my nose for ten minutes.”

  “Yeah? How many times a night do you have to close your eyes and hold your nose?”

  She shrugged. “Fifteen or twenty.”

  “Shit!” He wasn’t going to make any progress trying to turn this girl around.

  “So, do you have the money to play with Calina tonight?” She pressed up closer and allowed the blouse to slip down lower so he could see the whole of one immature breast pressed against his shirt front. One of her hands snaked up around his neck and tried to pull him down for a kiss.

  Before he could push her away with revulsion, he heard a sharp hiss. He gazed over Calina’s head.

  Helen.

  Oh, great! Now the you-know-what is going to hit the fan. What was she doing here? He’d told her to stay in the room.

  Her newly washed red hair was tied at the nape with a strip of lace, but soft curls spilled out around her cheeks and over her shoulders. Her face, with its sprinkling of freckles, glowed fresh and lightly tanned. She wore her military boots and the ugly green gown, which hung loosely on her, but she was lovelier to him than any woman. And more precious.

  He felt like a vise was closing around his heart, and he could barely breathe. Looking down, he realized it was actually Calina who had wrapped herself around his body tighter than a Cuban cigar. Damn! While he tried to extricate himself from her stranglehold, Rafe attempted to get Helen’s attention. Several men had approached and were saying something to her, but she gave them the cold shoulder.

  Glancing back at Rafe one more time, Helen’s brown eyes grew huge with hurt and began to well with tears. But only for a moment. Anger instantly took over. She lifted her chin, spun on her heel, and prepared to rush out.

  But the rambunctious miners blocked her way. “Hey, boys, lookee here. We got us a new singer. We doan need no Felicia. No sirree. Jist take a gander at this l’il redheaded filly.” They passed her toward the stage, ignoring her shrill objections.

  Rafe moved to go after her, but somehow the Mexican señorita had twined one leg around his calf and he tripped, almost taking both of them to the filthy ground. By the time he finally got himself loose from her clinging hands and legs, Helen was being shoved up onto the stage with demands that she sing.

  “I can’t sing,” she rebelled. “Will you men just listen to me? I’m not a singer.”

  “What can ya do, honey?”

  Much laughter followed that question.

  “She ’pears a mite like that Elena gal, don’t she?” one man speculated.

  “Ya mean the one that corkscrews?” another responded.

  And that held a lot more appeal to this crowd than singing.

  “Singin’ or corkscrewin’? What’s it gonna be, darlin’? Let’s get on with it,” snarled a mountain man, about six-foot-five with half his face covered with slash marks. He’d probably tangled with a grizzly bear at one time.

  Rafe noticed that one of Helen’s short sleeves was torn, and her eyes darted wildly through the crowd, imploringly, searching for him. He tried to force his way forward toward the tightening crowd, to no avail, and the two bouncers he’d met up with earlier stood in front of him. One of them barked, “Weren’t ya told before? No greasers on this side of the room. Out!”

  Rafe backed up.

  Since she obviously wasn’t going to sing, the men now demanded that Helen dance—a prelude to her corkscrewing the entire damn lot of them.

  Rafe rapidly assessed the situation and decided he had no choice but to leave through the front door.

  Helen stared at his departing back and couldn’t believe her eyes. He was actually abandoning her to this mob. Well, what had she expected? Just a few moments ago, she’d come into this hellhole to give him some important news, only to see him making out with some Mexican bimbo.

  She bit her bottom lip to stop its trembling and refused to allow the tears in her eyes to overflow. With more courage than she felt, she tried to outshout the obnoxious men. “Would you all just shut up for one minute and listen to me?”

  The music slowly petered to a stop, and the shouting died down to a low rumble. The only sounds were the clinking of coins at the gambling tables.

  “My name is Helen Prescott. I don’t sing and I don’t corkscrew. You ought to be ashamed—”

  She heard a rustling movement behind her and saw Rafe crawling under the tent flap. Thank goodness!

  “What’s that greaser doin’ up there? Someone oughta put ’im in his place.”

  “Yeah, let’s show ’im what we do to them what tries to mix with their betters.”

  “He’s my husband, you blockheads,” Helen yelled.

  “Her husband?” exclaimed the huge mountain of a man with a clawed face. He spit a wad of tobacco on the floor, splattering the boots of all the miners around him. No one seemed to mind. “What kind a white woman marries a dirty Mex?”

  Rafe had stepped up beside her and linked his hand with hers. He gave her a quick squeeze of encouragement.

  “Can we both scoot out of the tent the way you came in?” she whispered.

  He shook his head, watching the crowd warily. “No time. They’d be on us in a flash.”

  “Can you shoot our way out of here?”

  Again, he shook his head. “Too many of them. No, we have to divert them.”

  “How?”

  She saw several men in the front pull out their revolvers, and the man who appeared to be the owner stood nearby wringing his hands. “Damn, they’re gonna tear my tent apart any minute now,” he whined.

  Helen sliced the weasel a look of contempt. No concern for their safety. Just his private property.

  “Can you dance?” Rafe asked suddenly.

  “Wh-what? Now? You must be drunk.”

  “Not nearly enough, sweetheart,” he said, and asked the band to play a Mexican tune she didn’t recognize. The band was rotten, but the song carried a sultry Spanish beat.

  He began to circle her body in a slow, seductive rhythm. Hips swaying, fingers snapping, he eyed her like a virile predator, ready to pounce.

  She backed up slightly.

  Their audience hooted with laughter, considering it a well-planned act.

  Rafe held her eyes and motioned with the crooked fingers of both hands, beckoning her closer.

  She stood frozen. She couldn’t. She just couldn’t.

  Rafe held open his arms for her.

  “I can’t do this,” she protested weakly, even as she stepped reluctantly into his embrace. “Really. I’m not a good dancer.”

  “Honey, these men could care diddly-squat about the quality of your dancing. Besides, the kind of dancing we’re going to do will bring the house down.”

  He pulled her brusquely into his arms and lo
oped her arms around his neck. He placed both of his hands firmly on either side of her waist.

  She eyed him suspiciously. “And what kind of dancing would that be?”

  “The lambada.”

  He drew her close. Very close. Breasts pressed against his chest. Her stomach rested against his groin. Catching the slow rhythm, Rafe began to sway, then undulate his hips with hers.

  The crowd stilled.

  “Arriba!” one of the Mexican musicians called out and made a loud trilling noise with his tongue. She had no time to think about that, though. It was Rafe she was worried about.

  “What kind of dance did you say?” she choked out.

  “The lambada. The forbidden dance.”

  “Wh-what’s that? I never heard of it.”

  “It’s just like . . .” Rafe smiled. “. . . dirty dancing.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Foreplay on a horse? Followed by . . . ! Yippee ki yay! . . .

  “Just pretend we’re making love.”

  “I beg your pardon,” she said in a suffocated whisper.

  “The lambada . . . It’s like making love without penetration. Relax and let your body speak for you.”

  Making love without penetration? Oh, my!

  They were swaying from side to side, slowly. Hmmm. She’d never had much time for dancing, but this was really kind of nice. Sway and turn. Sway and turn.

  “I think I’ve got the hang of it,” she said.

  “Good. Now for some real lambada.”

  “What? Ooomph. Stop that.”

  He bent her over backward so that her upper body was flung over his arm and her breasts were arched up in a provocative pose. She had no choice but to clutch his upper arms or risk falling to the floor.

  The crowd went wild with cheers of encouragement.

  “Arriba!” the Mexican guitarist yelled out, as he had earlier, following it with the yipping noise.

  “What . . . are . . . you . . . doing?” she asked Rafe in a strangled voice.

  “Dipping. Geez, Louise! Haven’t you ever dipped before, Helen?” The jerk was laughing at her.