Ellen Kinder had given up trying to read the big man’s impassive face. He had lapsed into silence and she amused herself by trying to analyze from his actions what she had learned about him. She liked to think she was more coolly analytical than most women who saw only what they wanted to see in a man. Lassiter, she had concluded almost from their first meeting, was hard and mean. But was he as hard and mean as her father and Horace believed? Sometimes she was certain they were right, and yet at other times she wasn’t at all sure. Lassiter was a funny one to figure out and she wondered what it was about him that pulled so at her. He wasn’t handsome, not in the usual sense. Was it his untamed hardness she wondered? Like those who had preceded her, she refused to look at the truth about herself, to recognize that something about the man brought out a pure, animal hunger in her, the kind of raw craving a nice girl wasn’t supposed to have. It was more comfortable to explain her attraction to him on the basis of cool amusement, or curiosity or even the good, decent sentiments of affection.
And so Ellen Kinder contented herself with wondering about the goodness beneath that hard-bitten exterior. After all, he had been quick to map out the safest way for them all to get out of this strip of Kiowa territory. And now he was relaxed as a small boy at a picnic, whistling softly to himself as they rode. It almost made her forget that a band of Indians was searching for them.
Lassiter felt almost indecently comfortable. He had over three hundred dollars in his pocket, counting what he’d had to start with, fifty from the Reverend Herbert and Kinder’s two hundred and fifty. And before him lay the prospect of a nice, cool hundred thousand in ready-to-use silver. That he would put in a six-gun claim for the silver had been decided the moment the ex-judge had finished his history lesson. Of course he still had to wrestle with the details of getting away with the booty. That much in silver would take at least four chests or strongboxes, maybe six. He’d have to give more thought to that problem, he told himself. But he still had time to think about it. So far, things had gone far better than he had expected. The Kiowa had reduced the number of apples in the barrel to six, not counting himself and the girl. That number might be reduced still further by the time they reached the cache. Maybe the bad apple was already gone. In any case, things were going well and he turned to look at the wheat-gold hair riding alongside him and grinned. It was time to collect that bonus he’d promised himself.
The afternoon sun had grown hot, even through the filtering leaves and he trotted the Appaloosa down a narrow incline that opened onto a small natural arbor, an oasis of coolness with a soft cushion of leaves underfoot. A small fountain of spring water poured from a fissure in the side of a tall rock. He dismounted and watched the girl as she swung from the saddle, the deep, full sides of her breasts pulling tight against her shirt. He was beside her when she turned, his eyes boring into her.
“Lassiter,” she began, a frown darkening her eyes but his lips were on hers, crushing, pressing, forcing her mouth open. She managed to twist away.
“No, not now,” she gasped. “Not here. I thought we were stopping to rest.”
“Why not here?” Lassiter asked, still holding her.
“With Kiowa all over?”
“Forget the Kiowa,” he said brusquely, feeling the softness of her shoulders under his fingertips.
“I can’t forget them,” she said, pulling away. He looked at her eyes, uncertainty and fear mirrored in them.
“Forget about them, I tell you,” he said, again. “You made a bargain, remember?”
“I’ll keep it,” she said. “But I can’t here, not knowing they’re out there looking for us.”
Lassiter grunted. Hell, he swore, silently. She’d be no damn good all tensed up like this. He’d have to level with her.
“The Kiowa aren’t looking for us,” he leveled her. She frowned at him.
“Don’t trick me, Lassiter,” she answered.
“I’m not,” he said. “They killed three of us to pay back the three Kiowas I killed a few days back.”
“You never mentioned killing three Kiowas,” she said, suspicion in her eyes.
“Must’ve slipped my mind,” Lassiter grunted. “But I did and now that they’ve evened the score they’re satisfied, for a while, anyway.”
A conclusion was beginning to gather in the back of Ellen Kinder’s mind and her frown deepened.
“Then there was no need to split up,” she said. “We could have all ridden on together.”
Lassiter’s grin was self-explanatory. “I told you I’d find a place and a time,” he said. Her eyes held his and she didn’t move as he unbuttoned her shirt, slowly, one button at a time. Lassiter pulled the unbuttoned shirt loose and stepped back to drink in her beauty. His hand reached out and cupped one full breast, his thumb lightly moving across the pink tip. The girl’s head was lifted backward and up, her eyes closed, and a quiver ran through her body as his hand caressed the soft nipple. He closed down harder on her breast and she gasped and seized his hand with hers, pressing still harder. He lifted her, like a child, and laid her down on the soft, leafy carpet. Her eyes opened and he saw in them a terrible conflict, pure desire and a kind of raw fear intermingled.
He put his mouth down to hers and her tongue leaped forward, a hot, thrusting thing and as his hands covered her breasts he felt her body arch upward for a brief instant and then fall back onto the leaves. He held one hand over her breast, gently moving it across the soft tips, feeling then come alive with a life of their own.
She opened her eyes as he laid aside his gunbelt and removed his clothes and he let her take in the long, full-muscled hardness of his body. Her lips were quivering, her mouth opened, waiting, when he slowly moved down onto her again and now there was only feverish hunger in her gorgeous body. She flung herself against him with a savagery that surprised him and her cries came from deep down inside her body, wordless pleadings of eternal woman, hungering to be taken and fighting that hunger at the same time.
With Lassiter, with this big, hard man, she wanted the primeval, the raw desire let loose that he had aroused in her, that she had refused to admit. Only the body knew no deceits and hers responded with the totality of its needs, wanting only the completeness of flesh upon flesh, mouth upon mouth, limbs interlocked with limbs.
She made love with Lassiter in a way she had not believed herself capable, with a driving intensity she knew was sparked by him. He brought her higher and higher, holding hard against the wild thrashings of her body, until it seemed there was no escape from the anguished ecstasy of it and she felt her hands clawing against the leaves, digging deep into them with her fingers. And then, when it seemed she would go mad with pleasure, the world exploded and she heard her long, shuddering cry as if it were in some distant place, far removed. She held there, in that exploding world, until it vanished and she felt her body sink down, limp, still throbbing with the echoes of ecstasy. She heard a wood thrush burst into song overhead and she felt as though she were in a cradle, warm and content and satisfied.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Lassiter said, raising himself up on one elbow and looking at the white, curving figure of the girl beside him. “I’ll be goddamned.”
Either he was getting better or this girl was something special, he told himself. Maybe it was a little of both. He had known she’d wanted it but he had figured she would want it in the self-constricted way of so many women of her background. He ran his hand gently over the soft smoothness of her skin and she opened her eyes.
He thought of the look of fear mingled with desire he’d seen in them when he had begun to make love to her and he wondered about it. But not for long. He didn’t like to analyze and wonder. It diluted the pleasures of feeling and doing. It complicated enjoyment.
Besides, he had his own ways of understanding, ways that came not from thinking but from feeling, from his own, extra-acute animal senses. And so he knew, in his own way, that the fear in her eyes had not been of him, the man, but of what he would show her of herself. Women were strange creatures, he mused, idly. They always wanted to wrap things up to look prettier than they really were, even their own emotions.
He stood up and let the girl look up at his tall nakedness. She reached out and ran her hands up his legs, like muscled trees, up to the thick thighs.
“It’s time we got moving,” he said. She nodded and turned away to get her clothes. They rode out of the little arbor wordlessly. There would be a next time, she knew, and she was already wondering when it would be and where and her body moved with the thought of it.
Lassiter knew there’d be another time, too. He didn’t think about where or when. He just knew it would be and that was enough for him. He was wondering about the best way to move four chests of silver. That was the difference between them.