Hailey was already purring, rubbing herself against him practically like a cat, so Chad kept it slow. Little tiny swings with his hips, jostling his member around inside her so she didn’t have to stop stretching—so her walls stayed taut as his maleness shifted around and reminded her how full she was.
Small fists hammered down against his back. She didn’t want him to stop. She wanted him to give her more.
He gave her a long, slow stroke. Hailey gulped and the fists became nails digging into his back. He went faster, harder, heedless of the twinges of pain running across her face—rather, heeding more the slack-jawed pleasure that seemed to be taking over her expression the more he rutted inside. The pain never went away, but the pleasure became long, voiceless screams of ecstasy swallowed up by Chad’s hand. He thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of those screams down around his cock, where they started.
There was only so much fuel in Chad, with the fire raging at its hottest. Even Hailey, in all her luster, could only produce so much heat. He seemed to put hours into avoiding his fate, but finally the inevitable became inescapable. The whirlwind they were swept up finally landed them, breathless and dizzied, with nothing possible for them except to stay bound in each other.
Chad was still staked in Hailey’s delicious sheath minutes later, feeling there could not possibly be more in him to give over to Hailey’s receptacle. She herself seemed paradisaically pleased to find the heat of their union eventually ended up deposited inside her, wet and sticky, a testament to their pleasure to match the aching awesomeness of how drained Chad felt.
“Next time you find yourself in a brothel,” Hailey said, her voice hoarse, “remember there’s a whore here you can visit for free.”
“I do love a bargain,” Chad remarked. “It’s the Irish in me.”
Hailey giggled. “I didn’t think it was the Chinese!”
***
In the morning, Chad woke to the sound of someone rustling around at his bedroom door. Hailey was gone, as he’d expected her to be after she’d gotten her fill of laying her head on his chest and feeling the size of him in her arms and measuring him for the role of husband and rancher. It would pass, Chad knew. Women were damned practical after they’d been loved up some. Once they got the nature of it out of the way, they remembered how to be all civilized about it, and the gulf between a man of a culture and a man like Chad became evident. And, as she had departed the bedroom no matter how much she enjoyed being skin to skin with him, she would depart his future for much the same reason.
Chad came out of the bed, pulled on his longjohns to be something of a presentable figure, then opened the door. There was a bucket of water for him to make his toilet there. It’d been heated up—there was steam still upon the surface of the water. A time-consuming thing, Chad knew.
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the bedpan already looked like it’d come fresh from the general store. So either the servants just couldn’t wait to tend to Chad’s needs—and he had a doubt that a Mexican or Negro living this far from anywhere would be so inclined—or maybe he’d given Hailey enough loving to root himself staunchly in her picture of the future.
That was the other thing about women: you never could tell. Except that if it were convenient for them to be practical, you can bet they’d pick then to be unpredictable.
There was also a wooden tub. One bucket hot water and two cold would make for a nice, tepid bath. It was also about as polite a way as he could think of to say that the usual dunk in a watering hole wouldn’t do for the smell of him. But Chad’s stomach was wrapped too tightly around his backbone for him to want a soak. Maybe after breakfast.
Through the floorboards he could smell coffee boiling and thick slices of sowbelly drowning in hot grease on a frying pan. Chad remembered Hailey patting his belly—patting other parts of him too—and telling him she’d make cream gravy too, pouring flour and milk into the sizzling grease, and he could have it on his biscuits and mashed potatoes and chicken-fried steak. No other guest on the ranch was so fortunate and her eyes had sparkled saying how she couldn’t wait to see how strong he was with some proper womanly cooking fueling his fire.
He took the much-appreciated warm water to the mirror and scrubbed himself. It would not do to get used to this soft, all-but-citified living… but then, Chad figured, it wouldn’t do to forget how to use such amenities either.
With his hide scrubbed until it was suitably pink, Chad thought he might dip his clothes in the water and slap them outside the window, as he’d clean them were he to happen on a river and some handy boulders. Then he thought that as long as the water wasn’t too befouled… and his hide did collect less dirt than his duds… he could do with a shave. A drawer in the dresser below the mirror wasn’t quite as equipped as a barber’s, but there was shaving soap to smear on himself and aftershave to go on after. Chad took his own knife from his kit (he would not borrow another’s razor, as it seemed bad luck to chance leaving his blood on something that was not his through and through). He gave it a quick sharpening over his belt, then went at his beard while the water still remembered being warm.
After reducing himself to a stubble that would at least allow his smile to be seen without shrubbery in the way, presumptuous as it was to assume he’d have anything to grin about, Chad stirred his blade in the water and then set it aside. Cupping handfuls of the water to splash in his face and rinse off what hairs and lather were still trespassing on the landscape he’d just fenced in. Chad splashed his hair as well, which he’d leave to a qualified barber, and with his grit and dust consigned to a nice little bucket he could pour out the window, he straightened to admire his newly cleared face.
The Segundo was behind him. Bear Brody, with a wooden chair held high, a reflection Chad could see for but a moment ‘fore the chair came down on his back and he went to his knees and the kindling that chair had been reduced to clattered all around him like bones knocked out of his body. And that was how his bones felt too—no, he supposed if they were littering the floor, they would’ve hurt less. Everything had to be inside his skin to be panging him this bad.
He smelled the chicken-fried steak Hailey had waiting for him downstairs.
It was as good a reason as any to pick himself up and face Bear Brody.
Brody still hung onto two amputated chairlegs. He tossed them aside; they weren’t blunt enough instruments for him, Chad took it. Then he waded in with his ham hock fists swinging like they were on meathooks.
Chad ducked and the mirror took a big fist; if there was a place a mirror could take a punch from Bear Brody and not break, it wasn’t where he hit.
Chad swiped up his knife from where he’d set it and swung it at Bear Brody as the man reached for him. Purely as a measure for keeping those giant hands off him, but when Brody jerked his hands back, he didn’t jerk fast enough. The knife slit neatly through the furthest segment of Brody’s right pinky and it came away from the rest of his hand as neatly as a vole snatched up by a hawk.
Brody flung himself back. Chad stood there, his eyes irresistibly drawn to the floor where Brody’s fingertip lay like a thimble full of something red had spilled over. It wasn’t a nice thought: a body part, however small, in the boudoir where Hailey had listened so sweetly to his lies.
Chad moved the knife up and out of the way, signaling that he didn’t intend to do anymore butchery with it today. “I apologize. That was excessive for a fight between two men. But so was what you done to that perfectly fine chair.”
Chad himself would’ve appreciated such an understanding stop to the contest. Brody was not so gracious. He roared and rushed forward and Chad threw himself out of the way. He thought quickly of knifing the man, thought even more quickly that this way no way to resolve a fistfight, and gave the knife a nice throw into the bed’s headboard, where it quivered like an arrow in a bullseye. It could wait for him there, not availing itself to Brody’s poor sportsmanship, until they’d settled the matter.