Cry Wolf (41 page)

“You know you love it,” Kelly replied.

Malcolm winced as he pulled his shirt on, but the bulge in his pants didn’t diminish. She knew better. He had liked every second of the ring going through that piece of flesh nearly as much as he would like her mouth around his cock when they got home.

She stared down at her arm, peering beyond the white bandage to the pentacle beneath.

Illa habet potestatem
, she thought. When she looked in the mirror, her eyes glowed green.
I can live with that
.

“Let’s go,” she said softly.

Also available from Totally Bound Publishing:

Gravedigger

Aurelia T. Evans

Excerpt

Chapter One

Ivory

Franklin tickled the ivories of the piano. And near the piano, Ivory peered through the crowd to find someone worthy to tickle her.

Lively music accompanied rich, boisterous laughter in the bright bordello. Shouts from testosterone-charged, rugged, rough and ready men drinking at the bar or clinking chips at the tables mingled with come-ons and purrs from the girls as their perfume of the night interwove with the sweat of the day.

Men from around the whole county as well as those just travelling through all flocked to Ruby Rue’s every night. There was never a shortage of company. Ruby Rue—a ponderous woman who laughed with the men and could drink several of them under the table before offering them the services of her establishment—could afford to be particular with her girls. This was why the madam was known in all the territories of the Union and beyond for her discerning taste in a finer breed of whore. Reputation as much as happenstance brought curious men, young and old, through the swinging doors of Ruby Rue’s. No one left feeling short-changed, although they did leave with fewer coins or notes lining their pockets than when they entered—now tucked into corsets and garters and under pillows.

Ivory had worked with Madam Rue for nine years, easily one of the odder additions to her eclectic collection of working women. Whereas most of the girls stuck together for safety and as a kind of patchwork family, Ivory kept to herself. She also rarely trolled the room for just any john that tripped into her bosom, instead preferring to stay in her corner by the piano. Franklin didn’t mind. Gave him something nice to look at while he had his back to the rest of the room.

Ivory was very selective about the men she brought to her bed—it was considered a badge of honour as prestigious as a battle scar for Ivory to invite a man up. Some nights, she never moved from her chair. Many men swore she never even blinked, just sat still as a statue with her dark gaze considering the crowd, the skin she was named after scrubbed and matte pale, the generous dark curls of her hair pinned up and framing her face. Tonight, she had propped her boots up on an ottoman, the leather as black as her eyes—an impressive feat in a dusty town.

Her gaze lit upon a dirty, scruffy newcomer striding through the doors. Just from the set of his hard, defined jaw and the scars and lines of his face, Ivory detected the kind of man that could nurse a grudge for decades, who would wait patiently for just the right moment to put a knife to the back or a bullet in the head. A gunslinger if she ever saw one, but not trouble of the bar-fight kind, which wasn’t the kind of brawny she was looking for.

Determined, passionate, wicked, resourceful and unafraid of getting a little dirty. That was the kind of man she wanted in her bed tonight.

“Leave ’im cross-eyed and bow-legged, Ivory,” Franklin called after her as she stood.

“May you be as fleet-fingered on other instruments, Frank,” she replied, making him laugh. Ivory liked him. Most of the girls did. He enjoyed looking at them, but everyone knew he preferred saddle horns to stirrups. He was the only man allowed in Ruby Rue’s during the day because he had no use for women of the night.

Ivory wound her way to the bar where her man swigged from a tumbler of whisky, and came up behind him. As was her trademark with a client, she said nothing, merely slid her hand down over his arm to where he held the tumbler. When the man turned around to see who had interrupted his drink, she plucked the glass from his hand. He stopped mid-snarl as he took her in, his blue eyes darting over her, clearly unable to find somewhere to linger with such a sumptuous feast before him. From the way he had nursed his whisky, company hadn’t been forefront in his mind after his journey, although Ivory was confident it would have become more important in the hours ahead after he’d imbibed sufficient alcohol.

Ivory had better use for those hours.

“What’s your name, tall, strong and handsome?” Ivory asked softly, the murmur of a city girl of a much higher station, her drawl less pronounced than her counterparts. It was one of her charms—cowboys stumbled from the whorehouse feeling like they bedded the finest lady, finer for her willingness to satisfy their quite ungentlemanly desires.

“Wynn Rhodes, ma’am,” he replied, tipping his hat to her. “Just passing through.”

“Where to?” Ivory asked.

“Wherever my horse carries me,” Wynn said. “I got half a mind to be a lawman, if a town’ll take me.”

“Tell ’em Ivory took you first,” she said, caressing his rough hand with her thin fingers. She never took her eyes from his, and eventually his hungry gaze couldn’t look anywhere else. “Any John Law’ll respect you then.”

“I’m sure they would, ma’am.”

“You come on up with me now,” Ivory said, easing the layered fabric of her skirts between his legs to press close. She stroked the dusty and sun-browned chest exposed above the buttons of his shirt.

What would any red-blooded man say?

“Yes, ma’am.”

His drinking companions let out a shout and clapped him on the shoulder. He barely acknowledged the congratulations as Ivory hooked a finger in one of his belt loops. She drew him through the throng behind the train of her bright red satin dress, less gaudy than many of the other girls but fancy nonetheless. The skirts hid her legs but showed off the enticing curve of her hips and ass before flaring out in swirls of fabric like flame. The scarlet corset drew her waist in and displayed to full advantage the breasts spilling over it, barely encased by the rest of the satin bodice that pulled off her shoulders to reveal a generous expanse of unmarked cream-coloured skin.

The staircase to the girls’ rooms was narrow, almost too narrow for Ivory’s skirts, but Ivory had practice navigating the staircase and the corridor. As they passed by other rooms, they heard creaking beds, rough grunts and high-pitched moans through the closed doors. Wynn became more impatient, barrelling them through until Ivory stopped in front of her door at the end of the hall.

“I need to see payment, Wynn, before we proceed.”

“How much?” Wynn asked, staring at the way the dimmer gas light created deeper shadows around the curves of her body and between her breasts.

“How much do you think?” Ivory asked, leaning against the door and cupping his cock through his pants. He thrust into her grip, but she pulled her hand back. He growled in frustration at her smile.

Wynn pulled out a five-dollar note.

“Very good, sir,” she crooned, taking the bill and opening her door.

There wasn’t much room inside for anything other than a bed and a small desk, and that’s all there was, but that was all she needed. Even so, she had put her own unique touch on the décor. Ruby Rue’s was well-known for its crimson hues, but Ivory took that to the extreme with her red glass lamps, red-papered walls and dyed sheets.

Ivory opened the window shutters, letting in the night air and giving them a view of the stars.

“Don’t you want to keep everyone else from hearing?” Wynn asked.

“Is that what
you
want?” Ivory asked. “Me, I have nothing to hide.”

And she proved it by removing her corset as easily as if it were a simple panel of cloth. She folded the bill in with the corset when she discarded it to one side.

“Yes,” Wynn growled, advancing on her like a bull, but somehow the slim, delicate woman sidestepped him and threw him down on the bed.

He looked up at her in amusing confusion. Her men were always so bewildered when their brains weren’t getting any of the blood.

She removed her bustle, then unbuttoned the front of her bodice to reveal how the hidden skin was just as unblemished as the rest. She wore no underclothing of any kind. Ivory could tell from his expression that it ignited Wynn’s blood to imagine that powdered white flesh accessible under her skirts. He could have flung her over a table downstairs, hitched up all that satin, and taken her for all and sundry to see.

He reached for her, but she outmanoeuvred him again, pinning his hands to his sides and swinging her leg over his hips to straddle him. She rocked over his cock, tightly encased beneath his trousers and desperate to be released.

“Now, now, I never promised you the reins, lawman,” Ivory said, clicking her tongue in playful disapproval.

“I paid—” Wynn began, but Ivory rocked harder against him, and a strangled sound escaped his throat.

“Yes, you paid. You paid for what I give you, not what you take. Believe me, I’ll make it worth your while. You going to behave?”

Wynn nodded, and she guided his hands up to her breasts. He squeezed them roughly.

She made short work of his shirt, yanking it to the sides to nuzzle his furred chest. His breath hitched when she took his nipple in her mouth, worrying it with teeth that broke through the skin.

“Ow! Ohhh…” He groaned as she swirled her tongue around the tight piece of flesh. If she did indeed bite him hard enough to draw blood, he clearly didn’t give a horse’s ass as long as she kept doing what she was doing. In fact, the feeling of her tongue and teeth, the sucking and soothing of the small nub must have felt particularly good, as she managed to unfasten his trousers and push them over his hips without him even seeming to notice.

His ignorance didn’t last long. As soon as she pulled his cock free, she swooped to take it all with no preparation or warning.

Whoever walked the streets outside the brothel at this time of night was serenaded by Franklin’s music and the swell of groans that Ivory sucked out of Wynn.

Her teeth grazed the sensitive head, making him double over from the intense enjoyment. If any little stabs of pain stung through his pleasure, he quite clearly forget about them seconds later in the wake of the greatest pleasure he had ever received from a woman’s tongue.

“That was sweeter than sugar, darlin’,” Wynn said, falling back against the pillows with a heavy, satisfied exhalation.

“You think I’m finished with you?” Ivory asked. “Hardly five dollars-worth, I think. Hang on to your hat, lawman. We’re going for a ride.”

Ivory covered him with her lithe body, cool against his heated skin, her breasts pressed to his chest, and she latched her lips to his neck. His groans and her sighs as she mounted him and rode him harder than he’d ridden all day echoed across the dust-swept streets.

* * * *

In the quiet hours of the early morning before dawn, Ivory leant out of her window and watched Wynn stumble from Ruby Rue’s. He had blacked out after that third orgasm, as incredible as it should have been impossible. He wouldn’t have remembered much after Ivory had bitten down on the juncture of his neck and shoulder in the throes of her own orgasm.

Of course, when he told the story, it would probably be
her
third orgasm that made
her
pass out.

The evening was cold. The stars from earlier in the evening had been obscured by thick cloud cover, and it smelt like it might snow.

Wynn undoubtedly tried to hurry, but his feet tangled with each other as if he were seven-pint drunk, although he hadn’t drank that much—just a half a tumbler before Ivory had taken him to her bed.

Before letting him leave, she’d whispered to him that he was to head on foot towards the inn for a room. She’d left out the explanation for why he had to leave Ivory’s room when he’d paid for the night, or why he couldn’t just swing up on his horse to get to the inn that much faster.

In the last quiet pangs of the night before the birth of the day, Wynn’s head filled with her mist, his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed onto the street.

Ivory’s heels crunched in the dirt as she approached him. She flipped Wynn’s dead weight over onto his back. Wynn got a glimpse of a Bowie knife gleaming in her hand as she crouched down, fully dressed in scarlet once more and her lips stained red, with the redness dripping down her chin.

Ivory stroked his scruffy cheek. “You’ll do,” she said, her husky voice an intentional balm for his confusion. She played him like a finely tuned piano, and if she kept stroking him like that, her voice whispering in his mind and reminding him of the pleasures of their night together, his sparkling eyes told her he might just fall Stetson-over-spurs in love.

“I think we’ll have a fine time together,” Ivory said. Then she brought the knife to her wrist and opened a line across the veins. She poised her now-bleeding wrist over his slack mouth. The hot, thick drops fell in. The moment they hit his tongue, he suddenly became thirstier than he’d ever been, thirstier than riding days in the searing heat without water.

He groaned, his voice cracking with thirst. Ivory had mercy on him as she recalled her own first taste, and lowered her wrist for him to drink from until he lost the rest of his strength, succumbing to the exsanguination and the numbing poison of her blood.

As soon as his heart stopped beating its sultry percussion in her ears, Ivory viciously slashed Wynn’s neck and shoulders, rendering any marks she’d left there during their lovemaking nothing but a bloody, ripped mess. The other places she’d drawn blood from him, she’d only used her teeth and nails to whet her thirst with naught but thin wells of blood, but she had learned years ago to obliterate any marks identifying the attacker as a vampire.

If Ruby Rue had noted Wynn’s exit, she would doubtlessly attribute his winding path to drunkenness and an exceptional session with Ivory—such a sight was not uncommon in the bordello. She hadn’t seen Ivory leap from her second-storey window to pursue Wynn down the street. Her alibi was secured.