DangerousPassion (7 page)

“Put your dress on, and while I escort you home, I’ll explain why it is best to never say ‘no’ to me.”

* * * *

They made it back to Sarah’s carriage at the livery without incident. Derek retrieved his horse, a black, long-legged gelding with a white blaze on his forehead. They made it out of the town proper without being seen. It did not take long to travel the two and a half miles to Sarah’s small, tidy home with its small barn.

“You go inside,” Derek said when they reached Sarah’s house. “I’ll put up your horse for you.” Derek looked to the east. “It’ll be sunup in ninety minutes, or so.” He helped her down from the wagon. “Get cleaned up. I’ll be in there soon enough.”

Derek saw the gratitude in Sarah’s eyes. As she started to leave, he caught her by the arm to stop her. Quickly and impulsive, he bent down and kissed her on the temple, then turned away and began leading the horses to the barn.

Darkness inside the barn made the initial going difficult for Derek. He eventually found the small kerosene lamp, and after a bit more fumbling found the box of matches that he knew had to be nearby. By the time he got the lantern lit, he could smell wood smoke coming from the house. As he unhitched Sarah’s mare from the harness and put her into one of two stalls in the small barn, he thought about the events of the past several hours, and what ramifications they might have on his life.

Derek Jordan was a man who understood violence. He understood the absurdity of violence and the necessity of it. He often thought it ironic that he made his income, which often was rather substantial, by quashing violent men in a violent manner.

He found the bin where Sarah kept her ground oats. He gave the mare a half bucket, and then his own horse one as well. After more rummaging about—he found the barn to be neat and orderly, but not particularly arranged in the manner in which he would have liked—Derek found the curry comb, and began brushing down the mare.

Thoughts of Sarah drifted across Derek’s mind as he tended to the horses, and those thoughts and memories made him smile. Though his experience with women was considerable, he couldn’t remember a time when he’d seen such incredible breasts. So big and lush and firm! He typically wasn’t overwhelmingly aroused by voluptuous women, but with Sarah, it was different. Hazy mental images slithered across his consciousness of what emotions he would experience upon looking down as he straddled Sarah’s prone body, watching his hard cock sliding between her tits… The thought made him shiver. He shook his head, fighting against such licentious thoughts, struggling to focus on curry combing the mare.

Though Sarah was inexperienced, she was passionate…but would she be game for some lusty titty-fucking?

Aloud, to himself, Derek said sternly, “Stop...thinking...about...it.”

When Derek finished with the horses and exited the barn, he saw lights in the house through the window curtains. He felt a strange sensation—one he’d never before experienced and did not now understand—as he headed toward the house and toward the woman waiting inside.

Derek paused a moment before opening the front door to Sarah’s little home. He didn’t want to just barge in, but it seemed a bit formal for him to knock on the door before entering. He looked up at the morning sky. The clouds were rolling in from the west, fat and blue-black with the promise of mischief. It would be a miserable muddy day for the prospectors working in the mines today.

Thanking the Fates that he’d never tried his hand at gold prospecting, Derek pushed open the front door and entered Sarah’s private home.

He found her straining as she poured a large boiler bucket of steaming water into a galvanized bath tub. She had changed from her tattered clothing into a summer-weight cotton robe that had been worn so many times it was still white but almost translucent at her buttocks and elbows. The garment was wrapped around her womanly body and belted tightly around her waist, but the movement of Sarah’s extravagant breasts beneath paper-thin cotton let Derek know she was completely naked beneath. Despite the sexual satisfaction he’d experienced earlier in the evening with this voluptuous woman, he felt his cock twitch slightly in his gabardine trousers.

“Good idea,” Derek said, nodding at the bathtub.

“I knew that I needed a bath, and I thought you might like one, too.” She pushed an errant lock of auburn hair back behind her ear, now having abandoned all attempts to keep her hair in a bun. Derek watched her rounded breasts tremble gently beneath the cotton, and saw more than just a hint of cleavage. He looked away, not wanting to ogle. She said, “If you’re hungry, I have bread and cheese and some wine you can have right away, or if you wouldn’t mind waiting, I can cook up something hot for you.”

Derek looked at the steaming tub, then around at the interior of Sarah’s house. The bed was tucked into the southeast corner of the room, no doubt away from the fierceness of the nasty arctic winds that howled in the winter. There was a fireplace in the middle of the north wall, with a wood rocking chair and a bentwood chair on either side angled toward it. A small, rectangular table was accompanied by two simple chairs in the area that was used for dining. In the center of the table was a small vase for flowers. Derek immediately noticed the flowers, though not displeasing to the eye, were actually made out of paper. A porcelain wash basin and towel were there on a small table for her morning wash. There was a tall bureau that looked dreadfully old and did not have doors, but did have a curtain that appeared to have been made with several different scraps of either bed linen or towels. The bureau stood beside a scarred four-drawer chest-of-drawers. Derek assumed the bureau and chest-of-drawers contained every last piece of clothing that Sarah owned.

Everything around him whispered of quiet desperation, of a life lived at the very edge of the lowest level of respectability. During the ride from Deadwood to Sarah’s home, he had learned that she was a clerk of some sort. She had intentionally kept the facts quite vague, and Derek had been gentlemanly enough to not press her for details, despite his curiosity. If this was any indication of her wages, her employer wasn’t what anyone would consider generous.

“It’s not much,” Sarah said, apology and embarrassment coloring her tone as she spied Derek eyeing her home, “but it’s been in the family ever so long. I just couldn’t see myself selling the property, just to make some quick money.”

Derek grinned, gave her a sideways look that showed Sarah how proud he was of her, and replied, “That wouldn’t be right, now would it? And you, Sarah Miller, strike me as a woman who does right.”

She blushed and looked away. “I try,” she said, suddenly shifting her bare feet nervously on the slat-wood floor. “Sometimes I just don’t do very well.” She gave her head a little, unconscious shake, as though to cast off any unwanted personal doubts, and then nodded toward the steaming tub. “You’d better get in while the water’s still nice and hot.”

Derek removed his coat and put it over the bentwood chair near the fireplace. Next he slipped off the shoulder holster that held his deadly Colt revolver, and looped that over the chair. His back was to Sarah as he pulled off one boot, and then the other. His socks went next, then his shirt. Finally, he unbuckled his belt and removed his gabardine trousers. Very slowly, unsure of how he would be received while wearing only his underwear, he turned around. Sarah hadn’t moved a muscle, and in fact had hardly breathed. There was a slight blush in her cheeks that hadn’t been there earlier.

Suddenly having been caught staring at the nearly naked man, she muttered “I’m sorry” and turned away quickly.

Derek grinned, wondering how many nude men she’d seen in her life, wondering, too, of the physique of those men. Every new thing he learned about Sarah Miller pleased him.

He had at first felt himself to be astonishingly unlucky to stumble across the assault on her, since a man like him couldn’t simply not intervene. By doing so it put his life in grave jeopardy against a vicious enemy that vastly outnumbered him. But now, with the danger behind him and Sarah still with him, he was beginning to consider this past night and morning to be perhaps the finest, luckiest moments of his life.

Near the wash basin he saw a small, glass plate that held the thin, oval remains of a bar of soap.
 
He picked up the soap, untied the drawstring of his underwear and then pushed them down to his ankles before stepping out of them, then calmly crossed the room and eased himself down into the hot, clean water. He had noticed that Sarah had watched his every move out of the corner of her eyes. He knew better than to tease her for watching, and he kept his expression as bland as when he was at the poker table.

“I can’t thank you enough for this hot bath,” Derek said as he began trying to get some soap suds worked up between his palms. The bar of soap was much smaller than his palms, and thin as a coin.

He looked up at Sarah, and she suddenly smiled broadly. “Wait!” she exclaimed, then hurried over to a cabinet near the small dinner table, oblivious to what hurrying did to her ostentatiously feminine body with all those luscious curves that were only barely hidden beneath cotton so thin it was nearly “clothing” in name only.

Derek watched as Sarah, from cabinet containing provisions and supplies, extracted a new, white bar of soap. The new bar was about the size of a small red builder’s brick. She hurried over to him, unintentionally giving him an unhampered view of her naked legs all the way up to her thighs when her robe split open during her haste. And when she bent over to hand Derek the soap—well, that robe was doing all it could to contain Sarah’s voluptuous curves, and though succeeding, abject failure was an ever-present possibility. Derek had seen all of Sarah’s generously endowed physical charms, but seeing her flouncing and jouncing, bouncing and swaying in the pathetically old and worn cotton robe, was both astonishingly erotic and emotionally painful. That pathetic robe was the finest summer-weight robe she owned…and in the back of Derek’s mind, much to his astonishment, he was already wondering what stores in Deadwood there were that might have some clothes suitable for a woman as worthy as Sarah Miller.

Before accepting the fresh block of soap, Derek asked, “For sure?”

“Please, I want you to have it.” Sarah stood at the edge of the tub, looking down through the clear water at Derek as he began soaping himself. She could see his naked body in its stark, masculine perfection. Soon the water became cloudy with soap. In a quiet voice, she asked, “You’re not even a little bit embarrassed, are you?”

Derek looked up at her, dark eyes beneath slanting brows not really hiding the amusement he felt. “Embarrassed? About what?” he asked in a voice suggesting an innocence of heart and mind than Derek hadn’t possessed since his early teen years.

Sarah’s lips pressed together in a thin, annoyed line. She put her hands on the generous curves of her hips, and gave her bare foot a little stomp to signify mock disapproval. Finally, her lips curled into a half-smile and she asked, “Would you like something to drink. I’ve got some hard liquor, if you’re interested.”

Derek raised his eyebrows. “You? Hard liquor?”

Sarah looked away. That embarrassed edge came back to her tone as she said, “Like I told you, I’ve got a…a friend. It’s his. I keep it here for him. He’s buys it; I don’t.” Rhetorically, she asked, “Who in Deadwood would sell whiskey to a woman?”

Derek really didn’t like the idea of letting another man—especially when he suspected that other man was Sarah’s lover—buy him a drink when Derek himself would never be able to return the favor. But it had been an awfully long night....

“What’ll he say when he comes back and finds that the level in the bottle isn’t the same as when he left?” Derek asked.

Sarah’s green eyes turned flinty, but only for a moment. Then, in a voice that was calmer and more commanding than Derek had ever before heard it, she said, “He’s my problem, not yours. Right now, the most important thing to me is that I make you as happy as you can possibly be.” She glanced away, and when she did, her eyes softened as she concluded, “Don’t...don’t take this away from me. I want—no, I need—to do this for you. After all you’ve done for me, I have to do this. Please?”

 
“Well, it’s quite obvious to me that you have everything under control.” Derek smiled, and a boyish dimple appeared in his cheek. “And I am most pleased to be the recipient of your generous hospitality.”

Once again, Sarah hurried away from the bathtub, the smile on her lips and in her eyes glowing with an effervescence she had never shown as an adult. She hurried to the supply cabinet and extracted a bottle of Evan Williams whiskey, and from another cabinet a coffee cup.