Acres, Natalie - Propositioned by Outlaws [Outlaws 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (3 page)

“Let me guess, it’s not for the lack of trying?” Art teased her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You ain’t a whore, and that much is obvious,” Lane said. “I’ve seen one or two of them in my time.”

“That’s your problem, I reckon. I didn’t ask you to tell me your flaws.”

“No you didn’t,” Lane said, chuckling as he shook his head. “And I said I’ve seen one or two of them. I didn’t say I’d put it to one or two of them.”

Victoria
gulped. There was something about Lane’s frank way of saying things in simple terms. He made her body alert to all sorts of possibilities. Her nerve endings tingled, and her mouth was dry one minute, moist the next. And God help her, she couldn’t help but notice the sizeable bulge in the man’s breeches.

“So are you wanted by the marshal or not?” she asked, deciding their answer would more or less let her know whether or not she wanted to entertain strangers.

“I reckon we are,” Art said regretfully. “Does that mean you’re gonna judge us?”

Lane stroked his two-day growth of beard. “I don’t believe she will.”

“How would you know?”

“Lucky guess. I heard the way your voice changed as you read that letter there in your hand. There was something about the way your body went rigid. Your hands shook, and I believe if you hadn’t been in the open daylight, you might have let your fingers wander, maybe you would’ve pleasured yourself, slid your hands down the front of your pantaloons and done the kind of things you ain’t yet to experience with a man.”

“That’s not so,” she said, holding her head higher. She swallowed a few times. Why was this fellow talking to her in such a manner? And why, pray tell, was she excited by what he said? Her body tingled as he spoke, and she found herself wanting to hear more rather than hoping he’d speak less.

“Really?” he asked, arching a brow. “Got as much experience as the woman who wrote that letter, do you?”

“No, but—”

“You ain’t got any experience at all, doll,” Lane told her, walking toward the horses tied to the tree she could clearly see behind after taking an elevated position.

“And what if I do?” she asked, dropping her arms to her sides and sticking her chest out.

Art’s jaw dropped. “Good God.”

Apparently, the white dress showed everything a man wanted to see.

“You don’t,” Lane called out over his shoulder. All at once, he turned around. “How old are you anyhow?”

“I just turned twenty-one on my birthday.”

“And when was that?” Art asked, his brow furrowed.

“Awhile ago,” she replied.

“How long is ‘awhile ago’ in these parts?” Lane asked, grabbing the reins of his horse and swinging a leg over the saddle.

“Three weeks ago on Sunday,” she informed them proudly.

Art laughed. “Well shit howdy, Lane. She ain’t nothin’ but a baby.”

“That’s for damn sure,” Lane grumbled.

Feeling as if she were the butt of a cruel joke,
Victoria
marched back down the hill and stood nose to nose with Art. “I might be a little younger than the women you like to poke, but that don’t mean I can’t do it.”

“You offering?” Art asked, his tongue holding in the corner of his mouth.

“No but if I decided to, you know, offer…” She paused and gave some thought to the way she wanted to say what she needed to express. Opting to borrow Lane’s phrase, she finally stammered and said, “If I decided to let you put it to me, then you should know this. I can because…I know how.”

Lane rolled his eyes and pulled the brim of his hat over his brow. “Like hell you do.”

Art shook his head and started for his horse, too. “Psht. You wouldn’t know which hole it went in.”

Lane snorted at that.

When both men were mounted, she grabbed hold of her skirts and traipsed over to them. The swish-swish sound of crinoline and lace resounded, but nary a sound fell from either of their lips as she made her way over to their horses.

“I reckon if there are two of you, I can easily figure out what to do. One of you can fit in the front and the other one can squeeze in the back. If that ain’t what you like, then I got a mouth and I’ll figure out how to use it.”

Lane stared at her lips. Art stretched his neck and said, “Turn around.”

Taking the challenge, she faced the other way. She looked up at the sky and started to say a little prayer, hoping they wouldn’t take her up on her offer. She was only feisty because her ma’s damn letter gave her courage.

“Hmm,” Art drawled. “She’s got an ass on her all right.”

She looked over her shoulder and tried to see her sitter-downer. Had she put on some weight?

The men shared a laugh. Realizing this time she was certainly the butt of their jokes, she stormed off and headed home.

* * * *

She marched up one hill and down the other. She swung her arms out to the side as she pranced through weeds and jumped over horse manure. Fresh stacks indicated the men behind her had already been this way, and that alone irritated her. She wondered if they’d stopped off at her place to snoop around.

Cursing herself and her motives every minute or two, she clutched her momma’s letter in her closed fist. The edge of the crumpled paper bit into her fingers, but she didn’t check for a cut or blood. She could bleed out for all she cared.

She’d read her ma’s words and tried her hand at seduction. She failed miserably. In fact, she’d been rejected. The two strangers obviously didn’t think she was capable of pleasing a man.

She’d show them. Humph, she’d prove it to herself if no one else. She was born for this kind of life. She was supposed to follow in her momma’s footsteps. That was her sole purpose. Pleasuring men had to be the reason she was put on this earth. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have stayed in that prairie.

Victoria
looked down at her heaving chest as she approached the cabin. She had a decent body. She was curvy. Men liked women with a little meat on their bones, or so she recalled men telling her momma such a tale.

She was untouched, so what? She could change that, and she would. Starting tonight.

Maybe.

With damp hair and clothes,
Victoria
dripped all the way across her front planked porch. She stomped rather than taking an easy stroll, aware of the fact the two men she’d just met had followed her all the way home. Their horses had kept some distance but trailed behind her all the same.

Reaching her front door, she turned the knob and started inside. Instead of traipsing ahead and making a muddy mess of her dirt floor, she wheeled around and faced her uninvited guests. “Seeing as you claimed to have seen the best parts of a woman, it shouldn’t be too much to ask a favor.”

“You mean since you granted us that opportunity and we didn’t look away, we owe ya?” Art asked.

She held her head higher. “I’d like for you to turn your head. Let me strip off here so I don’t track up my floor. If you don’t mind to look the other way, I’d be much obliged.”

Art leaned over his saddle horn. “I’ll cover my eyes, but I can’t promise I won’t peek.”

Her nostrils flared, and she glared back at the handsomest men she’d ever seen riding on horseback. “A gentleman would turn around so a lady doesn’t have to go inside with wet skirts and make the floors into a muddy mess.”

“A lady wouldn’t have been frolicking in the waters like what we saw earlier. We’ve done seen you aplenty,” Art advised. “Go on now, get those wet clothes off, and you can start supper. We’ll pay you for a hot meal. We’re hungry, and you must’ve known we had eatin’ on our minds when we saw you home.”

“Then turn your blasted head.”

Lane chewed the inside of his jaw like he had a spit of tobacco rolling around in his cheek. “Miss, after the kind remarks you made down there by the stream, I’m not inclined to turn around. If you want to change, you might as well get on in there and do it. Otherwise, strip right here. I’ll watch. I think you might like that, but it’s your call.”

“I’m not inclined to mess up my cabin,” she bit out, already twirling the buttons at her sleeve. They’d seen her once. They could see her again. Besides, there was only one way to lure a man—show him the goods and sell him on the fact he couldn’t live without ’em.

Now, she was starting to act like her mother. She couldn’t help it. Whore blood ran deep. Either that or these two fellows pissed her off. Considering she’d never been with a man in the past, she sort of thought the latter made more sense.

She locked gazes with Art and then shifted her focus toward Lane. By the look on his face, he was betting on a taste of defiance.

Victoria
didn’t know a lot about men, but she understood one thing. Her momma’s company often looked at her ma in much the same way Lane was studying her then. He liked what he saw. He was playing hard to get.

“Well, then. So be it,” she said, hurriedly working to free the buttons on her skirts.

Lane bowed his head but lifted his gaze, studying her with the hottest eyes she’d ever seen. Maybe he was waiting to see if she had the guts to do the unexpected. Regardless of what he thought, lust and hunger spilled from those pretty green eyes of his.

And God help her, she had plenty of guts to take this as far as he wanted to go. She dug in her pocket and pulled out her mother’s letter. Placing the crumpled paper on a nearby ledge, she loosened the buttons on her white blouse and let the collar fall completely open.

Art rolled his tongue over his lower lip
,
and scratched the back of his neck. Lane’s right eye twitched. The corner stamped with wrinkles showcased his age and highlighted the fact he was getting on in years.

Then again,
Victoria
figured anyone beyond the age of thirty was advancing toward old age quicker than they might have liked. Maybe that’s why he had the wrinkles in the first place. He worried himself to where he looked a year or two older than what he was.

Not one to undress in front of strangers, she thought of her ma’s letter one final time. Her mother must’ve known she’d understand what to do with that note when she finally came of age.

She was twenty-one, untouched and pure, but regardless of the facts, she was pissed. They’d shown her plenty of interest until they found out how old she was, and now they were about to find out why age didn’t matter.

Besides, she wasn’t about to track up her recently swept dirt floor for the likes of stubborn strangers. If these men were true criminals, hell-bent on showing off their unlawful acts, they would’ve acted like outlaws long before they shot the likes of that snake. They would’ve shown their true faces back when she was bathing earlier in the day, which made her wonder all the same.

A bald eagle flew overhead, shrilling as it descended in the distance. Sometimes she felt like that damn bird, a free spirit enabled by her surroundings, and the lack of disturbances often caused by other humans.

Her present company had disrupted her nest. They took away her privacy but she wasn’t about to let them change her behavior. If she’d been out there all alone, she would’ve stripped off in a hurry, leaving heaps of clothing which she’d tend to the next day. If they couldn’t behave like gentlemen, it was their problem, not hers.

Victoria
slid the skirt away from her hips then removed her blouse. “Say you saw everything you wanted to see back there in the water, spying on me, did ya?” she asked, slapping the wet material over the front porch railing. The bishop-style sleeves fell over the top split log, landing in a perfect position for a good drying.

“No, ma’am,” Art replied. “I don’t recall saying I saw everything.”

She discarded her crinoline and stood there in her pantaloons. “Well?” she asked, studying Lane with her hands on her hips.

His lips curved in a wicked smile. When his tongue darted in and out of his moist mouth,
Victoria
knew she was in trouble.

Lane was the epitome of a dangerous man, the kind a woman typically avoided. He was like the fellas described in her mother’s letters. Only her ma forgot to mention one crucial fact.

Men like Lane came and went, but the memories they left behind didn’t easily fade. She’d watched her mother damn near mourn fellows like these two. They were the kind of cowboys who ruined a woman for good loving unless the loving came from them.

“Seen enough yet?” she asked, shifting her position, changing her pose.

Lane glanced at his sidekick. “I’ve seen a right smart. Art, how about you?”

Art placed some distance between the bulge in his breeches and the saddle horn. “I still don’t have a right mind to look away.”

“Then you ain’t got a mind to speak of,” Lane informed him. “Seeing those full tits without anything to hold ’em back will get us both in trouble.”

“So that’s what it’ll take, huh?”
Victoria
asked, slipping her arms out of the camisole. She held the material against her chest. In one fluid motion, she turned her back to them, dropped her pantaloons, wiggled away from her camisole, and left both garments on the porch to dry.