Cold Steel and Hot Lead [How the West Was Done 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (7 page)

“He is afflicted with the Saint Vitus dance!”

Rudy gasped, sat upright, and looked around the ceiling, as if he expected to find The Phenomenal Percy hovering up there!

Derrick was on his feet, standing over Alameda with protective outspread hands. “It’s that bear wrestler,” he hissed.

But they saw no one.

“Did you hear that?” Rudy asked Alameda. He removed his hands from Montreal Jed’s stomach region, as the fellow had apparently fainted again, from shock at hearing the voice, or the diagnosis.

“Yes,” said Alameda, some of the hearty Latin color drained from her face. She lifted a shaky hand to point at the fireplace. “It sounded like it came from there.”

Rudy tried a different tactic. “Percy,” he said with authority. “You are apparently a medical authority as well as a bear wrestler. How would you recommend that I treat Montreal Jed? As a fellow circus performer,” he added, remembering the Irishman’s fondness for his fellow showmen.

“What you are doing is fine,” came the raspy whispering from somewhere near a painting of tipis above the fireplace. “But go to the pharmacy of Chang in town and get some whiskey root. Steep it into a tea and make him drink it.”

Alameda now clutched Derrick’s hand, her eyes frozen open in horror.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,”
she whispered. Derrick sat next to her and put an arm around her as they stared at the fireplace. “What
is
that?” she asked.

“That,” said Rudy, “is The Phenomenal Percy Tibbles.”

“But…” Alameda whispered. “He has no
body.
”

That was a very apt description of the disembodied bear wrestler. “Percy,” Rudy called. “Can you show yourself? The lovely girl here is doubtful of your existence.”

Sure enough, before the river rocks of the fireplace there appeared the image of the muttonchopped Percy as though projected from a hidden magic lantern. He was transparent, but this time his movements were more fluid. He lifted an arm to gesture as though greeting Alameda. This movement consisted of perhaps six projected lantern slides instead of the two they had previously witnessed. Percy seemed to be getting the hang of this specter business.

To test this theory, Rudy rose and went to touch Percy’s arm. He seemed more solid than the previous pudding-like substance he had displayed. But Rudy’s hand could still go right through him if he just put a tiny effort into it. “This is Miss Alameda Hudson.” The poor girl had halfway collapsed into the crook of Derrick’s arm.

Percy’s cardboard face changed to a leer. “Yes, I know. This is why I advised you to seek out her house.” His magic lantern arm moved in a succession of four slides to tip an invisible hat to Alameda.

So Percy was playing cupid? Rudy said, “Oh, so you just wanted to lay eyes on her. Can’t say as I blame you. Can you tell me something? Why do you appear when I am mesmerizing Montreal Jed?”

Percy’s face returned to its former lack of facial expression. “That is when the spiritual fluid is flowing the best.”

“So I could, theoretically, call you forth when I am not laying hands on anyone?”

Someone switched the slide now to depict Percy shrugging. “I suppose. I don’t care much about what you can or can’t do. I’m more interested in the ladies”—the leer replaced the apathetic expression—“and in protecting them from people who wish to harm the good reputation of acrobats and waxworks shows the world over!” He raised a cardboard arm to point idealistically at the ceiling.

Rudy continued, “Then maybe you can tell us. Are we barking up the right tree in assuming it was Antonio Franconi who kidnapped Memphis Kittie?”

Percy’s arm was lowered, and once again he shrugged, although the leer stayed fixed on his two-dimensional face. “I saw a contortionist who looked Italian hunched over the unconscious figure of Memphis Kittie.”

“How did you know he was a contortionist?”

“Because of the manner in which he was contorted over Kittie.”

“What? That was your entire basis for assuming he was a contortionist?”

Percy stayed frozen in the shrugging position. “Wouldn’t you assume that? His feet were up near her shoulders.”

Rudy sputtered with exasperation. “He could have been fucking Kittie, did you think about that? It could have been this lover she prefers to marry. Alameda, does this lover fellow, could he possibly be mistaken for an Italian?”

Alameda was struggling to her feet, as if she wished to view Percy closer. Derrick supported the woman by grasping her elbows as though she were elderly. “Ah, no. The fellow Kittie loves has blond hair. Now tell me, you devious men. How are you making this illusion?”

“Go ahead and touch me!” cried Percy in his muddy voice. “Please, my spangled belle of tent and tightrope! Touch away!”

“Oh,” said Rudy, as Alameda put her hand through Percy’s pudding arm, “she’s not a spangled belle. She’s an upstanding citizen of Laramie City.”

Percy’s rectangular eyebrows moved into a wiggling position, like two black caterpillars tossed there. “Upstanding, indeed. I would baptize her ‘Deluxe Dora’ and use her theatrical skills over at the Oddfellows Hall, where they are gathering to rehearse a new tableau for Laramie citizens.” Derrick asked Alameda, “Do you have theatrical skills?”

“Not that I know of. I did act in a production of
Doctor Faustus
at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. But I had to leave school halfway through the play’s run to care for my mother.”

Rudy said admiringly, “
Doctor Faustus?
That’s a much beloved showman’s piece.”

Percy plainly didn’t approve of the attention being taken off himself, for he now cried, “As well it should be! This is why you should go to the Oddfellows Hall tonight. There you will see the kidnapper of Memphis Kittie! Or better yet, ask the midgets that were assisting Montreal Jed.”

“That’s a good point,” Derrick said thoughtfully. “They were standing behind the cabinet.”

“Hell,” said Rudy. “They were
in
the cabinet. All right. Thank you, Percy. Oh, and can you tell me. What did you mean about following the trail of the nail paint? Who paints their nails, other than ricewomen from China?”
And perhaps circus performers…

“Avast!” cried Percy, having fallen into the persona of a seafarer. “My time grows short! But, Missy. Deluxe Dora.”

“Yes?” said Alameda, as though she’d grown accustomed to the idea of conversing with a spirit.

“You must tell your sister Liberty and her husband Levi. Paddy Worth tells me they must go down another hundred feet in the McKinley Shaft. There they will strike pay dirt.”

“I will tell them,” Alameda said solemnly.

Apparently satisfied with his message, Percy cried, “Up and away!” His arm shot up in the pointing position, and a zealous expression appeared on his face.

“Come back, though, right?” Rudy asked hopefully.

Percy’s mouth didn’t move at all, but they heard him loud and clear. “I will not be far.”

But already his voice came from farther away. Everyone looked to the ceiling and the four walls, and when they looked back to the fireplace, he was gone.

Alameda was overcome with lust.

After the meeting with the otherworldly Irishman, who had apparently been a bear wrestler in life, she had excused herself. She wanted to change into a toilette that had workable buttons up the bodice, but most of her sister Liberty’s clothes were much too small in the bosom for her. She found a green silk gown that she could leave unbuttoned at the waist. The gap could be covered by a striped tunic with lacey, slit sleeves.

She had been so jealous of Liberty, whose husband Levi Colter seemed to embody everything that Alameda could desire in a man. Tall, dark, and dashing, he also owned a rich gold mine. But Alameda didn’t want a beau, so why was she jealous? After her experience betrothed to Ralph Ellis in Hyde Park, she felt she could easily go another ten years without courting a man. Liberty claimed that Levi—and Garrett O’Rourke, a fellow who seemed to always be there, working side by side with Levi—never lied, but Alameda didn’t believe it. All men were liars. Liars and adulterers.

As she chose among the many hats in Liberty’s selection, her mind raced over today’s events. She wound up leaning on a vanity, staring distractedly at herself, voluptuous in her half-laced corset. She even leaned forward and hunched her shoulders to display her tits more prominently. Shadows of her nipples’ areolas were revealed. She had always known that men stopped dead in their tracks to get a better view of her bosom, jiggling even under the stricture of a steel cage like the swan-bill corset. But until today she had been disgusted with their ogling looks.

Their drooling, slack-jawed looks. And in Laramie City, their crotch-grabbing, air-mauling, moronic hooting looks. Men here were much dirtier and more perverse than men in New York, and up until today, that had not been a thing to admire. Alameda was safe working at the Cactus Club, since the likes of Ivy’s paramour, the brutal and deadly Captain Park, protected her.

Suddenly, now she was overcome with lust. Passion of the sort Liberty described as “hysterical paroxysm” but Alameda really knew was a sexual lust for men. Merely standing between Derrick and Rudy, she could feel the sexual heat exuding from their bodies. It made her nipples stiffen and gooseflesh rise on her shoulders just to sit a foot away from Derrick Spiro. And it couldn’t have been her imagination that when Rudy Dunraven leveled those riveting eyes on her, he was thinking of sucking on her throat.

But one was married, the other a sodomite.

Of all the damned awful luck!
The first two men she’d been attracted to since fleeing from Mr. Ellis, and both were completely unsuitable. So Alameda did what any level-headed, modern woman would do. She dropped her petticoat to the floor, daubed her fingers in a pot of rose cold cream, and plunged them into the slit in her drawers.

Ah
. Perfect. The pulpy lips of her labia slithered between her fingers, and she let out a satisfied sigh. Her eyelids fluttered as her fingers found her enlarged button, taut and erect, crying out for attention. She sucked in a hiss when she stroked it but didn’t stop, knowing she would reach crisis extremely fast today.

Alameda liked to think she was an expert at self-pleasuring. A former beau had taught her—the one beau she had taken, compared to Ralph Ellis’s what, one hundred fucks?—by demonstrating himself how one could accomplish this with the hand. Then the mouth.

Thinking about a man’s mouth softly lapping at her button caused a tiny gusher of juice to flow over her fingers. She tugged on her corset, and a pendulous breast bobbed free, held up high and pert by the steel framework, bouncing saucily. She scooped some more rose cream from the jar, and when her fingers pinched her jutting nipple, she gasped so loudly the men in the parlor downstairs could probably have heard her.

No matter. They would never know what they missed out on. If a man was fool enough to marry, he should never entertain the notion of canoodling with another woman! Alameda was very firm on that subject. It was the price a man had to pay for obtaining a lifelong companion who oversaw all the details of the home life, freeing up the man to pursue an exciting political career. As for Rudy—well, Alameda was a modern woman with suffragist leanings. If a man preferred the delights of a well-muscled masculine body—and who wouldn’t? She could hardly blame him—that was his business entirely.

Alameda pinched her nipple then diddled it with her fingertip, sending waves of delightful bliss shooting straight into her pussy. She fiddled with more concentration at her button, allowing herself to think of Derrick’s athletic form. He must partake of some sports, that was obvious from the tapering of his wide shoulders down to his narrow waist. His biceps bulged through the thin cotton of his shirt, and when he crossed an ankle over the opposite knee while sitting, the sinewy strength of his thigh muscles made her breathing come shallow and anxious.

It was invigorating just to sit next to him. He simply exuded a power and rough sexuality. She knew he was a beast in bed, and it did no harm to imagine his sculpted lips slathering against her collarbone, his swelling crotch straining against her pubic bone. Alameda could acutely smell his citrus eau de cologne bathing the skin of her neck and shoulders.

She imagined his chest, broad, athletic, with a sprinkling of glossy hair over the juicy pectorals. Oh, how she would nibble on the tangerine taste of his bullet-hard nipple, causing him to gasp and jump and thrust his admirable penis against her mound! Her diddling at her extended clitoris came furiously, the slime dripping down her fingers as she stroked the eager, bulging appendage. Oh, what would it be like, licking a hungry trail down the center of that brawny abdomen? To find the soft trace of shiny hair that arrowed down to his navel and beyond into the steamy delights of his crotch?

Alameda came so unexpectedly, she swooned into a kind of stupor. Her mind went numb, a shutting down of all senses. Waves of ecstasy clutched her inner canal, clenching her uterus into a solid knot of orgasmic joy. She forgot to tinker with her nipple, the convulsions were so strong, sucking all rational thought from her brain. She slapped her free hand onto the marble of the vanity as the spasms came closer together, stronger, as though her pussy wanted to chomp on her poor fingers.