Lone Star 01 (20 page)

Daphne was clinging gently to Ki's midriff as she confessed her torment, her fingers circling of their own volition. Ki felt a prurient stirring in his loins, triggered by her longing, and sparked by a perverse physical yearning that was building between them. He tried to resist. Another time, another place, he'd have flattened her to the nearest bed without hesitation, but here?

“Okay, I get the picture,” Ki said curtly, feeling himself hardening against his will. He tried to shift where he sat, his beginning erection bulging out the crotch of his pants. “So you don't like it, you're fed up with him. Fine. So leave him.”

“I have, quite a few times. He always brings me back and beats me, beats me so hard he's broken my bones before. Now that Ryker's hired him and his gang, and installed them up here, there's no way I can get free without...” There was a sob in her voice now. “I could only wait, Ki. Wait for a strong man I could trust.”

“For a crazy man willing to die for you, you mean.”

“No, no!” she replied in a thick whisper, and on her face was a look of sudden excitement. “To live for me, Ki, not die! Haven't you ever felt that about a girl, Ki?”

Ki didn't answer.

“Not ever?”

“Never mind.” He glanced away from her searching eyes, from her lips and breasts and legs, her nightgown hiked up almost to her thighs from the awkward way she was sitting.

“Ki?”

“Yes?”

“I don't know if I love you, but I want you.”

“Stop it.”

“I've wanted you since the second I laid eyes on you. I want you now, right now, in spite of everything.
Because
of everything.”

“You don't want me, Daphne. You're just upset.”

“I do ... and you want me. You're hard, hard as a bar of iron. I can feel you poking my arm, Ki.” She giggled lightly, and languidly began to strip off her nightgown. Unbuttoning it at the throat, she crossed her arms and with slow, tantalizing suggestiveness, eased the gown up over her head and tossed it aside. “There. Now you.”

For a moment Ki did not move, could not move, his eyes feasting on her nudity. Her breasts, golden and firm, nipples large and jutting like ripe black cherries. Her belly, taut and flat, flaring down into rich black curls of pubic hair, the pink flesh of her vaginal lips peeking warmly from underneath. Her thighs, smooth and tapering into long legs that he instinctively knew would wrap around him in a squeezing grip of passion.

Then, goaded to recklessness, Ki removed vest and shirt, and rose to unbuckle his pants, aroused, throbbingly erect, aching to penetrate her voluptuous body. Her hands reached high, her fingers burning his flesh as she began pulling his pants down, her gaze riveted on his naked loins, her breath coming in short, hissing gasps. Daphne was in heat, animal heat, and Ki knew there was no longer any denying her—or himself.

His left trouser leg off, he balanced on his left foot while they both tore at his right trouser leg. Daphne, gazing hur grily at his jutting instrument, giggled again. “Position eighty, Chin Chi Tu Li.”

“What?” Then Ki got it. “Oh, yes, your father's
T‘ai
chi exercises—'Golden Cock Stands On One Leg‘.”

He settled alongside her, moving one hand down over the smoothness of her buttocks, marveling in their warm texture and beautiful shape. She tilted her face and kissed him urgently, her hand searching down between them and closing around his burgeoning shaft. He sucked in his breath, his blood pounding as she stroked him with her fingertips and nails, and then he crushed the full length of her body against his, grinding his pelvis into her.

“Yes, now,” she moaned. “Now, I beg you ...”

Ki pulled her beneath him, and she opened her legs to accept his thrust between them. He could feel her crevice moist and tender against the blunt crown of his erection, and thinking to repay her, he taunted, “Position sixty-three,
Yeh Ma Fên Tsung—
‘Partition of Wild Horse's Mane,'” as he slid gently through her pubic hair.

“And
She Shen Hsia Shih,”
she moaned, “‘The Snake Creeps Down,'” feeling Ki plunge fully into her loins, her hips slowly undulating against him. Her thighs pressed against his legs as her ankles wrapped over and locked around his calves. He pumped deep into her soft flesh while she strained under him, moaning beneath his rhythmic surges, opening and closing her thighs, her head thrashing from side to side on the cold shed floor with total abandon.
“K‘ua Hu! K'ua Hu!
” she chanted. “‘Ride The Tiger'!”

Ki could feel himself growing and expanding inside her till he felt as if he were going to explode from the exquisite pleasure building in his groin, and he could sense that Daphne was also nearing completion as she gripped him tighter and moved more frantically under him, reveling in his thrusts, hot and pulsating and deep.

“Now, Ki, now!
Pao Hu Kwei Shan!
‘Carry the Tiger to the Mountain'!” she pleaded, urging him on with the pounding of her heels on his legs. Then she cried out shrilly, loud and piercing, uncaring if it brought the camp running. Ki didn't give a damn either, ejaculating violently into her as she shuddered convulsively beneath him with each of his pulsing spurts.

Then Daphne's body collapsed limply and she was still, except for the uncontrollable quivering of her thighs still firmly pressed around his loins. And Ki remained inside her, feeling himself drained of energy, placidly satiated.

“Forgive me ... forgive me ...” Daphne murmured crushing her lips against his mouth before he could respond, then pulling away as abruptly as she'd clung. “You must think terribly of me, Ki, and I don't blame you. But, oh, I wanted you ... needed you ... I still do ...”

A shaft of waning sunlight filtered through a crack in the wall, illuminating her face under him, and revealing a smile that was sad, and yet warm and tender. Ki wanted to tell her now that he didn't think less of her, only of himself for having given in to the risk of being caught like this. And to tell the truth, he didn't even care much about that. Their coupling somehow seemed natural, even though the circumstances were unnatural; their joining had served to release their dangerously pent-up emotions.

But Ki was a fighter, not a poet. He found it impossible to voice what he only dimly perceived in his instinctive reaction to her sensuality. He drew her to him instead, answering her fears in his own way, by hungrily kissing the smoothness of her lips, her neck, the swelling nipples of her breasts.

“Ki ... Ki ...” Daphne cried, while her naked flesh began to tingle with renewed excitement. Tears blurred her eyes, and her voice was thick with desire and fright. “Don't leave me, don't ...”

“I won‘t,” he assured her as he tongued one nipple.

“Take me with you. Please, take me away from here.”

“If I can.”

“And don't die for me, Ki, live for me ...”

“I'll keep living ... living as I am now.”

And he was alive, he had to admit wryly. He could feel himself harden within her, swelling into stiff, reinvigorated passion. He tentatively thrust deeper into her.

Daphne gasped with delight. “You can't ...!”

“I am,” Ki chuckled throatily.
“Hai
Ti
Chên.”

“‘Needle at Sea Bottom,' it is indeed,” she sighed, arching and writhing underneath him—then she suddenly screamed, freezing rigid.

Ki twisted his head sideways to see what had shocked her into mortal terror. And he just kept on twisting, withdrawing from Daphne and swiveling around in an upright crouch, readying to strike.

The shed door was open. Not by very much, but enough to admit Volpes. “I thought I heard that squawk of yours,” he snarled at Daphne, stepping closer as she scuttled into an almost fetal position. “So I was real quiet about unlocking and sliding the chain loose, and I'm glad I was. But shit! I could've fired a cannon off in here and not disturbed you, the way you were bucking and snorting!”

“I—I'm sorry,” she whined. “I'll never do—”

“You're right, you won't.” Volpes loomed menacingly over her; and Ki, who'd been cursing himself for being as blindly preoccupied as Daphne, made a motion to stop Volpes from touching the girl. Volpes, pivoting and drawing his pistol, yelled out, “Boys!”

The door swung wider and three more men rushed in, grinning rapaciously and bristling with revolvers. Ki tensed to take them on too, but then thought better of it; Volpes now had his pistol aimed at Daphne, and he looked ready to shoot her at the slightest provocation.

“No, I wasn't ignoring you,” Volpes told Ki with a sideways glare. “I was saving you. Killed one of my men, I hear. Just bashed his head in. And now you've been dipping your wick in my woman. You've got brass balls, boy.” He glanced at his men then, ordering, “This chink so much as breathes, blow those balls off.”

There was a chorus of lewd snickers, while the girl huddled naked and cringing.

Volpes, concentrating on Daphne again, shouted, “Get up, you slut!” And when she didn‘t, he holstered his revolver and wrapped his hand in her hair, whipping her upright. “You fuckin' li'l whore!” With his other hand, he smashed a brutal fist to her jaw, and she sagged limply, still held standing by her hair.

Volpes dragged her to the nearest two men. “Take her out,” he said contemptuously, dropping her into their eager arms. “You know where—same place I'm taking this here squint-eyed bastard.”

Volpes palmed his revolver again and, with the third man, marched Ki outside, a few steps behind the two who were carrying Daphne. Down along the side of the cabin they went, and openly across the clearing. Daphne had begun to regain her senses by now, groggily staggering between the two men, whimpering as they fondled her breasts and fingered her loins, still damp from Ki's secretions.

The clearing lay bleak under an overcast sky, cooled by a leaden drizzle and shadowed by the advance of evening. Only ten or so rustlers were out of their shacks, most of them milling about the fire to warm themselves. Whey they glimpsed Daphne and Ki being paraded naked past them, their first reaction was one of astonishment. But when they saw how the two nude prisoners were being mauled and manhandled, they quickly began jeering and hooting obscenities.

“Get an eyeful now, fellas,” Volpes yelled back, “‘cause this'll be the last you'll be seeing of 'em!” Then, jabbing Ki in the spine with the muzzle of his revolver, he said in a lower but nastier voice, “Ryker'll fart a blue streak when he finds out. But I'll just tell him you were too tricky to let run around loose.”

They entered the scrub at the other side of the clearing, where thorny vines and briars scraped Ki's bare legs as he was prodded up a rocky defile. He walked without giving resistance, without showing any defiance, while his mind worked swiftly to figure out when and where to make his stand. But mainly he walked feeling sadness for Daphne and bitterness toward himself. The gleam in Volpes's eyes was of pure malicious hatred—the implacably murderous kind that Daphne had warned him Volpes would feel—and that now was directed against them both. Yet Ki understood this kind of hatred, and in a sense he could not blame Volpes for it. In fact, he held a certain rueful respect for it.

Fifty yards from the clearing, Volpes called a halt in a wide spot of the defile. The ground was relatively soft here, a bit sandy and fit only for grass and stubby weeds—and for three oblong mounds of earth, just beginning to sprout fresh growth.

A rusty shovel was stuck like a grave marker at the end of one of the mounds. Volpes crossed over; still covering Ki with his revolver, and with his free hand he wriggled the shovel loose.

“Here,” he ordered, handing Ki the shovel. “Now dig.”

Chapter 15

Ki took the shovel and rubbed his hands along its rough wooden handle. He considered it in terms of a weapon; and then he wondered about the three victims already buried here, who they'd been and if they'd thought the same thing about the shovel while digging their own graves.

“Go on, start digging,” Volpes snapped. “Right where you're standing will do fine, I reckon.”

Ki glanced fleetingly at Daphne, who still needed to be held upright, her face a mask of mute terror. Then he began to dig. Under the thin top layer of soil, the shovel struck clay pan, and his digging became more difficult. The evening lengthened; Ki's naked chest and back soon became beaded with sweat, which rivuleted down his flesh and mixed with the drizzly rain. By the end of an hour, he had gouged a three-by-six pit to the depth of a foot.

“Keep digging,” Volpes growled. “But I'll let you off easy. You don't have to dig two holes, just make yours double-wide.”