Chapter 26
Lula
Okee’s voice still rings against the limestone, as if the shallow hollow where we took shelter were a bell.
My gaze returns to Boone again and again, and each time I find him already watching me.
For all the ways Boone Maddox has tried my patience, there is something honorable in him I have labored not to see.
How could a man so plainly bred for trouble possess a chivalry I have never found in gentler men?
There is no soul Boone loves better than Okee. And yet he stood against him. For me.
A man does not cross the one he loves best for nothing. Not unless he believes the thing he defends belongs somewhere near his heart. And I have been near a man’s heart before. Near enough to feel it become a cage.
I’d understood Okee’s tenderness to be a thing with borders.
That he is a man who can tuck me beneath a hide, kiss me senseless, and still set me aside the instant keeping me becomes too costly.
But after his voice strikes the stone and comes back raw, I hear the truth beneath his pride and I fear the opposite.
What if he doesn’t set me aside?
A man can say he cherishes you while trimming away every dangerous, inconvenient piece of you. I fought too hard for a life of my own to hand it over again because a man’s mouth is soft and his arms are warm.
Okee claps his hands on his knees, rising from a crouch onto his feet. “I’ll take first watch. You two ought to get some rest.”
As he takes his rifle and sulks toward the rim of the cut, another part of me fears that he would keep me.
For a while, Boone and I sit without speaking, the silence not empty but full to bursting. The limestone keeps the wind off poorly, and the fire has burned down to a sleepy glow. He glances at me then, gentleness in his face now.
“Come here,” he says, low. He sits with his shoulders hunched against the cold, holding up one edge of the buffalo hide.
I move to his side, and he settles the hide around us both, careful in a way that seems almost impossible from hands so broad and scarred.
His arm comes around me only after I lean into him, and we settle together.
His heartbeat is steady beneath my cheek when I let myself rest there, breathing in smoke and leather and cold wool.
For a moment, neither of us says anything. Then Boone’s hand, rough from reins and weather, passes once over my hair.
“Didn’t like hearing him talk to you that way,” he says. “But he’s just scared. He ain’t ever known how to show it proper. It’s because he cares for you like I do.”
The wind moves over the canvas and the fire sinks lower, throwing its weak red light against the hide. Boone draws it more securely around my shoulders, then bends and kisses my forehead.
I shut my eyes.
“Do not be so sweet to me,” I whisper.
His breath stirs my hair. “Why?”
Because Boone spoke of the future and suddenly I felt like I was hiding unarmed under a tattered canvas.
“You’re a good man,” I say. Before I can say, “But…” his face changes. A relief so deep it looks as though some long-carried burden has been lifted.
Then all at once he cups my face, the other arm drawing me close under the buffalo hide, and he kisses me as though I have given him something holy. I gasp against him, startled by the force of his tenderness.
His callused thumb strokes my cheekbone once, then slides back to tangle in my hair, holding me steady as he kisses me harder.
My heart hammers, lungs seizing. Heat surges up my neck and I draw back, pulling in a sharp breath.
“You all right?” he asks.
I wriggle back further, the heavy hide lifting at the side, icy air seeping inside.
“You’re lettin’ the heat out.” His arm finds my waist, pulling me against him. “Thought maybe I’d fuck your soul loose, but if you’re tired, at least keep warm.”
The dread in my belly turns over and comes up laughing. “You ridiculous man.”
“Wasn’t nothing ridiculous about me spreading you open and fuckin’ you deep.”
He lowers his mouth to the place beneath my ear, and my answer scatters before I can give it. Not a kiss at first. Just the brush of his breath, the graze of his lips, the lazy confidence of a man who knows too much about my body and not nearly enough about my heart.
That is the trouble.
My body remembers him without permission. It remembers the weight of him, being stretched full of him deeper than I ever thought possible, the way he made pleasure feel like something dragged out of me by force. It remembers too well. It leans toward him like a fool.
“If you’re tired,” he whispers, “I can fuck you slow until you fall asleep on my cock.”
My fingers twist in his shirt, teasing. “Ought to wash your mouth out with soap.”
“You say that like you don’t know exactly where it's been.” He hums cruelly, as if the memory alone is delicious. “I don’t care how many hard miles we traveled, woman, you tell me you need your little quim sucked and I’ll dive in face first right now.”
I smack him, half horrified, half jest. “You’re terrible.”
The cold is at my back, his heat is all around me, and my body has never had the decency to lie where he is concerned.
I pull him down before I can think better of it, before tenderness can creep in and ruin the wanting.
The next thing I know, we are both breathing hard, the sound of it echoing off the hollow stone, the hide twisted around our legs and the fire burned low beside us.
With my skirt rucked up and his trousers shoved down just so, he fucks me like he means to brand his name on my very soul, kissing the deepest part of me until my sight sparks white.
The smack of flesh meeting flesh is muffled under the blankets and hide, the smothered sound still echoing off the basin windbreak.
Every moan, every grunt, every slick sound comes bouncing back, no doubt clear as a bell where Okee stands guard.
The thought should sober me. It does the opposite.
“Look at you opening up so sweet for me,” he says, making no effort to lower his voice. “You stretch so pretty around me. Feeling like silk inside.”
My teeth release my lip.
My wanting belongs to me, ugly or holy or foolish as it may be.
Pleasure coils tight in my belly as my nails dig into the hard muscle of his back, my legs shaking as they lock around his waist. Mouth falling open, I can do nothing but take him.
“Don’t hold back those sweet sounds. Let ’em carry on the wind. I want to hear every moan I pull from you.”
The sound that leaves me is raw and loud enough to startle even myself. And as the pleasure crashes over me in brutal waves, I think—let him hear.
The next day passes quiet enough. No arrows. No riders. No shots cracking from the trees. Only frozen roads, bitter wind, and the three of us too tired to spend much breath on quarrels.
The Gemini stands near the edge of Fort Gibson in a camp called Three Forks, three stories of dark-painted clapboard rising above a clean plank porch, its tall windows dressed in red and plum curtains and glowing with low amber light, even though the day has not yet gone wholly dark.
Brass lamps burn on either side of the door.
The railings have been freshly painted, the steps scrubbed clean of mud.
Above the entrance hangs the sign for THE GEMINI CLUB.
Two women turned away from one another, each posed beside a Greek column, a gold star centered between them.
The filigree is weathered at the edges, and the letters spelling MEMBERS ONLY have chipped and faded.
The door gives with a groan. I expect the sort of place I remember. Sawdust, sour whiskey in the air, and the sounds of unruly drunkards. The first Gemini was a shithole with a piano.
This place is something else entirely.
Inside, the air is rich with violet water, cigar smoke, and expensive liquor.
This Gemini is shrouded in dark velvet like a coffin lined for a queen.
Heavy curtains shut out the day, sunlight replaced by gas lamps burning behind ruby and amber glass, with a golden glow that turns the room soft at the edges.
The walls are paneled in black wood so highly polished they throw back blurred reflections of lifted glasses and moving hands.
At the bar, two girls in deep red gowns lean against a slab of gleaming mahogany, flushed and laughing, rings winking at their fingers.
A piano trills from behind the curtain. Men crowd the card tables in tailored coats, drinking from cut crystal and pretending not to stare until I catch them at it.
Behind me, the door creaks. Boone’s silhouette fills the doorway first—broad shoulders, rough jaw, hat tipped just so. Okee follows, long black hair draped over both shoulders, sharp eyes scanning the exits.
One of the women behind the bar straightens like someone just rang a bell inside her, and then a third appears from behind a curtain, eyes lighting up.
“Well hello,” she purrs. “What have you brought us?”
Boone barely glances their way. Okee nods politely, then lowers the brim of his hat like he’s worried his daddy might catch a glimpse of him through the window.
A woman at the end of the bar sizes me up, kohl smudged under her eyes. She lifts her chin. “You lookin’ for someone?”
“I am,” I reply, steady. “Goldie.”
She lets the silence stretch a few beats too long. A redheaded girl in an emerald satin sash steps into my path with the easy authority of someone playing older than she is. She opens her mouth to turn us back, then stops dead.
“Lula?”
It takes me a beat.
The freckles are mostly gone, the child’s roundness sharpened away, but the eyes are the same—big and blue, clever and too curious for her own good.
“Pearl?”
Her whole face lights. “Lord, I knew it was you.” She catches my hands in both of hers and leans back to look at me proper. “Oh my goodness, I’ll bring you to Goldie.”
Boone shifts behind me. Pearl’s gaze flicks to him, then to Okee, taking their measure with an ease that startles me. Her mouth twitches. “And who, pray, have you brought home?”
“Trouble,” I say.