Little Joe eased into her room first. "Callie." His dark eyes dropped to her chest for a passing second, just like they always did only today might have been a little different because the natural sparkle in them had disappeared.
"Little Joe," she responded. A sizeable lump formed in her throat and she tried to move the fix on out of the way by swallowing a few times. It didn’t help anything so she tried again. She needed to practice her gag reflex.
Joe liked it when she wrapped her lips around the better part of a man. He told her the last time they were together, he thought Richard might ask her for a scad more than they’d shared before. She didn’t think much about it because Richard never mentioned it. If he had, she might have charged him since his penis was thick enough to make a woman’s mouth bow wide with a painful stretch.
She imagined his size was why he never asked before. Joe had the money. He might offer to pay for her time if she asked him, but she never bothered. Richard didn’t lie down beside her and truth told, she wouldn’t mind if he did. He could have a free one.
Sometimes Richard talked about getting inside her and once or twice, the mere mention of it made him hard. She watched how his thighs tightened and the showing in his breeches proved he wanted an invited ride. Callie didn’t think he held much of an interest for women, but sometimes when he looked at her a certain way, she doubted her own assumptions.
"You been doing all right for yourself?" Little Joe asked, slumping over on the bed. Typically, he waited for the invitation but not tonight. He tossed one of her pretty pillows to the side and slid up against the headboard.
"The boots," he said, trying to kick them off while holding his belly in the process.
Callie’s focus immediately fell to his gut. He pressed a large handful of material to his side and winced in pain when she tried to pry his fingers away from it. She studied his face again. He looked sick as a horse and she noticed the beads of ready sweat pebbling across his forehead.
"Let me see you," she insisted, tugging at his wrist. "You’ve been shot, haven’t ya?"
"No," he replied with a devilish smile. "I somehow woke up this morning with this hole in my side. I ain’t got any idea how it ended up there." He chuckled at his stand-alone humor, but then moaned when she removed the cloth and the gush of blood stained her fingers. She immediately applied pressure again. He watched her face, like he wanted to see a reaction, maybe some sort of concern in her expression, her eyes.
"Damn you, Little Joe. This is what I’ve been afraid of." She rushed to the basin, quickly filled it with water from a hand-painted water pitcher and then ripped a few strips from an old dress hanging nearby. In a frantic effort to stop the bleeding, she knelt beside him with the water dripping from the cloth.
"I’ll pay for the dress," he advised, groaning out in sudden pain when she made contact with his open wounds.
"I’m not worried about a dang dress. You should have come straight up here to this room rather than stand downstairs trying to look all interesting to a woman."
"Did it work?"
He grinned. She didn’t.
"No."
About the time she realized her efforts were useless, Richard slipped inside her room. His gaze immediately locked with Joe’s and just like always, Callie felt a little left out. The level of intimacy the men shared wasn’t anything she ever tried to understand but right now, after two years passed, she wanted something from them. An explanation was in order.
"Who did this to him?" she asked, trying her best to clean the wound.
"Don’t know. First time I’ve bumped into him in over a year," he replied, returning his focus to Joe. "What happened?"
"Trouble," he announced, his gaze moving back and forth between them.
"Trouble don’t shoot guns," Callie informed. "The men behind a mountain of it typically fire the first shot." |
