DangerousPassion (2 page)

“I told you to never mention that to me again.”

Edgar smiled as he took Sarah by the wrist. “Agreed. I shouldn’t have brought it up. But there’s something else that’s up.” He placed her hand over the hard lump in his tailored trousers. Sarah closed her eyes and turned her face away. “Give your special man some pleasure once more,” Edgar whispered. “Come on, you know what I like.” His voice deepened, the tone becoming harsher, more demanding. “Sarah, I’m a virile man, and a rich one. If I can’t find the satisfaction I need from you, then maybe I should start looking for someone more...compatible,” he drawled the four syllables out slowly, accusingly, “to my desires.”

Sarah squeezed his erection through his trousers. He had taught her how to touch him, how to stroke him until he achieved satisfaction. It was, Sarah had decided over the past year of their engagement, the least of many possible evils. She still didn’t like doing it, but it wasn’t as defiling as being bent over his desk with her knickers down to her ankles. And it couldn’t be as bad as getting down on her knees to use her mouth on him, which Edgar had once asked her to do. Sarah had vociferously refused to grant him that sexual request, now or in the future.

Edgar was very hard, very aroused, but Sarah felt nothing. Not so much as a single spark of sexual excitement registered within her.

“There isn’t time for this,” Sarah said quietly, searching for an objective tone. “Tomorrow, after work—by the livery. I’ll do this for you.” She squeezed him again, careful not to use too much pressure. Edgar was very specific on how he wanted his needs met. “I promise. Tomorrow.”

“Good.” He gave her a half-smile as his hips unconsciously moved in a circular motion while Sarah’s fingers toyed with his arousal. “Tomorrow it is then.”

He cupped her breasts one last time, leaned into Sarah to kiss her lips again (though this time he didn’t try to force his tongue in her mouth), and then stepped away from her.

“There’s still a couple of minutes left in the workday,” Edgar said as he walked back to his desk. “I’ll talk to you before I leave.”

Sarah did not hesitate. Though her stride had faltered upon entering Edgar’s office, it was purposeful as she left the office. Her heels clicked against the hardwood floor, prompting Ellie Mae to look up from her ledger. Sarah stepped up into her chair.

“Are you all right?” Ellie Mae whispered. “You’re pale.”

“I’m fine. Leave me alone, will you?” Sarah said with more harshness than she had intended. “I am sorry. Edgar’s pushing me to set a date for the wedding. I am just not ready to do that. Not yet.”

Before Ellie Mae could reply, Edgar stepped forward with a file folder in his hands. He dropped the folder onto Sarah’s desk and said, “These are the numbers for the Sutherland Mining Company. I want your breakdown of the figures ready for me by the time I get to the office tomorrow morning.”

Sarah’s heart sank. She was being punished by Edgar because she hadn’t provided the sexual satisfaction he’d wanted. “Edgar, this will take at least two or three hours!”

“Yes, I suppose. Make sure it is on my desk in the morning. I’ll lock up the bank when I leave. Just let yourself out when you’re finished with your work. See that the door locks behind you.”

Sarah was sitting in her chair at the high desk, looking through the financial ledger of a small mining outfit that Edgar was considering acquiring, when the employees of the First Bank & Trust of Deadwood filed out the door. The vault had been closed and locked, as it always was every day immediately at
six o’clock
. Sarah was left alone in the bank with a single lamp to illuminate the pages of a mining company’s profits, losses, and expenses. Hot tears of rage burned in her eyes, but she refused to let them escape.

* * * *

After writing the final sentence to her acquisition report, Sarah set her pen in its holder, placed her face in her hands, and sighed wearily as she rubbed her eyes. While she thought about what she had promised she would do for Edgar after work the following day, the bank’s clock began to chime. It sounded nine times.

She told herself that what she was going to do for Edgar wasn’t something she hadn’t done before, so she shouldn’t let it weigh too heavily on her mind. She also tried to remind herself that she had a job which paid reasonably well, and that her brother was counting on her continuing to pay for his hospitalization in the outskirts of
Denver
. But whenever Sarah’s thoughts drifted in this direction, she began seeing herself as a soiled dove, her motivation with Edgar as being mercenary, not matrimonial, and when this happened she was afraid of looking at her own reflection in the mirror.

Go home and don’t think about anything at all. Worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes.

She left the bank, making sure that the door mechanism locked behind her, and began the weary four-block walk to the livery, where her horse and carriage would be waiting for her.

* * * *

“Lookie here, boys!”

The sound of the male voice directly behind Sarah startled her so badly she nearly fell over in her haste to see who had stepped out of the shadows. She looked at the young man who had spoken, and at his four companions, and Sarah’s heart began pounding furiously with primal fear. The speaker, as well as his friends, was young, perhaps under twenty, who wore range clothes that had not seen a cleaning in quite a while, though he had a well-oiled and thoughtfully cared-for pistol in a holster at his hip. He and his friends were itinerate cowboys, but with barbed wire being strung up nearly everywhere, they had taken to renting out themselves as gunmen. The contemptuous sneer on his lips seemed a permanent, prominent expression.

“I think this filly is looking for a stallion!” the leader said, his eyes going brazenly up and down over Sarah’s voluptuous curves as he spoke.

Another young man said, “Jimbo, I believe you’re right.”

The leader, Jimbo, put his right hand down between his legs to obscenely fondle himself. As he did this, his friends fanned out to surround Sarah, trapping her between themselves and her carriage. She didn’t stand a chance of getting in her carriage, turning it around, and riding away before they captured her. Some fifty yards down the dusty side street of Deadwood, Sarah heard an excited cry, and the fragment of a sentence indicating that Jimbo had found a girl. How many more vicious young men were on their way now?

Sarah tried to moisten her lips, but her tongue went dry. With as much confidence as she could manage, she said, “You’d better leave now before you get in trouble.”

This comment brought hissing, sadistic laughter from the leader of the blackguards. Jimbo stepped closer to Sarah, still fondling himself through his baggy, dirty trousers. He licked his lips in a crude manner, saliva dribbling from the corner of his mouth. Sarah was disgusted.

“At this time of night?” the cretin asked. “Hell, ain’t nobody in town dumb enough to open their door or keep a lamp lit. At this time of night, me and my boys own the back streets of Deadwood!”

“Please leave me alone,” Sarah said. Then, her tone suddenly quivering, she pleaded softly, “Won’t you please just leave me alone?”

“That would be a damned neighborly thing to do...but it ain’t gonna happen!” Jimbo broke into another peel of laughter that was shared by his gang. “So why don’t you just go along real nice like, and just maybe you won’t get that pretty face of yours all cut up when we’re done with you?”

Jimbo stepped close enough so that he could reach out and touch Sarah. His dark gaze raked up and down over her, and his expression was a foul thing that was both frightening and ugly to see.

“I like what I see,” the leader said. “But I don’t like your hair like that. Take out that pin and let your hair down, missy.”

Sarah contemplated refusing to comply, but then a calmer, more rational voice inside her head whispered that needlessly angering the volatile gunman wouldn’t do her any good. She reached up and pulled out the wooden pin that held her long, auburn hair in a bun at the base of her neck. Her hair, gleaming in the moonlight like some precious metal, fell down her back.

“See? I can be a real nice fella when a gal knows how to follow orders.”

The other gunmen cackled at Jimbo’s comments. Sarah shivered inside. There were now eight men standing in a half-circle around her, all of them looking at her with a carnivorous gleam in eyes that held lust but no pity.

The leader of the outlaws glanced at his men, now close by, then back at Sarah. He made no effort to disguise the fact that he was staring at Sarah, taking in her ostentatious physical charms--and lusting after what he was seeing. Her lusciously rounded, heavy bosom did not require a corset to be held high, and their allure held Jimbo’s gaze for several unblinking seconds. Then, slowly, his gaze crawled slowly down to her stomach, and finally to her pleasantly curved though not extravagant hips.

“Hey, heifer, where you been all my life?” Jimbo asked quietly, conversationally.

His tone and manner were in sharp contrast to the quickly rising fear in Sarah’s heart. There was nothing but remorseless menace in the gunman’s black heart. When Jimbo reached out casually to place his hand over Sarah’s plump breast, she started to slap his hand away, but the look in the man’s eyes warned her that he could be much more brutal, more cruel and barbaric, than anyone she could possibly imagine.

She stood motionless, fearful and yet furious at what was happening. Sarah was disgusted at having the foul young man cruelly pressing his fingers into her breast through her dress while he simultaneously used his other hand to fondle himself through his dirty trousers.

Jimbo laughed and looked around, making sure that all his men were watching. Then, without warning, he stabbed his fingers into Sarah’s dress at the neckline and ripped down with all his strength. The buttons gave way easily to savagery. Without hesitation, the young hoodlum then grabbed Sarah’s camisole and ripped it apart as well, tearing the thin cotton to expose extravagant breasts.

“Stop it!” Sarah screamed, crossing her arms to cover herself.

A cry of excitement went out among the men, a collective howl like wolves on the hunt. Jimbo held a patch of cotton ripped from Sarah’s camisole. He waved it at Sarah, then tossed the cotton to the ground and stepped on it, symbolically crushing her beneath his heel.

“Now get on your knees!” he hissed, his lust racing through his veins like a drug. He pulled a Bowie knife with a foot-long blade from a sheath attached to his holster. The enormous, razor sharp blade glinted silver in the moonlight. “Get down on your knees, and do it right. Make me angry and you’ll be the sorriest bitch Deadwood has ever seen.”

There was a moment of complete silence as the outlaws stared at Sarah, devouring her with their eyes as they waited to see if she would willingly sink to her knees to provide them with pleasure, or if fists and boots would be necessary for her to understand that she really had no choice in the matter.

Through the temporary silence, a much deeper male voice cut through the darkness, causing Sarah and all nine gunmen to turn toward the intruder as he stepped out of the shadows.

“Walk away from this,” the stranger said. He was talking to Jimbo.

The stranger was an inch or two over six feet, with broad shoulders and a lean waist. His coat, shirt, and trousers, and even the neckerchief around his throat, were all
midnight
black. Sarah guessed his age at somewhere around thirty-five, though she could be a couple years off in either direction. His hair was black as
midnight
, as were his eyes, which despite their darkness glittered dangerously. On his face was an expression that Sarah was incapable of reading. She could not tell from the man’s expression what he was thinking. He just looked dangerous. Deadly dangerous. And seductive. She couldn’t say precisely how, but the stranger moved like a man in complete control of himself and the world around him, and this awareness triggered a physical and emotional response from Sarah that she was only partially conscious of.