Training Ivy [How The West Was Done 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (19 page)

Her entire pelvis filled with yearning blood, and she gyrated her hips to gain a better angle on the wooden dildo. She sucked Neil with great appetite, inhaling the lengthy member down her throat. She bounced her mouth back and forth on the prick, Neil guiding her by clutching her shoulders. But Harley’s fingers—and the wooden object he fucked her with—were rousing her to great heights of ecstasy.

The orgasm came unexpectedly. Suddenly the entire length of her vagina was clenching with such force she felt she would suck the object up inside her. Harley’s fingers applied to her bulging clitoris with renewed vigor, and she could barely get a smidgen of air with the giant, taut cock in her mouth. She was still orgasming violently around the dildo, jerking her hips in a delirious frenzy, when her throat was flooded with a surge of semen.

Neil, too, jerked his hips and gasped as though sobbing. Harley remained placid the entire time, urgently whispering in her ear, “Give yourself up to me. I shall never cause you trouble.”

Ivy wanted to scream, “Just shut up and fuck me with that thing!” But her mouth was inundated with gush after gush of salty, pungent liquid as Neil emptied his prick into her throat. Her pussy spasmed for what seemed like many long minutes as Harley slowed his fucking with the piece of wood.

By then, Ivy was gulping both jism and air, and she had to detach herself from Neil’s prick or she would start hiccoughing. Collapsing on hands and knees as Harley slid the dildo from her, she giggled while wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her cunt still twitched and she luxuriated in the warmth of Harley’s torso as he gently wrapped his arms around her.

“Oh, my,” she said weakly. She twisted about to look at Harley. “What
was
that thing?”

With a boyish grin, Harley held the slimy implement up to her view. She took it gingerly, turning it about with a frown.

Neil fell to the rug, too, in a jumble of exhausted limbs, cradling her between his thighs. He laughed weakly. “That’s my flintlock lighter from the mantel.”

“Oh!” Indeed, it was a fire-lighter, a little metal box for tinder with a flintlock attached. Neil probably used it to light logs in his fireplace. Ivy cast Harley a low look of false disapproval. “Bad boy. Didn’t they tell you to never play with matches?”

Harley shrugged his massive shoulders, unconcerned. “I play with fire whenever I touch you.”

Ivy laughed and was about to lean into Harley’s chest when a clear feminine voice shouted angrily, “Get on with you! Stop mucking about. Get down to the river!”

All three sat up, alert, casting their eyes about the room.

“It’s Minerva,” Neil whispered.

Harley added, “The voice came from the front door. Talk to her, Neil! Find out where on the river we’re supposed to see these bison and the Red Sea.”

Neil got to his feet, his cock hanging from his pants, rubbery and swaying, and shouted at the door, “Minerva, my love! See, right here I have a photograph of you.” He looked at the photograph on the mantel. “A photograph of your beautiful, ah, your beautiful image—”

“Her throat long, her neck strong,” Harley advised.

“Neck strong, bust and belly large, breasts full and firm!”

“You don’t need to shout,” said Minerva’s tinny voice, although she did sound pleased. “Can you still not see me, standing by this door?”

“No,” Neil admitted. With renewed vigor, he added, “But I know now of your glossy locks and your warm, moist buttocks. Reveal yourself to me. I cannot see a ghost.”

Ivy and Harley gasped to see a shimmering image appear before the front door. It swayed and roiled like a storm cloud and was about the height that Minerva Shortridge must have been in life. Minerva said, “Can you see me now? How I long to run into your arms, Neil Tempest!”

Neil held out his arms. “My Minerva! Yes, I can see you now!”

Harley got to his feet and hissed in Neil’s ear, “Ask her exactly where the bison will appear.”

“Yes,” intoned Neil. “Minerva my dear, can you guide us to the spot where the bison will cleave the waters of the Laramie River? We want to see this vision for ourselves.”

Ivy was tickled that Neil was apparently fully a believer now in spirits. He showed no signs of scoffing at the shivering human form that was attempting to display itself. In fact, if she didn’t know any better, she’d say he had serious affection for this ghostly being who was disturbingly attached to him.

“Ride out toward the river to Salt Pork Ridge and watch at ten minutes past four,” the shimmery Minerva said. “I will demonstrate the power of my friends, Whit Gentry, and poor Mr. Weatherman, murdered in the Elks Club.”

Harley interrupted. “Minerva! Who murdered Walt Weatherman and Whit Gentry? If you tell us, we can arrest him and bring him to justice.”

“Yeah,” muttered Neil. “Necktie party justice.”

“You will release that monster Rodney!” shrieked Minerva. “Why? So he can rape and plunder more innocent women?”

The trio shared aghast looks. Neil stammered, “I–I—did not know he had done that, Minerva. I mean, you were his wife. It cannot be called ‘rape’ if a couple is married.”

“Oh, yes it can!” wailed the succubus. “When a man beats his wife and pins her down and forces his smelly carcass onto her perfumed body, is it not rape?”

It was Harley who replied. “You’re entirely right, Minerva! No woman should be forced to submit against her will, even if she’s married to the louse. We will keep Rodney in lockup.”

Ivy didn’t know if they could do that based upon the evidence submitted by a disembodied specter, but this seemed to placate Minerva. Her voice turned affectionate and warm now. “I wait for you to console me, Neil Tempest,” she said. Then her sparkling image abruptly vanished.

“Damn,” said Harley. “It’d be so much easier if she’d just tell us who the murderer is.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know him,” Ivy mentioned.

“That’s true,” said Harley. “But, Neil, you’ve really got to dab it up with this doll. Have you never wooed a woman you had to flirt with?”

“He does all right.” Ivy stuck up for Neil.

Neil frowned at Harley. “Dab it up with judies, my ass. And you wonder why it’s
me
she’s lusting after and not
you?
”

But it was nearly three thirty by now, and Neil said it would take half an hour to ride to Salt Pork Ridge, so they set off.

Ivy was very impressed with Neil’s ranch. The house itself had been built with more in mind than a solo rancher, with two stories, a nicely outfitted kitchen, and three bedrooms. Neil claimed he needed such a house for his ranch foreman, and the kitchen was necessary so the cook could make grub for the Mexican hands. But there were homey touches, such as an oil painting of a snowy landscape hanging over the mantel. The carpets were of plush Persian silk, and the walls boasted a couple of tribal masks, perhaps from Australia. Evidently Neil was a man of some artistic sensibilities, which surprised Ivy. She knew Harley would have a house full of Oriental marvels and strange objects from Arabia, but she was pleasantly surprised to find Neil didn’t decorate with spurs and cattle prods.

They set off down the sloping meadow toward the river. Harley pointed out the western mountains as rising from four to ten thousand feet above sea level. As a surveyor, he also mentioned many sage and buffalo grasses that clothed the slopes and made it an excellent choice to rear stock. The horses trotted through the grasses already tall from months of rain, traversing tongues and ridges that projected down to the river. Harley noted twinkling violet asters dotting the fields, lamb’s quarters, and mallow. The perfume of honeysuckle tickled Ivy’s nostrils, and the pleasant air feathered her arms.

It was probably a frightful region when winter storms swept across the prairie, but on this peaceful spring day Ivy felt like bursting into song. She had been afraid to ride a horse, not having done much of it in her New York youth, but the little roan mare trotted along as though on clouds. Out West, women were allowed to ride astride, which simplified the act. They reached the top of Salt Pork Ridge at just after four o’clock. Tethering their horses to some aspen trees, they dismounted and stood on the lip of the butte.

“How long since you’ve seen a bison out here, Neil?” Harley asked.

Neil chuckled. “Once, three months ago. I saw a small herd of about a hundred. I’ve heard tell they’re all decimated by white hunters. The last buffalo steak I had at Fort Sanders was two months ago. Since then it’s all steer beef.”

“I’ll attest to that,” said Harley. “I saw only two herds coming out here from Omaha. I heard they’re all being pushed either north or south, divided into the two last herds.”

“Well,” said Ivy. “I suppose we’re waiting to see some now.”

“Yes,” said Neil remotely, raising a glass to his eye. “In the next five minutes.”

“Wait,” breathed Harley. “Give me that glass.”

Most everyone had better eyesight than Ivy, so she didn’t strain to see what Harley looked at with the glass. She really needed a pair of spectacles. She saw by the way Harley’s jaw hung lower, though, that he’d seen something.

“What? What?” Neil prodded.

Harley whispered, “A bison.”

When Ivy looked where Harley aimed the glass, she did see a brown dot moving against a field of green. Soon, from a stand of cottonwoods, came more brown dots. The dots meandered without a care, milling as they munched. When Harley handed Ivy the glass, she could see them clearly through the bubbly lens. Now they numbered dozens as they meandered slowly to the river to drink.

“Now,” said Neil, “how are they going to change the course of the river? We have two minutes left for them to accomplish this.”

Harley recited Minerva’s words. “Like the waters of the Red Sea, the river will stand up like giant walls and allow the bison to cross.’”

They were cunning creatures, and Ivy couldn’t take her eyes off them. Their giant fleecy heads seemed nearly as big as their bodies, and she imagined she could hear them huffing and snuffling as they chewed on the sweetgrass.

Neil said, “With Minerva at our side, how can we go wrong? Though I don’t see how the bison can—”

A sudden jolt knocked Ivy on her ass. The glass flew as she splayed out both hands to break her fall. An enormous rumbling encompassed her, not unlike the approaching train sound that had engulfed Vancouver House the night of the séance. It seemed impossible, but the very earth below her was shaking in undulating waves. The very soil, seemingly at a great depth below her, rose up as if to buck her off the edge of the butte and into the valley below.

“What is it?” Harley shouted. He was also splayed on his ass next to her.

“Earthquake!” bellowed Neil, leaping to his feet.

Ivy followed suit, but the rolling of the ground was so severe she had to hold both arms out at right angles like a tightrope walker. A portion of the butte’s lip not ten feet away was suddenly missing, falling off in a landslide. All around the great bowl of the river’s basin, the ground shook her so violently her teeth chattered. Walls of soil were cascading to the valley floor below, and above all this tumult, Ivy heard the hooves of bison stampeding.

Her head being rattled till her eyeballs shook in her skull, she saw the brown dots running as one herd to the river. Snatching up the glass from the rolling ground—a sudden cavern appeared in the soil not four feet away, so she ran away from the butte’s edge—she jammed it to her eye socket just in time to view the most wondrous sight of her life.

For a few split seconds, the river was devoid of all water. The upraising of the riverbed in a sudden jolt had diverted the water temporarily, two walls of water separating and flowing outward in different directions.

“Damnation,”
Ivy whispered.

The herd of bison raced directly down the pathway created by the departing waters. The two giant waves rolled away from them as they safely forded the river, a few of them slipping on mossy rocks. But within seconds, the herd had safely made it to the opposite shore, just before the entire valley shuddered with another large concussion. More walls of soil plummeted downhill all around them, and the waves of river water rushed right back in, closing up the gap forever.

Bison milled in excitement and wonder on the bank closest to Ivy now, safe and sound. And probably in as much surprise as Ivy.

“Great balls of fire,” Neil whispered. “I guess we’d better do whatever Minerva tells us to do from now on.”

“Put him back. Put him back!”

Neil was taking the bracelets off Rodney as he let him out of the room where he’d been hobbled. But when he heard Minerva, standing directly behind his shoulder and giving him such urgent directives, his hands paused on the bracelets. Rodney Shortridge had to shake his wrists out of the cuffs himself.

“Well,” said Rodney. “Can’t say as it’s been pleasant being with you. I’m heading directly to the Bucket o’ Blood. Coming with, Neil?”

“Don’t let him go anywhere!” Minerva snarled. “You put him right back into that lockup, Neil Tempest.”

Neil spun about and was face to face with Mrs. Minerva Shortridge. Only this time she was much clearer than her former shadowy figure. Now she very much resembled the photograph, down to her harsh, unsmiling visage and the clean white apron. However, she looked younger than the photograph, as though spirits could choose their favorite age and stay that way for all eternity.