A Man Called Bone 3 (Patreon)

Sofia didn’t like to think of the past, but the arrival of the stranger was like a fever seizing hold of her brain. She thought hotly of the wrongs done to her and the things she had promised herself she’d do to get back at him who had hurt her, used her, robbed her of a normal life and reduced her to this instead.

The plans unfurled before her mind’s eye so quickly she felt she could barely follow along. It would be so simple—dangerously simply, like pushing a wagon-cart downhill. If she seduced this man…

Well, she would seduce him anyway. That was her job. She needed the money. Sofia would do the same for any man with a fat wallet. But this wallet… fattened by the blood of four men… such a man could be more than just a stack of bills to her.

She looked out the window again, to see her deliverer before she approached him, and saw that the man was poised outside the saloon, looking up at her where she lazed on the windowsill.

Sofia got a quick impression of the stranger—tall and lean, with a drawn but handsome face caked in the dust of the trail and the grizzle of many days without a razor—but most of all, she felt the force of his stare. It shocked her she hadn’t noticed him looking at her before. His eyes were like a strength pushing against her, shoving her back with their fervor, as a man would knock her to the ground before having his way with her.

They were rapturous, enthralled with their own consummate hunger, the eyes of a man who satisfied himself at all costs. But of course, she knew that. He had killed four men to get what he wanted. But it made Sofia question whether she should want this man in her life, even a sip of him.

Perhaps Janey and Maud were right, in their own simple ways. This was a man that the townspeople would go out of the way to avoid, crossing the street to stay out of his path. And if he lingered, they would urge him on—pressing Sheriff Barton to send him on his way, perhaps even forming a mob to run him out of town.

And Sofia was fitting him for her bed.

But no. No excuses. No hesitation. If he was a monster, she would let him go on his way. All she had to lose was a little more of her virtue, and she had been selling that off for a long time now. But if he was just a man… she could handle men. She had made a career of handling men. They were not saints or monsters, only flesh and bone, and she knew everything that was to be known about the flesh.

Whatever assessment the stranger made of her, he made it in the privy of his own thoughts, and tipped his hat to her before pushing on into the saloon. Sofia tied her dressing gown and walked across the floor, mirroring the stranger’s passage downstairs until she came to the stairwell and its railing, something like a balcony overlooking the tablespace on the first floor.

She could see the stranger’s shadow as he stood at the bar, dropping the first of his cash on the bartender, Antonio. “Whiskey, and if it’s any of that backbar swill, it’s coming back at ya.” His voice was cold, rough with the dirt of the trail.

She recognized Antonio’s high-pitched voice come in answer: “Something to wash the sand outta your mouth, mister?”

The pop of a cork from the bottle. The pour of whiskey into a glass. Sofia pictured Antonio doing it. The Italian expatriate was a spirits-man who fit the spirit of a place like this. No one knew how many shots he took for all those he sold, but when the place was bustling, Antonio could be counted on to be as owled as any of the big spenders.

That showed even when the place was drying. White-haired and balding, his unshaved stubble was grossly black, only shading the red cheeks and shiny plug of a nose that went with a daily toff. The bartender was his own best customer.

Sofia circled the stairs, coming down to see the back mirror behind the bar. As much a sign of prosperity as the reflection itself showed that this prosperity had fled. And it showed a man in a canvas duster, brown as a rattlesnake, over a tobacco-colored vest and white Henley shirt. Two sixguns holstered on a leather cartridge belt. Levis and Justins. Trail clothes, soaked with yellow dust and the alkali of old sweat. Traces of fallen dirt littered the floorboards from the batwing doors to the bar, waiting to be swept up.

The stranger downed his glass and cleared his throat, indeed working out whatever grit his canteen hadn’t been able to hold off on the trail. He wore a red bandanna, but it’d been rolled into a band, soaked with water, and tied around his neck to cool him. It was still faintly dark, dribbling water down the unbuttoned reach of his chest.

He was about to order again when Sofia spoke for him. “Make him a margarita,” she trilled. “And one for me as well.”

The stranger looked at her, posed on the foot of the stairs, as he himself was revealed to her in full at the bar. Tall and built like a whipcord, compact muscle keeping him from being gangly, his face long and worn and plain as one of the towering rock formations out in the desert. Sofia wondered what it would be like, burnished by soap and hot water. She imagined he’d be nigh-unrecognizable.

She knew what he saw when he looked at her. She’d long ago mastered the art of tying her dressing gown so it stayed only halfway on her. Underneath, she was dressed, after a fashion. Her cut-away skirt showed off every inch of her long legs but their very apex, almost all of her creamy thighs before her stockings held her slender legs from the knees down. A corset reduced her already modest waist to a trim twenty inches. The camisole under it covered her plump breasts, but their heft spilled out against the fabric’s tight confines until her bust looked like a waterskin about to spring a leak.

At thirty-two, she was closer to losing men’s eyes upon her than gaining them. But so far, age had given her more than it had taken away. Slender in her youth, she had firmed and plumped with maturity. Her chest was two generous handfuls of creamy flesh, each teat the size of a ripe cantaloupe, spilling over even the accommodating corset she had bought special order—and the feel of them had never disappointed a man attracted by the sight of them.

And her hips bloomed with a fullness that had no need of a bustle. Her buttocks were as abundant as her bosom, swelling out from ample hips and a comparatively narrow waist. She was not fat, despite her voluptuousness. Her thighs were thick and her belly was as soft as pudding, but her proportions did not disappoint, even outside the unnecessary choker and glovelettes and heels that needlessly accentuated her body into something men worshiped more than simply adored.

She was a half-breed, with something of the Spanish conquistador to go with mestizo swarthiness, putting a dusky cast to her skin and a raven blackness to her hair, which fell in haphazard curls to between her shoulder blades.

Her accent was lustily Mexican: it shook her words and made her Rs a thing of beauty. She was not quite fluent in English, but more competent at it than she let on. Some men particularly disliked accents like hers and, in a pinch, she could speak without it.

But she liked her accent, flamboyant and occasionally impenetrable as it was. When men liked it, she took it as a sign of good taste on their part. Men’s hunger for her body, though, was something she saw as simply inevitable.

She was tall as well, almost six feet, as if a statuesque frame was needed to give her curves a proper canvas to work on. But for all her rounded hips and jubilantly plush breasts, her warm eyes were her greatest feature. Sweetheart eyes, she’d heard them called, for every man they looked upon thought in his wishful heart that he might be her sweetheart.

She sat at one of the tables, picking one at random as there was no one else there but Frank the Indian, who bummed what change he could from passersby until he could afford a drink. And he sat in the corner where he couldn’t offend more profitable customers, on pain of being run out.

Where Sofia sat, she sprawled, her legs apart, trailing across the floor with her skirt drawn high over her crotch like a careless bedsheet covering her as she slept in. Coquettishly, she drew the gown shut over her ample cleavage, sure the stranger had already gotten a good look and equally sure he would want to see more.

She wouldn’t say the man was helpless to resist her, but with an air of curiosity he moved his lean frame towards her until he sank into the chair opposite her. Antonio brought their drinks. Usually, he’d bring Sofia iced tea, both so that she wouldn’t get drunk on the job and so that he could charge full price for the alcohol while only giving away a bit of sugar water.