Bone's Country (Patreon)

Bone didn’t want her dressing like a whore anymore, so at Fort Worth, he took Sophia to the dressmaker’s place and bought her new clothes. She still felt like a whore. Supposed she still was one, just for one man.

Not that Bone paid her. But when it came time for her to eat or sleep, it was always his greenbacks and eagles that got spent. She supposed that might make him her pimp, but his nature was too jealous for that. Sophia was his prize possession and he made her feel that way, in both senses. She would feel cherished and valued and then sometimes like a thing he owned—an object used to sate his basest desires.

She’d never enjoyed being a whore, not really, but she did enjoy that, even when it made her angry. So she supposed she wasn’t a whore after all. But what she was, Sophia didn’t know. Only that she was Bone’s. He’d certainly paid dearly enough to have her.

Yet he’d rid her of the anger that had tainted her life for as long as she could remember… killed the man who’d despoiled her and taken away her hatred like a sawbones undoing a sickness. Now she could enjoy life—or at least do without the fuming, the simmering, the gnashing memories of what had happened.

They were still there, but what Bone had done was like a wall between them and her. Sophia’s rapist was dead. There could be no more poison in that fang.

She looked at herself in the mirror. The pretty mestizo looking back at her did not appear a whore. Her face had always belonged on a Gibson calendar, but the dressmaker had put her in a proper walking suit: white calico with the pale pink patterning of roses in oh-so-frail bloom. The bodice fitted to her, finished with a skirted peplum. The long skirt ruffled around the hem. Her hair was up in a bun, tied up with a ribbon dark as her tresses but shiny as whale oil. Her skimmer hat had green laurel wound around the band.

A locket, that’s all I need to look a proper lady to a proper man, Sophia thought, petting the bare throat she left uncovered, unbuttoned, in deference to the Texas heat that could try even a Chicana. A gold locket, with a picture of her beloved. And there was only one man that could be.

He didn’t make a sound, but she felt him coming up behind her. Sophia looked at the mirror, seeing herself in it and him looming over her, his tall frame seeming to dwarf even her voluptuous body. He seemed armored as heavily as an Old World knight in his canvas duster, his tobacco-brown vest, his red work shirt. The shirt was clean and new, slowly being broken in, stained with as much sweat as the man ever gave, while the rest was trail clothes. As rough and tumble as the man himself.

Hot water and a shaving kit couldn’t erase the desert from Jeremiah Bone, nor the Texas from him. His striking face, as imposing as the side of a cliff, held more threat in it than the sixguns holstered on his cartridge belt.

“You look nice,” he said, his gruff voice as soft as it got—low as fog clinging to the ground on a cold morning. “Outright respectable. Pretty soon, folks won’t know what a trat like you is doing with a sidewinder like me.”

Sophia smiled into his reflection. “We’ll know.”

Her heart beat faster; the hope and worry that he would ravish her once more. Those twin emotions—following closely as shadow and light to each other—made Bone’s presence as potent as straight whiskey to her. She could drown in it. Or she could end up tippled as the town drunk.

Bone took his hands from behind his back, bringing out something so airy and insubstantial that Sophia thought for a moment he had snagged his paw on a spider’s web. Then he held it over her body so she could see herself in it within the mirror.

It was a chemise, short, skimpy, only coming down to the fullest curves of Sophia’s thighs. Spun of fine lace and damned little of it. Sophia pressed her hand through the fabric; she saw her fingerprints on the other side of it. All but the exact duskiness of her skin was shown with that phantasm of a garment in the way.

“Paris, France,” Bone enunciated, speaking with a wonderment meant to spread to her. “Ya wear it to bed.”

Sophia made a face—in fact, she all but hissed like a cat in wet. “You may; I don’t. Even a dance hall girl wouldn’t wear a thing like that—you think I’d be caught in it? You think I was such a mauk I spread my legs for every sourdough that blew into town? I took the money I wanted. Me vendí! Yo no estaba en venta! Me vendí!”

With the hands holding the filmy undergarment to Sophia’s chest, Bone pushed on her. Shoving her voluptuous body back into his own muscular frame. No matter her curves, the way he manhandled her made her feel slight. Girlish, no matter how much of a woman she was.

“You’ll wear it if I want you to wear it,” Bone growled. His gaze flicked to the mirror, showing Sophia’s body encased within the reflection of the chemise. The force of his stare pulled Sophia’s eyes in. She saw herself inside it—all her glorious figure wearing the fluttering sheet like fire wearing smoke. “I want you to wear it.”

Sophia turned around, dutifully taking the chemise from him to hold it to her own full breasts. “I may wear it,” she grinned up at him, her Iberian temperament gone deep and mean. The low cruelty of a mestizo woman. She loved to torture and she tortured what she loved. “But all you’ll do is see me in it. I won’t take it off. And you won’t take it off me.”

Bone only smiled at her as he leaned in to whisper in her ear. “You can barely take the way I look at you now, puta. When you’ve got nothing on but lace and sweat, looking even halfway like I can picture you—ya really think you’ll be able to say no to me? You’ll be begging me to have my way with you, pretty thing. And we’ll leave the French on you.”

He took a hold of the chemise’s skirt, drawing it up over where it lay on her hips. Even with Sophia truly wearing her walking suit, not the undergarment, it gave a flutter of intrigue within her, this debauched implication.

“You’ll hold it out of the way for me til I’m done. Then we’ll straighten it out. Your splayed cunny will look nice and modest with the French in the way. Won’t that be a pretty picture to go to sleep to?”

Sophia’s breath came hot and fast. It was the same twinned feelings as always with Bone: white-hot lust and white-hot anger. She drew her hand back to slap him, but waited for the glint in his eye that told her he saw the blow coming.

When she swung at his face, he caught her hand at the wrist. His grip felt warm, tight. Under his thumb, her pulse roared like a team of horses, whipped into a lather.

Still holding her wrist—something in his firm clutch telling Sophia that he would release her when it pleased him and not a second before—Bone used his free hand to dip into his vest pocket, coming up with a Waltham watch. He checked the time.

“We’ll have to finish this discussion later. Go to the register, get everything rung up and packaged. I’ll be along in a minute to pay.”

“And where do you think you’re going?” Sophia demanded, breathless, irritated that he would abandon her after having got her so worked up. He could at least leave her something to do with all this heat.

“Got money on a race,” Bone told her. “Business ‘fore pleasure.”

Sophia acquiesced, nodding. With her acceptance, her face grew a slow smile.

“Yes, jefe,” she said, a purr creeping into her voice. She could get used to Bone ordering her around… men paid a puta to order her around… but then there was the charge she got out of it. A fault of hers, not of his.

As irksome as it was to be told what to do, it was also the closest she had ever come to having a husband. Sophia had never thought she would have that—a soiled dove with so much hate in her heart that there was no room for love.

Now the hate was gone. She didn’t know what would replace it.

***

Bone remembered a time he and another fellow had gotten good and soaked on benzene. It’d been at a water stop with no dancing girls, no music, not so much as an old squaw around for entertainment. They hadn’t even had playing cards. So for want of anything else to do, he and the guy he was bending elbows with played Tic-Tac-Toe.

It’d been good fun while they were jingled; the pair of them so drunk that it was anyone’s guess who would win. But as the night wore on and the drinks ran out, they sobered up. Bone stopped winning and stopped losing too. All he could do with that clodhopper was keep drawing him, again and again.

That was what it reminded him of, the way he and Sophia went on. A stalemate. She’d prevailed upon him to gun down the man who’d stained her honor, leaving her fit for nothing but the work of a wag-tail. He’d done so. It was his line; the work of a bounty killer.

The toll Bone had extracted from Sophia was her solemn vow to work at his beck and call, his own personal swamper, doing all he asked of her with one exception. He couldn’t lay hands on her without her permission.

So here was a beautiful woman, all his, sworn before God to obey him. Such a thing called for debauchery of the kind not seen since Sodom and Gomorrah were smote by God’s wrath. But he didn’t truly have her, for if he fired that temper of hers hot enough—well, the last one to get her that het up had ended up collecting Bone’s lead. It would be nothing for Sophia to refuse his touch til Kingdom Come.