Bone's Country 5 (Patreon)

“Yeah, she does, doesn’t she?” Gail commented, finding her eyes seeking for exactly what Bone’s arm was doing under Sophia’s full skirts—why Sophia’s eyes-shut face was happy as a full moon in October. “And with a bad’un like that… maybe I should go over and see if they want company.”

Hank didn’t appreciate the jibe. He came to his feet, his stand knocking his chair squealing back. His body forced Gail against the table. She had to sit on the baize to keep from being pressed up against him, but that was for naught. Hank pushed himself against her anyway. His hand touched her cheek, then slithered down her throat.

“You don’t have to saw me,” Hank said. “Wasn’t I right there with him when he undid that hard case? That little trick of his didn’t have to work, y’know. If it didn’t, he’d’ve been one big spindigo and I’d have that outlaw in the crowbar hotel. Probably la chica too. She cuts a dash, don’t she? But here I am with you. You should be grateful I’m making do with you, slommack.”

Gail turned her head sharply away, eyes searching the bar for a promise of assistance. But as she discounted those shirking from her gaze, the place seemed deserted…

Sophia’s eyes were closed, while Bone’s were so slitted that they might as well have been. He watched, blind to all else, the gasping, open-mouthed look on Sophia’s red face while his hand carried her through whitewater rapids, towards a great waterfall. But this precipitous drop she looked forward to. She craved the obliteration of the fall and she was panting raggedly in an attempt to stay conscious until she reached her delight to the point of Lethe.

Sophia didn’t feel anyone’s eyes on—especially not with the disturbance between Gail and Hank—but she did feel the keen disappointment of her familia, mother and father, grandparents and siblings, friends and old flames. What they would think if they could see what she’d been reduced to, the mad brute she rutted with?

But their disappointment didn’t stab as deep as it had before she met Bone. No, it felt insubstantial as a spider-web next to how Bone made her feel. He curled his index finger inside her, stroking along the folds of her sex, and his touch seemed to breeze over the roots of that spot on top of her slit, the little beating heart where all her pleasure seemed to center. And Bone’s little rubs went inside her, even deeper than his finger already was, swirled around the sucking need of her button like water caught in a whirlpool, and went into her desire to make it more acute than ever. A passion that grew with every twitch of his finger… that made her thrust her hips so hard, Bone’s chair lifted onto two legs and banged back down. That had her wide lips pulled back in a rictus grin, her tongue wagging as he stroked and she jerked.

No, the disappointment didn’t matter. She had gotten back at that puta Alvarez for what he’d done and now, if she was a base and lowly ramera, she had at least found a man who accepted her in the dirt. She was a bitch in heat, but she belonged to a wolf.

The clap of an open palm admonishing a sneering face stole across the room. It robbed Sophia of her orgasm. The familiar sound made her eyes fly open and she noticed Gail trapped on top of the table like a woman on a sinking ship, seeing solid ground dropping away from her. Hank’s cheek was a stinging red, but he showed no pain. His smile was cold and calm, the three black intervals in his teeth matching the cold blankness at the center of his eyes.

Sophia grabbed her master’s wrist and held it still with a strength born of seriousness. Her face shone with sweat. Her hair was dark with the same, where it met her scalp. She looked lovelier than ever as she told Bone he couldn’t have her.

Bone had heard the sound. He didn’t care. It was one more background noise to be found in any saloon with rowdy men and loose women mixed. Not enough to make him look up, any more than he would be shocked by the sight of haggling at a fish market. Far more of a surprise to him was Sophia’s tight grip, fighting off his touch and no longer in the manner of a good-natured protest. He gave into her, trailing his slippery fingers along the inside of Sophia’s thigh to mark her with her own wetness. She shuddered and he knew she was still aroused, even as she closed her knees and hauled her cleavage back beneath her dress.

“Let’s get some shuteye,” Bone told her, his voice electric with meaning.

He didn’t plan on closing his eyes for a long time; as he worked at Sophia, this time with no dress or semblance of propriety in the way, his eyes would be wide to drink in as much of her spectacle as the moonlight would permit.

“Aren’t you going to help her?” Sophia stressed, her words pleading, even distressed.

Bone looked from her to the saloon girl, wondering if it was a sister or a niece or one of those Southern belles from back where he’d found her. But the piece of calico wasn’t known to him and she was white as a summer cloud, so Bone doubted Sophia knew her either. Why she cared, he could only chalk up to the vagaries of women.

“Why?” he retorted.

As they spoke, Gail drew back her hand to slap her assailant again. Hank’s left hand seized it by the wrist. His right hand took her by the throat. She beat at his face with the pudgy fist of her free hand, but he turned his shoulder against the blows so that she might as well have been trying to hammer a nail with a rolled up broadsheet.

“He is hurting her,” Sophia said, as carefully precise in her English as she would be with an Anglo child.

“Then she shouldn’t have put herself in a place like this, where a woman’s liable to get hurt—if she don’t have someone watching her.”

“And you cannot watch her?” Sophia argued fervently.

“Why her? Why not a hundred other women in places like this with snapperheads like that?”

“Because they are right there before you, Maricón! Andate a la verga!”

Flushed, sweaty, aroused and ashamed, Sophia pushed herself up out of Bone’s lap and raged her way to the dispute between Gail and Hank as fast as her lengthy skirt and kid boots would allow. She seemed to cover the length of floor in a heartbeat, like the long moments of argument with Bone had drawn her back like a bowstring and now she was launched. As she’d wanted from the moment she’d heard Gail slap his face, she grabbed a half-full glass tankard off a table she passed. She held it in one hand, her skirt up out of the way with the other, and as she came to Hank, Sophia broke the tankard over his head.

The slap had been loud, in the companionable silence of a comfortably nestled hole in the wall. The sound of breaking grass was omnipresent, looming over even Hank’s grunt of pain. He staggered, scraps of glass littering his shoulders and tumbling across his body to tinkle on the ground. Some stayed in his scalp, protruding like horns as a mix of liquor and blood darkened his hair and ran over his face. Cursing, he wiped his eyes and clawed at his hair to end his suffering, his cursing getting louder as his fingers tore on the sharp shards.

It took only a few moments for him to recover. Gail fled immediately: scrambling off the table, crawling a few feet away on all fours, then getting to her feet and making for the safety of the backroom. Sophia, though, just stood there. The tankard’s disembodied handle still loaded in her grip.

Hank’s ire focused on her. She drew a step back under his venomous gaze. Hank adjusted his gunbelt. Looking at the voluptuous woman who had done him such wrong, he felt like restarting the courtship which had begun with Gail its recipient. But it was hard for him to recapture a romantic mood when black anger thundered inside him. He wanted to lash out, kill her and be done with it—but oh, what a waste that would be. A waste he might regret on lonely nights to come.

She had attacked him, they’d all seen that. Would anyone care if he recouped his losses in a way of his own choosing? Hell, they might cheer him on; every man in here had to want to see what that man Bone was clearly getting…