Bone's Country 7 (Patreon)

Upstairs, Sophia was wearing the chemise. The all but translucent material concealed nothing of her figure, her curves, her voluptuousness. Seeing it made Bone think of a force of nature: a thunderstorm or a whirlwind. In her walking suit or some other framing of modesty, she was a dark cloud. Nothing exactly hidden, but dormant.

Now, though, the wind was raging, the rain coming down, lightning splitting the sky. Bone saw her stiff nipples pushing through the sheer fabric, her generous breasts shoving out the material so far that it would fall straight to her toes were it not for a draft in the room.

The flow of air pressed the gown to her, kissing the lace to her smoothly rounded belly, her hips that swelled like the sea in a high wind, her legs that tapered like that wind calming. She was enough woman to steal Bone’s mind away and leave nothing but the instinct to rut; he would’ve taken her already if it weren’t for bull-red anger in the way. Doubling now that she’d aroused him so yet left him unable to act on it.

Not when she needed discipline.

“This your version of a peace pipe,” he asked her without making it a question.

“I felt I owed you,” Sophia said, her voice low and gentle. “I didn’t mean for this thing to happen… it got out of hand. I must thank you for delivering me…”

Bone bit the inside of his cheek, torn between getting madder at her and containing his anger. He knew Sophia well enough to see she wasn’t a bad sort, not even too manipulative—no more than any woman. Just a big kid, sometimes, or a coyote. Howling at the moon because it was there. He couldn’t ask too much sense of her. Just that she heeded him.

Land’s sake, was that too much to ask? That Sophia heed him at least as much as his dumb ol’ horse, knowing as she did that he only wanted to look after her?

“So this is your apology,” he enunciated dryly.

Sophia nodded tightly. Even that little gesture did things of intrigue under her chemise, which felt like they were happening right under his nose. Force of nature. The way she held herself, the way she breathed, even the way her eyes flickered to him.

He could take a daguerreotype of her, hire an artist to paint a masterpiece of her, and the difference between that image and the real thing would still be like night and day. Or like a bonfire, lit and unlit.

“And this is your gratitude to me for not letting that ape wring your pretty neck?”

She nodded again, though he barely noticed. Those long raven locks set against the silken white chemise… a contrast like a bright moon on a dark night. He didn’t know how it could be legal, such a thing, when there were preachers railing against drinking and playing cards. You’d think one of them would realize the temptation this filly presented when she wore white was more than any other vice put together.

“You’re not worried I’ll wring that pretty neck myself?” Bone asked, letting the venom drip from his fangs.

He’d played nice already; she’d misbehaved. That’d be enough to earn his horse the spurs. Why should she be any different?

“I almost got shot just now,” he went on. His glare bore into her, snaking deep inside, past all her defenses to a fear Sophia hadn’t felt since Alvarez. “You don’t think setting a fellow up to be shot is as bad as shooting him yourself?”

“I didn’t want that,” she said, trembling with fear now, her heart a stallion that’d lost all its training—bucking and stomping and rearing and kicking.

Bone reached for his belt and opened up the buckle. “What did you want? Just to see me kill one more soul?” he asked.

Sophia's throat narrowed. It was harder for words to get past the fear choking her. She had to force them through, a shrill cry. “I wanted you to protect that poor girl!”

He loomed over her like a giant, like when she was a little girl and her father had caught her being bad. “I ain’t the goddamn sheriff!”

Sophia was trapped, helpless, but she scrambled desperately for anything she would wield to defend herself. “The sheriff wasn’t there! You were! And it’s not as if you don’t know how to use that gun.”

“What dime novel are you writing? I use my gun to turn a profit. I’m not out to write a happy ending to every sob story in the West!”

She wanted to throw herself against him, plead for forgiveness, but he’d never seemed more lethal than he did now. Cold and bereft of any of the love she’d felt from him before, like a well that had run dry. In his present state, she feared to move—it may be an invitation to a quick-draw.

Sophia cracked. “And if it was me? If it was back when Alvarez first soiled me—"

Bone took his hat off. It was like the ugliness inside him jumping out, marring his handsome face by topping it with a crown of scars. “Don’t start that. Don’t you take that road, because then I’ll ask you if you would’ve looked twice at me if you didn’t need killing done.”

As Bone had unburdened himself, Sophia felt like all her misery and frustration was crawling out of her—abandoning her along her active tear ducts. She loosened, without tension to hold her stiff, but also felt like she might melt into a pool of nothing, there was so little of her to stand up to his anger.

“You know how I feel. The way you touch me, how I hunger for it… how else must I prove myself?”

“You haven’t learned a damn thing here, but I have. I know you can’t be trusted. That’s gonna change. You’re getting taught a lesson and it starts right now,” Bone said, his voice cold, his thin lips the only part of him that moved. Everything else was carefully still.

He’d become a statue and Sophia was all liquid, like a flutter of raindrops falling but not reaching the ground.

Sophia squeezed her hands tightly together, as if she were holding onto Bone, clutching him close to keep him from abandoning her. “No, you promised! You swore! You would not lay a hand on me, you gave your word!”

“That’s right. I did. And you swore you’d do whatever I asked.”

“Yes…” Sophia admitted. His hold on her was the only thing that moored her. She needed to get him to forgive her.

But that hard-won promise, his vow that he would never touch her without her permission, it felt like the only fuel that the flame of her soul had. Without it, she was nothing, less than nothing.

She would give him anything, but she could not give him the last inch of herself.

“Go over there. Face the wall.” His voice was soft now, husky, almost trembling. Sophia knew then that he’d forgiven her. All she needed to do was act as he said and they could forget this had ever happened.

She went to the wall.

“Lift that thing up over your waist,” Bone told her, his words now sounding like they were coming from somewhere far away. What depredations Bone enjoyed there, Sophia could not imagine.

“You swore never without my permission,” she reminded him.

“I’m no liar. I won’t lay one finger on you. But you’re going to stand like that until you take your licks.“

Sophia shut her eyes, trying to hold down her thoughts as a whirlwind blew them around. Memories reared their heads out of the muck that they'd sunk into, out of sight for so long. She envisioned herself as a little girl lying across her Papi's lap, skirt raised because nothing could stand in the way of her punishment.

She could not imagine Bone having that power over her… the ability to reduce her to a small child in her mind, while the luscious body that went with her spirit… it still belonged to him. He had no use for the mind of a woman. “You’re a monster.”

So amused Bone sounded now. Like she really was la nina, saying that she’d seen Santa Claus. “You were looking for a monster. Why act so surprised you got one? Now, let your monster see his woman.”

The chemise clung so tightly to Sophia’s curves that skin and silk seemed to merge. The seams on it were so close to the sea of flesh that they were more like scar tissue than stitching. When Sophia raised the hem of her chemise, there was little room to maneuver and the silk clung to her wide hips as though unwilling to relinquish it.

Bone watched, making no move to help. The fabric was stretched taut. Her decadent warmth and creamy softness ghosted through the tissue-like cloth. Still she eased the silk upward, relinquishing it to his gaze and her own anticipation of his touch. Without thinking about it, almost without knowing she was doing it, Sophia arched her back and pushed her bare ass out, yielding to her own need more than to him.