Read Online New Mexico Madman (9781101612644) by Jon Sharpe - Free Book Online Page B

lust.
    â€œFargo, it goes so deep!” she panted in a hoarse whisper. “So deep, so
deep
!”
    The angle was perfect for maximum stimulation of her magic button, and soon she was so galvanized with pleasure that each breath ended on a groan. Fargo felt the pin-prickling in his groin swell to a massive, explosive release just as she climaxed in a series of hard, uncontrollable shudders.
    The two of them, weak and dazed, collapsed sideways to the ground while their ragged breathing slowly returned to normal. After uncounted moments Raul’s voice called out:
“Socorro! Donde estas?”
    With an effort she found her voice.
“Ya vengo, hermano!”
    â€œHe knows why I came outside,” she told Fargo as they untangled from each other. “And he will not be angry. But he does not want the others to know. Thank you, Fargo. I will always remember the stallion who took me under the stars. And it will be very much time before my hands are again outside the blankets.”
    â€œThank you, too, lady. This night’s been a reg’lar tonic for me.”
    She kissed his lips and hurried toward the station. Fargo rose to his knees again, closed his fly, and buckled on his shell belt. A moment later he flinched hard when a voice bellowed from the house: “Ha-ho, ha-ho! Fargo, you double-poxed hound! You’ll smell like fish all night!”
    * * *
    Fargo debated sleeping outside. But Booger slept like a dead man, and Fargo’s deepening suspicion of Lansford Ashton made him reluctant to leave the house—he was, after all, Kathleen Barton’s bodyguard. So he compromised by sleeping right next to the raw plank door.
    Despite his torrid session out back with Socorro, sleep eluded Fargo long past the time the other three men nodded out—Booger snoring like a leaky bellows. He listened to the night sounds outside the door: the gentle soughing of the wind in the valley, the mournful howl of prowling coyotes, the monotonous rise and fall of insects. All of it eventually reassured him and gradually he floated down a deep tunnel into sleep.
    Dream images danced across his sleeping mind, half formed, jumbled: Kathleen Barton’s beautiful face, transforming into a mask of terror; pale-ice eyes promising hard death; a silver concho belt turning and twisting like a writhing snake and growing bloody fangs; a Concord swift wagon hurtling out of control into a black maw of hellish death.
    And dream sounds, echoing a warning: the whinny of an agitated horse, then the almost comforting sound like meat sizzling in hot grease.
    Meat sizzling louder and louder (
this
is
no
dream,
Fargo!
), but not meat, something else, something deadly, something he knew all too well (
the
readiness
is
all
,
Fargo!
) . . .
    Fargo’s eyes blinked open and some inner urgency, the vital force to live, chased the cobwebs of sleep from his mind. Now he heard the Ovaro, nickering insistently to warn him, and realized: the insect noise was gone.
    And that “meat sizzling”—there was a half-inch gap under the door, and Fargo saw faint, flickering orange flashes of light, and he felt the cold sweat of dread break out in his armpits when he realized exactly how Death had come calling for him.
    For a frozen moment his muscles seemed severed from his will, but it passed in a blink as a frontiersman’s well-honed instinct to survive took over. Fargo catapulted to his feet, clawed at the latchstring, flung open the plank door. Clouds had mottled the bright yellow moon, and he squinted to see better in the stingy light.
    There! Perhaps fifteen feet in front of the doorway—a dark shape spitting sparks!
    Expecting his next breath to be his last, Fargo bound forward in several long strides. He could not risk trying to snuff the fuse, and instinct warned him the object was too heavy to kick safely away from the house.
    Leaning far forward while still on the run, he scooped it up in both