Page 8 of Working the Lode

CHAPTER FIVE

Zelnora

Zelnora carried a basket of tortillas, bad Boston wine, and a bowl of frijoles made by Californio women at the Fort. She headed back up to Brannagh’s store so she and Mercy could eat dinner. Sutter freely gave them the awful wine—awful because they’d wondered why, when the country abounded in grapes, they had to import such stuff at exorbitant rates—when he knew Brannagh was gone. As a habitual toper, Sutter knew the relaxation a glass or two could bring, and he was very affectionate toward the women. He’d told them the Spanish government had discouraged the planting of grapevines as a protection against the monopoly of their own winemakers.

Zelnora nearly dropped the basket when the three horses came stomping down the muddy road from upriver, Quartus jiggling like a marionette astride the saddle horn. Mr. Bowmaker! Quartus, true to his word, had brought the powerful mountain man back to her! How she would kiss and hug Quartus for the kindness of his heart—maybe even give him a new pocket compass. It had been so long since she had tussled with the delectable buckskinned man, she had almost thought the entire thing was a dream. Or that it had just been a temporary absence of sanity on his part, and he had moved onto other more attractive diversions. Frontiersmen, Zelnora knew, were accustomed to moving about the plains with abandon. On arriving in California, newcomers found themselves enlisted in the ranks of one or two classes, the hopeful or the despondent. Zelnora had been afraid Mr. Bowmaker might be among the despondent.

By the time she reached the store, the men had already tied up their animals and had dismounted. Mr. Bowmaker assisted Quartus, who seemed to have lost all sensation in his limbs, as he nearly slithered into the woodsman’s grasp. With arms uplifted, Bowmaker’s shirt cleared his ass, and she viewed the round muscular shape of it under the tight leather when he moved. Oh, better than a compass, she would give Quartus one of these Indian drums she had seen about the Fort!

Shoving the basket of food at Mercy, Zelnora skipped to Mr. Bowmaker’s horse. She should have greeted Quartus first, as he leaned wobbly and red-faced against the flank of the horse, but without thinking she stepped right up to Mr. Bowmaker. He looked calmly down at her, unperturbed by what was obviously a strenuous and taxing ride, his clear tourmaline eyes flickering with some new kind of mischief. Reaching up, she tucked a loose lock of ginger hair back into his head scarf. His scalp steamed with sweat and exertion, yet he looked as unflappable as a member of Congress.

“Cormack,” she said, presuming to call him by his Christian name. “Quartus gave you my message?”

His eyes roved over her face, a pleased grin lifting one corner of his mouth. “Zelnora. Yes. I was very happy to receive it.”

She grabbed his bicep and tugged. “Then let us go to my cabin. He told you Brannagh was away in San Francisco for awhile?”

He allowed himself to be dragged toward her cabin, though Quartus was slowly sliding onto the ground in a puddle of boneless limbs, and Henry Bigler, a fellow missionary, was suddenly there tugging at her other arm.

“Sister Sparks!” Bigler cried urgently. “We need your expertise for a matter of—“

“Yes; can we talk later, Henry?”

The couple fairly jogged up the hill to her cabin, a small twelve by twelve canvas room, the sides hung with chintz. The toilet table was a trunk set upon two claret cases, and the women’s looking glass was the sort that came in paper cases for doll’s houses. The washstand was another trunk with a large dish for the bowl, but the two pine beds with their straw mattresses were perfectly serviceable, and here Zelnora gently shoved the man back upon the cotton ticking.

He leaned against the rough boughs of the headboard, one arm slung above his head, the thumb of his other hand hooked under a much-worn belt. Zelnora plunked down next to him and leaned against his solid chest, toying with the shoulder fringes of his shirt.

“Cormack,” she nearly sobbed, her mouth slack and watering for the taste of him. He seemed perfectly content to wait all day and perhaps even drink some tea, so she moved one hand to his scarf and slid it from his head. “How I’ve missed you. I don’t know how in the short space of time we spent together, but I’ve got such a case on you, not a minute passes I don’t think about your bewitching eyes, sparkling so mischievously…” Placing her mouth against his face, she whispered, “What is it that you think of when you look so bewitching?” He did smell of sweat after his long hard ride from the mill, but he was imbued with his own individual scent of pine, wood smoke, and melted snow, as though the sweat itself had crystallized on his skin.

He chuckled a little as he removed his hand from his belt and brought it round her shoulders to hold her peacefully, as a lover would…if he was capable of love. Was he?

“I think about fucking you, Zelnora. This child is gut-shot. The first second I saw you by the Fort my prick got hard, and all I could think about was fucking you. Plunging my hands into these heavy braids—no, let me—then sliding my cock into you so deeply you’d think you’ve gone under. You’re some now, Miss Sparks, the biggest kind of pumpkin.”

He slithered his fingers between her plaits and unbound them as they panted into each other’s mouths. It was hardly realistic to hope for a proclamation of love from someone she’d only known a few hours, especially from a rough aloof mountain man, so Zelnora decided to be happy with the proclamation of lust. She kissed him then, his mouth slick and moist and delectable as she wondered what if would feel like to have that tongue elsewhere on her body. His hand glided to untangle her braids into voluptuous curls that bobbed about her shoulders and snaked against his face. She knew that a man of the lonely frontier could not resist a woman’s freshly washed silken curls, especially when she rinsed it with attar of roses.

She leaned into him, slowly removing his cravat as she lifted a leg to straddle him. Now she could finally lick his throat and taste the essence of him, but he had fixed some very convoluted sailor’s type of knot in the cravat. She struggled pleasantly with the black cloth while lazily riding his hips at a very slow canter, her quim squarely planted atop the massive bulk of his penis, purring as she lightly bit his mouth. Oh Dear Lord, he is built so impressively, would I be able to take him? Brannagh had never actually penetrated her, just groped her in back rooms and in the tower of his newspaper’s printing press. More than likely afraid of making her with child, although Zelnora knew that to be impossible, Brannagh merely forced her to jerk his crooked prick up and down, or he would do it for her, and he particularly enjoyed releasing onto her breasts.

This tall, lean virile man between her thighs was different in every aspect. They said he’d taken the bark off the Arapahoe and fought the Blackfoot, and “raised the hair” of more than one Apache, yet between her thighs he was nothing more than a vulnerable “beaver kitten” as he called himself, allowing himself to be controlled by his lust for her, and—

He flipped her over onto her back! What was he doing? They were kissing, smacking on each other’s mouths while she stimulated his penis with her riding abilities, when suddenly he gave a low, guttural grunt and flipped her, pinning her to the ticking with dexterous hips, engulfing her torso in his long arms, laying thick sucking kisses against the side of her throat. She was wide open as the sky above, feet hitched to the backs of his thighs.

“Cormack,” she whispered hoarsely, “please take me. Fuck me now.”

“Zelnora,” he rasped back, “the bullfrog has croaked it. I want your dewy pussy clamped down around my prick.”

As she waited for him to say “but,” suddenly the warmth of his torso against hers vanished, and in her dizzy desire she had no idea where he’d gotten to—the canvas ceiling of her cabin was spinning wildly, and she gripped the edges of the straw mattress with claw-like hands. Then she felt him, down between her outspread thighs—how mortifying to be seen so promiscuous like that, her drawers on view for such a savage man! But he was no doubt accustomed to much worse—and he was slathering giant, lascivious kisses to the inside of her knee—her knee!

No one had ever paid attention to any part of her anatomy lower than her quim before, and it was oddly erotic the way Cormack licked such wanton sucking kisses up the inside of her thigh, nipping little beaver bites at her flesh, sending shivery waves directly into her clitoris. Oh, hurry, please hurry Zelnora’s inner voice screamed, until she realized she had moaned it aloud.

The lips of her quim exposed to the air through the slit in her drawers, soon Zelnora felt the hot puffs he snorted against the very length of her clitoris. Oddly, it seemed to elongate and engorge with juice. Mindlessly she clutched the back of his skull when he bit the fatty part of her inner thigh—oh, when would he jump on top of her and just fuck her like the animal she knew he was?

Good Lord! He licked so close to her quim he surely must smell that awful odor women emitted, no matter how clean, that made them smell like a fishwife! Yet the sensation was so erotic the inner walls of her channel shivered and clenched, sending additional waves of agonizing ecstasy into her uterus. Now yanking a handful of his hair to bring him back to his proper place mounting her, the tip of his nose touched her clitoris, and she cried out, “Cormack! What are you doing?”

He dove in so heartily that Zelnora gasped loud enough to be heard down at the store. One, two, three tremendous strokes of his proficient tongue the entire length of her clitoris. He slurped unashamed like a cow in a lake, as though her quim were the most ambrosial trough of sauterne imaginable. Was this some strange Indian thing? It was unbelievably shameful yet arousing to have his beautiful pointed nose buried in her sex, lapping away like a mountain cat. It almost seemed as though he were attempting to give her pleasure, though how could that be possible? Women were for the pleasure of men; why would he be seemingly attempting to bring her to the climax she had only before given herself…and with his mouth? Was that even poss—

Rational thought evaporated from her brain as all sensation got sucked down into her clitoris. A rapturous groundswell squeezed her, travelling down her inner channel, centering on her clitoris where he licked harder, yet slower. She crested again and again, her entire body convulsing like an epileptic, toes clenched inward, and then outward. She didn’t realize until much later she must have been grasping fistfuls of his beautifully glossy hair, and disconcertingly, it felt as though she even gushed liquid against his face.

As Cormack slowed his slurping, minute after minute passed before the convulsions had almost completely ebbed away. The ecstasy was almost painful by then, and she languidly shoved him away from her. Her knees collapsed on top of each other as she rolled to one side, her ribcage heaving, her fingers scrabbling listlessly against the cotton ticking.