Valves & Vixens, Volume 2 Read online

  “Anyone here suppose I won’t knife fuck every mad bastard one of you that don’t let me drink my peace?” Donnegan growled. The only response was from the engineer on the table, still squealing about his broken nose. “Shut your filthy mouth,” letting go of the cane, he grabbed the engineer by the hair, “or I’ll make a permanent end to the problem for you.” Donnegan yanked the knife from the table and slid it along side the engineer’s nose, blood and tears streaming from the man’s face. The click of a hammer being pulled alerted Donnegan to the other engineer, about to come at him from the side. Cait Morrow stood at the railing above, aiming a navy colt at the man.

  “Leave him be. I like his talk better than yours.”

  “Ain’t no need for that kind of aggression, Miss Cait,” came the smooth, southern voice from outside the saloon’s bat wing doors. Donnegan kept his attention on both Grayson Wynn and the man on the table, trusting the woman who was already watching his back to do so a little while longer if this new player was going to start anything. He made no move towards Miranda or Donnegan, instead he waved off the other engineer, motioning for Wynn to step down off his chair and join the other man in the corner as he strode into the centre of the room, a grim vision in parson’s black. His smile was at once too wide, his teeth too big and horsey. Donnegan felt an immediate distrust of him the way he always did around men who armed themselves with nothing but their mouths and God’s words.

  “Brother Wynn, brother Lundy, I trust that you do not require the kind of lesson brother Allen has received to understand the error of tonight’s exercise in piety?” Wynn and Lundy said nothing, eyeing Donnegan instead. “Go home, boys. Take brother Allen and patch up his hurt.”

  Donnegan released his hold on the engineer’s hair and letting his head hit the table again with a thud before slipping backwards, his backside introducing itself to the sawdust covered floor. Wynn and Allen quickly grabbed their prone partner, one under each arm and hauled him out of the saloon under reverend Hayes’ ever watchful, ever smiling gaze. When they were gone, Hayes turned his attention at last to Donnegan.

  “I don’t believe you and I have met, sir.”

  Donnegan reached for his drink, brought it to his lips only to find it empty, and returned it to the table, all the while ignoring Hayes’ extended hand causing Hayes’ smile at last to falter. He had to fight not to smile himself when it had.

  “I’m Reverend Hayes. I’m the local churchman around these parts.” Hayes, regaining his composure, smiled again.

  “I can see that from the collar. I don’t like your men.”

  “Well, a man can’t judge a whole flock by a few wayward sheep, can he? Matter of fact, you look like a man might need some help gettin’ right himself.”

  “Let me make something clear to you.” Donnegan took up his cane again and stood, towering a full foot above the reverend. “I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of your men. And I’m sure as hell not afraid of your tin god.” Donnegan looked around at the other men in the saloon. “Don’t know what it is about you that makes these people so scared they let their womenfolk be the only ones to stand up for them. Don’t much give a damn either. You want to run roughshod over people willing to let you, go ahead. But the next three days, till I leave town, stay out of my way. I hear you bother either of these two women, I’ll make your man Allen look all kinds of pretty compared to you.” Hayes stared at Donnegan in silence for a moment. Then, he began to laugh.

  “I like you mister. Got a certain brutish simpleness to you, makes you talk plain.” He started for the door, stopping next to Donnegan. “You remember what I said about gettin’ right with the lord. Come a day all the angels in their heaven and all the devils out of hell ain’t gonna lift a finger to save you. Got a feeling the day comes soon.”

  “Righter than you know, reverend. Don’t expect you and yours are the ones to introduce me to my hereafter though.” Hayes laughed again, Donnegan not turning to watch him as he left. As the bat wing doors shut behind him, Donnegan looked around at the other men in the room and found every pair of eyes on him. “Go back to drinkin’. You ain’t earned the right to look at me like that.” He turned to the bar where Job Quarrel already had another drink waiting for him. Taking it, he paid, silencing Job’s inclination to protest with a look and raised it in salute to Cait Morrow as she descended the staircase from the brothel above.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” Cait Morrow corrected as Job brought her a glass of wine. “It’s nothing to point a gun at a man from where he can’t reach you. Especially when someone else has already stood up to him.” She sipped her wine, then put the glass back on the bar, reaching instead for the hand that held Donnegan’s glass and prying it away from the drink as she leaned in close to him and whispered. “I don’t think there’s a woman here who wouldn’t take you into her bed, gratis.” In full view of the bar, she slid his hand beneath the folds of her bustle skirt, cut short in the front like those of her girls and into the split knickers underneath, finding the moist heat awaiting him. Closing her eyes, she ground down against his hand and sighed. “Not a one of them,” she whispered and watched over his shoulder as Miranda walked out of the saloon doors.

  Donnegan withdrew his hand, albeit slowly, placing it flat on the bar. “It’s a good offer. Sorry, I’m not the type.” The madam caressed his chest with one gloved hand, feeling suddenly what he kept hidden beneath his shirt and understanding. She smiled at him again, this time not with lust, but with warmth, kissing him at the corner of his mouth.

  “You change your mind, come see me.” Her hand slid along his arm as they parted and she returned up the stairs, not looking back at him. Donnegan in turn went back to face the bar, ruminating over his drink.

  Chapter Three

  Donnegan saw the dim red glow of Cotton’s pipe long before his eyes could pick out the man himself, sitting outside his shop in the darkness.

  “Mr. Donnegan.”

  “Mender. Hell of a town you got here.”

  “I should probably give you back your piece and tell you to get out.”

  “Probably.” There was a momentary silence, both men staring out into the night.

  “Can I ask you something?” Donnegan nodded, adding a small grunt of consent. “How many men do you figure you killed in the war?”

  Donnegan shrugged. “Hundred. Maybe a few more. Probably only ten as deserved it. Why?”

  “Come inside. I want to show you something.” Cotton wheeled his way into the small workshop where they’d earlier talked. Lighting the electric lantern he illuminated the room, though dimly.

  “Lift the tarp off there,” he instructed. Donnegan did as he was told, dust flying into the air as he removed the shroud-like sheet. Lamplight played off of the polished brass and lacquered wood underneath. “You know what this is?” Cotton asked as Donnegan stared at the thing on its wooden stand.

  “I was at River’s Bridge, right before Columbia burned,” Donnegan said, nodding, “saw half a company blown all to hell with just a handful of these. This one’s simpler than I remember though. Not that I tried for a close look.”

  “It’s the first of them. Banshee Mark I. I keep it to remind me of how many men are on my head.”

  “You built it?”

  “And god will surely damn me for doing so.”

  Donnegan rubbed his chin, eyes still fixed on the thing beneath the sheet. “Why are you showing me this?”

  “Sometimes a man gets war in his veins, he can’t get it out. Everything becomes another fight to win, another siege to be endured. End of the day, all he can see is blood, his own or some other man’s. I’m tired of blood, Mr. Donnegan, and so are these people. You’d be hard pressed to find someone here that didn’t fight in the war or lose someone in it.” Silence fell over them again and Cotton turned away from his creation, and from Donnegan. “
Cover it up.” Donnegan did as he was asked.

  “I worked the docks in Vicksburg before the war,” Donnegan started, “nothing much, move something off one boat, put it on another or on a train to get it where the boats couldn’t. Sometimes the head man, he’d ask if I wanted to make some extra money, watch the boats at night, make sure nobody took anything. Had a wife then, Jeanne and extra pay for the two of us was extra pay.”

  “What was she like,” Cotton interrupted, gesturing towards the empty stool still sitting along the wall, “your wife.”

  “She was... everything. Till one day, the army comes calling, decides they want Vicksburg and the fort that’s there. Now I didn’t have much part in the war then, Jeanne and I weren’t supporters of the... institution, being she was a quadroon herself. But that didn’t matter much when it came to the city because we were all inside together while they sat camped out there shelling. Didn’t even attack like men, just the shelling, day and night, all the time.” Donnegan pulled the chair to sit across from Cotton, easing himself into it, feeling, at once, older than his years.

  “Pretty soon, we started running out of food, people eating cats, dogs, horses, anything they could get their hands on. And there’s me and a whole lot of boats stuck in the dock, boats full of supplies for the men at the fort.”

  “See, I’d gotten to know who was like to steal from the boats by then. Sometimes a captain would do something the head man didn’t like and he’d send me home with a quail or a duck he’d got, tell me to make sure Jeanne cooked a big supper that night. Take my time coming back to finish looking after the dock. I’d come back and find a few fellas leaving the yard I didn’t know and a boat that was half as full as it was when I left. Except I never got called on it. So I find one of these men, the ones I recognize, and I tell him what I’m thinking and he says it’s a pretty good idea. Few nights later, most everyone busy up at the fort instead of watching the boats, we go out and we feed our families. And a few nights later, and a few after that because I will be damned if I ever let Jeanne eat rat, or dog, or horse or anything else isn’t fit to be food. And the whole time, we knew, if we got caught, they’d string us up right there for treason.”

  “Did she know?” asked Cotton. Donnegan looked blankly at him. “Your wife, did she know where the food was coming from.”

  “I sure as hell didn’t tell her. But she knew. Problem was, while I was out doing what I’d decided was the right thing to do, she was at home listening to the shelling, day in, day out and now, she had me to worry about each night, not sure if one time I’d go out and not come back. I was out so much, I couldn’t see what it was doing to her, just that we were fighting more and sleeping less all the time. Til one night, maybe thirty days in, one of their big guns hits a boat we’d been skimming from. The docks caught fire, then the buildings closest the water. The fellas with me all make a run for it, but people I know live there so I stay, try to help put out the fire. She must have heard what was going on, thought I’d gone up with the boat when I didn’t come home. Or maybe she couldn’t take the cannonade anymore. Maybe both. I came back after dawn and there she was, hanging from the big beam over the hearth, chair laying on its side underneath her.” Donnegan’s grip on the cane made his knuckles go white as he relived the discovery. “Wasn’t long after that Vicksburg fell.”

  “After the funeral, one of the fellas who was with me at the docks came up and asked me if I wanted to kill myself some Yankees. And there’s me with a belly full of hate and sadness and looking to blame someone. So I told him it sounded good. Sounded damn good in fact. That night we put torches to one of the barracks the Union men had taken over. Pretty soon there was a gang of us, harriers going up and down the edge of the Union raising whatever kind of hell we could.” Donnegan’s eyes were distant, haunted, the man himself somewhere else. Cotton touched him gently on the shoulder and saw the heartbreak there as Donnegan lifted his head to look at him.

  “You want me to leave?”

  “No,” replied Cotton, wheeling his way through the curtain and into the back rooms, “but see you don’t bring blood into my house.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Goodnight, Mr. Donnegan.”

  Storm clouds hung low as Donnegan stepped outside and around to the back of the building, the temperature already starting to drop as the wind picked up. Exhaustion, reflection and drink took their toll as he entered the rear room Cotton had given him use of only to find himself being slapped in the face. He hadn’t seen the lantern light visible underneath the door giving away the waiting Miranda.

  “I didn’t ask you for help.”

  “I don’t see as I offered,” he replied, closing the door behind him.

  “You broke a man’s nose and cut off his ear.”

  “I nicked him. He bothered me and someone took my drink, so the only way to get another one was to get those boys to shut up.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “I can see that!” Donnegan shouted, louder than he should have with the girl’s father likely just on the other side of the wall. Miranda huffed in frustration, fingers hesitating over the bellows box. “You’re braver than they are, I’ll give you that.”

  “What’s that meant to mean?”

  “It means I’m not unaccustomed to forgetting to think before I act and it’s an unhealthy habit to be in.” Miranda raised her hand to slap him again but found him quick enough to catch her wrist before she could strike him. He held her there for a moment, looking down into her dark eyes. Her long braid had started to come undone, the static in the air from the coming storm causing strands of her black hair to float about her face. After a moment, he released her, turned, kicked off his boots and stripped off his shirt as if she weren’t even in the room, hanging it on the bed post before climbing into bed, facing the wall. She stood, silently staring at him before reaching for the bellows box.

  “Don’t help me again.”

  Donnegan pulled the woolen blanket over himself.

  “Goodnight, Miss Cotton.”

  Chapter Four

  Donnegan dreamed. In his dream, he followed the red haired madam, her hips swaying before him as she led him up the stairs of the saloon to her room. He reached out as she neared the top step, his hand sliding along the back of her leg, up to her bottom. She looked over her shoulder, smiling and quickening her step, her red curls bouncing as she moved. Down the hall, she stopped in front of him, fishing an iron key from the garter belt around her thigh. Donnegan came up behind her, wrapping one arm around her waist while with the other hand, he turned her chin towards him, kissing her as she pushed the key into the lock on the door. They stood in the hall for a long moment, she returning his kiss twice as passionate, twice as heated, her hand sliding over his resting on her waist and guiding it down to her knickers, her fingers over his, probing together the warm, wet opening between her legs.

  “Come inside,” she whispered, nipping at his earlobe.

  “I intend to,” Donnegan replied.

  In a moment, they were inside the room, Donnegan turning her around, pressing her to him, his strong hand kneading her backside. She gasped as it moved inward, rubbing against her slit. For the first time, Donnegan realized that, in the dream, he was whole as she reached between them, working at his belt buckle, grinding herself back against his hand as she did so. Cait moaned as his middle finger made its way inside her, stroking her velvet walls. As she finally managed to open his belt, undoing the buttons of his trousers, she felt him add a second finger and lost all ability to focus on the task as pleasure took over. Leaning her head into his chest, she let his fingers take her until, at last, she screamed in a fiery crescendo.

  When she had returned to her senses, she reached up, forcing her mouth against his, her tongue teasing between his lips even as her hands completed the job they’d started below, freeing his hard prick.
Breaking away from him, she descended to her knees, grabbing his member and eyeing it hungrily. After only a few strokes, it was in her warm, waiting mouth. Donnegan ran his hands through her red hair, removing the pin that held her scarlet tresses up and watching them cascade around his manhood as she swallowed him. Releasing his cock, she licked along the sides with small, darting strokes of the tongue before returning just the head to her lips, kissing it again and again. Now taking the head into her mouth, she held it there as she reached behind and loosened her corset stays enough to free her pale breasts before taking him all the way into her mouth again.

  Donnegan pulled her to her feet before she could finish him with her mouth. Running a hand along her cheek, he kissed her before turning her around to face the foot of the bed. Sensing what he wanted, she grabbed the bed frame, spreading her legs for him while behind him, he removed his shirt. Reaching for her waist with one hand, the other began to tease her exposed nipple, causing it to harden. His cock bobbed between her legs as he pressed up against her, teasing her breasts. Finally, she could take no more, grabbing his manhood and guiding him into her.

  There was a long, lingering moment, Donnegan relishing the long forgotten feeling of a woman’s heat before he drew back and thrust again. His movements were deliberately slow, careful but powerful, each thrust bringing him fully into her, the bed frame squeaking in time with their movements, Cait gasping each time Donnegan entered her. The hand Donnegan had kept on her waist slid forward, his fingers finding her clit and she screamed, flooding him with her juices and driving herself back against him even harder as she shuddered in orgasm.