The Gunslinger's Man Read online

  “And Blackjack?” he asked instead, surrounding his bent knees with his arms. “You trust him?”

  “With my life,” Halloran answered, traces of his usual caustic tone in the retort.

  Asher sucked his cheeks to conceal a smile. “And me?”

  At that, Halloran swiveled his head around with a glower. “You ain’t one of ’em.”

  It was a deflection, and not a particularly good one, but rather than return to his watch, Halloran dropped to the edge of the bed—a win, by some standards. Enough of one that Asher was willing to let the question go.

  “Is it true what they say in the papers?” he asked instead, keeping his voice soft. “You robbed a coach full of Pinkertons with just two men?”

  “I don’t read the papers.”

  Don’t or can’t? Suspicion had gnawed at Asher before, but he’d dismissed it as Nyle’s harmless vitriol or yet another example of Halloran’s indifference. He wasn’t so sure anymore and the uncertainty went a long way toward planting the seeds of pity. “All the same,” he insisted. “Is it true?”

  Halloran’s sigh teemed with vexation. “They were soldiers.”

  “Never mind that. Who were the two men?”

  Inexplicably, Halloran’s expression darkened. “Blackjack was one. Other one’s gone.”

  “Ah.” Asher didn’t need it spelled out for him. Avoiding his name was easier than avoiding all mention of the vampire Nyle had been.

  They traded the cigarette once more. Asher welcomed the excuse to fall silent while he gathered his thoughts. The more he tried, the harder it was to steer his mind away from the duel. He had avoided the spot where Nyle last stood since it happened, as if the rain wouldn’t have washed away all evidence of his passing within the hour. As if his ghost might still be lingering there. Inside the ranch, another card game had resumed tonight—Charlie taking Nyle’s seat as though nothing were amiss.

  “Were there others, before me?” Asher wondered aloud.

  Halloran hitched his eyebrows. “Men?”

  “Men, women…bloodbags you kept around for a while, I guess.”

  “Some.”

  Asher wasn’t sure how he’d expected to feel about having his suspicions confirmed, but it wasn’t with the sense of satisfaction that settled over him when Halloran spoke. “So I’m nothing special.” What he felt wasn’t infatuation but mere biology. He wasn’t betraying his principles at all by sleeping with the enemy. Like a drunkard cleaving to the bottle, he simply couldn’t avoid it.

  “You’re not.”

  “But you won’t share me with the others.”

  It wasn’t much of a question, which was probably why Halloran didn’t offer much of a response. Snagging the cigarette from Asher’s limp hand before ash could stain the covers was a poor stand-in for elucidation.

  Halloran crushed the cigarette into the silver tray. “If you can’t sleep with me in here, then I reckon I’ll go down—”

  “No, don’t.” Asher seized his arm. Metal scales reflected what little moonlight penetrated through the windows.

  Halloran looked down at the hand. So did Asher. It didn’t feel like his own.

  “Don’t,” Asher said again, softer, and tugged Halloran toward him.

  He still ached from their earlier tryst, but Halloran’s touch was a hardship he could bear. His body craved it with an intensity that frightened Asher. As their lips met in a rough kiss, he tied a ribbon around his reservations and told himself he had no choice.

  Nothing was fixed by letting Halloran pry the covers away and expose him to the crisp evening air. Nothing was forgiven.

  Their earlier urgency thrummed in every skim of Halloran’s hands over his bare flesh, but his infuriating tenderness held it at back. Asher arched against Halloran’s cool form, his nipples hardening beneath the pinch of callused fingertips, his cock firming steadily—to no avail. Halloran held him down and kissed him with the patience of a saint.

  A frustrated noise tore out of Asher, his skin tight with need.

  “Can’t get enough, can you?” Halloran whispered as he trailed kisses along his collarbones. If he minded the jarring fusion of metal and bone, he didn’t let on. He seemed to treat one as he did the other, his hands and mouth reclaiming territory only recently mapped out.

  Asher moaned by way of answer and splayed his legs wider. He ached to be filled. He ached full stop, which should have embarrassed him far more than it did. With those fingers that still had them, he scraped short nails down Halloran’s spine, tightening his grip when he reached Halloran’s hips. The swell of his arousal made itself felt through his pants. Asher’s hole clenched as he recalled it spearing inside him again and again. Halloran’s self-control hadn’t faltered until the end and Asher could still feel the heat of his release as it pulsed into his body in feverish bursts. He was slick with it and the oil they’d used to spare him further pain.

  “What are you thinking?” Halloran growled against his sternum.

  “Is that why you wanted me to sleep?” Asher panted, lightheaded with want. “So you could get into my head?”

  A sly look slithered into Halloran’s eyes. “Why not? I already have the rest of you.” As if to prove it, he shuffled down the bed and, in one smooth motion, engulfed Asher’s cock with his mouth.

  Pleasure slammed into Asher, hollowing his chest. His back arched, every cell vibrating with the hum of Halloran’s throat around him. Damn Halloran for knowing exactly what Asher needed. Damn him for turning Asher into a zealot to his torment.

  The twisted sheets rumpled in Asher’s fists, his efforts to brace against shoving deeper into Halloran’s beautiful, wicked mouth thwarted at every turn. It probably wouldn’t hurt Halloran if he did, but this last frayed shred of self-control was precious. Asher didn’t have much left to give.

  Breath stuttered out of him on a choppy whine, the sound as inelegant as the jerk of his hips once Halloran eased a thick finger inside him. He would be sore tomorrow. He’d remember what he had allowed Halloran to do and why. And once pleasure became a distant recollection, only the guilt would remain, accusatory and deserved.

  Twisting fingers in his hair, Asher pressed his head back into the pillows and let bliss obliterate all other thought.

  It didn’t take long. Halloran was well versed in exploiting Asher’s weaknesses. He knew how to used his body against him with merciless skill. Hollowing his cheeks, he sucked him deep and flicked his finger against that part deep inside Asher, the one that made his whole body seize with a flash of pleasure-pain.

  Asher might have cried out. He wasn’t certain. He was aware of his limbs seizing, fingers gripping Halloran’s, twisting in his own hair until it hurt. He returned to himself just as Halloran pulled off, tugging him through the last of his climax with lazy strokes.

  The whites of his eyes gleamed in the low evening light. “Better?”

  “Don’t…don’t pretend that was for me,” Asher forced out. His mouth was as dry as the arid plains that surrounded Sargasso, tendrils of hedonistic delight still juddering up and down his spine.

  He registered Halloran’s smirk through a half-lidded squint.

  “Wasn’t it?”

  You’re a vampire. You don’t do shit for other people. Unless those people bore the same curse.

  And yet here Halloran was, staring down at him with an undecipherable expression, his mouth wet.

  Asher’s insides squirmed, the way they so often did now when he was forced to recognize how little he understood about what went on in Halloran’s mind. He’d come to depend on a man so unlike himself—on a vampire, of all things—and it wasn’t as simple as compromising to stay alive.

  Not anymore.

  Too far gone to form a coherent answer, Asher grimaced and reached down to arrest Halloran’s lazy strokes. He’d never been particularly adept at marking that fine line between pleasure and pain with any of his past lovers—most of whom hadn’t been the talkative kind anyway—but with Halloran, it seemed vita
l. Halloran already knew too much about what he enjoyed and what he could endure.

  The touch of his metal fingers had the desired effect. Halloran eased his fingers free with uncanny solicitude. His gaze tracked slowly up Asher’s body—with good reason. From the gangrenous knee that had to be replaced with a cluster of pistons and gears locked perfectly into the bone, to ribs corroded by poison, Asher was not the man he’d been three months ago.

  The first night he remembered spending in this house, his feebleness had made it easy for Halloran to lock the cage around him. The second had been a dreadful stretch of apprehension.

  Someone had once told Asher that fear lived in the gut. The memory of it loitered there, too, a stubborn beast uselessly chasing its own tail. Asher’s throat worked against so many pointless questions that the one which finally surfaced was little better.

  “Nothing special, right?”

  Halloran met his eyes. He was not as opaque as he’d once been. What he saw was obvious—a collection of misaligned parts meeting garishly on a withered calcium frame, a troublesome human getting in his way.

  A wedge steadily cleaving through the ranks, turning his friends into enemies.

  With vampire swiftness, Halloran clasped Asher’s wrists in his and turned him face down onto the bed. The bedsprings squeaked belatedly, answering the shift of his body upon Asher’s.

  “Oh—”

  Surprise was snuffed out by a kiss that hurt his neck but aroused just as quickly with the press of a hard cock between the soft crescents of Asher’s cheeks. He hadn’t seen Halloran unbutton his fly, hadn’t noticed he was even hard.

  “I thought,” Asher gasped, turning his head. His lungs ached. “I thought you weren’t…”

  Rather than answer, Halloran slid one of Asher’s wrists beneath the other and pressed down to pin them. Metal scraped skin. Asher’s fingers twitched of their own accord, both the flesh and the hybrid ones. He clenched them tightly when he felt Halloran’s length press against his hole.

  A sharp intake of breath was all the time he had to prepare for its intrusion. Halloran canted his hips forward. He offered no warning, no soothing endearments. His groan reverberated through the inner labyrinth of Asher’s ear, sending a pulse of want deep into his belly.

  This, at least, he had no trouble deciphering. This, he understood.

  He ought to have been too tired to welcome it—and he was—but with Halloran looming over him, inside him, lethargy dissipated. Hunger boiled deep in his chest. Shame warmed his cheeks. He wanted to close his eyes as Halloran plowed inside him but found it impossible. He was fettered in more ways than one. His insides seized at the thought.

  Halloran’s rhythm picked up, sharp, staccato bursts of movement leaving Asher breathless. He was too spent to harden again so soon, but that didn’t stop his body from giving a valiant effort. The precise, skillful nudge of a cock inside him only narrowed the gap between what ought to have been possible and what Asher felt.

  Mortification fell by the wayside. His moans picked up in volume, raw, broken noises flooding the room with sound. The groaning mattress accompanied them.

  Halloran hooked an arm under his knee and spread him wider. What little Asher could see of his expression was no less intent for the moonlight that reflected off spliced metal scales. Halloran knew what Asher was. If he minded, he didn’t mind it enough to keep from burying himself deep and quaking as release pulsed through him.

  Asher bucked, cock jerking between his belly and the bed in a not-quite-climax. The sound he made when he felt the clasp of fingers around his wrists give way would have embarrassed him in daylight.

  He didn’t know what to do with his hands once they’d been freed. He was equally at a loss as Halloran slid away, rolling onto his back beside him. For once, his first instinct didn’t seem to be to put his clothes to rights and leave.

  Small mercies.

  A strange and fragile peace hung in the air. Rather than disturb it, Asher let his eyes droop shut and laid a tentative hand on Halloran’s silent chest. At least the rain had stopped.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “You know,” Asher mused, heaving another hay bale into the barn, “you don’t have to hold me down every time.”

  Halloran slanted a sharp glance in his direction. Its ferocity was easily deciphered. They were out in the open, in broad daylight, and two of the other ranch hands were quick on Asher’s heels with more hay from the cart.

  Charlie and Blackjack had left the ranch in the early hours, when it didn’t seem as if an attack was forthcoming, and returned from Crossroads Grange with a cartful of feed for the cattle. The trip had been uneventful but Charlie was reaping its rewards over a drawn-out breakfast while Asher and the other humans were put to work.

  Asher didn’t mind. The crisp morning air was slightly damp, his breaths forming steam clouds with every exhale. Halloran had taken over the watch from Maud. His company was almost enjoyable when he wasn’t glaring quite so hard.

  “You’ll do what you want,” Asher acknowledged, vying for nonchalance, “but I’m just saying. You don’t have to.”

  “Why? ’Cause you’ll be a good whore for me?”

  Boots crunched over the straw-covered floor of the barn, announcing the other hands. Asher’s riposte tangled in his throat.

  “Get back to work,” Halloran advised, no less mordant for speaking quietly.

  Asher shammed a salute. “Yes, sir.” A lack of respect could cost him dearly, but fear of repercussions had recently been subsumed by other, far more pointless sentiments.

  It was necessary to remember that pointless was all they were.

  He stomped outside to join the others, another cog in the machine that Willowbranch was shaping into at Halloran’s behest. Another few months and, once winter was done with them, there’d be no point in rebuilding New Morning Farm. Sargasso could raise its animals here, slaughter them at Crossroads Grange and keep all the profits safe in the mayor’s house at the heart of town.

  Nothing had changed. The ache inside him had deceived Asher into thinking otherwise last night, but as morning bled into a frosty afternoon, he remembered his place.

  “Was thinking we ought to see about that pump out back,” Charlie said, once he’d joined Asher on the porch with a cup of coffee. “In case the other one freezes by midwinter.”

  “Think it will?”

  Charlie nodded. “Oh, yeah. Always had problems gettin’ our water at New Mornin’. And if there ain’t no snow…”

  There would be nothing to melt to water the cattle. Asher nodded. “All right, I’ll help—”

  “No, you won’t.” Halloran could move as soundlessly as a cat in the night. He never failed to make use of that talent when Asher least expected him to.

  Incensed, Asher glanced over his shoulder. The demon in the doorway was easy to pick out. A cigar’s smoldering end illuminated his eyes.

  “You wanna do it instead?”

  “No.”

  “Then I will.” Asshole.

  “You won’t,” Halloran reiterated, exuding calm, “’cause you won’t be here.” It might have sounded like a threat, if Halloran hadn’t wasted a liberal amount of those on Asher in the past.

  By now Asher knew the difference between idle talk and real peril. He knew this wasn’t the latter.

  “Why? Sick of me reeking of cow dung?”

  Gaping at his churlish answer, Charlie glanced away hastily when Halloran knotted a hand in Asher’s hair. The grip was firm enough to yank his head back. It stopped just short of making his scalp sting.

  If Asher hadn’t fought the tug, it would’ve hurt even less. “Ow! What’s the—”

  “Watch that mouth,” Halloran growled. “Or Malachi may just cut it out.”

  Malachi? It was enough to quell Asher’s resistance. He glared up at Halloran, bemusement morphing into the most absurd surge of hurt. “Done with me just like that, huh?”

  “Apparently you’ve got some skill with watch-f
ixin’. I ain’t got no need of that. Malachi, on the other hand…”

  Border towns did this a lot. The trade of workers and bloodbags ensured the gene pool never became stagnant. Without it, Asher’s parents might never have met. He wondered idly if that wouldn’t have been preferable.

  “For how long?”

  Halloran released him with would’ve been a light shove for a vampire. For Asher, it was violent enough to sting his pride. “That’s no concern of yours.”

  In other words, Halloran didn’t know. Malachi had requested Asher and, like a bottle of milk or a roll of clean laundry, Asher had to be delivered to his doorstep. What went on between him and Halloran in the night didn’t matter. Malachi called the shots. Halloran obeyed.

  “Ain’t that just swell, then? Fine, I’ll go wash up,” Asher forced out through clenched teeth. He only briefly met Halloran’s eyes on his way into the house. He didn’t know what he expected to find in that unnerving, dark gaze, but it wasn’t wariness.

  Then again, Halloran knew better than anyone else what Asher was capable of. Perhaps he was right to fear.

  * * * *

  A dull, buttery glow lengthened their shadows over the shop floor. The gas lamps strained to provide adequate illumination, but the night was thick and starless, and it took Asher a moment to adjust to the gloom.

  Peeking from beneath a black lace hem, limbs twitched and trembled on the desk. The trays of instruments and magnifying glasses had been pushed to one quarter of the table to make room for the body.

  A woman’s black shoe hanging precariously from slender toes clattered to the ground.

  “I found it like this,” Malachi explained. “The second in as many days.” He sounded put-off by the tally.

  Asher swallowed hard. “I see.” Halloran’s dismissal had made mention of fixing things for Malachi. He just hadn’t said that Asher was being summoned for the purpose of fixing people.

  The maid lying prone on Uncle Howard’s worktable twitched an eye in his direction. The other was gone, exposing the hollow metal socket behind it. Thin membranes stretched over the copper and brass, more organic than Asher would’ve expected.