“I could entertain myself and in the evenings we could—”
“You are not going anywhere but home,” Hank said. He dropped his hands to his sides and turned away.
Paula was up off the bed in a flash. She grabbed his arm and anxiously stepped in front of him. “Very well. If you must go, you must, but I’ll see to it that you won’t forget me while you’re away.” She spread hands on the steely muscles of his chest, then smiled devilishly as she rubbed warming circles around the flat brown nipples. At the same time she pressed her pelvis against his and began slowly gyrating her hips. “You want to make your train? Then you’d better take what I’m offering because I’m not letting you leave until you carry me back to the bed and make love to me.”
Half annoyed, half aroused, Hank lifted a hand, slid long fingers into her lustrous dark hair, clasped a generous handful, tightened his grip and urged her head back. He was both irritated and intrigued as he lowered his head until his lips were an inch from hers.
He said, “I’m not carrying you back to bed, Miss Gentry. You want me, you’ll take me standing right here or not at all.”
“Oh, Hank,” she sighed, breathlessly, “yes, yes, kiss me, darling.”
“No time for kisses,” he said, “ten minutes is all we have.”
Paula shrieked with excitement when he put his hands around the backs of her thighs and easily lifted her from the floor. He locked long arms around her thighs and raised her higher. Her bare toes dug into his knees. She giggled with delight and braced her hands on his shoulders. With her pelvis now pressed against his hair-covered chest, she already appeared dizzy with desire.
She anxiously clasped his handsome head in her hands, pushed it back, looked into his sky-blue eyes, and began to wiggle and hunch her back, bending and sliding lower so that her breasts were at his face. She held her breath as she eagerly brushed her heavy left breast against his lips.
“Kiss it, Hank,” she begged. “Please. Lick it a little and then—”
She ahhhed with pleasure when his mouth captured the nipple and he raked his teeth over it, then sucked greedily.
On fire, so aroused she could hardly keep from crying out, Paula Gentry learned that making love while standing in the middle of a room with the summer sunlight spilling in and the sounds of people talking and laughing on the street below was pleasurable beyond belief.
She wasn’t sure if she was a contortionist or if he was or if they both were; all she knew was that this incredibly sexual man managed to get her legs wrapped around his waist and a hand between their pressing bodies to coax and tease her burning flesh until she was dripping wet while his heated mouth continued to dazzle her by feasting hungrily on her breasts.
Doubting he could penetrate her without his mouth releasing her aching nipple, she gave a shout of joy when, as if he’d read her mind, he did just that.
While he expertly lowered her down onto the surging tip of his hard, thrusting flesh, he bowed his back so that his lips continued to cling to her stiffened nipple, giving her what she desired.
It was rapture.
His pulsing erection was only just barely inside her, making her yearn for more, making her look eagerly forward to the incredible instant when he would force her down onto it and fill her completely. It was a splendid kind of torturous teasing, a preview of the pleasure to come. For a thrilling moment they stayed just like that until finally, unable to wait one more second, Paula at last urged his head up, put her lips to his ear and whispered, “You won’t ever forget this moment, Hank, nor will I.” And she slithered down onto him, until she was fully impaled upon him.
Hank moved his bare feet wider apart to brace himself, then stood there in the bright Nevada sunlight, hands filled with the twin cheeks of her bottom, controlling her, while he rhythmically thrust into her. Paula gave as good as she got, opening fully to him, sucking him in, squeezing him tightly, gripping his ribs with her knees.
Locked in lust as they were, they began to reel around the spacious room. She moaning, he groaning, they did a dance of desire that found them first tangled in the heavy drapery blowing in the open windows while deep masculine laughter rose from the street below. Seconds later they were half leaning against a heavy drum table. Then they found themselves balanced against the high back of an easy chair. Finally, they landed roughly up against the wall, Paula’s bare backside pressed into the lush flocked wallpaper, Hank hammering her hard.
Ten minutes after he’d first lifted her from the floor, both exploded in wrenching orgasm.
Five
At straight-up noon the handsome, thirty-two-year-old Hank Cassidy stepped onto his private rail car—alone—for the journey across the country. The muscular, rough-around-the-edges, hardworking Westerner who had made tens of millions in the mines was better known as Nevada’s young Silver King.
Hank looked the part of royalty on this sunny summer day. With his smoothly shaven face bronzed by the Nevada sun and wind and glowing with good health, his midnight hair slightly damp from his bath, Hank was impeccably dressed in buff-colored custom-tailored trousers and sky-blue linen shirt. He had the self-assured manner and sleek, self-satisfied appearance of a man who had been born to the purple.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Hank Cassidy came from modest means. He never knew his mother. She died giving birth to him. When he was seventeen his quiet, frugal father, a lifelong miner who rarely talked or smiled, was killed in an explosion deep underground. To Hank’s surprise, his undemonstrative father had managed to save a small sum of money and left it to his only son.
Hank had invested every cent of his meager inheritance in what everyone told him was a worthless hole in the mountain. He hadn’t listened. He’d bought the long-boarded-up quarry from an old miner who was a pallbearer at his father’s funeral.
Hank christened his mine the Black Cat and immediately went to work. He spent years laboring deep in the darkness, searching for buried veins, patiently coaxing the precious metal out of stubborn solid rock. The mine hardly yielded enough silver to pay his hands.
Hank didn’t give up.
Four long years after his first day in the Black Cat, Hank and his employees hit the mother lode. Overnight, young Hank Cassidy was a millionaire. He bought more mines. He made more millions. He continued to work alongside his men, sweating and straining and toiling and, as he worked, filling the cavern with the sound of his rich laughter. He encouraged the miners to joke around and make play out of work as much as possible.
His men loved him.
Hank paid his workers far above the average wage and supported their widows when things went wrong below.
Soon every miner within hundreds of miles had heard of Hank Cassidy and all wanted to work for the young, likable Silver King.
Hank’s mining empire grew and finally he came up out of the darkness into the daylight to enjoy his riches. He had a huge three-story mansion built on the bluffs above Virginia City. He purchased, sight unseen and fully staffed, a stately home on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. He ordered a private rail car from the Pullman company. He commissioned the building of a yacht to be harbored in San Francisco with a full crew at the ready for whenever he felt like a cruise.
A generous man, he also lavished expensive gifts on his trusted employees. Especially on their delighted wives. Hank liked to say that they were the only wives to whom he would be giving presents. He had no plans to ever have one of his own.
No one doubted he meant it. Everyone who knew the handsome, footloose, cavalier Silver King agreed that marriage was not in Cassidy’s cards, to the disappointment of many a young