Moonshine Massacre

Chapter 18

“Whoa!” Matt exclaimed in surprise. “Hold on there!”

Frankie had the top three buttons undone already, and as the shirt began to fall open, the cleft between her breasts became visible. She paused in what she was doing, though, and asked, “You want me to stop? Why?”

“Well…blast it…” Matt searched for words. “I told you last night you don’t have to pay me back for helping you and your family. You sure don’t have to do it this way.”

Frankie’s eyes narrowed. “Let me ask you, Bodine…Do I strike you as the sort of person who does anything she doesn’t want to do?”

“Well…no,” Matt admitted.

“And right now, I want to go skinny-dipping. This is as close to a swimming hole as we’ve got around here.”

With that, she turned around so that she faced the creek instead of Matt and finished stripping off her shirt. He couldn’t help but admire the smooth, clean lines of her bare back as she tossed the shirt onto a bush. She held onto a tree trunk with one hand and used the other to pull her boots and socks off. Then her hands went to the buttons of her jeans.

She paused and looked back over her shoulder. “You can come in if you want. It’s up to you.”

Then she unfastened the jeans and pushed them down over the graceful curve of her hips. Matt had to swallow hard as he watched her drape the jeans over the same bush as her shirt. Then she waded out into the creek.

“Aw, the hell with it!” Matt muttered as he reached for the buttons of his own shirt.

Frankie had told the truth. She didn’t do anything she didn’t want to do, and Matt knew it. Sometimes, a fella could beat his head against his own best instincts all day, he thought, when what he ought to do was just open his eyes and see things for what they were.

A couple of minutes later, his own duds were draped over a bush and he was wading out into the creek, too. Frankie had sunk up to her neck and was stroking around, swimming as best she could in the relatively shallow water. The creek was cool but not actually cold, Matt discovered as the water crept up his thighs.

Frankie rolled over in the water and looked up at him, a grin stealing across her face. “See, Bodine, you didn’t have anything to be ashamed of,” she said.

“I never said I was ashamed. I was just brought up not to take advantage of a lady.”

“Well, if one of those highfalutin’ critters happens to come along, I’m sure her virtue will be right safe with you.” Frankie laughed and then ducked all the way under the water.

A second later, Matt felt a strong little hand grab one of his ankles. He tried to set himself, but he was too late. Frankie pulled hard on his leg, making his foot slip on the muddy bottom of the creek. With a startled yell, Matt went over backward, landing in the creek with a huge splash.

He came up a moment later, sputtering and trying to shake the water and wet hair out of his eyes. He heard Frankie laughing, and when he could see again, he glared at her as she hunkered about ten feet away with the water up to her chin.

“You’re all wet, Bodine.”

“So are you.”

“Yeah, but it was my idea.” She paused. “How many times have you been skinny-dipping with a girl?”

“None when the girl was as troublesome as you.”

She laughed again and splashed water at him. “If that’s the way you feel about me, I reckon I’ll just have to live up to it.”

“Dang it!” Matt tried to duck the water, but got another faceful of creek. He lunged at her, but she twisted away with a lithe grace that kept her just out of his reach.

He was just judging her speed, though, and when he made a second try to grab her, this time he moved faster. The lightning-quick reflexes that made him respected across the West as a gun-handler allowed him to anticipate her reaction, and as she leaped, he was there first, closing a hand around her arm. Frankie cried out in surprise.

They both fell, sending up another big splash, and when they came out of the water this time, they were in each other’s arms, mouths pressed together in an urgent kiss.

After a moment, Matt took his lips away from Frankie’s and said in a husky voice, “I’ll tell you one more time…you don’t have to do this.”

“And I’ll tell you one more time, Bodine…the hell I don’t!”

After that, neither of them wasted time or energy talking for a while.

Later, they stretched out on the bank in the sun, which had risen high enough now that its rays were getting pretty warm. The light felt good on Matt’s skin.

After lying beside him for a while, Frankie turned and propped herself up on an elbow so she could look at him. “How long do you think it’ll be before Cimarron Kane makes another move against us?” she asked.

Matt shook his head. “I reckon you’d know that better than I would. I never even heard of the hombre until yesterday.”

“I don’t think he’ll wait too long,” Frankie answered her own question. “Once he makes up his mind, he doesn’t waste any time going after what he wants, and what he’s got his heart set on now is taking over the liquor business around here.”

“Is there really that much money in it?”

Frankie’s forehead creased in a frown. “Are you joshing me, Bodine? If those special marshals put everybody else out of business, and if Kane can run us out or kill us, then anybody in this whole end of the state who wants a drink of whiskey will have to pay his price. He can charge Ike Loomis through the nose for the stuff, and Ike will have to pay. Same thing is true of anybody else who wants to sell it, and Kane can always cut out the middleman and peddle it directly to folks, too. If it takes a few years for the legislature to wise up and realize what a foolish thing they’ve done, Kane can make a small fortune in that time.”

“But if we can stop him, you and your family will make that small fortune,” Matt mused.

“That’s right.”

“You’d be able to pay that visit to San Francisco and then go back to the Smoky Mountains as a rich woman, like you wanted.”

Frankie smiled. “Yeah.”

“So I reckon it’s worth it to you to get Kane out of the way, whatever it takes.”

“Sure, I—” Frankie stopped short and frowned at him again. “What do you mean by that, Bodine? You still think that what we did a while ago was a…a bribe?”

Matt sat up. “I’d like to think it wasn’t, but—”

Frankie came upright suddenly, and her open hand flashed toward Matt’s face. She was a strong young woman, and she was mad. It would have been a vicious slap if it had landed.

But Matt’s hand moved too fast for the eye to follow and caught her wrist, freezing the blow in midair. Frankie strained against his grip but couldn’t budge it.

She bared her teeth and said in a quiet, furious voice, “You son of a bitch. I never saw a more suspicious bastard in my life.”

“Women have tricked me before. I don’t intend to let it happen again.”

“That’s not all that’s never gonna happen again. Let go of me!”

Matt released her wrist. She didn’t try to slap him again. Instead, she turned her back to him, scrambled to her feet, and started toward the bush where she had left her clothes earlier.

Matt stood up, too. “Listen, Frankie, I had to be sure—”

“Well, now you are, or at least you damned well should be,” she said without turning around to look at him as she jerked her denim trousers on.

“Come on, there’s a lot of money involved here. You admitted that yourself. You might have thought that it was worth it to do whatever you had to in order to get me on your side.”

“Yeah, well, I was a fool,” she said bitterly. “I thought just asking you for your help would be enough. I had you pegged as the sort of hombre who appreciates it when folks are honest with him.”

“I do,” Matt insisted. “And I believe you—”

She shoved her arms through the sleeves of her shirt. “You didn’t believe me all the other times I told you, though. There was still some doubt in your mind, even when we…even when we were…Oh! The hell with it!”

Leaving the shirt unbuttoned, she started toward her horse. “Hey, wait a minute!” Matt said as he reached for his long underwear. “If you ride back to the cabin lookin’ like that, your pa’s liable to take a shotgun after me!”

“And you’d damned well deserve it, wouldn’t you?”

“I wasn’t the only one out there in that creek, you know.” Matt was getting mad now, too. She couldn’t blame him for having a few doubts about the situation when there was so much at stake.

Evidently she did, though. She stopped long enough to force her shaking fingers to fasten the buttons on her shirt. Then she stomped into her boots, grabbed the reins, and started to mount up. By that time, Matt has his own jeans and boots on. He pulled the bib-front shirt over his head, which had just emerged from the faded blue garment’s neck opening when he heard the sudden crackle of gunfire in the distance.

Frankie must have heard it, too. Her head jerked up as she settled down in the saddle. Her eyes widened in fear.

“That sounds like it’s coming from the cabin!”

Matt agreed with her, and he ripped out a bitter curse at his own stupidity. He had agreed to help the Harlows, and then, knowing that Cimarron Kane and his bunch of bloodthirsty kinfolks might attack at any time, he had gone off to play a little slap-and-tickle with Frankie. No matter how pleasant that had been, he should have known better.

His Winchester was still in the saddle boot on the gray. He grabbed his shell belts and the attached holsters and strapped them on, quickly thonging down each Colt. As Matt did that, Frankie suddenly wheeled her horse around.

“Wait!” Matt told her. “Don’t go charging off—”

Too late. That was exactly what Frankie was doing. She jabbed her heels into her horse’s flanks and sent the animal racing up the hill from the creek. All Matt could do now was grab his hat off the saddle horn, bound onto the stallion’s back, and gallop after her.

That and pray that she wouldn’t ride right into a hailstorm of leaden death.