"Connie Willis - One-Eyed Jack" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

One-Eyed Jack
By Connie Wilkins, illustration by Noel Bebee

6 August 2001


He might have been reduced to one eye, one arm, and scarcely more than one
good leg, but Lightning Jack lacked nothing in between. Nothing at all. Half a
man? Miss Lily's first impression had been wildly off target. Two or three men put
together (and of course you never could put the good bits together) couldn't
equal his endowment.


No one judged better in these matters than Miss Lily, better known as The
Schoolmarm.


Not that she often took gentlemen into her own bed these days. She might, for
a substantial fee, apply her other, very specialized skills where they would do the
most good; but any customer with the fortitude to seek a bedmate after Miss
Lily had latticed his hairy butt with her lash could make do with one of her girls.


Jack, though, was an investment. An unwise one, she had feared, watching him
hobble from the train; but an investment nonetheless. And rumor insisted that
he still possessed that legendary aim and speed, and a gun with new notches
earned only weeks ago.


More certain was the cold fire of revenge consuming him. Miss Lily understood
the power of that fire. And, since his enemy was her enemy, she had welcomed
his written offer and guaranteed his personal safety up until the shoot-out, as
well as a handsome fee upon completion, payable to an address in San Francisco
in the event that he was unable to collect it himself.
Jack's personal safety was best guaranteed in The Schoolmarm's well-guarded
establishment. That it required sharing her own opulent rose-and-ivory
bedchamber was less self-evident, but Miss Lily had acquiesced. Something in his
blend of frailty and rage recalled men she had nursed in the war, long ago, before
she had come west to teach and learned a lesson or two herself, the foremost
being that she might as well make men pay for what they were determined to
get anyway, the second that there was no limit to what some men would pay
for.


Miss Lily would have drawn the line at taking her whip to Jack's already-ravaged
body, but she was expert at reading men and doubted that he wanted anything
more than the softest bed in the Territories and maybe a little womanly comfort.
It came as no surprise that before dawn he was sobbing into her ample breasts.
The surprise was that those breasts were heaving as though the Grand Tetons
had been tossed on the waves of an earthquake. It seemed forever until she