Page 71 of Coyote

I closed my lips over the spot and sucked hard. He moaned and shook, and when his hand started for his cock again I caught his wrist and put it back on my chest.

"Not with your hand," I said against his ear. "You get it off me or you wait."

I started moving him faster, fucking him harder than I'd meant to when we got started, and the right side of my ribs sent up a bright wire of pain that stopped my breath halfway in. I kept going anyway.

Coyote stiffened and let out a long, low groan, and then he came with nothing on him at all, striping my chest and my belly, his thighs locked and shaking against my hips. He bent forward and bit into the meat of my shoulder, hard enough to bruise, and I cupped the back of his skull and held him.

That did it. I came inside him with my hand cradling his skull, holding him flush down on my cock through every pulse, and he stayed put and took all of it.

After, I held him on the blankets until our breathing evened out. He'd gone loose in a way I'd never seen before, every bit of the readiness out of his back.

I wet a rag from the canteen, cleaned him up, cleaned myself, and kissed him once at the corner of his lips before I pulled Sierra's kit over by the strap to clean out the bite he'd left behind. The whole time he lay with his chin on my chest, unrepentant, checking my work the way he'd made me let him check it earlier.

He settled along my good side, sighed once against my ribs, and was asleep before I'd pulled the blanket up.

I stayed awake a long while in the dark, listening to his breathing turn long and deep. Blue morning light seeped in through the patched wall, enough to inventory what I'd left on him: a bruise coming up over his Adam's apple, a second under his jaw, four finger marks on his hip. He'd wear all of it out to the fence line in a couple of hours, and he'd want every man on this ranch to see it.

I was watching dawn come when the radio on the charging shelf crackled, spat, and found a voice.

"Big John," Linc said, breathing hard. "You awake? Over."

Coyote's eyes were open before the second word.

I reached for the radio and keyed it. "Go ahead."

"I'm at the east fence past the tank. I need you out here. Now."

"What's wrong?" I reached for Sierra's kit. Coyote reached for his knife.

Linc cursed. "Somebody dumped a body inside the fence."

I had my boots on before Linc released his radio key.

John was already answering him, so I reached past him for my knife and clipped it to my belt one-handed while the other hand dragged my shirt down over the marks his mouth had left on my throat. Later, when the ground had told me what it knew, every man here would see them. Not while I was reading dirt. Something had crossed into my territory while I lay soft against a big man's side with my ear full of his heartbeat, and I couldn't let that stand. I lifted Nimue out of the rag crate, and she slithered up my arm and settled her coils at my collar, cool through the cotton.

"We're coming," John told the radio. "Don't touch him."

"Wasn't going to." Linc's breathing still ran hard under his words. "I haven't been off my horse."

"Hold where you are," I said toward the radio. "Keep the horse standing still. The dirt around him is mine until I've walked it."

The yard lay blue and cold under a sky just graying at its east edge, and my breath showed all the way to the barn. I saddled my mare, who pinned her ears at the hour and thought better of it when I looked at her, and then I hauled John's saddle up onto the gelding myself while John stood at the horse's head with his jaw set about being helped. He mounted off the corral rail instead of the stirrup, guarding his right side the whole way up, and I tracked every inch of the climb, hands loose and ready in case he needed me.

We rode east at a walk, while the light behind the fence line turned a dirty gray. My thighs held a deep, used ache from the night, and an hour ago that ache had been the best thing I knew. John had given me the word in the dark, and I hated Zaroff even more for ruining that.

Linc sat on his horse fifty yards up from the stock tank with his rifle across his back and his flashlight pointed at the dirt, and the third keeper on his bridle still hung loose where I'd told him twice to fix it.

Fenix was with him, which was unusual. Fenix didn't often come out of his space in the cellar unless there were bodies to handle, and he couldn't have known about the body ahead of time. Could he? With Fenix, it was always hard to tell. Nobody had told him about this one. His dead had, probably. They tell him things before they tell the rest of us.

I stepped down well short of them and left the mare standing. "Walk where I walk," I told John, "and only when I tell you."

Then I made my circle alone, eyes down.

Two sets of boot prints led in from the fence, where somebody had cut the wire. The prints ran deep and even on the way in, side by side, stride matched, the two of them sharing the load the whole distance, and they ran shallower on the way out, single file, without one hurried step anywhere in them. They had dragged nothing and hidden nothing. Two men had carried a dead man four hundred feet onto Pae Saco land, laid him down, and strolled out. I followed the out-trail to the service road and found where something heavy had backed in off the gravel with dual tires, and pulled away without spinning a wheel.

I returned along my own prints and waved John in.

The man lay across the patrol track, face up, arms at his sides, laid out straight. He was nobody I knew. He looked thirty-some, lean and hard-used, his dark hair cropped close. Whoever had put him down had squared him to the track our riders crossed every night, so the first horse through would have to stop for him.