Smugglers' Gold Read Free

else. “You’re paid up for the night.”
    â€œGood thing I planned ahead.”
    â€œI like a man who knows his mind,” she said. Her fingers teased him underneath the sheet that pooled around his waist.
    Ryder was drunk, no doubt about it, though the whiskey hadn’t managed to erase the memory of his dismissal. Dolly, as she called herself, had done a better job distracting him, but in between their bouts of tussling—two, so far, and he was hoping for a third if he could manage it somehow—the anger still came back at him, setting his teeth on edge. The offer of another law enforcement job did nothing to defuse his sense of being sacrificed to please a copperhead whose preference, if truth be told, would have been Grant surrendering to Lee, and not the other way around.
    Instead of locking up the traitors, mealy-mouthed appeasers catered to them, offering forgiveness when they should have felt an iron boot on their necks. Ryder had lost a childhood friend to Rebel guns at Chickamauga, and another in a firestorm at the Battle of the Wilderness. For what? So that the politicians who had voted for secession could be welcomed back to Congress as if not a drop of blood had spilled over the past four years?
    And what about the slave states that had sided with the Union out of cowardice, as Ryder saw it? They had harbored spies and saboteurs and cutthroats posing as “irregulars” to cast their crimes as acts of war. He thought of Lawrence, Kansas, sacked and burned by Quantrill’s butchers, well over a hundred innocent civilians slaughtered in the ruins. Why forgive, much less forget?
    â€œI think we’re getting somewhere,” Dolly murmured, and he felt that she was right. Her nimble fingers brought him back to here and now, from battlegrounds he’d never personally seen.
    Ryder had planned to join the Union Army after Shiloh, back in April ’62, but Marshal Lamon had reminded all his deputies that they were vital to the war effort at home, hunting the enemies who lurked in Washington and everywhere across the country, from Manhattan with its draft riots to Arizona Territory, where Confederates vied with Apaches under war chief Mangas Coloradas to harass and murder loyal settlers. Ryder had agreed to stay in harness with the U.S. Marshals Service, maybe saved his life that way, but now he had nothing to show for it beyond a sense of being crumpled up and thrown away.
    â€œThat’s it,” purred Dolly, as she climbed on top of him. “I’ll just . . . okay, now . . . there it is.”
    She settled on him, squirmed a little, getting comfy. Ryder raised his hips to meet her, and she placed a hand flat on his lower stomach to restrain him.
    â€œNo, you don’t! Let me take care of you.”
    Whore talk, he realized, but what else did he ever get in Washington? At least with Dolly, there was a reward for being used. And at the moment, Ryder didn’t mind a bit. In fact . . .
    She clenched him somehow, rose a little, made him catch his breath. “I don’t know whether I can wait,” he said.
    Dolly relaxed, quit moving. Asked him out of nowhere, “How’d you get a name like Gideon?”
    â€œSome kind of angel,” Ryder said, thankful for the distraction. “Never thought it fit, myself.”
    â€œI woulda guessed a devil,” Dolly said, starting to roll her hips again. “Oh, yeah. Like that,” she purred. “Just stay right there. Don’t move a muscle till I tell you.”
    Ryder bit his lip, resisting the impulse to help her out. She obviously knew what she was doing, had already proved as much to his complete, exhausted satisfaction, and he didn’t plan to spoil the moment. To distract himself a little, Ryder turned his head to glimpse his pocket watch, propped open on the nightstand to his left. He saw that it was ten thirteen, then Dolly gripped his chin with one hand,