A Hope for Rauri Ch. 02

That would take a little time, she'd said, because the new house was in Missouri.

Shauna didn't know anything about a new house or what this portended, but she gathered that they'd be moving in a while. In the meantime, her mother told her, she was going to be sent off to a school far away.

It pretty much happened that way too. She was gone and didn't come home, other than for a few holidays until she was almost grown.

------------------------------

After years, a few hundred anyway, Wes had been all over Europe and had gotten well and truly tired of it. By then, he'd managed to amass and save a fair bit of wealth and so he'd sailed to the New World to begin again there. There hadn't really been a plan to it in his mind, but his travels took him westward after a time.

He met and just lived as a hired hand out on a farm of poor croppers out in Missouri. They couldn't pay him much, but then he didn't need much where he was there and he liked the work and the way that they just accepted him and the fact that he could just about walk over the hill to be alone -- on those nights when it had been what he'd wanted. What he'd come back to the last time was something that stayed with him forever.

A crew of Unionist "irregulars" had stopped by. They were irregular in that they liked to spout the talk, but it was more of a cover for intimidation, robbery and murder in a fairly lawless place. For the most part, they operated without much in the way of official sanction.

It took them only a moment to decide that the small family on the isolated little farmstead just had to be confederate supporters to judge by the sound of their accents so they had to be run off their land, now that everyone was in the mood for it. The poor farmer had little in the way of any sentiment on either side of the issue. He just wanted to feed his family, so he refused to be run off the land that he and Emily had given everything for. He didn't really see it as a choice.

But the men had only smiled and drawn their guns.

So Wes had been away one day and come back to find them all dead, even the two children. He buried then as he could, but found that something seethed in his breast after he'd figured it out. By poor luck and happenstance, he'd blundered into a state in the union which was intent on eating out it's own heart -- and the civil war had barely begun. He felt for the slaves which were purported to be in the middle of this, but he had another pull in him and it tugged in in a different way and for a different reason.

A few months later, Wes joined a group of confederate raiders, seeing it as a chance to get even a little with the sort of system which had allowed the slaughter of 'his' family. He wasn't really interested in the slavery issue; he'd never known anyone who'd had any among the poor families where he'd lived. It was more to strike a blow at the kind of place who'd allow almost open banditry while proclaiming that they were a proper state as he'd been told when he came there..

They'd begun as Quantrill's raiders, but by then Quantrill himself had lost control of them and they were under the command of somebody else. But after a time, Wes also saw that what they was doing for the most part was not as it had been explained to him at the outset. What he was a very reluctant part of was just the same thing which had been done to that family -- it was just done to other unfortunate people. Once he'd figured that out, Wes stayed as far in the background as he could get, seeing that there wasn't all that much difference. It was little more than neighbor against neighbor in a lot of the borderlands between Missouri and Kansas.

He would ride and take part when they ran into units of the blue-coated soldiers who'd been sent to re-take Missouri, but the thing that he loved the most was when they ran into their opposite numbers. He hated the Jayhawkers with a passion that ran deep in him.

------------------------------

Shauna Kavanagh was a bright and precocious girl of sixteen when she was sent to her last school, the finishing school in Washington, though her family's sentiments were solidly secessionist. Through old family friends, she was recruited as a spy by the Confederate Secret Service -- the youngest to serve, gleaning information from her schoolmates about the doings of their families and cadet boyfriends.

It took her only minutes to meet and make a friend her own age there. The girl introduced Shauna to her mother when she brought her home over Thanksgiving. One thing led to another and the older woman quickly recruited Shauna and a little later, it became a weekly thing where Shauna made the trip to the friend's home and passed her knowledge, even getting riding lessons out of it.

Shauna was moderately successful, but shunned the socialite existence after the end of the war, having had enough of it already by then.

----------------------

The war ended, and rather than go back to a regular life -- since he knew nothing of it by now, Wes struck out on his own. Nobody knew him as one of those raiders, the ones being sought to stand trial for their war crimes. Wes saw it as a bit of a joke. He knew that if the South had won, it would have been the roving bands who called themselves Jawhawkers who would have been hunted instead.

Wesley Valence became an outlaw. He'd never ridden in to take the proffered olive branch because he doubted that it would lead him to anything other than his discomfort as they tried to kill him in various ways.

No sir, Wes had kept the guns that he'd been issued and ridden away alone the day that they'd been told that the war was over. He made out not too badly, never having to kill any man that he robbed and he thought of himself as fortunate in that regard. It was one thing to have to do the things that he found himself doing to stay fed. It was another thing to kill somebody over what he might have in his pocket at the time.

One day, he found himself a little close to his old home -- the nearest town anyway - and he was a little surprised to find that it was his birthday once he found out the date. He went to a whorehouse that evening, wanting to find a little company and release that didn't involve transferring the callouses from his hands onto his dick, as he'd smirked to himself.

The trouble with that ...

Well, the trouble with that was that he'd wanted to buy himself a birthday present.

Out of the women there, he found a girl that he liked very much at first sight. She'd come -- she'd said -- because there was nothing else that she could do other than starve after her family had come to much the same end as his croppers had. He hadn't learned that right away. That had come out afterward as she'd lied to him, not wanting him to know that she came from wealth and had fallen pretty far in her descent. He liked her smile and the way that she seemed a little shy as she told him that her name was Lila.

Wes had smirked then looking down and the girl had asked why.

"I don't know much about a lot of things," he said as he looked up with a little humor as he removed his hat to hang it up. "I was in the war and well, a lot of the boys in my group would just go hog wild whenever we were in a town with a place like this.

It might say somethin' about 'em all, I sure don't know, but at least half of 'em come back tellin' me that they were in love."

He began to work on the buttons of his shirt while she worked at getting his pants undone as he continued.

"Funny thing. From what they said, not everybody went to the same place, and not many had the same girl."

She stopped as he paused to look up and, thinking to get this started before he had too much time to think, she kissed him.

Wes liked it, but he wasn't the sort to let too many things get to him in a way that might interfere with his thoughts, since the ability had been one of the things which had kept him alive and drawing breath since he'd gone to England to fight in his father's army centuries before.

"But they all raved about Lila. Surely not every girl in all of those places has the same name.

And it surely couldn't have been only you that they were all so happy about."

He pushed her away gently, looking straight into her dark eyes, "So what's your real name, Sugar? I guess you could lie to me about that too, it sure don't matter much, but just give me a name that ain't a lot of cowshit coated in molasses like what you said about where you come from."

The girl looked at him, liking him for more than his money -- for the first time since she'd begun this profession.

"I'm sorry, Baby," she cooed as she pulled herself to him and licked the salty residue of his sweat from his throat, "My real name's Shauna."

--------------------------

Hours later, Shauna looked over at the man next to her in the bed.

Sweet Jesus; that had been something.

While she'd thought that he was one of the many 'retired' soldier boys of one side or the other, home now and wanting a little joy and pleasure as they'd passed through, she'd been sorely mistaken. He was anything but.

He didn't speak much, so you had to listen when he did. She thought that she could get used to that in a man. She sighed.

She could get used to a lot of things about this one.

For one thing, he'd said nothing about his own experience at the outset, so she'd just assumed that he was just another farmboy from somewhere or other -- just another neophyte looking to get his toy wet just a time or two on his way back to 'Becky' or 'Katie' or whatever her name might be.

They were all the same out here, the similarly inexperienced, but properly-raised bumpkin heifer-girls who knew enough to moan and cry out at the right points while he huffed over her so that she could have her four to eight offspring on a little ditch-farm where he'd work himself to death for her.

Shauna Kavanagh knew what lay underneath in a lot of those boys. She knew that each and every one was living his life, quietly wishing for the rest of that life that he'd known that the ten times that she'd let him anywhere close to her slit was all that he'd ever get.

She blinked and looked on a little sadly. Oh no, she thought as she forced herself not to kiss those lips again. Not this one.

She hoped that this one had as much of a brain as she thought that he did, because to think of him in a situation like that felt like a crime to her.

Those simple farmboys.

She saw them every Sunday morning as she looked out through her window as she got ready to go to sleep while their wives led them into the church to hear the droning sermon of the week. But she knew something those cows never would.

They'd gotten what they wanted in their docile capons, but they didn't have the slightest clue that she and the others whom they loved to look down on, well they really ought to thank them.

While they paraded their menfolk and their broods into and out of the church, they never saw it from her angle -- the way that most of those men looked at her place of employment out of the corners of their eyes in passing, trying desperately to think of a valid-sounding need to go to town without their wives, something like a need to see the horse doc, or the smith -- any little reason to run over for something that their walking whipping posts would never think to give them.

She smirked, the ploughboys had become men out in the world, and had then run home to forget what they'd learned out there to become the tubby overworked turds who were dying to get a little relief from the little overworked woman who held their chains tightly in their fists, completely believing the reverend who told them that it was just the same thing as what the animals did to procreate and nothing more.

But not this one, she was sure of that.

If he even had a 'Becky' and she had a brain, she'd never let him out of the bed, so that couldn't be where he'd come from.

He'd surprised her right out of the gate, getting to his knees on the floor in front of the armchair that he'd asked her to sit in. She'd looked at him curiously, but she's agreed. The next thing she knew, he had her leaned back, with her bloomers right the hell off and he'd grabbed her ankles then and lifted them, holding them up for her as he'd fucked her deep and hard.

At one point, he'd made her call for the attendant to get them a little booze and he did that (and she'd made the transaction afterward) with her standing on one leg with her ass on a table by the door with her other leg over his shoulder.

Shauna had done it all breathlessly; even feeling a little embarrassed. But though he'd fucked her to a lot of joy more than once like that, he hadn't even broken a sweat at it. She knew right then that this man was different. He took her out of her boredom and fucked her six ways from Sunday.

He was a loving monster, the emphasis on the adjective, she decided, and he was all that she'd never known that she liked so much. He tasted so nice anywhere that she tasted on him and the semen that he gave was wonderful, since it was a little unlike any that she'd ever coaxed from a man. It was a little thicker in consistency and was it ever warm! He gave a lot when he gushed and she could feel it when it came to her -- just from the heat. It left the nicest feeling of warmth inside her. She'd never felt anything like that before.

The only disturbing thing was that there was something else about him and she just couldn't quite look at him in a way that would allow her to see what it was somehow. She just knew that it was there.

She didn't want to think about him getting up and leaving. She now didn't want to service the regular dolts.

It was easy enough to be pleasant in her job. That was what it was all about, after all. But after only six months at this, Shauna was beginning to get jaded. She felt little most times, only making the motions and the noises to get the rubes to squirt as quickly as possible.

She was here because she needed the money.

The old family plantation back in Louisiana was closed and sold off, the silent workers gone the very next day. The plan had been to start up fresh farther west at the cusp of an economic boom.

But it had never happened. There had been no boom. She and her mother and her aunt came here and there was nothing but a large house. The cost of the construction and the move had eaten deep into the family pockets and then Ophelia had taken sick, wasting away to a stick before she passed.

Her mother was the next gatekeeper, but by then, there was little traffic from that other place for some unknown reason.

She'd found her mother hanging in one of the sheds one day, having made good on her thoughts to do that and no longer ready to accept the role. The note warned her daughter to never go to the stable.

Well that was easy to do, Shauna thought. There weren't enough horses here to need that stable anyway. With no farming going on, she kept her horse in the barn.

That night, she'd had the strangest dream. As she walked away with her mother's note in that dream, thinking to ride into town to notify someone, she looked over and saw the stable door open. The same man was waiting there -- or a similar one -- who she'd first seen fucking her aunt in the stables back in Louisiana. Maybe it was to be her turn now. He beckoned to her and she went.

When she walked into the stable, the first man was gone and in his place stood this man -- the same one who was lying beside her asleep in the bed. The same man. She was sure of it.

Only in her dream, this man had turned into something else, something four-footed but still nice for her to look at. He looked at her and in her dream, she'd pulled up her dress to show him what lay there under it.

The next part of the dream saw her under him, on her hands and knees while a lean creature with fur over a non-human face fucked her from behind. In the middle of that, she'd looked up and seen into a mirror out in a barn of all places and stared at her own face, looking back at her -- looking just like the beast there behind her, since that was what she really was anyway.

She'd awoken terrified and covered in sweat. It had taken a good while to get her heart rate back to normal as she thought over what she remembered of the nightmare.

She was so aroused that there had been only one help for it.

But now that man -- or a dead-ringer for him was here with her. She needed time to think.

Her mother's death made Shauna the owner of a large place with no way to make it go and a stable that she would never walk into. So it had come down to this and a little thievery when she had the chance for it. She never went back home again.

Now she was a whore in Dead Dick Gulch or whatever it was called.

She looked at him again. What she knew that she'd do was about the last thing that she wanted to do to this man. She wanted, as she watched him sleep, to hold onto him until he awoke. If she could have had her wish then, she'd go wherever the hell he went, doing her damndest to make it something for the two of them.

Shauna smiled up at the ceiling. One night and she knew that he'd be somebody to hang onto and never lie to, never try to deceive, and never give him anything but her best. She knew it and it was why she smiled.

She knew that he didn't look down on her at all over what she was.

Shauna had always been 'a little on the thin side', as her mother had always said. The trait separated her from the other women in the family who'd always tended toward the more lush side. Shauna had never really been all that thrilled with the way that she looked, with what she'd have said was mousy brown hair and dark brown eyes.

She knew that, had he lived long enough to see it, her Da would have called her lovely in her own elfin way. Coming from only him, she'd have been pleased with the complement.

But to herself, she was lanky, bony and pretty much a washout at never attaining the busty description that she'd have killed to have heard said of her.

But this man Wesley seemed to have no proper fear of anything, least of all a woman's wrath, even if she was a whore.

He'd called her beautiful.

He'd turned 'mousy' into 'a delightfully rare shade, lighter than chestnut', and 'yellowish- brown' into 'haunting and captivatingly dark' eyes. And he'd tied every single thing that she hated about her body together in a way that had even wrapped it up beyond her ability to argue him down over it.

She wondered if he might be Irish if he had that ability.

She hadn't thought it even possible, but she'd finally met a man who she thought that she might be able to believe in, besides her dim memories of her father.

But the smile passed after a moment.

Her wishes were things just as fanciful now as they'd been when she was a girl. If she could have her way, she'd love to be his anything. But, ...

So she waited a little longer and then she eased herself out of the bed to get dressed quietly, but quickly. With a cautious look over her shoulder, she took most of what he had in his moneybelt and even the gold pieces that he kept in his boots against a dire need.

After that, she left by the back door, heading straight to the stables. She tossed a half-dollar to the night boy, for keeping her horse looked after and then saddling her up after midnight on the nights when he knew that she'd be leaving.

She was out of town and down the dark road a minute after that.

--------------------------

It was summer 1868 and he was alone out in the wildlands when it came to Wes where she was, the woman who'd robbed him.

Once he'd gotten over his anger, he'd rationalized it to himself by reminding himself that what she'd stolen from him had already been stolen from somebody else. He tried not to think about going to prison for stealing money which he never got the benefit of having.