Chapter 1

I would sit in the back of the church and wonder what it would be like to fuck Jezebel Noble. Yes, I know that I was calling down the wrath of God upon my head but believe me, it was far more pleasant to imagine a naked Jezebel moving and moaning underneath me than to listen to the minister preach about the importance of forgiving those who had wronged us.

And what an unfortunate name she had—Jezebel, synonymous with whore as far as most people were concerned. I often wondered what parent would saddle their undeniably beautiful child with a name like that. And Jezebel was beautiful, there was no doubting that, but so pale and quiet that she made me wonder about her. She walked silently beside her husband, Mason Noble, attending church and other social events on his arm but she was never really present; her dark eyes had a far-away gaze as though she was seeing the invisible. Beautiful Jezebel seemed a sleepwalker, so removed from everything and everyone.

In the back pew where I always chose to sit, I would gaze at her still profile one row down and to my left, and consider if she ever cried out in pleasure as she lay underneath Mason Noble. I doubted it, not so much doubting that Mrs. Noble had a sensual side or that she wouldn't enjoy being plowed by a man who pleased her but that Mason Noble would bother to see to it; he was the type to only be interested in his needs alone. He wasn't an unkind man that I could see and I always judged him a bit of a coward so I don't think he was capable of outright cruelty. I never heard how he, a wealthy but rather unattractive, stodgy man, won such a beauty as Jezebel who was so much younger than he.

Jezebel must have been in her late twenties and Mason, in his fifties. He owned a neighboring ranch named The Noble Pine and had a medium-sized herd but no mining or timber interests other than a partnership with Hoss and me in a small copper mine on the corner of our mutual property. We had hit a vein of turquoise that at the moment, was bringing in more money than the copper. Mason was honest and fair in his dealings with us but he had been a lonely bachelor, once bemoaning the fact of his loneliness to me hoping, I suspected, that I would point him toward an eligible woman who desperately wanted a husband. Every so often, one of us, Hoss, Joe or me, would see him head toward Broadbent Street, the street lined with whore houses and gambling parlors in Virginia City. One night as Hoss and I were playing poker in the gambling parlor of Miss Ora's Place, Mason Noble came stealing in, spoke quietly to Miss Ora who was making sure that none of her patrons received anything but the best watered-down whiskey money could buy, handed her some folded bills and then went upstairs. He was back down and out the door in less than fifteen minutes.

"Must've been ripe and ready to burst," Hoss said about Mason's short visit. I laughed at than one. The whore sitting next to me at the table, one of her naked, plump legs thrown over one of my thighs, remarked that Mason had odd tastes. She said that once she serviced him and he wanted to be called a naughty boy and smacked on his bottom and then he came in a lace handkerchief she gave him.

"Remind me not to buy you for a night," I said to her. "Seems you can't keep your mouth shut." She flushed—Barb was her name—and swore she never did talk about her patrons except that one time and that was just to me and Hoss. But I remembered that piece of information later when Mason came back from a trip to St. Louis with a young and beautiful but silent wife. Maybe the fact that she rarely spoke was the pull; he needed a wife who wouldn't talk about their private life together.

I also wondered, as I watched the mute Jezebel, if perhaps Jezebel was a screamer when thrilled—if she ever had been thrilled. I didn't think so though. But then she was so quiet, so emotionless and bloodless in public that maybe in private she would release all her pent-up passions and become an abandoned wanton, a lustful wench who would energetically ride the man who pleased her. And I always wondered if I could be that man. But then, as I said, Mrs. Jezebel Noble rarely spoke. The only things she had, up to that time, ever said to me to my memory were my name in acknowledgement of my presence at some gathering and "No, but thank you for the kindness," when she would decline my request for the honor of a dance. So to say she fascinated me is an understatement.

It was about a month before Jezebel Noble disappeared—yes, she disappeared—that I saw her at the lake. It was a hot day; Hoss had said that it felt like the inside of Hop Sing's new oven and he and I were riding to meet up with Pa and Joe in town to all have dinner at the Imperial House when I noticed a cabriolet with red wheels under a group of trees. The small sorrel was hitched and cropping grass. We were still on the Ponderosa and so was the intruder so I pulled up my horse.

"Why're you stoppin'?" Hoss asked. "It's just a two-wheeled buggy. Probably some stranger stopped to look at the lake, maybe to cool off. Iffen we weren't so late, I wouldn't mind takin' a dip myself."

My suspicions were aroused anyway. "Your stomach'll wait," I said, dismounting. "You won't starve." I dropped my horse's reins and he dipped his head to the grass. So while Hoss waited and grumbled, I carefully walked through the brush and trees down to the lake and was about fifteen yards from the shore when I saw her.

It would have been more ironic if her name had been Bathsheba instead of Jezebel because just as King David had to possess Bathsheba after he saw her at her bath, I felt I needed to possess Jezebel after I saw her standing up to her hips in the cool, blue water, her wet, dark hair falling almost to her waist as she raised her face to the sky, her firm breasts proudly exposed to the wilderness and her ivory skin glistening in the sunlight.

I was entranced—fully and completely and it was only when I heard the horses nicker to each other that I came back to myself and the fact that I was watching Jezebel without her knowledge. And what did that make me? Other than hard, a bit ashamed of myself and yet…I couldn't look away.

TBC