Slocum and the Hellfire Harem (9781101613382) by Jake Logan

what you see?”
    Slocum had to smile at her plain crazy ways. “Yeah,” he said. “Mighty pretty . . . country.”
    She laughed, a throaty sound that Slocum found sexy.
    He had no idea just what he was walking into, but he had to admit it had been an interesting few days. And this answered his question of earlier: What next? He was about to find out. He took his eyes off her backside long enough to see that they’d rounded that bend in the road. And he couldn’t believe what he saw.

9
    A teeming gaggle of children, all little girls from the looks of them, bubbled and squirmed, shouting and chasing one another in circles. Beyond them sat a small farmhouse, adobe in construction, and missing half of its roof, the porch a sagging thing at one end. Beyond that sat a corral and low, open-sided barn, the wood siding curled and puckered through years in the sun. And there stood the Appaloosa, hipshot, still saddled, and looking at ease, as if he were catching a few winks in the afternoon sun.
    â€œDamn horse,” said Slocum under his breath, though he was relieved to see it hadn’t abandoned him at what was shaping up to be another nest of strange strangers.
    As they approached, the group of six or more children, ranging in age from toddlers to just under eight years or so—it was difficult for Slocum to guess with any certainty—swung their heads toward them as if by instinct. Half of them, it seemed to him, bolted toward the woman before him, shouting, “Mama! Mama!”
    â€œRuth! Ruth, that you?” came a voice from the little house. A stout woman seeming no taller than Slocum’s rib cage shouted from the porch, drying her hands on a much-used apron. “Where have you been, girl?” Then she must have caught sight of Slocum, because she visored a hand above her eyes and her voice took on a sharp, growly edge. Had to be the wildcat woman’s mother. “Who in the blue blazes is that? A . . .
man
?”
    The children by then had swarmed Ruth and she looked at Slocum and said, loud enough for the old woman to hear her, “Oh, he’s a man, all right.”
    John Slocum had many times been the fond recipient of amorous intention, as if he were being sized up for a roll in the hay. And that’s exactly the sort of look Ruth was giving him; not for a second apparently did she consider the fact that it seemed as if half the teeming mass of children about her legs were anything to him but a distinct shock and letdown. And yet that face of hers was a stunner, something bold and chiseled about it, her dark eyebrows and full lips, between which a long nose, slightly arched as if in pride, seemed to sniff at him of its own accord.
    Slocum looked back across the yard. The old woman had retrieved a shotgun from somewhere. But that wasn’t what shocked him. Flanking the scowling old thing stood three more women, two of them filled out so that even at this distance he saw they were nearly a matched set, more women than girls, and the third was a younger thing, barely into her teen years. Each of the three new arrivals was armed.
    â€œOh my, what have you stumbled upon, sir?” said Ruth, reading his mind and following up her comment with that same throaty laugh that, despite the strange situation, stabbed him deep in his groin.
    He knew exactly what he’d stumbled upon. And it was what Old Man Tinker called “his womenfolk.” So here was his proof that the bandits who supposedly took them were nonexistent, and these women had fled the crazy man of their own free will. That made some sense, considering how he’d heard Tinker run down women, as if they were put on earth for breeding purposes. Slocum would be the first to admit that spending time with women could be a whole lot of fun, and had its own rewards. But he’d also known far too many that were the equal or better of many men ever to generalize about them or