Page 14 of Runaway Hucow

With shotguns, a smaller number meant a bigger gun. Most folks used a 20 gauge for shooting quail and jackrabbits, 12 gauge for anything bigger. You might find a few big men who carried a 10 gauge or maybe even an 8, but that was a rarity.

A 4 gauge was unheard of.

The gun and shells had been specially built by Spike’s younger brother Peyton, the smart one of the family. It had come in handy yesterday with those bounty hunters, and it was going to come in handy again today if anyone had dared to lay a finger on his precious little hucow.

As he headed for the mouth of the cave, Spike made sure to keep his hoofsteps light. If there was trouble waiting for him outside, he didn’t want it to know he was coming.

The entrance to the cave faced due east, and golden beams of early morning light were already streaming in from outside. Spike mentally cursed himself for that. He’d intended to be up before the sun.

It was those dreams that had kept him asleep.

Those damned wonderful dreams.

As he emerged from the mouth of the cave, Spike paused and listened. Little birds were twittering among the limbs of the cottonwoods surrounding the outcropping of stone, and a light morning breeze was stirring the leaves in the upper branches, causing them to rustle lightly. But behind those ordinary morning noises, he could hear a different, softer sound.

The sound of weeping.

Spike turned toward the source, and his heart jumped with joy. It was Tess. He had found her. She was down below on the bank of the river, kneeling by the water’s edge. Spike started to call out to her, but then he saw what she was doing, and he stopped.

The little hucow was facing away from him, so he couldn’t see too clearly, but he could see enough. She had the front of her shift pulled up to her chin, and she was doing something with her breasts, squeezing and massaging them while she wept.

Part of him thought he should leave her alone, but he knew he couldn’t do that. His little hucow was in pain. He needed to help her, the same way she had helped him last night with the stitches.

It was his duty as her mate.

Moving quietly and slowly, so as not to startle the timid little creature, Spike leaned his gun against the entrance of the cave and started down the hill toward the river.

CHAPTER 9

Tess was not feeling good. As a matter of fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she had felt quite so bad. It shouldn’t have been like this. She was free now, and she even had her own personal minotaur bodyguard to protect her. She should have been the happiest hucow in the world.

But freedom was proving to be much more painful than she’d expected.

Her whole body seemed to hurt this morning. Even though she’d spent most of yesterday on horseback, she was unaccustomed to long-distance riding, and now her legs ached even worse than they had after the previous day of walking. The hardtack she’d eaten last night, while closer to her idea of real food, was not sitting well in her stomach, and she almost wished she had shared Spike’s supper of bitter grass instead.

But the worst ache of all was the one in her breasts. That pain had faded yesterday while she’d been traveling with Spike and the horses, but today it had returned.

With a vengeance.

Tess suspected Spike was to blame for that, though she didn’t know exactly why. There was something about the minotaur’s presence that made her breasts want to produce after so many years of lying dormant, and it seemed as if they were trying to make up for lost time. When she had woken a few minutes ago from her dreams of being shared—not by shadows this time, but by minotaurs, bison minotaurs—her breasts had grown noticeably larger, and they had felt surprisingly heavy and unwieldy as she’d sat up in the dimness of the cave with the fire all burnt down to ashes and Spike’s massive form snoring softly on the other side.

Tess had known instantly that she had to do something. She had to empty herself, and she had to do it without waking the bisonman.

Not here, she had thought. Not in the cave. Spike will hear me, and even if he doesn’t, he’ll see the mess I’ve made, all warm and white on the cavern floor.

Outside, she had thought. Outside where the river can carry away the evidence of my shame.

And so, Tess had risen and made her way to the entrance of the cave, keeping one hand on the wall to guide her in the predawn darkness, stifling her groans of pain as she tried to keep her milk-heavy breasts from jostling and jouncing.

Outside, the fresh air had been a cool relief after the stifling warmth of the cave and the overpowering smell of woodsmoke and masculinity. Tess had taken a few deep, gulping breaths, then she had started down the hill. It had been dark still, but the eastern sky was beginning to lighten with the coming day, and Tess could hear the river below her, sliding lazily past beneath the leaves of the cottonwoods, as indifferent to her plight as the unseen birds twittering in the branches overhead.

As soon as she reached the water’s edge, Tess had dropped to her knees on the muddy bank and pulled her shift up to her chin, exposing her nakedness to the gathering dawn. The eastern sky was already lighter than before. The sun would be up before long.

She needed to work fast.

But how? Tess had never actually milked herself before. She’d never had to. The man who had bought her as a child had ended up raising her as his daughter instead. When Tess had gotten older and they had realized that her body didn’t produce milk the way other hucows did, her adopted father hadn’t minded, and neither had Tess. She’d heard that the larger dairies used firestone-powered milking machines with tubes and metal teat-cups that sucked the milk right out of a hucow’s breasts in a matter of minutes. She had always thought that sounded unpleasant, but she would have gladly submitted to such a machine this morning if it would mean an end to her agony.

On the smaller farms that couldn’t afford such expensive machinery, the hucows were milked by hand. Sometimes the milking was done by a farm worker who had been trained for that job. On other, more humane farms, the hucows were trained to milk themselves. That was how things were done on Duffy Ranch, for example. God, if only Tess had ended up there like she was supposed to, she would know the proper technique.