Sundays are quiet in our dusty little town. The poker games, bar brawls and gunfights all take a backseat to gettin’ right with the Lord. Business won’t pick up again in the brothel ‘til after sundown, but when it does, I’ll be ready. I’ve got my eye on that ruggedly handsome newcomer, and I hear he’s heading our way tonight.

The clanging of the church bells slowly pull Virginia away from her dreams. She knows she’ll have to make excuses to explain why she wasn’t in her normal corner of the pew this morning. Pulling her slumbering body deeper under the quilts, she feels her hips nesting in the warmth of the feather tick. Stretching her slender long legs, Virginia slowly rolls over planting her breasts into Caleb’s back. Running her hand slowly down the hard muscles of his broad chest, she closes her eyes as she feels his body responding to her touch.

Caleb grabs her hand and pulls the softness of her fingers around his growing firmness. Their bodies melt together in a natural rhythm as the distant bells call her neighbors to gather and worship their creator. Virginia whispers a prayer asking God to forgive her and thanking Him at the same time for putting this cowboy in her path. She swings her leg over his hips and folds herself into his arms upon the bed she shared with her husband for less than a year before he went missing.

You two are revoltingly good. Are you sure you haven’t done this before?

@Jeruba Find us a publisher, woman!

Reverend Graham swung his pickaxe rhythmically, sweat coating his naked upper torso in a mellow sheen that accentuated the hard packed muscles he had acquired working dawn to dusk on his parent’s cattle ranch for most of his young life. A life he had fled from as soon as he could when the Lord, and a particularly moving, traveling tent revival, had called him away from the senseless lowing of the longhorns and the endless days of his Godless father’s drunken torments. Days filled with thankless labor, and the crack of the elder Graham’s belt when young William fell behind in the day’s schedule. Days that began and ended with his mother softly weeping as she contemplated the decisions that had led her to this place so bereft of love. Days spent dreaming of a better life.

A life that he had found when he accepted both Jesus Christ and Virginia Caldridge into his heart. He could still see her in the back row of that revival, her hair pulled back in a . . .

The crack of the overseer’s whip brought him out of his reverie, fire once again tracing a cruel path down his back. It lay there among the countless other lines the had preceded it and were sure to follow. William grunted and went back to pounding the dark, hard rock that made up the walls of the Falwel Diamond Mines. He wondered for perhaps the millionth time, fleetingly and with an enormous rush of guilt, why God had forsaken him here in South Africa. Hadn’t he been doing the Lord’s work when he had left his beautiful Virginia back in Montana with a promise that the missionary work would only keep him away for six month? Hadn’t he been doing the Lord’s work converting the region’s natives when the Dutch slavers had burst in to the village and took man, woman, and child alike to go work the mines, regardless of color or station. Was it the will of the Lord that he now toil away his days trying to pound diamonds from the unforgiving, dark depths of the Earth?

William pushed the thoughts from his mind and focused on the task at hand. He needed to keep up his strength, what little he had, if he was going to escape the hellish pit he had been imprisoned in. Another whipping from the mine’s foreman wasn’t going to help accomplish that goal.

He spared his beloved Virginia one last, loving thought as he once again set determinedly to his work and offered God a prayer of thanks that at least his brother Caleb was back home looking after his new bride.

Man, I freaking love what you did. Good twist. That was really, really good. I didn’t see that coming.