Longarm and the Diamondback Widow Page 3

  Sometimes, the best course of action in such a situation was to do as little as possible. If someone were indeed shadowing the lawman with evil intent, there was little reason to keep riding and allow the stalkers to possibly work around him and ambush him. Sometimes the best course of action was the least amount of action. He would sit down over there in those trees by that glinting brook, build a fire, boil up some coffee, and wait for the fellow or fellows to show himself or themselves.

  Maybe they’d even have a cup of coffee together, talk things out in a civilized manner . . .

  Longarm gave a wry snort as he reined the big army bay, which he’d requisitioned at the small cavalry outpost near Chugwater, off the trail and headed south through the aspens toward a shallow creek that flashed along the base of a boulder-strewn ridge, rippling and murmuring over rocks.

  As the bay moved slowly, stepping around or over fallen branches, its hooves thumping and crunching dead leaves, the lawman cast another cautious look to the east. Beyond the trees and toward the bluff he’d ridden over ten minutes ago, still no movement.

  Longarm reined the bay to a halt at the edge of the water lined with tall, green grass, moss, and coffee-colored foam licking at the bank. He stretched his six-foot-three-inch, broad-shouldered frame, outfitted with the narrow hips and muscular thighs of a veteran horseman, and then doffed his hat and ran his big, brown, callused hands through his close-cropped, dark brown hair. He scratched at his long sideburns and then ran a sleeve of his tobacco-tweed frock coat across his sweat-soaked, handlebar mustache.

  It had been a long, hot trip out from Denver—blazes, it had been a hot summer!—and he’d be glad to get out of the sun for a while. The lawman’s face, burned by many western suns and chewed by many a cold western wind, was customarily Indian-tan, but now at the tail end of a long, hot summer, it had been charred nearly as dark as mahogany. His mustache and sideburns had been bleached cinnamon, an interesting contrast to the mahogany. They were, in fact, nearly the exact color as his keen, intelligent eyes that could flash in jovial good humor and ribald laughter as easily and as quickly as they could flare in anger when riled.

  Altogether the lawman called Longarm’s earthy, chiseled, darkly handsome looks, accompanied as they were by a brawny, angular, long-muscled body clad in a now-dusty three-piece suit with a chocolate brown string tie, attracted quite a few admiring glances from the women of the species.

  And Longarm had never been a man to brush away a woman’s attentions. In fact, on the long trip out here by train and horseback he’d entertained himself remembering the silky, warm, wet lips of Cynthia Larimer. Yes, the heartrendingly beautiful young niece of Denver’s founding father, General Larimer, had bequeathed to him a French lesson on the grandest scale the evening before his train departed Union Station for Wyoming.

  He would remember the way she’d sucked and tongued and gently nibbled his cock while tickling his balls with her fingertips, holding him teetering on the edge of satisfaction until he’d thought his heart would explode—on his deathbed!

  When Longarm had released the bay’s latigo and bridle bit, so it could forage and drink at will, he knelt by the stream and dunked his head in the cold water, ridding his mind of the sensation of Cynthia Larimer’s lips around his manhood. No use torturing himself.

  He donned his hat, rose, and scrounged in the near trees for enough wood to make a coffee fire. While he worked, he kept a close eye on the trail curving just beyond the copse. He kept his ears pricked, as well, but so far he’d heard nothing but the slight breeze, the stream sliding between its broad banks, and the birds fluttering around the branches overhead.

  He made coffee, and when the Arbuckle’s had come to a boil, he settled the grounds with a little fresh water from his canteen and then filled a fire-blackened tin cup. He was sitting on a log by the fire, sipping the hot brew slowly and staring through the trees toward the trail, when the bay pricked its ears and gave a low nicker deep in its chest. The horse had been facing the stream, nibbling the green grass growing along the bank, but now the mount swung its head around to look toward the trail.

  Longarm almost smiled when he, too, began picking up the slow clomps of a rider making his way along the trace.

  That old sixth sense of his was as keen as ever.

  He remained sitting on the log, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, steaming cup in his gloved hands, listening to the slow thuds growing gradually louder. He stared toward the trail and saw a shadow move. The shadow was shaped like a horse and rider. The rider angled off the trail and into the trees and was making straight for Longarm, slowly.

  The horse was a sorrel with a left front stocking and an interrupted stripe down the muzzle. Longarm couldn’t tell much about the rider because of the shade cloaking her, but that she was a girl was obvious by the curvy figure clad in a red-and-white checked shirt and faded blue denims with patched knees. Full, round mounds pushed out the shirt and jostled as horse and rider approached through the trees.

  When she came out of the trees, the girl stopped the sorrel about ten feet away from Longarm’s fire. The lawman’s throat swelled and dried as he stared up at her. She was a pretty, suntanned girl with coarse auburn hair hanging straight down past her shoulders from beneath her black Stetson, the chin thong of which dangled across her chest. Her hair was streaked copper by the sun. The girl’s eyes were the most striking green Longarm had ever seen.

  Her face was expressionless as she stared at Longarm, who canted his head to regard the girl more closely. Seventeen, eighteen, he would say. A tall girl—long-legged and full-busted. Those jade-green eyes were damned off-putting. She wore brush-scarred brown chaps and brown stockmen’s boots.

  The cat had gotten Longarm’s tongue, so the girl was first to speak, lifting her smoky green gaze to the sun-dappled, cool, refreshing water behind him. “This is my swimmin’ hole, mister.”

  Longarm opened his mouth to tell her that he was sorry for intruding, but then she turned the sorrel around the fire and, clomping past him, turned her head toward him and quirked her mouth corners just slightly, provocatively. Then she turned forward and jogged up along the stream for about fifty yards, her hair bouncing on her shoulders, and stopped.

  She swung her long right leg over the cantle of her saddle and leaped fleetly down to the ground, landing and bouncing slightly on the balls of her boots and immediately reaching under the sorrel’s belly to release its latigo strap. She slipped the horse’s bit from its teeth, dropped the reins, and doffed her black hat.

  She tossed the hat on the ground, then reached into one of her saddlebag pouches and pulled out what appeared to be a towel. She tossed the towel over a small pine tree that was not as tall as she was. Glancing at him almost furtively, she stepped behind the tree and lifted her hands to her shirt. Again, she glanced at him, and Longarm turned away discreetly, dipping his nose in his coffee cup and taking a sip, feeling a hard thudding in his chest and a tightening in his crotch.

  Christ, was she going to undress right there? Swim right there?

  He held his head forward and continued to sip his coffee, making an effort to look nonchalant, but he kept glancing out the left corner of his eye. The girl was moving around over there. He thought he could see clothes being tossed to the ground. When she swung away from the tree, he turned his head toward her, and drew a deep breath.

  She was stepping off the bank and into the stream, naked as the day she was born, but a whole lot better filled out.

  Christ. She was tall and leggy, all right.

  Slender-wasted, shoulders kind of broad in the way of girls who rode a lot get broad-shouldered and long-legged.

  He couldn’t see her front, but he could see the curve of her left breast under her arm, and it would be one nice handful indeed. She did not turn her head toward him as she walked slowly into the stream, holding her hands out slightly, taking one step at a time, hair d
ancing across her shoulders.

  She walked out beyond the shade of the aspens and cottonwoods, and the sun shone on her. The rich light was like a lens revealing her dimpled, pale, round butt cheeks and another dimple at the small of her back.

  The delicate spine curved down from her neck and between her shoulder blades to that beautiful rump any man in his right mind would want to sink his teeth into . . .

  When she was about twenty feet out from the bank, she turned to face downstream, toward Longarm, and he turned his head away so sharply that he heard a couple of bones in his neck creak. His heart fluttered. His hands shook, rippling his coffee.

  He brought the cup to his lips, sipped. The coffee had grown lukewarm.

  He dropped to his knees, used a leather swatch to lift the pot from the fire, and poured himself another cup. He felt a little sick inside, the way a man will when he’s “in season,” so to speak. His mannish desire was tempered by his lawman’s sense of caution.

  A lone girl getting naked out here and swimming around practically before his eyes could very easily be a trap. He kept his ears and eyes skinned, watching and listening for more hoof clomps or the crunch of brush under stealthy feet. Men might be using her to distract him so they could work around him and perforate his hide with hot lead.

  A roar sounded in a branch over Longarm’s head. His heart leaped in his chest. He dropped his coffee cup on his thigh, and groaned against the burn as he reached across his belly for the Frontier Colt .44 holstered for the cross-draw on his left hip.

  He clicked the hammer back while at the same time he lost his balance and fell back on his rump with a shrill curse.

  He lifted the Colt’s maw, aiming up at the branch, but stayed his trigger finger.

  A squirrel hung its head over the aspen branch arcing over him, glaring down at him, flicking its tail and chittering loudly, sounding like an unoiled whipsaw blade.

  Longarm depressed the Colt’s hammer. “You little bastard,” he snapped.

  Sitting in the middle of the creek, upstream fifty yards, the girl lounged back on her arms, tipping her head far back on her shoulders, laughing huskily. Her bare breasts jostled as she laughed and idly tapped the heel of one bare foot against the water.

  Chapter 4

  Longarm’s ears warmed as the naked beauty continued to laugh at him.

  He curled his lip at the squirrel, who seemed to be laughing at him, too. He looked at the girl again, who kicked her feet in the water and gazed at him over her the swollen mounds of her upthrust breasts. She did nothing to cover herself. In fact, she didn’t seem to mind exposing herself to him at all.

  A tease, that one. As pretty as she was, she couldn’t be too bright, swimming naked out here with a strange man sipping coffee nearby. This was rough country. How did she know he wasn’t the sort to walk out there and force himself on her?

  Of course, he wasn’t that sort. Longarm, good with women, had never had to resort to such crude tactics as rape.

  But how did this girl know that?

  “You really oughta be more careful, Miss Whoever You Are!” he yelled now as he picked up his coffee cup and gained his feet, anger mixing with his embarrassment. Then, under his breath: “Frolicking naked around a stranger. Who in the hell raised this she-cat—wolves?”

  He kept his eyes off of her, still embarrassed, and brushed his glove across his wet pant leg. His thigh was tender from the scalding coffee, though fortunately most of the hot liquid had landed on the ground and not on his leg.

  A rumbling sounded. He lifted his head and tipped his hat brim back off his forehead to peer at the sky.

  Gray-bellied clouds were closing over the valley. In the far east, lightning forked down from a massive, anvil-shaped storm cloud. The leaves around Longarm rustled as a chill breeze lifted.

  Shit, a storm was moving in. He should have kept pushing up the trail to Diamondback, still nearly a day’s ride away. Instead, he’d pulled up here to get laughed at by a squirrel and a girl who didn’t know any better than to swim naked in front of strangers . . .

  His regret at not having kept moving on toward the scene of his next assignment was tempered by the girl, whom he could hear splashing in the stream. She was damn compelling, he had to admit. But then, most naked girls were compelling to any man with blood in his veins.

  Not all that sorry that he’d have to wait here until the storm passed, he unsaddled his horse and used his tarpaulin and rope to fashion a lean-to angling off a tree near the fire. Then he scrounged for a couple more armfuls of wood, to get him through the storm, and brewed another pot of coffee.

  He continued to keep his senses attuned to his surroundings, always wary of an ambush. He kept them attuned as well to the girl, who, after about twenty minutes of playing like a baby beaver in the flashing water, walked up on the bank, glanced at Longarm coyly, and then stepped behind the pine, which did little to screen her, and began dressing.

  Longarm was sitting on his log under the tarpaulin as the first cold raindrops began to slant down out of the leaden sky and the girl walked her horse over to his fire. She stopped just beyond the fire and began unsaddling the mount—moving quickly and sure-handedly, with no wasted motions. This was a girl who’d grown up in the saddle, though judging by how she’d looked naked, she was about as full-grown as they came.

  Leaving the horse free to roam, she turned to Longarm, her hair hanging down over one side of her face, lending her a wry, dubious look. One green eye blazed against her pretty, suntanned face.

  “Share your fire?”

  Longarm hiked a shoulder. His pride kept him from wanting to look too eager, though he would have been crestfallen if the girl had climbed on her horse and ridden away. He’d halfway built the lean-to for her, figuring she’d need a place to get in out of the rain. He hadn’t seen any signs of a ranch or a miner’s cabin in many miles.

  She ducked under the tarpaulin and sat on the log in front of the fire, about three feet to Longarm’s right. He filled his extra cup with the smoking brew and handed it to her, aiming the handle toward her.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “You always do that?”

  “Do what?” she asked as Longarm made himself comfortable on the log once more.

  “Swim naked in front of strange men.”

  “Did you like it?”

  Longarm looked at her. Her hair had come down to hide the other half of her face now, exposing the left side and the left blazing green eye that had an almost unsettling depth to it.

  “My swimming in front of you?”

  Longarm’s cheeks and ears warmed. “Young lady, there ain’t no man on this earth that don’t like to see a pretty girl naked. But that don’t mean it’s right for said pretty girl to go swimming naked in front of one. Especially way out here in the middle of nowhere. If I’d wanted to take you, there’d have been damn little you could have done about it. And damn few people around to hear your screams for help.”

  She smiled, her lips shoving a few strands of her hair aside. “How do you know I would have screamed for help? Maybe I would have enjoyed it.”

  Longarm studied her, incredulous. His pants were growing tighter, pinching his stiffening mast. He looked at the fire, trying to clear his mind of his wild imaginings. “Got a handle?”

  “Connie,” she said just as a pitch knot popped, sounding like a derringer. She glanced at the cinders climbing skyward. “What’s yours?”

  “Custis Long. Most folks call me Longarm.”

  “You’re a lawman.”

  He looked at her again, narrowing one eye. “How did you know that?”

  Connie hiked a shoulder. Her left green eye continued blazing into him. So did the right one, from behind the thin screen of her auburn hair. “I guessed it. Something about how strong you look, and the integrity and honesty in your eyes. Even when you’re lusting
after a girl, imagining rutting around between her legs, sticking your mast in her pussy, you’re still of a pure heart. I like that about you, Longarm. I sensed it in you right off. I know good men from bad ones. I’ve had plenty of experience with the latter, which is why I’m always on the scout for the former. That’s why, when I saw you sitting here by my swimming hole, I stayed.”

  Longarm’s voice was thick. “You from around here?”

  Connie sipped her coffee and looked out at the rain. “Not going home anytime soon. The arroyos up by my folks’ place are gonna be flooded. But doesn’t this cool rain feel good?”

  She reached forward to let the rain sluicing off the top of the lean-to splash against her hand. She brought the water to her face. She cupped another handful and pressed it to her neck, running the hand down her chest and into her shirt.

  Longarm watched her hand. The moisture dribbled down her shirt and pasted it against her breasts. Longarm sipped his coffee and told himself that she was young and a little touched. He wouldn’t go near this girl with a ten-foot pole.

  This was a bad place for young girls. Too isolated. When their sap started to run, there wasn’t much they could do with it. It drove them crazy, like an in-season mare without a stallion to satisfy her body’s natural demands. No, this girl was young, and she probably had a pa following from not too far back with a double-barreled shotgun loaded with double-ought buck.

  But then those thoughts slithered away like baby snakes in the rain as the girl set her empty cup down on the log, stood, and faced him. She raised her hands and swept her hair back behind her head. The movement caused her shirt to draw back tightly against the twin cones of her breasts, which jutted toward him.

  Her eyes blazed down at him as she tied her hair in a loose knot. Feeling jittery and heavy in the belly and loins, Longarm forgot his resolution of only a few seconds ago. He tossed his own cup down and rose and placed his hands on her breasts.