Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Teaser chapter

  A Little Taste of Hell . . .

  Longarm stepped forward, thumbing the Winchester’s hammer back to full cock. “Hold it there, you mushy-nutted dung beetles!”

  The man behind the rain barrel twisted around toward Longarm, bringing both his pearl-gripped pistols to bear, and snarling like a frenzied wildcat. Longarm’s rifle barked. The man popped off both his pistols into the dirt between his spread black boots, and slammed his head back against the rain barrel so hard that Longarm could hear the sharp crack of his skull.

  The man with the whiskey bottle out in the street turned toward Longarm, dropped the bottle, and slapped his hands to the two big Remingtons bristling on his leather-clad thighs. He must have forgotten that he’d fired the bottle’s wick, however. He hadn’t gotten either pistol clear of its holster before the bottle exploded with a whoosh as loud as a dragon’s belch.

  The bottle shattered, spraying the man from boots to knees with burning whiskey.

  Longarm held fire. No point in wasting a cartridge . . .

  DON’T MISS THESE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SERIES FROM THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts

  Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him . . . the Gunsmith.

  LONGARM by Tabor Evans

  The popular long-running series about Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long—his life, his loves, his fight for justice.

  SLOCUM by Jake Logan

  Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel.

  BUSHWHACKERS by B. J. Lanagan

  An action-packed series by the creators of Longarm! The rousing adventures of the most brutal gang of cutthroats ever assembled—Quantrill’s Raiders.

  DIAMONDBACK by Guy Brewer

  Dex Yancey is Diamondback, a Southern gentleman turned con man when his brother cheats him out of the family fortune. Ladies love him. Gamblers hate him. But nobody pulls one over on Dex . . .

  WILDGUN by Jack Hanson

  The blazing adventures of mountain man Will Barlow—from the creators of Longarm!

  TEXAS TRACKER by Tom Calhoun

  J.T. Law: the most relentless—and dangerous—manhunter in all Texas. Where sheriffs and posses fail, he’s the best man to bring in the most vicious outlaws—for a price.

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LONGARM AND THE DOOMED BEAUTY

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Jove edition / December 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54597-3

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  Chapter 1

  Weary from travel, Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis P. Long, known to friend and foe far and wide as Longarm, tramped up the outside stairs of his second-story flat in a neat, frame rooming house on the poor side of Cherry Creek and froze in his boots. He stared down past the knob and lock plate of the green-painted pine door, his tired heart picking up a reluctant warning rhythm in his chest.

  The half length of stove match he’d wedged between the door and the frame had fallen to the sill. It lay there on the painted oak, its red sulfur tip and ragged opposite end staring up at him in mute testament to surefire danger.

  The federal lawman always wedged a matchstick in his door when he left his flat, so he’d know if anyone had come prowling around, possibly intending to lie in wait for him inside and gun him when he wandered in, weary from his latest assignment.

  He’d given his landlady strict orders not to enter his flat when he was away. He did his own cleaning, which wouldn’t be enough for some folks but was as much as he needed, since he was gone more often than he was home—his home essentially being the owlhoot trail—and he wasn’t what anyone would call particular about such things, anyway.

  He raised his eyes to the door panel two feet in front of him. His skin crawled with the half-conscious expectation of a sudden shotgun blast from within blowing a pumpkin-sized hole in the door and burrowing a similar hole through the dead center of his chest and painting the stair rail behind him with his own blood and shredded bits of his ticker.

  Longarm swallowed.

  He touched the end of his tongue to the underside of his upper lip, which was capped with a brushy, dark-brown mustache upswept in the longhorn style. Very slowly, he took one step back, wincing, hoping that his low-heeled cavalry stovepipes did not set a board of the staircase to squawking and giving him away—never mind that anyone inside likely would have heard him tramping with weary heaviness up the stairs only a few seconds ago . . .

  Just as slowly, holding his breath, he let the saddlebags riding his left shoulder slide down to his elbow. From there, he lowered the bags soundlessly to the floor at his feet. In his right hand, he held his sheathed Winchester Model ’73 repeating rifle on his right sho
ulder. Pressing his tongue harder against his upper lip, and sucking a short, silent breath, he lifted the rifle off his shoulder and leaned it against the rail to his right.

  The carbine was too much gun for tight quarters.

  Stepping back to the right side of the door frame, and out of the way of a possible blast from inside, he reached across his washboard-flat belly clad in a blue wool shirt and brown wool vest and unsnapped the keeper thong from over the hammer of the double-action Frontier model Colt .44 holstered for the cross draw on his left hip. He slipped the gun out of the holster, and held it at waist level, aimed at the door.

  He’d just started to reach for the knob to see if the door was locked when a sudden whoosh rose from behind him. Pivoting, he gave a startled grunt and brought the Colt up, aiming over the rail and into the side yard of his landlady’s house. The bird was a shadow rising amongst the poplars and maples and angling over the cinder-paved sidewalk and the sandstone street. It disappeared, but a moment later, from the direction the bird had flown, an owl cooed.

  The hair along the back of the lawman’s neck pricked.

  An owl. The Injuns of most tribes said an owl heard at night was the darkest of omens.

  “Shit,” Longarm muttered, swinging back to the door.

  He reached forward, slowly turned the knob. His heart fluttered when the knob kept turning. It wasn’t locked.

  Which meant someone was waiting for him inside.

  Crouching and tensing, shifting his feet slightly, he continued to turn the knob. It clicked. The door fell slack in its frame and a one-inch gap shone between the frame and the door. The gap shone with flickering umber lamplight.

  Not only was someone inside, but they were apparently making themselves to home. At a little after midnight, no less!

  He sprang off his heels, hammered the door wide with his left shoulder. Throwing himself forward and down and hitting the floor on his belly, he heard the door slam against the wall with a bang. He looked up raising the Colt, which he held tight in his right fist.

  His bed was just ahead to his right. There was something on the bed—round and covered in some thin fabric. Longarm blinked, frowned, raised his head farther.

  A woman’s bare ass stared down at him from the edge of the bed. Not quite bare but covered in just enough of a see-through shift to make the definition only slightly negligible. It wasn’t covered nearly enough to hide the fact that it was a very nice, tight, round, pale ass tapering out wonderfully from slender hips. An ass that, at that moment, moved. The pink bottoms of two bare feet that also shone at the bed’s edge but about four feet down from the ass moved, too.

  Longarm looked around to make sure no one else was in his small, shabbily furnished flat. Then he rose up onto his knees and stared at the black-haired beauty on the bed. She was just now twisting toward him and, groaning groggily, lifting her head. She frowned, slitting her cobalt-blue eyes framed by a delightful tangle of long, straight, indigo hair.

  Longarm’s voice caught in his chest. “Cynthia?”

  “Custis?” She sounded like she had a burr in her throat. “What on . . . ?” She rolled onto her back and propped herself on her elbows, blinking her eyes to clear them as she looked from the kneeling lawman to the door standing half open behind him. “What on earth are you doing down there?”

  Longarm lowered the pistol and rose from his knees, blinking his eyes as if to clear them but glad that the image of the naked young woman on the bed before him did not go away. She wore the sheerest of sheer black wraps—so sheer it appeared only a shadow spread across her supple, curvaceous, full-breasted, trim-waisted, round-hipped body. It came down to mid-thigh but did nothing to hide the furred V between her legs.

  “What on earth are you doin’ up there?” he said around the hard knot growing in his throat. “Tryin’ to give a man a heart stroke one way, and then . . . another . . .”

  Cynthia slid up in bed and, spreading her knees innocently but giving Longarm a not very innocent look at sundry private parts, fisted the sleep from her eyes like a little girl awakened from her nap. “You’re so late, Custis. I thought you’d be here hours ago.”

  “How’d you know when I was getting in?”

  “I stopped by the Federal Building and charmed the information out of that dapper little man in your boss’s outer office.”

  “Ah, Henry.” Longarm chuckled and dropped to his knees beside the bed. He wrapped his hands around the ankles of Denver’s favorite debutante, Cynthia being a niece of the town’s moneyed founding father, General William Larimer, and feasted his eyes on the girl’s all-but-naked body displayed so richly before him. “Sorry about that. The train was held up by a wildfire between here and the Kansas line. Damn, how long you gonna be in town?”

  “I’m leaving in the morning,” she complained, pressing her rich lips into a delightful pout. “First thing.”

  She lowered her hands from her face and smiled suddenly, displaying all of those perfect, white teeth. Didn’t rich folks ever get cavities?

  “Custis, guess what?” She kicked her legs straight out and sandwiched his big, mustached face with strong, narrow hands. “A studio in New York City bought several of my watercolors as well as the oils I painted of you in the mountains—remember the ones, sans attire?—and they want me to bring them more! So I came back here to fetch the ones I’ve stored at Uncle William and Aunt May’s, and I’m bringing them all back to New York with me for my very own personal showing!”

  Longarm gulped. “You mean my pecker’s gonna be on display in New York City?”

  Cynthia tittered and pressed those incredible lips to his broad, sunburned nose. “Don’t worry. I don’t think anyone in New York City will recognize you. You’re only famous west of the Mississippi. I think our secret”—she dropped her eyes toward his crotch—“is safe.”

  “At least, for now. Cynthia, what if someone who knows Uncle William and Aunt May buys those paintings you did of me in the raw, my pecker at half-mast because you were sitting there painting me in practically nothing at all—and they hang ’em somewhere dear Uncle William and precious Aunt May will see ’em?”

  She stared at him. “I . . . guess I never thought of that. But not to worry, Custis. No one who knows anyone in my family is interested in my kind of art, I’m afraid. They buy only the staid and proper paintings, like those of Mr. Whistler and Mr. Sargent. They’d never dream of owning anything contemporary, and certainly nothing that depicts a brawny, naked man in the Colorado mountains with his big cock on full display !” She tugged on his ears, laughing. “Speaking of which . . .”

  Longarm chuckled then, too, knowing she had a point. He ran his hands up and down her smooth, bare thighs and had to force himself to rise from the floor. “Hold on,” he said, shrugging out of his brown frock coat dusted with coal ash from his recent train ride. “I’d best try to scrub some o’ the travel grime off this old, tired carcass.”

  “Let me help you with that.”

  “Huh?”

  She dropped her long legs over the side of the bed and rose, shaking her black hair back from her eyes. “You get out of those dirty clothes and lay down. I’m going to give you a sponge bath you’ll remember on your deathbed.”

  Longarm watched as she turned her all-but-nude deliciousness away from him, and strode over to the washstand on which a cheap tin bowl and ewer sat. He had a bucket of water on the floor beside the stand, which he kept nearly filled for quick bathing purposes. As Cynthia bent over to pick up the bucket by its wire handle, giving him a view that would also be remembered on his deathbed, he felt a hard knot swell in his throat.

  Humming to herself and casting him flirtatious looks over her shoulder, Cynthia poured water into the bowl. He jerked his string tie off, then lifted his blue wool shirt over his head; to hell with the buttons.

  He tossed the shirt onto the floor, then kicked out of his low-heeled, mule-eared cavalry boots that fit his feet like old gloves. Standing, he shucked quickly out of his
brown tweed trousers and balbriggans that had shrunk from so many washings that they fit his tall, brawny, sun-seared body like a second skin.

  “My, my,” Cynthia cooed as she carried the washbowl over to the bed, “you certainly are one fine hunk of a man, Custis Long.”

  “Yeah, you, too,” he said, scuttling backward onto the bed and resting his head and back against the plain wooden headboard.

  She glanced at him, arching a brow.

  “I mean,” he said thickly, watching her heavy, pale, cherry-tipped breasts swaying around inside the black fishnet wrap, “you’re . . . well, you know what I mean.”

  Cynthia gave a husky chuckle as she sat down on the edge of the bed and wrung a sponge out in the bowl, her eyes trailing across his left thigh to his full, engorged cock bobbing at full mast between the thick, dark tangle of hair between his legs. She leaned forward and touched her lips very gently to the tip of the iron-hard member, setting Apache war lances of pure pleasure rippling around under Longarm’s hide, like worms under a log.

  “Now,” she said, straightening her back and running the sponge down over the top of his left thigh, “let’s get you civilized, shall we?”

  Her voice was deeply sexy and raspily alluring.

  Longarm groaned as she worked, slowly bathing him as one would bathe a child—slowly, soothingly, cooing to him in an almost motherly tone and wringing out the sponge after every few caresses.

  When she finished with his left leg, she washed his feet and worked her way up his right leg to his crotch. She gave his cock another slow, soft, but all-too-brief kiss, stoking the flames inside him once more, then, smiling beguilingly, she set to work bathing his arms and his belly.

  Longarm lay back against the pillow, feeling every muscle turn to butter. Every muscle, that was, except for the one that stood at full attention between his legs, waiting there, eager for more attention beyond the fleeting, teasing kisses from the beautiful woman crouching over him on the bed, her full breasts sloping toward him, a bud-like, tender nipple occasionally brushing his arm or leg or his belly or hip, silently enflaming him.