Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) (2 page)

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.

He reached up to cup one of those breasts.

“No,” she chided him, pulling back slightly and brushing his hand away. “I'll do the touching. You just lay there and let me clean you.”

“You're killing me.”

She showed her fine, white teeth. “I know.”

“Devil.”

She chuckled again huskily, then gestured for him to turn over. Wetting the sponge, she dribbled water down his back, along his spine, then scrubbed every inch of his back and the back of his neck and behind his ears, and then his backside—even the bottoms of his feet. It must have taken her nearly a half hour, though to Longarm—with that hickory knot hardening in his throat—it seemed even longer. While her slow, damp caresses were infinitely soothing, his body hungered for her, his hard-on throbbing against the bed beneath him.

Finally, there was the soft plunk of the sponge being dropped into the bowl. She touched his shoulder, and he rolled over onto his back in time to see her rise from the bed and dump the water from the bowl into the chamber pot beside the night table.

Another nice view of her black snatch opening pinkly beneath the round, pale globe of her delightful bottom.

“Cynthia, Christ,” he rasped, curling his toes in desperation.

“Just you wait, mister.” She smiled at him over her shoulder as she splashed more water into the bowl. Then she returned to the bed, sat down on its edge once more, dipped the sponge in the bowl, and touched the sponge to the head of his hard-on. Longarm drew a short, quick breath. She ran the sponge down the iron-hard organ's underside to his balls.

He drew another fast, shallow breath.

She lowered her head, so her hair slithered across his thigh, tickling him, and touched her tongue to the underside of her upper lip as she slowly, deftly, torturously ran the sponge up and down and all around his throbbing dong.

Longarm's heart turned somersaults.

When she was finished, she returned the sponge to the bowl. She dumped the bowl out in the chamber pot and returned the bowl to the washstand. Longarm's cock was both hot from the blood coursing through it and cool and damp from the water Cynthia had washed it with. He lay there as though tied down, his heart thumping slowly now in his chest, distant bells of excruciating desire tolling in his ears.

“Now, then,” Cynthia said.

She stood beside the bed, lifted the fishnet shift up and over her head, and let it fall to the floor at her feet. Her hair fluttered like black feathers around her shoulders and the swollen globes of her breasts.

Longarm swallowed against the hard knot in his throat.

He stared up at her—his buxom, beguiling, cobalt-eyed executioner.

Slowly, she sank back down on the edge of the bed, crossed her fine legs, twisted her torso around and lowered her warm, soft breasts to his thighs. She wrapped both her hands around the base of his waiting member, and closed her hot, wet mouth of the swollen mushroom head.

“Oh, boy.” Longarm flexed his toes and ground his shoulders into the sheets as she swallowed him. “Oh . . . oh,
boy . . .
”

Longarm awoke at dawn, only an hour or so after she finally let him sleep, and only long enough to glimpse her dressing in the shadowy room, clothing that magnificent long-legged, round-hipped, full-bosomed body, tossing her long black hair.

The wind kicked up by her movements smelled like spring roses.

He'd drifted off for a time, exhausted from the long train ride from Kansas and the near-savage coupling with the delectable and tireless Miss Larimer—three times after her initial French lesson!—and was pulled up from his slumber once more when she kissed him lingeringly on the mouth, then giggled as she squeezed his already sore and chafed old member.

Just as the stalwart beast between his legs started to come alive—like a grumpy, sleepy bear stirring instinctively to head back out on the hunt—she pecked his cheek, laughed raspily, nibbled his ear, told him she'd see him again in a month or two, when she returned from Paris or wherever the hell she was off to with her sketches of him in the buff, and left.

“Cynthia!” he cried, jerking up in the bed and shooting his anxious gaze at the door.

He gulped. He was too late. She'd left when it was still almost dark, at least an hour ago. Now saffron sunlight filtered through the ash and maple trees that the city of Denver had planted along the street outside his boardinghouse on the poor side of Cherry Creek. Shadows were long. Dust motes filtered through the prisms of light angling through the soot-streaked door panes and the window over the small eating table at which he'd never actually sat down to a meal.

The indigo-haired she-tiger, portfolio of his naked pecker in hand, was probably heading into the far eastern reaches of Colorado now, maybe to Julesburg already, on her journey back to New York, where she'd display her sketches and oil paintings of him in the nude. She'd used him for a model last summer along the Arkansas River, up near the picturesque little mining town of Buena Vista, a two-day's train ride west of Denver. Somehow, she'd coaxed him out of every stitch of clothing, and now he, in all his nakedness, was on his way to the most populace city in the country—one of the largest in the world!

Oh, Lord—what if his boss, Billy Vail, learned that his most senior of federal law bringers was on full display in some highfalutin art gallery patronized by half the mucky-mucks on the East Coast? Or, worse yet, what if Cynthia's regal, legendary, filthy rich clan headed up by General William Larimer himself, and the kindly, pious, albeit perpetually befuddled Aunt May, found out he'd been exposing himself to his favorite debutante in the tall and rocky when Longarm was only supposed to have been the girl's unofficial
bodyguard
?

Two things settled the lawman down.

One—Cynthia had likely been correct when she'd asserted that no one who knew the Larimers, let alone Chief Billy Vail, would ever see the art in the first place, let alone recognize the burly, naked gent lounging in the verdant grass along the river, his big cock in repose across his thigh.

Two—the sun shining so brightly meant that Longarm was late for his nine o'clock meeting with said boss, Chief Vail!

Longarm glanced at the small clock hanging above his bed. Yep, he was late, all right. A whole five minutes already.

The big lawman shoved a wing of his dark brown hair back off his forehead, brushed a hand across his longhorn mustache that bore not one fleck of gray despite all his professional stresses and wild travails, and scrambled out of the bed still warm from the girl's supple, eager body. He dug around in his secondhand armoire for fresh clothes, duplicates of those he'd torn off last night in his haste to fuck the general's princess.

Then he scooped his saddlebags, saddle, rifle, and war sack off the top landing of the stairs outside his front door, and kicked his McClellan saddle through the open door and into his flat. He preferred the cavalry saddle to the bulkier western stockmen's saddle, but surely he wouldn't need it today. Billy wouldn't send him out of town on assignment the morning after he'd just returned from a three-week sojourn fighting back robbers out on the Kansas flats!

He knew that wasn't true, but he decided to risk it, for he was too tired from the journey, the fuck-tussle, and the abbreviated rest, to haul the heavy load up Colfax to the Federal Building.