Longarm and the desert r.., p.1
Longarm and the Desert Rose, page 1
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
NO PLACE TO HIDE
A bullet buzzed past his hair, struck one of the empty canteens, and sent it spinning off the wall.
Longarm let his instincts do the reacting for him. He flung himself to the left in a rolling dive. Even as he was rolling over on the sand, his hand found the butt of his Colt and palmed the revolver out of the cross-draw rig on his left hip.
But there was nothing to shoot at. He saw nothing but sand, no matter where he looked. The buzzard could be up there on the far side of any of those dunes.
With a vicious whine, another bullet whipped past his ear. Longarm couldn’t be sure, but he thought this shot came from a different direction. He saw a puff of white smoke from the crest of a dune to his left and snapped a shot toward it. Then a fourth slug smacked into the wall just to his right.
They had him in a crossfire.
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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 DESERT ROSE
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Jove edition / January 2003
Copyright © 2003 by Penguin Putnam Inc.
All rights reserved.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-17929-1
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Chapter 1
He dreamed, and in his dream he was making love with the woman again. Her name was Elizabeth, and she had thick, dark brown hair that fell in wings around her lovely face. As she lowered her head over his groin, he ran his fingers through her hair. When she opened her mouth and took his erect shaft into it, his hands tightened a little on her head in reaction before he remembered that most women didn’t like that and forced his fingers to relax. She closed her lips around his throbbing member and ran her tongue around the crown, then used the tip to toy with the opening and lap up the juices that already were welling from him. He closed his eyes and lay back to enjoy the delicious sensations she was creating within him.
For several minutes, he didn’t move, just sprawled there on the bed and let Elizabeth work her magic with her lips and tongue and the fingers that stole to the inside of his thighs to massage and caress the muscles there. Lazily, he reached out and placed a hand on her back, moving it up and down and enjoying the smooth sleekness of her skin under his palm. She was as skilled at what she was doing as any woman he had ever met, and he had bedded a good many over the years, both before and since leaving West-by-God Virginia to come to the frontier following the Late Unpleasantness.
It would have been easy just to wait for his climax to overwhelm him and spill his seed in that hot mouth of hers, but that wasn’t what he wanted. She deserved more than that. So, after a while, an interval of some of the most tantalizing pleasure he had ever known, he grasped her shoulders and urged her up over him. She didn’t argue. She was smiling as she let the thick pole of male flesh slide out of her mouth. Moving with catlike grace, she straddled his hips and poised there for a moment, letting him look up at her and drink in her beauty. His hands went to her apple-sized breasts and he cupped the mounds of warm, creamy femininity. His thumbs stroked the hard, cherry red nipples. Elizabeth’s eyes were dark and hooded with desire. She reached underneath her, closed her fingers around his erection, and guided it into her as she sank down on him. The pace of their joining was deliberate, as if they both wanted to make this coupling last and draw as much joy from it as they could.
“My God,” she breathed. “There’s so much of you to take in. But I want it all, every last bit.”
Finally, his shaft was embedded all the way inside her. She gave a long sigh of satisfaction, obviously pleased with herself that she had been able to take him. For almost a minute, she sat there, motionless, her eyes half-closed, while he continued toying with her breasts and let her grow accustomed to the feeling of fullness he created in her. Then her hips began to move, slowly at first but then with a growing urgency and speed. She leaned forward, resting her lithe, petite body on his broad, muscular chest and found his mouth with hers. Her lips were open, ready for his tongue to slide between them and penetrate her for the second time. Her hips bounced up and down, and he met her thrusts with his own, his hips rising from the mattress and then falling as he drove his shaft in and out of her.
Their level of passion was so high, so intense, that there was no way either of them could stand it for very long. Within minutes they were breathing hard and thrusting and driving and clutching at each other. He reached down and caught hold of her hips to steady her as he pounded into her, his massive organ penetrating deeper and deeper as excitement made her womanhood open even more to him. His groin was drenched with the dew that emanated from her. They were as slick and hot and wet as a man and a woman could be.
She shuddered and cried out as her culmination washed over her. He froze where he was, letting the buttery muscles of her femininity quake around him, and that sensation sent him plummeting over the edge as well. His seed raced from the heavy sacs between his legs up his shaft and then erupted into her in white-hot spurts. He emptied himself inside her, leaving him drained and gasping for breath. She went limp atop him, every bit as satiated as he was.
It just didn’t get any better than that. No how, no way.
But then, through the golden afterglow of the dream, pain hit him, stabs of agony that shot through his body and made it jerk and spasm. The heat of lovemaking went away, to be replaced by a grim coldness that sent shivers up and down his spine. With the pain and the cold came awareness. The dream had been nice, but it was only a dream. He would never make love to Elizabeth again.
She was dead. And that bastard Culhane had killed her.
He sank back against the pillow and felt a blanket underneath him. Trying to force the pain to the back of his mind, Longarm opened his eyes and wondered where the hell he was—and who that woman was who had both hands wrapped around his talleywhacker.
The sky outside had been gray with the approach of dawn that morning when Sarah Hodge heard her dog barking behind the house. Dobie was the sort that barked at everything and nothing, but Sarah thought there was some extra urgency in the sound this time. Snakes crawled up from time to time in this settlement where the high desert turned into the mountains, short fat diamondback rattlers that packed plenty of venom in their bite. Sarah knew that dogs, unlike humans, seldom died from snakebites, but she didn’t want to take a chance that Dobie had some rattler coiled up in a corner, ready to strike. He was a small dog. She got out of bed in her cotton nightgown, shrugged into a robe and went out of the bedroom and through the kitchen to the back door. Before opening the door, she picked up the Winchester that leaned in a nearby corner and levered a cartridge into the rifle’s chamber. She’d been able to shoot the head off a snake since she was twelve years old, and that was a decade in the past.
Sarah pulled open the doo
The barking sounded like it was coming from the shed where Sarah kept the mare that pulled her buggy. Dobie was really upset about something. Sarah moved down onto the split logs that formed the rear steps, then hesitated as she realized she was barefooted. If there was a snake crawling around, she didn’t want to go out there with no shoes on. She went back into the kitchen and placed the rifle on the butcher block. A pair of boots sat beside the door. She picked them up one by one and shook them out, checking for scorpions. None of the vicious little creatures fell out. Sarah jammed her feet into the boots, brushed her blond hair back away from her face with her fingers, and picked up the Winchester again. She probably looked a sight, she thought, her hair tangled from sleep, wearing nightclothes and boots and carrying a rifle. But nobody was liable to be up and about this early in the morning, so she really didn’t care. She went outside and walked across the yard toward the shed. A few beads of moisture clung to the sparse blades of grass. It got cold here at night, even in the summer like this, but the air was so dry hardly any dew formed.
“All right, Dobie, settle down,” Sarah said as she approached the shed. “Even if there’s a rattlesnake back there, there’s no need to pitch such a conniption fit.”
The dog kept on barking. Sarah shook her head and stepped around the corner of the shed.
She gasped and jerked back as she saw the dark figure leaning against the rear wall of the shed. The light wasn’t strong enough yet for her to be able to make out any details, but the shape was tall and broad and menacing. Sarah’s first thought was of the Cheyenne renegades who sometimes rode through the small strip of fertile ground that separated the desert from the mountains, but she could tell somehow that this man was not an Indian. He slumped against the wall as if he were exhausted or hurt or both. His head drooped forward, even though he was on his feet. Was he unconscious? He wasn’t moving. Sarah lifted the rifle anyway, just in case he did move, and said, “Who are you? What do you want here?”
The man lifted his head a little. He had heard her. He wasn’t unconscious after all. But he wasn’t coherent, either. The best he could do was let out a groan.
Sarah wished she had a lamp. A cottonwood tree grew beside the shed, making the predawn shadows back here even thicker. She sidled away, keeping the rifle trained on the stranger. “If you’re hurt, I’ll try to help you,” she said. “I can go get Doc Barkley. But you’ve got to come out here where I can get a look at you.”
With both hands braced against the wall to steady him, the man took a couple of steps forward. Then his balance deserted him and he swayed forward. Too weak to catch himself, he toppled to the ground, groaning again when he landed hard on his side. Sarah gave a small, involuntary cry as she flinched away from him. In only seconds, though, her natural boldness—that bane of her parents’ existence when she was younger—asserted itself, and she moved toward the man as he lay on the ground near the shed.
“Don’t you move,” she told him. “I’ve got a Winchester here, and I know how to use it. I don’t mind using it, either.”
If he heard her, he gave no sign of it. Maybe now he really had passed out, she told herself as she approached.
The sun was peeking over the horizon now, and her eyes had adjusted to the weak light. She saw that the man was dressed like a cowhand, in denim trousers and jacket and a butternut shirt. The fabric of that shirt showed a dark, ragged stain where the stranger’s jacket hung open. He had no hat, and his boots were too low-heeled to be a cowboy’s. A leather gunbelt was strapped around his waist. He was lying on his right side, so she could see that the holster attached to the belt rode on the left, and a pistol with plain walnut grips was snugged into the holster with the butt facing forward for a cross-draw.
So the stranger was some sort of gunman, not a cowboy, Sarah told herself. No doubt he had been wounded in a fight with some other pistolero. Not that too many of that sort of men came through here. Bell City was small and peaceful, a haven from the violence that seemed to infest so much of the rest of the frontier. Sheriff Clyde Hampton didn’t stand for interlopers making trouble in his town.
The proximity of the Circle C ranch helped, too. The crew of the Circle C was a salty bunch, and they would have come down like a ton of bricks on any troublemaker they encountered.
What she ought to do, Sarah told herself, was to back away from this wounded man and run down to Sheriff Hampton’s office. The sheriff could get Doc Barkley and come along to deal with this. That was their job, after all, dealing with violent men and the damage they did to each other.
The little dog was still barking, and the shrill sounds finally got on Sarah’s nerves. “Dobie, hush up!” she snapped. He gave her an offended look and backed away, then turned back toward the stranger and growled.
Sarah shivered. It would be plenty hot later, but right now there was a definite chill in the air. The wounded man had lost enough blood so that he probably felt even colder.
She made up her mind. She would get the man into the house and then fetch the sheriff. Anyway, she couldn’t very well go running down the main street of Bell City in her nightclothes. She would get dressed first, too.
She reached down with the barrel of the Winchester and prodded the shoulder of the wounded man. He didn’t stir, didn’t even make a sound this time. Sarah leaned the rifle against the wall of the shed and bent over to slide her hands under his arms. She grunted with effort as she tried to lift some of his weight off the ground. He was a big man. Not fat by any means, actually sort of rangy except for those broad shoulders, but he packed plenty of meat on his long, tall frame. She eased his shoulders down and went around to take his feet instead. That worked better, although she worried about what dragging his torso over the ground might do to the wound in his side.
The sun was up, a blinding red-orange orb over the desert to the east, by the time Sarah got the stranger to the back door. None of her neighbors were out and about yet, though, or she would have called to them for help. She couldn’t drag the man up the steps. She had to push and pull him into a sitting position beside them and sort of roll him up and through the door. Then, she was able to take his feet and drag him into her bedroom. She frowned at the smears of blood he left behind on the plank flooring. She would have a devil of a time getting those stains up.
She spread an old but clean blanket on the bed before she lifted him onto it, so that he wouldn’t get blood on the sheets. Raising him onto the bed was the hardest chore yet, and when she was finished with it she was breathing hard and had beads of sweat on her face despite the cool, early morning air in the room. The clicking of toenails on the floor behind her told her that Dobie had followed her into the room. The little dog whined.
“I know, I know,” Sarah said. “You don’t have to tell me it was foolish of me to bring him in here. You know what Brent always says, that I’m too softhearted for my own good. But I couldn’t just leave him lying out there on the ground. I’ll get dressed now and go find Sheriff Hampton.”
She started to turn away from the bed, but then she turned back and reached down to unbuckle the gunbelt. She felt uncomfortable with the man wearing it in her bed. She was able to work it out from under him. Coiling the belt, she placed it and the holster and the gun on a dressing table across the room.
She went to her wardrobe and opened it, then hesitated again. She felt a little odd about getting undressed with this strange man right here in the room with her, even though he seemed to be out cold. Stepping over to the bed, she looked down at him, studying his face intently to make sure he wasn’t shamming. It was a strong face, handsome in a rough-hewn way, mostly planes and angles and high cheekbones that gave him a vaguely Indian look. His skin had been weathered and darkened by years of exposure to the elements until it was the same brown color as old saddle leather. He wore a mustache, a thick, luxurious growth that swept out to both sides of his mouth and curled upward, reminding Sarah of the horns of a longhorn steer. His hair was dark brown, like the mahogany of a piano. After a few moments, Sarah decided that he really was unconscious. She went back to the wardrobe, took off the wrapper, then pulled the nightgown over her head. A smile tugged at the comers of her mouth. She must have looked pretty humorous, standing there naked except for a pair of man’s boots.
