Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) (3 page)

The girl stood waiting, sort of half-smiling, at the bottom of the stairs at the back of the room.

Longarm followed her up. He stared unabashedly at her blue jean–clad ass. Outside of Cynthia Larimer's ass, it was the best ass he'd ever seen.

It was just what the doctor had ordered.

Longarm followed the girl to a door at the end of the second-story hall. She paused and fished a key out of her gray denim trousers that fit her snugly, revealing the delicious curve of her hips and the tautness of her long, slender legs. “That was my father's assistant, Captain Sidney Ashton-Green,” she said in her sexy, husky voice, looking Longarm up and down once more. “I don't believe anyone has ever spoken to him so . . . carelessly . . . since he was in grade school.”

“'Bout time then,” Longarm said, following the girl into the room.

She closed the door and turned the key in the lock. “Take your coat off. Best take your shirt off, too.”

A red lamp burned on the room's dresser. It was a small room. The brass bed occupied most of it, set against the back wall in which a window was shuttered against the night. A charcoal brazier blazed in a corner. The room smelled slightly of cherries and talcum—a feminine smell. Longarm drew a deep draft of it into his lungs. He'd been on the trail of the prisoners who'd escaped from the federal pen in Julesburg for six weeks, and he hadn't seen, much less bedded, a woman in that time.

His loins were heavy with the need. Heavier now as he stared at the rich, honey-blond hair curling down over the collar of the man's wool plaid shirt the girl wore, behind which her breasts jutted, proud and full.

She'd gone to the dresser, and now as she turned up the lamp, she glanced over her shoulder at him. She caught him staring at her, smoke from the cigar billowing around his head. She smiled, blinked slowly, and turned away. “I said take your clothes off, mister.”

Longarm grinned around the cigar and leaned his rifle against the wall by the door. “You said take my coat and shirt off.”

“Did I?”

She went over to the washstand at the foot of the bed and poured water into the basin. She added a splash of tanglefoot from a labeled bottle—labels on liquor bottles were few and far between this far out in the high and rocky—standing next to the basin and grabbed a cloth off a nail in the wall paneled in vertical, unadorned pine planks. Splashing some of the liquor onto the rag, she turned to face him.

“But why waste time, really?” she said. “We'll be pulling out early in the morning.”

Longarm shrugged out of his sheepskin mackinaw, hung it on a spike in the room's closed door. He unbuckled his cartridge belt with its single, cross-draw holster and double-action Frontier Colt .44. He draped the rig over a front bedpost and buckled it. The Colt was never far out of its owner's reach, and it wouldn't be tonight, for he knew that the escaped prisoners had been in these mountains to meet up with members of their old gang.

The girl leaned back against the dresser, holding the bottle in one hand, the rag in the other, watching him with catlike eyes, her rich, red lips parted just enough so that he could see the gleaming, white teeth. The lamp and the charcoal brazier filled the room with dim, umber light and dancing shadows, and it illuminated little gold flecks in her hazel eyes.

Longarm hung his brown tweed frock coat on another bedpost and then kicked out of his boots as he pulled his shirttails out of his pants. He unbuttoned the blue woolen garment and tossed it to the girl. She smiled as she caught it out of the air, and the movement mussed her hair attractively as she coolly threw the shirt onto a near armchair.

A groan sounded from behind the wall flanking her. Longarm froze, frowned.

“What the hell was that?”

“Murphy,” the woman said. “Feelin' poorly. We're on the way to the village of Crazy Kate, takin' him to see a sawbones. We heard they had one over there.”

Longarm knew the village. He was heading there himself. The town, mostly populated by Romanian immigrants, and which had once been called New Romania, had a town marshal and a jail tight enough to house his prisoner while he scoured the nearby ridges for the other members of Goldie's Gang.

The groan came again, raspy and anguished.

“What happened to him?” Longarm asked as he sat on the bed to peel his whipcord trousers down his legs.

“Wolf bit him,” the girl said, as she set the bottle and the cloth on the dresser and began unbuttoning her shirt, behind which her breasts were rising and falling sharply.

“Bad?”

“Bit his leg. Torn it open pretty good, but he should make it.” She shrugged out of the shirt to reveal a thin chemise and corset beneath. Her arms were long and the same skin tone as her face—polished ivory.

Longarm felt his longhandles grow tight across the crotch. He flung his pants on the floor and stripped his longhandle top down his arms and then peeled it down his waist. It had shrunk so that it fit his big, hard frame like a second skin. He peeled the bottoms down his legs. His cock bounced free and stood at attention, the head swollen. He heard the girl draw a breath.

Longarm looked at his bloody right side. The bullet had clipped him about three inches above his hip.

“Here,” the girl said, and tossed him a towel. “Hold that against it so you don't get blood all over the place.”

Longarm pressed the towel to his side while the girl continued undressing slowly before him.

Naked, he leaned back on the bed, propped on his elbows, and watched her remove the chemise. When she'd gotten the corset untied, her breasts fairly leaped from the tight confines, and the corset dropped to the floor at her long, pale feet. She shook her hair back, though some of it remained curling onto the tops of her breasts, and it delightfully jounced across her shoulders.

Her nipples stood up like ripe cherries.

Longarm sighed. His cock grew harder.

Footsteps sounded in the hall. There was the thud of someone dropping something in front of the girl's door.

“That'd be my whiskey,” Longarm said.

“You stay there.” Catherine walked to the door and opened it without any sign of modesty. She bent forward, giving Longarm a view from behind that made his heart turn a somersault in his chest. She hauled his saddlebags inside, dropped them on a chair, and handed him his bottle of Maryland rye. Then she fetched her own bottle and set both of them on the floor at Longarm's feet.

He watched her full breasts slope downward then jostle as she straightened and fetched the washbowl from the stand. The water steamed.

“I had the houseboy heat some water for my sponge,” she said, “just before you arrived.”

He popped the cork on the rye and offered her the first sip. She took it then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and returned the bottle to him.

“Don't let me ruin your bath,” he said, and took a long pull of the rye.

“You already have.” She splashed more tanglefoot on the cloth. She tossed her head to throw her hair back, glanced casually at his cock, and said, “My, my . . . ,” as she sat on the edge of the bed beside him and began dabbing the cloth against the bloody burn in his side.

The whiskey felt like a porcupine raking up against the wound. He sucked a sharp breath and, still leaning on his elbows, threw his head back, as well, stretching his lips away from his teeth. He felt his cock start to dwindle. She saw it as well, and, while holding the burning cloth against the wound, leaned over his right thigh and dropped her mouth down over the head of his staff.

Her warm, silky mouth contrasted the burn in his side, and he flexed his toes and groaned as a complex tangle of pain and pleasure equaling near-euphoria rippled through him.

She lowered her mouth halfway down his cock, pressing the swollen head against the back of her throat, then lifted her head and smacked her lips as the shaft stood up tall and throbbing once again.

“That's better,” she said, and continued scrubbing his wound.

While she worked on the bullet burn with one hand, she fondled his cock very lightly with the other, running just the tips of her fingers up and down his cock and across his balls that sagged down over the edge of the bed.

“You really know how to torture a fella,” he rasped.

“Am I hurting you?”

Longarm took another deep swallow of rye. “Real bad.”

“Let me know if you'd like me to stop.”

He glanced down at her hand manipulating his iron-hard shaft and then at the cloth that had nearly cleaned all the dried blood from around the bullet graze in his side. “You seem like the sorta girl who finishes a job once she starts it.”

She smiled, then leaned down once more and took his long, hot, throbbing length into her mouth. She sucked him expertly until he came, spurting his jism down her throat while she held her mouth taut against him. She gagged as she swallowed, her own body quivering, scissoring her long, bare legs against him, her throat expanding and contracting against the head of his shaft and increasing his pleasure until he thought the head on his shoulders would explode, as well.

When he'd spent himself, she lifted her head, tossed her hair back in that deliciously sensual, female way of hers, swallowed, and drew a deep breath. “Christ, I thought I was going to drown!”

She took the bottle from him and took a long pull, not reacting to the harsh burn. Obviously, she was accustomed to hard liquor.

Longarm flopped back against the bed, his muscles still reverberating from the pleasure of her mouth. The preliminaries out of the way, she finished cleaning the wound and then bandaged it while he lay dozing dreamily beside her, taking occasional drinks from the bottle. When the bandage was secure, he rose to a sitting position, placed his hands on her shoulders, and lifted her up onto the bed, so that they were both lying lengthways on top of it.

“Aren't you tired?” she said, smiling and brusquely rubbing her hands through his close-cropped hair. “After being wounded and having, if you don't mind my saying, one hell of a blowjob?”

“No, but if you want to go to sleep, I can find a warm place in the barn.”

She gritted her teeth and drew his head down to hers. “Don't you dare not plunder me with that big organ of yours!” she laughed, reaching down between them and wrapping her hand around his cock, groaning with anticipation when she found it fully erect once more.

Longarm slid the organ of topic between her thighs, which she spread wide for him, grunting and groaning and hooking her hands around her ankles to spread her knees even wider. “Oh, gawd!” she rasped, tipping her head back on the pillow and arching her back. “You're gonna cleave me in
two
!”

He hammered against her for about fifteen minutes, mindless of the racket they were kicking up, with the bedsprings singing and the headboard slamming against the wall with each savage thrust, until he fairly exploded inside of her. She groaned through clenched teeth and released her ankles to dig her hands into his ass as they spasmed together, Longarm thrusting against her while she bucked up against him, welcoming his seed.

Fortunately, someone downstairs, in the drinking hall, was playing a raucous fiddle, and that probably covered most of the racket and even the girl's final, shrill love scream.

Longarm remained suspended over her on his outstretched arms and on the tips of his toes until his prick started softening. He pulled out of her and rolled to the side. She rolled against him, curling into a ball, her hair hiding her face.

“Oh, Christ, you plundered me, all right. I've never been assaulted by anything that big. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

Longarm lay on his back, catching his breath. Sweat glistened on his forehead. He extended a big hand to her. “Custis P. Long of the U.S. Marshals Service. You can call me Longarm. All my friends do.”

“Hi, Longarm,” the girl said. “I'm Catherine.”

“Pleased to meet you, Catherine.”

“Likewise.”

The girl remained in the fetal position beside him, her forehead and knees pressed against his side. Longarm heard the soft squawk of a floorboard and turned to the door. Beneath the door he could see light from the hall lanterns, and a shadow.

“Be right back,” he said, patting the girl's naked ass. “Just gonna stoke the stove a little. Gonna be a cold night.”

He dropped his feet to the floor, glanced at the shadow under the door again, and then slid his Colt from its holster and rose.

Longarm hid the Colt behind his back as he walked naked over to the brazier, crossing in front of the door, and then turned back to the door suddenly, wrapped his hand around the knob, raised the Colt, and drew the door open quickly.

He cocked the Colt as he hardened his jaw at the man kneeling before him, the man jerking his head back to stare up, aghast, at Longarm. He was the young fellow with the too closely set eyes from downstairs, who'd made the last effort to save Catherine's honor.

He'd just opened his mouth to say something, when Longarm grabbed his collar, jerked him forward into the room, and kicked him onto his back.

“Sidney!” the girl intoned from the bed, dragging a wad of quilt up and sort of writhing against it to cover herself. “What is the meaning of this?”

Longarm planted a bare knee on Sidney's chest, pinning the man to the floor, and pressed the barrel of the Colt against his crimson forehead. “I . . .” he said, his close-set eyes nearly crossing as he stared in horror at the cocked gun being held taut between two forked veins in his forehead. “I was . . . I . . . was . . .”

“Peepin' through the keyhole,” Longarm said.

“Sidney!”

“What you got to say for youself, Sidney?” Longarm growled. “You got about three seconds before I drill a pill through your worthless skull!”

Catherine came off the bed, holding a blanket in front of her, though it didn't cover much but her breasts and the silky blond hair between her perfectly sculpted thighs. “Longarm, please,” she said, chuckling. “The man you have flat on his back on the floor, and against whose head you are pressing your big pistol, is none other than President Johnson's favorite nephew, Sidney Ashton-Green! Do please let him go.”

“Yes, do let me go,” Sidney Ashton-Green said evenly, as he continued to stare up at the cocked Colt and the iron-hard, dark brown eyes of the angry lawman glaring down at him.

“This little pissant is the President's favorite nephew, eh?” Longarm said, depressing the Colt's hammer. “Well, in that case I won't kill him.” He pulled the gun away from Sidney's head and straightened until he was standing tall, though completely naked, over the cowering dandy, still keeping the pistol aimed at Ashton-Green's head. “I'll just shoot an ear off. That's the punishment for staring through keyholes in this neck of the woods. Maybe I'll send the ear back to the President, tell him he'd best keep his favorite nephew closer to home, lest something more important, like his entire
head
, gets mailed to the White House!”

Catherine set her lovely bare feet on the floor and rose from the bed, holding the inadequate covering before her and chuckled down at the man pressing his back flat against the floor. “Yes, an ear might be all right.”

“Please,” said Ashton-Green, his broad chest rising and falling behind his white cotton shirt and fancily stitched deerskin vest, trimmed with a gold watch chain. “I do apologize. I'd only heard Catherine bellowing so, and I was worried that something terrible was happening to her.”

“No, you weren't, Sidney,” Catherine said. “You knew we were fucking like a couple of wild horses, and you wanted to watch.” She looked at Longarm. “Forgive him, Longarm. He's a fool, but a harmless fool.”

“What the hell's he doing with your old man's hunting party?” Longarm asked in a disgusted tone.

“He's father's . . . well,
Captain
Sidney Ashton-Green, of the United States Cavalry . . . is Father's bodyguard.”

“Bodyguard?”

Ashton-Green glared up at Longarm now, as though realizing his life was no longer in danger, though his pride had been badly damaged. He pulled his vest down taut against his broad chest and glared up at the brawny, bronze-faced lawman, who stood a couple of inches taller and at least that much broader.

“Yes, bodyguard, you behemoth!” Ashton-Green's eyes flicked to Longarm's dong curving down against his thigh, and then he looked at the girl standing to his left and holding the blanket negligently against her at once coltish and voluptuous body. “And I don't think your father would approve of your cavorting with savages such as this, Catherine. Good Lord, what are you thinking? Look at him!”

“Yes,” Catherine said, lowering her eyes. “Look at him.” Her eyes blazed angrily when she lifted them again to Ashton-Green. “Shouldn't you be downstairs guarding my father or something?”

“I'll never understand it,” the bodyguard said, jerking his vest down again, cheeks flushed haughtily. “A girl of your station cavorting with . . . with the likes of this!”

He flung a hand toward Longarm and then strode quickly out of the room. Longarm glanced at the man's buckskin pants. They looked brand-new, and they sagged on his ass. Longarm slammed the door behind him.

“Sorry about that,” Catherine said. “He's in love with me.”

Longarm brushed the girl's chin with his thumb and kissed her sleek neck. “I have a feelin' just about every red-blooded man who runs into you falls head over heels.”

As he dropped his pistol back into its holster, she wrapped her hand around his shaft. “Or at least head over cock.” Rising up on her tiptoes, she tossed the blanket onto the bed and kissed his lips, pressing her full, firm breasts against his chest and then running her nose against his thick longhorn mustache.

“Come,” she said, turning away and drawing the bedcovers back. Let's crawl into bed and snuggle till we fall asleep. I'm absolutely exhausted. You nearly fucked me to death!”

As she got into the bed, Longarm walked over and stoked the charcoal brazier, for real this time, adding a shovelful of coal from a box behind it, and then climbed in beside the girl. He took a long pull from the rye bottle then returned it to the stand beside the bed.

“What's a general and his beautiful daughter doin' up here in these mountains in weather like this?” he asked, settling into the bed. “Ain't it warmer back East?”

Yawning, she squirmed against him and rested her cheek on his chest, playing with the curly brown hair sprouting around his heavy, muscular slabs. “Mm-hmmm. But we decided to spend Christmas this year out at Father's ranch near Sapinero. Father bought the spread six years ago, when he retired from President Lincoln's cabinet in Washington, but we've only visited a handful of times. He lets his foreman run the place, with our fifteen to twenty cowpunchers. I love it there, but Father's business interests lie in Washington and Virginia, and he can rarely get away.

“Anyway, he and several of his business cronies and I came out to spend Christmas here and got socked in by the heavy snows in the mountains to the east, forbidding travel. Father and his pals were getting bored . . . and drunk . . . lounging around the ranch lodge all day, when they came up with the lovely idea of riding up here into these beautiful, rugged mountains and seeing who could shoot the largest wolf.”

Longarm chuckled at the decadence of the leisure class.

“We heard that the wolves in the San Juans are especially large and wild.” The idea of large, wild beasts seemed to appeal to her. Longarm could feel her nipples coming alive against his side, and she slid her hand down his belly to tickle his cock and balls.

Longarm groaned. Despite how tired he was after the long ride through the snow, he felt himself coming alive again, as well. To get her mind off her hand, he said, “The others down there with the general are all rich, eastern mucky-mucks, I take it?”

“Mm-hmmm. Including Murphy, poor man. Murphy owns a couple of clipper ships and hunts foxes with princes over in England.” She smiled. “Do you like that?”

Longarm groaned again. She smiled, gazing up at him with those catlike hazel eyes. She kissed his chest and continued with: “Oh, yes. They're very powerful businessmen from back East. Most of them widowed, like Father, though Murphy's wife ran off with the Prince of Wales.”

“Murphy's the one the wolf bit?”

“Yes.”

“I reckon he found out how savage the beasts are in the San Juans, eh?”

Catherine sighed as though the attack were an especially annoying inconvenience. “The fool was off evacuating his bladder without his rifle. He didn't see the beast perched on a boulder above him. Father saw it just as it jumped, and he fired, scaring the thing away—good Lord, it was so big I thought at first it was a grizzly bear!—or it surely would have torn poor Murphy's head off.” She dropped her tone an octave. “Would have served him right. The fool tried to maul me on Christmas Eve when he and the other ‘boys' were drunk on chokecherry wine our foreman's Indian wife made. Potent stuff.”

“I'll say you're potent stuff,” Longarm said, running his left hand down her back and into the warm crack between her butt cheeks. He ran it still lower, until the tips of his fingers felt damp fur.

She looked up at him again, her eyes sparkling. “How's your wound?”

“You did a damn fine job with that wound.”

“Care to ravage me again, Longarm? Not to seem wanton, but having found a real man in the world, I feel I've been trifling with boys.”

Longarm looked down. Her hand was wrapped around his fully engorged cock once more, pumping. He sighed. She smiled.

He rolled her onto her back, mounted her, and began driving, as she spread her knees high and wide, throwing her hair into a lovely golden cloud across her pillow.

•   •   •

Longarm rose in the predawn darkness, gently slid out from beneath the regally lovely head of Catherine Fortescue, and dressed quietly. When he'd stepped into his boots, he leaned down to plant a tender kiss on the girl's cheek. She groaned and sighed in her sleep, snuggling deeper into her pillow, and then he donned his hat, grabbed his rifle and saddlebags, and stepped into the hall.

Slinging his saddlebags over his shoulder, he continued walking down the hall on the balls of his boots, hearing men snoring behind the closed doors around him. He assumed that the especially raucous snores were issuing from General Alexander Fortescue himself, exhausted from his own trek through the snow.

Catherine probably kept the general's old nerves tied in knots. What father of hers wouldn't be on constant edge with a daughter so full of unbridled, absolutely unabashed passion? Longarm gave an amused snort, entertaining memories of his and her hijinks of the night before, and quietly dropped down the stairs into the main drinking hall, obscured with heavy, dark shadows, only a little milky light washing through the front windows.

He was happy to see that his prisoner was where he'd left him, tied to the ceiling support post. The man's head was down, chin dipped to his chest, and he was contentedly sawing logs. His greasy, dark brown hair hung down from the thinly haired top of his head, dangling around his shoulders, which were clad in a ratty plaid shirt beneath a cowhide vest.

Longarm hauled a three-for-a-nickel cheroot out of his shirt pocket, struck a lucifer to life on his cartridge belt, and lit up. Puffing smoke, he kicked Goldie's left boot, causing the man's spur to grind against the floor. The escaped convict lifted his head with a gasp, blinking.

“Oh, it's you,” he said in his gravelly voice.

“Rise an' shine, amigo.”

“Where we goin'?”

“To Crazy Kate. I'm gonna lock you up over there with orders to shoot you if anyone tries to spring you while I'm away, huntin' them you're s'posed to meet up with.” Longarm had set his gear on a table, and now with his folding Barlow knife, he cut the rope tying Goldie's ankles together.

“You ain't takin' me back to that federal hotbox. Ain't no way. I'd rather die first.”

“That can happen.” Longarm unlocked the handcuffs, and Goldie pulled his hands out from behind the ceiling support post, wincing at the stiffness in his shoulders.

“God damn,” he crooned, rolling his shoulders. “I lost all feelin' in my arms!”

Longarm grabbed his rifle and his saddlebags off the table. “Get up.”

Goldie grunted and wheezed as he pushed himself heavily off the floor, taking his time. “I didn't sleep very well. I'm gonna be grumpy today, Longarm.”

That last came out as a grunt as Goldie dropped his head and bulled toward Longarm, who'd been expecting the move. He stepped to one side and slammed the butt of his Winchester '73 down hard against the back of Goldie's neck. The man dropped straight to the floor like a fifty-pound sack of cracked corn, making the floorboards leap beneath Longarm's boots, lifting a racket.

Longarm sighed. “Let's try it again, Goldie.”

Goldie groaned. Again, he took his time rising. When Longarm finally had him on his feet, he let him fetch his blanket coat and fur hat from the chair he'd left them on the night before, when he'd been playing poker with his now-dead pards. As Longarm was prodding the outlaw toward the front door, he heard a footfall and a wooden creak behind him, and a woman's voice said softly, “Longarm—that you?”

Longarm turned to see Catherine standing in the shadows atop the stairs, holding a thick quilt around her shoulders. Her legs beneath the quilt shone creamy in the gradually intensifying, winter light.

“Yeah, it's me, Catherine. Just on the way out.”

“You going to Crazy Kate?”

“Yup.”

“Maybe see you there.”

Longarm smiled, genuinely enthused by the prospect, though he didn't expect to be in town long. He had to find the men looking to hook up with Goldie and get them all back to Denver, to his boss, Chief Marshal Billy Vail, for formal proceedings, which likely would mean hanging. They'd killed several guards when they'd busted out of the federal pen.

“Might at that,” Longarm said, pinching his hat brim to the girl.

“Be careful out there,” Catherine said, in her sexily raspy voice. “Wolves on the prowl.”