Longarm and the Pleasant Valley War, 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
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
LONGARM AND THE ARIZONA ASSASSIN
Train Keeps a’Rollin
Karl crouched, reaching for both his revolver and his knife. Longarm kicked him so hard in the crotch that the impact shot up into his own knee. The big half-breed lurched forward, bounding off his heels toward Longarm, his eyes on fire. The lawman took one step to his left, grabbed the half-breed’s collar with one hand, and heaved him out of the vestibule into open air.
There was a thud audible even above the roar of the iron wheels and the shriek of the wind as the big body was smacked hard by the second coach car. Karl screamed shrilly as he fell straight down on the tracks.
The scream died abruptly.
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Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him . . . the Gunsmith.
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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 PLEASANT VALLEY WAR
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Jove edition / November 2009
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Chapter 1
The silent night was shattered by the crack of a branch under the boot of a stealthy stalker.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, his senses honed by years of man-tracking and its accompanying perils, snapped his eyes open and lifted his head from his saddle. Instantly, he clawed his Frontier Model Colt .44 from the holster wrapped in its cartridge belt beside him and thumbed the hammer back.
Deputy Long—known as Longarm to friend and foe far and wide—extended the cocked pistol in the direction from which the crack had sounded, stretching his lips back from his teeth as he snarled, “One more step, you bushwhackin’ son of a bitch, and I’ll give you a third eye you won’t—!”
“Custis!”
Longarm blinked, and slackened his trigger finger.
No slit-eyed, unshaven would-be bushwhacker stood before him, crouched over his campfire with a cocked shooting iron aimed at the lawman’s liver. In fact, there was no campfire. The tall, rangy lawman wasn’t even outside. He was in a sprawling, well-appointed boudoir, the air perfumed with the faint musk of cherries, and with a wagon-sized, canopied bed upon which his long, naked frame was drawn as taut as that of a docked ship’s mooring rope.
A girl wearing only a sheer silk wrapper quaked before him, leaning back against a scrolled oak dresser, her wrapper hanging open to reveal the deep cleavage between her full, firm, pear-shaped, porcelain-pale breasts. One delicate foot rested atop the other, a naked thigh drawn protectively inward and faintly quivering.
“Ah, shit,” Longarm grumbled, his ears instantly warming with chagrin. He lifted the Colt’s barrel and depressed the hammer. “Sorry, Cynthia. I heard a snap, and I thought . . .”
The sexily regal Cynthia Larimer removed her hands from the edge of the dresser behind her and unexpectedly chuckled, her full, rich lips spreading and her cobalt-blue eyes sparkling in the wan dawn light pushing through the curtains.
“You heard the fire pop, you fool,” she said as Longarm returned his Colt to the holster hanging from the bedpost beside him. “I just added some piñon to make the room smell nice, and one of the branches must have had some sap in it.”
“Damn—sounded just like a branch snappin’ under some yellow-toothed death-dealer’s boot!”
Longarm chewed his thick, brown mustache as he looked around the room, still trying to drive out the uncannily real feeling of being out in the tall and uncut, and having an interloper drawing a bead on his chest. He gave a little start as the large fieldstone hearth popped once more, and then he glanced at Cynthia.
“Sure am sorry, girl. Hope I didn’t scare you too bad. Don’t know what gets into me sometimes. Too long on the owlhoot trail, I reckon.”
“Holy mackerel,” Cynthia purred, a strange, slack look crossing her finely sculpted, slightly flushed cheeks. “You sure are fast with that thing.”
“Had some practice, I reckon.” Longarm lay back on the bed and ran his hands through his thick, brown hair. “What’re you doin’ up, anyways? Didn’t know you to rise till nearly noon.” He chuckled.
“I remembered that you said you had to leave early, so last night, when we’d snuck in after the policeman’s ball, I told the kitchen girls I’d like a breakfast tray brought up to my room around six-thirty. I was just now checking the time.”
Cynthia’s voice was so thick that Longarm lifted his head to regard her curiously. Her sparking eyes were sliding across his broad, naked chest and down his long, naked legs.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “I didn’t give ya a heart seizure, did I?” The strain in his thighs and lower back reminded him of their rather strenuous sexual athletics of a few hours ago. “A girl in as good a shape as you . . . ?”
He drew the several quilts and blankets up over himself, as it was late fall in Denver, the growing cow town sprawled beneath the Rockies’ Front Range, and the nights and mornings were chill.
“You certainly did.”
Cynthia’s chest was heaving, her breasts rising and falling sharply behind her see-through wrapper. The light was murky, but Longarm thought her nipples were stiffening.
“Custis, something happened to me when I saw you aiming that big gun at me,” she said breathily. “Not sure what it was exactly. Maybe it was how a killing fire came into those savagely narrowed eyes of yours. Maybe
The girl’s breasts were swollen. Her face was mottled red. Her lust was catching. Longarm felt his own body temperature rising. He patted the bed beside him and frowned with mock concern.
“Maybe you better crawl back into bed, then, sugar. Take a load off. Let ol’ Custis . . . uh . . . massage your back and other sundry parts.”
Cynthia placed her hand on her chest. “I forget sometimes, Custis, with all our silly playing around, that you’re one of the greatest lawmen in all the West. That you have put fear and trembling in the hearts of many a badman . . . and likely have turned a good number toe-down, as they say in the yellow-backed novels.”
“Ah, hell,” Longarm said with a self-effacing chuff, feeling his member stiffen down beneath the covers as he stared at the girl’s pebbling nipples and the tuft of silky black hair between her thighs. “I reckon someone’s gotta protect the innocent, punish the lawbreakers.” He swallowed. “Like I said, you best come back to bed, Miss Cynthia, and let me administer some tender care to your obvious . . . uh . . . strained nerves.”
The leggy, raven-haired Larimer heiress started toward the bed. She wore only the sheer wrap, the tails of which fluttered about thighs that were slender but tight from riding her uncle’s finely blooded Thoroughbreds and Tennessee trotters all about their impeccably landscaped Sherman Hill estate.
When she wasn’t on one of her frequent world tours, that was.
In her mere twenty-two years, Cynthia Larimer had visited more countries than Longarm knew the names of. She and he had met about a year ago. They’d been introduced to each other by Cynthia’s uncle, General Larimer—that is, William Larimer III, considered by most to be Denver’s founding father, after whom a good many streams, streets, counties, and babies had been named.
Longarm and Cynthia hadn’t fallen so much in love as in lust, neither being at all ready for the traditional banal commitments, even if such commitments had been possible given the pair’s class differences—he, a pistol-packing public servant; she, a world-class heiress who would naturally follow the silver spoon jutting from her bee-stung lips into the palace of some European prince, say, or into the coifed and manicured grounds of a rich East Coast industrialist’s estate.
So the improbable pair—the cultured princess and the roguish lawman whose storied past had found its way into many an illustrated newspaper and dime novel—got together to frolic whenever they both found themselves in Denver at the same time. So people wouldn’t talk, as people were wont to do, especially about the moneyed Larimers, and so the general and Mrs. Larimer would find nothing untoward about their fraternization, Longarm pretended to be merely the beautiful young heiress’s escort and bodyguard, whose intentions were merely protective, as opposed to seductive.
However, being a filly as headstrong as any of those in her uncle’s stables, and downright defiant at times, Cynthia found the masquerade silly, and this inattention to appearances on her part had often proven not only embarrassing but dangerous.
It had all come to a head, as it were, when, during a party at the Larimer estate last Christmas, they’d both tread to within a few seconds of discovery by the general himself in the general’s second-floor libary/office—Cynthia on her hands and knees beneath the general’s desk with Longarm’s fully engorged cock in her mouth.
Now she sat on the edge of the bed and leaned over the tall, rugged lawman, running her hands through the hair on his broad chest and grinding her fingers into shoulders that were as solid as wheel hubs. Her breathing was labored.
“Custis,” she said. “Oh, Custis, you are quite a man!”
He rose to a half-sitting position and placed his hands over her breasts through the gauzy silk of the wrapper. As they moved together, massaging and caressing, the bed-springs began to squeak faintly.
“Easy,” he whispered. “You said the general and your aunt are on the premises, correct?”
“Don’t worry about them.”
“I’d like to not have to worry about ’em, but it’s me who’ll be flyin’ out the window if the general comes callin’ with that big Russian-made bird gun of his.”
Cynthia slid a hand down beneath the covers and wrapped her small, fine-boned hand around his iron-hard cock, and squeezed. She leaned forward, closing her eyes, the flush of sensual pleasure climbing higher in her cheeks.
Longarm closed his own eyes for a moment and groaned as she continued squeezing his staff, sending hot spasms of pleasure throughout his loins. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that she was sprawled beside him with one foot up on the edge of the bed, toes flexed, and her thighs slightly spread. Tender pink flesh shone within the silky darkness of her snatch.
He slipped a finger inside. He didn’t have to do much work to get it in. She was warm and moist.
Keeping her eyes closed, she lifted her chin suddenly, gasped, and squeezed his cock even harder.
Longarm’s heart leaped slightly, and he stuck his finger farther into the girl’s warm, wet center, and sort of turned it while at the same time massaging the delicate, petal-like folds of flesh at its opening. She squirmed around, sighing and groaning, running her fist slowly up and down Longarm’s cock, which was now so hard he thought the skin would split and the big, mushroom head pop open.
When Longarm had the girl sopping wet and shuddering, he stuck another thick, brown finger into her core. She gave a start, rising up on the heel of her foot slightly and stopping the manipulation of Longarm’s organ briefly, as though in sudden shock. She half-croaked, half-muttered something and stretched her lips back from her perfect white teeth.
Then, laughing crazily, she began pumping him harder. He groaned and grunted, arching his back, as she moaned and shifted her taut, round bottom around on the bed beside him, her full breasts jerking and sliding on her chest.
Suddenly, she dropped her head over his cock and dribbled a dollop of spit onto its blossoming purple head.
She let the saliva roll down the sides of his cock, and then she began pumping him again, but faster now, working him into a veritable lather as he continued fingering the girl’s steaming pussy.
“Oh, Custis!” she groaned. “Oh . . . good Lord, help me . . . Custis!”
He sighed, cursed, shook his head, threw it back on his shoulders, and squeezed his eyes closed. He stretched his left leg straight out on the bed, keeping the right curled beneath his other knee, and hardened his jaws as his fingers danced around between Cynthia’s legs, her own juices now bathing his knuckles that were now nearly all the way inside her. He felt his blood rising to a fast boil, and he gritted his teeth, wanting to savor every second of the incredibly erotic swelling inside him as the girl pumped him faster and faster with both hands.
She leaned over his chest while keeping her thighs spread, trying hard to muffle her grunts and excited laughs as they both rose to the height of their mutual passions.
“Christ,” Longarm muttered, barely parting his lips.
He’d had handjobs before, but nothing to equal this. Somehow he felt more closely united with the delectable girl than if he’d been hammering away between her legs. It was as though they were both sound asleep, spirits entwined, and enjoying the same improbably wonderful wet dream.
Longarm delayed his climax as long as he could, tearing at the sheets with his free hand. Then Cynthia let out a yelp as his fountain erupted, spurting his creamy jism across his belly and chest, a couple of rounds landing just short of his neck, one or two splattering the underside of Cynthia’s chin.
She continued to pump as she, too, came, throwing her head back on her shoulders and laughing at the ceiling as though she’d completely lost her marbles. Longarm’s seed ran in two slender rivulets down her neck and into the valley between her breasts.
