Longarm and the Arapaho Hellcats (2 page)

Longarm turned to the girl staring up at him, her full lips quirked in a lascivious grin.

Longarm had to fight to keep from putting his hands on her. All over her. “I'd like to tell you what I'd like to do about that, young lady.”

“Why don't you show me?”

Longarm frowned, incredulous.

“Like I said, she's sound asleep.”

“What if she wakes?”

Cynthia shook her head. “She won't wake for a half hour, at least. I've traveled with dear Aunt Beatrice enough to know that when she starts snoring, she's out like a lamp.”

Longarm turned to look through the glass pane in the top of the coach's rear door. The glass was badly smudged and it reflected the brassy ­high-­country sunlight, but Longarm could still see Mrs. ­Schimpelfinnig—­the only one left in the car after all the other passengers had gotten off to ­stretch—­sitting in her green plush seat, head tipped back against her seat, lower jaw hanging, mouth wide open.

Longarm thought he could even hear her raucous snores through the glass. His heart skipped eagerly, quickened. He swung around to see Cynthia smiling up at him again. She arched a brow.

“This is going to have to be quick and very, very sneaky.” Cynthia, who loved stealing quick pokes in the most trying of circumstances, let out a thrilled giggle. “And oh so naughty!”

Once, Cynthia had given Longarm a blowjob in her uncle's office chair at the Larimer residence during a Christmas ball. Her uncle, the General, and Chief Marshal Billy Vail had even been in the office at the time, though they hadn't seen her with Longarm's cock in her mouth beneath the desk. Longarm had had one hell of a time trying to converse with the two men while the General's niece sucked and tongued the head of his staff as though it were a lollipop.

That rendezvous had almost killed him. But he was sure that each of his unions with Cynthia had put such a strain on his heart that the gorgeous little ­black-­haired, ­blue-­eyed lass had cost him at least a couple of precious years.

He thought she was worth every lost minute.

Longarm glanced into the car once more, took Cynthia's arm, and said, “Right this way, my lovely.”

He walked over to the top of the vestibule steps and looked around. All three of the coach cars were up train from him and Cynthia, so most of the passengers were up train, as well.

While the locomotive's boiler was taking on water, the men were smoking and kicking around beside the tracks, or gathered in clumps, smoking and talking, while the ladies also formed groups to watch their children running around the ­cinder-­paved railroad bed and the wooden platform surrounding the little depot shed. One tyke was trying to climb one of the telegraph poles and being met with a crisp scolding from a woman wearing a ­red-­and-­green-­checked dress and matching bonnet and holding a fussy baby in her arms.

The only folks down train from Longarm were a couple of brakemen in striped overalls standing around near the caboose, both men laughing at some private joke while one lit a fat cigar. Directly behind Longarm's and Cynthia's car was the stable car.

“Don't mind a little hay and straw, do you?” Longarm said as he dropped down the steps to the ground and then turned to reach up and wrap his hands around Cynthia's slender waist.

As he pulled her down off the platform and set her easily onto the railroad bed, she said, “You mean, you want to do it with a bunch of animals watching? I absolutely love the idea, you naughty, naughty man!”

“Come on!”

He grabbed her hand and, looking around to make sure no one saw them stealing off together like oversexed schoolchildren, led her back to the stable car. He looked around once more to make sure no one was watching. The engineers were too busy feeding water to the locomotive and the brakemen were too involved in their joke to worry about Longarm and Cynthia.

Quickly, Longarm slid the stable car door open.

“Here we go,” he said, lifting her up through the open door.

Cynthia giggled at the thrill of being tossed around so easily, as though she weighed no more than a ragdoll.

Longarm leaped up into the stock car, looked outside once more, and then quickly slid the door closed. The car was all brown shadows and blurred edges.

The only light was the slender columns of golden ­sunshine bleeding in between the car's vertical wall boards. Dust motes shone, drifting lazily. Horses nickered softly, shuffled around.

The Larimers' ­two-­seater, leather buggy with high, ­red-­spoked wheels sat a ways back in the shadows. The General had sent it along so that Cynthia and Mrs. Schimpelfinnig would have a stylish ride to the town of Arapaho, after they'd detrained in Cheyenne. Longarm would have the honor of driving them.

The only thing he was thinking about driving now was the General's daughter, who threw herself against him and wrapped her arms around his neck. Longarm wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her long and deep, entangling his tongue with hers.

Cynthia moaned, returning the kiss, ramming her hot tongue against his, mashing her breasts against his chest, grinding her pelvis against his hips.

“Oh, Lord, you're ready for me, aren't you?” she said, lowering a hand to his bulging crotch.

“My dear,” Longarm said, “I've been ready for you since about ten minutes after the last time we parted.”

Cynthia's lower jaw dropped in shock. “Custis, I think that's the most romantic thing I've ever heard any man say to any woman.”

“Ah, hell.”

“No, I mean it.” Cynthia rose up onto her tiptoes and mashed her lips against his. “Fuck me.”

“That's what we're here for, ain't it?”

She laughed in wicked delight and lowered her hands to the buckle of his cartridge belt. When she'd removed the gun belt, letting it drop to the floor of the stable car, she immediately, deftly went to work on the belt holding his whipcord trousers up his lean hips, and then she opened the buttons of his fly.

She peeled his pants open, reached into the fly of his ­summer-­weight underwear, and pulled out his fully erect cock. She knelt before him as though in worship, crossed her eyes as she stared at the impressive shaft standing up proud and hard and angling back against his belly.

“I've been thinking about this ax handle for months now,” Cynthia said, wrapping a hand around the massive, ­banana-­shaped organ and pumping him gently. “Oh, Custis, no man can please me like you can!”

“Feelin's mutual, there, girl,” Longarm said, grimacing as she closed her tender lips over the head of the swollen member.

Looking up at him from under her thin, black brows, she slowly slid her mouth down on him. Her mouth opened wider, wider, her lips feeling like warm, moist silk sliding over his member.

Longarm groaned.

As she continued to slide her mouth down him, she flicked her tongue across the underside of his cock, ­antagonizing him, sending several lances of fiery desire through his loins.

His heart hiccupped.

Longarm rocked back on the heels of his boots as she went down as far as she could, gagging slightly, and then slid her mouth back to the engorged, purple, mushroom head. She licked him like a ­fruit-­flavored sucker again, pausing only to giggle at his groans and sighs, and then sucked him harder for a time, until she knew from experience that she had him about halfway to his precipice.

“Oh, take me, now, Custis. Fuck me in the hay, ­please—­with the horses!”

She rose, chuckled, grabbed his bobbing member, and led him into a stall where the Larimers' Hanoverian, trained for pulling the Larimer surrey, stood eyeing the lovers skeptically, wagging its tail and twitching an ear.

“Hello, Thunder,” Cynthia said as she ducked under the roped stall. She kissed the horse's long snout, patting its wither, before Longarm swept the girl into his arms, swung around, and dropped to his knees. He lay her out in a mound of hay in a corner of the stall and slid her dress up her legs.

“Fuck me.” The girl groaned, writhing in the hay as though enduring the most excruciating agony. “Oh, fuck me, please, Custis. I've been dreaming about you for months ­now—­remembering how you plundered me with that massive organ of yours in Uncle's garden shed! Do you remember? While Aunt May was serving tea to her friends from the opera company?”

“What the hell?” Longarm ran his hands up and down Cynthia's long, smooth, creamy bare legs. “You ain't wearin' no under frillies, Miss Cynthia.”

Cynthia smiled and chewed her thumbnail. “I came prepared for you.”

“You mean, you been ridin' right across from me in that seat beside old Aunt Beatrice with
nothin' on under your dress
?”

Cynthia tittered and continued to chew her thumb-
­­nail.

“Bad girl!”

“Punish me, Custis.”

As Longarm slid her dress up around her waist, laying the entire length of her ­porcelain-­pale legs bare down to her ­ankle-­high, ­puce-­colored, ­side-­button shoes, she lifted her legs and spread her knees wide.

“Oh, punish me!”

She reached up with both hands, grabbing her ankles, opening herself even wider, until she looked like a halved peach spread before him.

The ­petal-­pink love hole enswathed by silky black fur opened like a mouth, extending its tiny tongue that appeared as erect as Longarm's massive, nodding shaft. Cynthia groaned, scowled down between them at the member in question, which he lowered ever so slowly to the girl's open, waiting pussy.

“Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” she cooed, wrapping a hand around him and sliding the swollen mushroom head up and down her slit.

Longarm sighed as the feeling of dipping his dong in warm mud engulfed him and caused his loins to throb. Cynthia drew a long breath, lifted her head, and closed her mouth over his as she pressed the head of his cock inside her.

Longarm kissed her vehemently, passionately, as he slid the organ deeper, lowering his hips to hers. At the same time, keeping his mouth clamped against her own, he pushed her head back in the hay.

And then he was bottomed out inside the girl, grinding his hips against hers, and she was groaning deep in her chest, hooking her bare legs around him and ­grinding her heels against his ass while he slammed against her over and over.

Cynthia groaned and whimpered, shaking her head and occasionally lifting it to look down between them at his cock driving in and out of her ­black-­tufted, ­pink-­petaled snatch. Longarm propped himself on his arms, his knees planted in the straw between the girl's spread legs. He went to work in earnest, pummeling away at the wanton creature, Cynthia's knees flapping like wings to each side of him.

He could feel the heels of her shoes grinding into his ass. This enflamed him even more.

As they toiled together, Cynthia unbuttoned her dress and peeled it open so that her large, full, pale breasts flopped naked between them. Longarm lowered his head to her cleavage and slid his nose and mustache up and down that deep, mysterious valley. While continuing to fuck her hard, driving her deeper and deeper into the straw, he kneaded one breast while nuzzling and licking the other one.

Both nipples pebbled, swelled, distended.

“Oh!” Cynthia said. “Oh, ­Custis—­oh,
gawd
, Custis!”

Longarm lifted his head from her magnificent left tit but kept squeezing the other. He arched his back and gritted his teeth, driving even harder and faster.

“Oh!” the girl said, louder. “Oh! Oh! Oh,
fuck
!”

She arched her own back, ground the back of her head into the straw, gritting her teeth until the cords stood out in her long, fine neck. Longarm clamped a hand over her mouth, knowing from experience that she couldn't control herself when she came, and then rose up on the toes of his boots for better leverage.

He drove deep and held there at base of her womb.

He exploded inside her, red lights flashing behind his ­squeezed-­shut eyelids. Bells tolled in his head. His heart throbbed in his temples until he thought his head would burst.

He could feel Cynthia's warm lips and open mouth against the palm of his hand. Her tongue ground against it. The girl shuddered beneath him, bucked, grunted, rammed her shoes into his ass, convulsed.

Her warm honey bled out around his cock and coated his balls.

Longarm pulled out and then rammed himself back inside the beautiful heiress as he continued to spend himself, his seed still jetting though the convulsions were diminishing gradually. When they stopped altogether, his muscles turned to putty, and he dropped on top of her with a long, ragged sigh. Her breasts were sandwiched between them.

The sound of crunching gravel was heard outside the car. There was a light knock on the stable car door. Beatrice Schimpelfinnig said, “Cynthia? Deputy? Are you
in
there?”

The next day, as Longarm drove the Larimers' fancy, canopied carriage up into the foothills of the Buckskin Hills northwest of Cheyenne, Cynthia called from the seat behind his driver's perch, “Custis, would you mind stopping the carriage, please, and pulling off the trail?”

Longarm glanced over his shoulder. Cynthia was riding in the carriage's quilted leather seat beside Aunt Beatrice, who looked especially puffy and drawn. Apparently, the ­three-­hour ride along the rough wagon trail through the high, ­sage-­ and ­yucca-­stippled desert ringed with dramatic mountains had been a little rough on the old gal.

“Why would I want to do that?” Longarm said, feigning innocence.

Cynthia held his gaze with a crisp, faintly admonishing one of her own. Mrs. Schimpelfinnig gave him the same look, hardening her jaws and flaring her nostrils.

Longarm grinned with boyish deviltry out one side of his mouth. He couldn't help needling the woman a little. He and Cynthia had managed to avoid getting caught with their pants down in the stable car by remaining very quiet until the woman had given up and walked on, calling for the conductor to help her open the door.

When she'd passed, Longarm and Cynthia had snuck out of the car and back into the coach car, acting as nonchalant and ­devil-­may-­care as possible despite the hay and straw that had tickled the lawman's ass all the way to Cheyenne.

But if Mrs. Schimpelfinnig had been suspicious of them before their stable car escapade, she was even more so now. In fact, since they'd left Cheyenne early that morning after spending the previous night in the Union Pacific Hotel, Longarm had felt the old woman's eyes burning twin holes into the back of his head. She'd let him know very quietly but in no uncertain terms that she'd be keeping her eagle eyes on him and her most precious niece for the remainder of the trip.

“Oh, sure, ­sure—­I understand,” Longarm said, turning the Hanoverian off the right side of the trail and into the shade of some cottonwoods lining a creek. “It just hasn't been all that long since we stopped
last
time, so, you know, I was just sorta wonderin'.”

“Please keep your wondering to yourself, Deputy Long,” Mrs. Schimpelfinnig admonished as Longarm drew back on the horse's reins.

Apparently, the old woman's bladder was a little logy though Longarm reckoned anyone's bladder would get logy if they drank as much coffee as Mrs. Schimpelfinnig had drank that morning before they'd pulled away from the hotel after breakfasting in the stately Union Pacific Dining Room. She'd brought an extra jug and a pile of doughnuts along for the ride, and within the trip's first hour she'd consumed all the coffee and doughnuts herself.

Longarm made a mental note, inwardly chuckling, to stay upwind of the old gal.

He set the carriage's brake and then helped the old woman down and gave her the carpet accordion bag she always hauled off on one of her “walks.” As she started to amble away, she glanced back over her stout shoulder and said, “I'll be back shortly. Not going far.” This last she spat out at Longarm, as though to say, “So don't try anything, bucko!”

“You're a devil,” Cynthia said when her aunt was out of hearing, ranging around in the trees for a private shrub.

“That mean you don't think we'd best risk a quick poke in the buggy? Might take her a while. It did last time.”

“Don't tempt me.”

“Why not?
I'm
tempted.”

Cynthia glanced in the direction in which her aunt had disappeared, and then stepped up close to Longarm, pressing her belly against his groin. “Didn't yesterday hold you?”

“Did it hold you?”

“No, but you know I'm an absolute maniac for you, Custis.” She reached up and placed both her hands lightly on his leathery brown cheeks, running both index fingers down into his thick longhorn mustache. “Maybe we should think about making this a permanent ­thing—­you and me?”

“Maybe,” Longarm said, taking her hands in his and kissing them. “If I was a few years younger and independently wealthy. I got me a feelin' the Larimers wouldn't appreciate havin' a workaday gent mixin' in with all that pedigreed blood.”

“Maybe not, but we'd have quite a ­time—­you and me.”

Longarm couldn't help narrowing an incredulous eye at her. Never before, during the past three years they'd been “friends,” had either one ever brought up the prospect of marriage. Longarm had always thought it was obvious they couldn't be together for the long, serious run. He'd thought she'd realized the same thing. Besides, knowing that they couldn't ever be together as a married couple had made their rare, strenuous, and furtive carnal adventures all the more precious.

“Oh, don't give me that look, Custis. I'm just thinking out loud. I guess it's just that Casey's imminent wedding has gotten me thinking about . . . eventually settling down.”

“You? Cynthia, you can't cage that tiger inside you. There ain't no way to do that and keep that tiger happy.”

“I'm not getting any younger.”

“You're only ­twenty-­three, darlin'.”

Cynthia hiked a shoulder. “To some, I'm an old maid. Aunt May and Aunt Beatrice are always asking me if I haven't met someone by now. You ­know—­someone I'd like to settle down with.”

She looked at Longarm askance, a tad bit abashed. “I reckon you're the only one I'd even consider, Custis.”

Longarm glanced around to make sure that Mrs. Schimpelfinnig wasn't shuffling toward them, and then engulfed the girl in his arms. “You just haven't found the right one yet. You will, sooner or later. Some prince over the big ocean yonder, no doubt. You know enough of them.”

“Oh, I know enough of them, of course.” Cynthia wrapped her arms around Longarm's waist and returned his hug. “And of course a few have proposed, but damnit, Custis, I just don't feel the spark for any of them.” She pulled away and walked into the trees. “My friend Casey just looked and sounded so happy the last time I saw her in Denver, when she told me about the young man she was marrying.”

Longarm reached inside his frock coat and dug a cheroot from his shirt pocket. “Hard to believe any gal you know would be marryin' a badge toter.”

Cynthia leaned back against a boulder and slid a vagrant lock of black hair back from her right eye. “Casey had a falling out with her mother after her father died. Her father was a good friend of my uncle's. Anyway, she decided to go off to a teaching college in Kansas City, and she met a young soldier on the train. They corresponded for a year, and then the soldier visited her in Kansas City and proposed.”

“Her family didn't have anything to say about that?”

“Nothing that Casey listened to. If you think I'm headstrong . . . well, Casey could teach me a few things.” Cynthia chuckled and crossed her arms on her breasts. “She was so angry about what her mother had to say about her future husband, whom Mrs. Summerville had never met, that she told her mother to take her out of the family will. So, Casey gave up her family's fortune to marry the dashing young soldier who was about to be appointed sheriff of Arapaho and the surrounding county by his father, whom you, coincidentally, know, my dear Custis.”

“If young Ryan is anything like his father, old Thrum, he's quite a catch. I just hope Casey realizes how comparatively frugal she'll be living, compared to how she was raised.” Longarm scratched a lucifer to life on his holster and touched the flame to the ­three-­for-a-nickel cheroot.

“I have a feeling Casey and Ryan will do just fine. Love can make up for a lot, you know.” Cynthia dropped her eyes, pensive, and then lifted them to Longarm. Lines cut into the bridge of her nose as she canted her head to one side and asked, “Don't you think, Custis?”

The lawman puffed his cheroot and looked off, suddenly uncomfortable with the conversation. “Wouldn't know.”

Cynthia pushed away from her rock and walked toward him. She placed her hands on his forearms and looked up at him from beneath her straw hat. “This is a question I never expected to ask you, Custis. It's one that I hoped I'd never feel compelled to ask, because I thought it might complicate things between us, might temper some of the nasty excitement of our . . . trysts. But . . . do ­you—?”

“Yes,” he said before she could even finish.

He smiled down at her. “But let's leave it at that, shall we? Since there's really no point in taking the conver­­sation ­further—­me bein' who I am and you bein' who you are.”

Cynthia rose on her tiptoes and planted a tender kiss on his lips. “Touché, my dear Longarm. Touché.”

A branch snapped in the direction in which Mrs. Schimpelfinnig had disappeared. Cynthia stepped back from Longarm, and they both turned to see the old woman stumbling toward them through the grass growing up around the cottonwoods, her accordion carpetbag slung over one stout shoulder.

She appeared flushed and out of breath.

“Are you all right, Aunt Beatrice?” Cynthia asked, walking over, taking the woman's arm and leading her to the carriage.

“I'm fine, dear. I could do with something to eat, however, and a wee bit more coffee. The trip in this wretched ­buggy—­you know how I hate long trips by ­carriage—­is growing rather tiresome.” Mrs. Schimpelfinnig cast a cool, baldly reproving glance at Longarm and pitched her voice with peevishness. “How long before we arrive at Arapaho, Deputy Long?”

“It's just over the next . . .” Longarm glanced toward the northwest and let his voice trail off. He frowned at what appeared a tendril of ­charcoal-­gray smoke rising between two ­cone-­shaped bluffs.

“What is it?” Cynthia asked as she helped her aunt into the carriage.

“Looks like a fire up near Arapaho.”

“Fire?”

“Probably just someone burnin' a field or some dead brush.” Longarm glanced once more at the smoke and then offered his hand to Cynthia. When she was seated beside her aunt, both women shielding their eyes with their hands and staring toward the smoke, Longarm climbed into the driver's seat, released the brake, and pulled the Hanoverian onto the trail.

While the ­smart-­stepping sorrel pulled the carriage up toward the pass between the buttes, Longarm held his gaze on the smoke. The closer the carriage drew to the low pass, the smoke column widened, grew bushier. Long­arm felt fingers of unease tickle his backbone.

Where there was smoke, as the saying went, there was fire. He hoped the fire was far afield of Arapaho. Fires in dry, western towns spread as fast as those that plowed through a mountainside of dead timber. Longarm had seen more than his share of ­fire-­gutted or decimated settlements, and none of them had been pretty.

The Hanoverian trotted up and over the top of the pass. As it started down the other side, Arapaho spread out in a bowl in the low, ­piñon-­ and ­cedar-­stippled hills and high bluffs to the ­west—­a mile or so from the base of the pass. Behind Longarm, Cynthia drew a sharp breath.

“Oh, my goodness!” exclaimed Mrs. Schimpelfinnig. “The town's on fire!”

Longarm hoorawed the fine horse in the traces, sending it barreling down the pass. As the carriage bounced over chuckholes and hammered over small rocks, the lawman stared at the column of black smoke and flames rising from what appeared the town's center. As the horse closed on the small settlement, Longarm saw that the fire appeared to involve a large building on the main street's right side.

He could see no scurry of movement around the building in question, which seemed odd. Usually, a bucket brigade would have been formed between the town's main water supply and the conflagration, and men would be running and yelling as they passed the buckets.

But then the lawman started to understand. And he didn't like it a bit.

For beneath the drumming of the Hanoverian's hooves, the hammering of the buggy's wheels, and the squawking of the leather thoroughbraces, he heard the rataplan of what could only have been gunfire.

“Ah, shit!” Longarm stood up in the driver's box and whipped the reins over the horse's back, encouraging even more speed.

All hell was breaking loose in Arapaho.