Tabor Evans (19 page)

Buried as deeply within her as he could push, Longarm stopped. Dolly stirred and half-turned her head inquiringly, but said nothing. Longarm worked a hand under her hips, picked her up, and pulled her into an all-fours position. He brought his own body erect, grasped Dolly with a firm hand on each of her hips, and started stroking again. This time there was no feeling of falling off the narrow bunk to inhibit his long lunges. Dolly was wet and hot now, and she was beginning to squirm in his grasp. Longarm maintained the speed of his thrusts until his time ran out and he let himself go.

"Only a little bit longer," Dolly cried. "Just a little bit, Windy?"

He held himself rigid, plunging in full-stroke again and again and yet again, until Dolly cried out in a thin scream that faded into soft sighs, and her hips, under his hands, gyrated for a few mad moments, then stopped as she went limp and folded up in a heap on the tattered mattress. To give both her and himself room, Longarm withdrew, and went and sat down on the bunk against the opposite wall. The cabin was so small that he was only an outstretched arm's length from her.

Dolly unfolded her body and lay straight, on her side, facing him. They could see one another dimly in the faint skyglow that the tiny, high window allowed to trickle into the cabin.

"Do you think I'm pretty bad?" she asked him.

"Now, that's a Susanna Mudgett question," he answered.

"I don't mean bad, like a bad woman. I mean bad as a woman to make love to."

"No. Sort of unusual, though. You waste a hell of a long time before you get down to the real part of it."

"I have to, Windy. If I don't, it doesn't do a thing for me except hurt because I'm so dry inside. But if I fondle a man and feel him a long time--longer than I did with you, Windy--then I moisten up, and it doesn't hurt me."

"I've known women who liked to feel me up. But none of them ever took as long as you, or handled me the way you did."

"In one of the places I worked, there was a girl who taught me that trick."

"You ought to tell a man why you're doing it. If he's any kind of man, he won't mind."

"It makes most men mad when I try to tell them. They start to droop, and I lose a customer." She shook her head; Longarm could just see the movement in the gloom. "You know, Windy, you're the first man in more than a year who's brought me off?"

"How about your old hometown sweetheart?"

"Lonnie? I wasn't sweet on him. When he ran into me there in Texarkana, I thought for a while I could go back to being Susanna Mudgett. But I couldn't. And he didn't do anything at all for me. All I felt was him prodding around in me." Dolly sighed. "I guess it's really my fault."

"Maybe. But maybe you just never started right."

She frowned. "I guess I don't know what you mean."

"Come over here, Dolly."

Dolly didn't question his invitation. She got off the bunk and took the half-step necessary to reach Longarm. He took her hand and pulled her gently down onto his lap. Dolly relaxed with a contented sigh, and tried to curl up when his arms went around her, but he ran one hand down over her breasts and stomach in a long, sweeping, soft caress that ended when he reached her thighs and pressed on them with just enough force to keep her body straight.

Bending his head down, Longarm began to kiss Dolly's breasts, circling their nipples in turn with his lips and, between kisses, brushing over them with his chin and mustache. Her skin erupted in gooseflesh when the sharp hairs of his beard rasped across her nipples. Longarm slipped a hand between her thighs, buried his fingers in her silken pubic hair, and started to rub gently within her soft and still-moist folds. Dolly's body, so relaxed when she'd first settled down on his lap, began to grow stiff.

So did Longarm, but he waited until he was completely hard before lifting her around. He stretched his legs and brought them up between hers as he moved her. Then he lowered Dolly until he could feel her dewy fur against his erection. He held her suspended for a moment, her hips swaying, and lowered her even more slowly while sliding into her. He let her body descend by fractions of an inch, each movement putting him in her deeper and deeper.

Even while Longarm was only half-buried inside her, Dolly began to breathe irregularly. His hands, in her armpits, could feel the expansion and contraction of her ribs. When he'd gone in almost all the way, Longarm released Dolly's body. As she slid down the final few inches of his erection, he brought his own hips up with a sharp, quick snap to stop her descent. The shock of this final penetration brought from Dolly's lips an involuntary gasp of surprised pleasure.

She fell forward against him, her head lolling on his shoulder, and whispered, "Oh, that was wonderful. I've never had a man go into me so deep, or fill me up the way you do."

Longarm stood up. He let Dolly ride him as he shuffled his feet, turning around. He held her to him while they dropped to the bunk, and when their bodies met the thin, tattered mattress, he thrust hard. Dolly whimpered, a jagged little cry, as his weight drove in. Involuntarily she raised her legs and locked her ankles around his waist.

"I'm starting to build up already," she told him in a low voice. "Just stay with me as long as you can. I think this is going to be something I've never had happen to me before."

Longarm began easing himself in and out with slow, deliberate strokes. When he felt himself beginning to build, he stopped and pressed hard against Dolly. She squirmed with impatience while she waited for him to begin thrusting again, but Longarm took his time. He let her build with him until, at last, she began to gasp deep in her throat while her body shivered in rolling spasms and her upward thrusts grew frantic. Then he let himself go, pounding hard and fast, driving into her relentlessly.

Only after she'd begun to fall back and lie limp, accepting his thrusts but unable to respond to them any longer, did Longarm speed, with a few quick jabs, to his own orgasm. Then he let himself down on her gently while her body continued to quiver, and now and then to shake in a little convulsive spasm. He lay on her, still buried in her depths but flaccid now, almost as drained as she was.

At last Dolly said, "I'm half asleep, but I still want to feel you in me, even if you're not stiff hard."

"Go to sleep, if you want to," he told her. "I'll stay here until you do."

He kept his promise, waiting until Dolly's breasts rose and fell beneath his chest in deep, regular breathing. Then Longarm left her, moving softly so that he wouldn't wake her. He stepped over to the other bunk and stretched out. He lay there for a short while, listening to the soft rhythm of Dolly's breathing. He was too relaxed and pleasantly exhausted to think about the long ride they'd be making the next day, and the problems he'd be facing during the days that would follow. Soon he fell asleep too.

CHAPTER 12

Longarm noticed Dolly studying him over the rim of her raised coffee cup as he lighted a cheroot. He'd looked up before she had expected him to, before she could blink the sadness from her eyes. Through the swirl of blue smoke that shimmered between them, he asked her, "You sure you're doing what you really want to, Dolly?"

"I'm doing what I think best, Windy. I never will go back to Yates Center. My family turned me out once, and I don't intend to give them a chance to do it again."

"And you'd sooner go back to..." he hesitated.

Dolly finished the thought. "To whoring in a saloon? I'm used to it, and it's not a bad life. Oh, sure, I'd like to stay with you, at least right this minute, but I know I can't. I'd always be afraid I'd slow you down at some time when you couldn't afford it, like I did Lonnie. Or I might turn out to get like Belle Starr. So I'll go back to Texarkana for a while. Sooner or later, I'll move on. Who knows? We might run into one another again sometime."

"We might at that," Longarm agreed.

They were sitting in the dining room of the Union Depot in Fort Smith. The day before, they'd left Younger's Bend before daylight and ridden steadily. At Little Juarez, they'd been in time to stop at the general store and buy Dolly a cloak to cover the somewhat battered dress that was the only garment she'd had left after losing her horse and saddlebags while escaping from the posse that had been chasing her and Taylor. Longarm tried to persuade her to get a new dress too, but she'd refused. She was wearing the cloak now, of a light blue that brought out the almost white sheen of her long hair, which fell down her back in rippling waves.

After getting off the ferryboat that had taken them across the Arkansas to Fort Smith, they'd learned that the first train Dolly could take to her chosen destination wouldn't pull out until mid-afternoon of the following day, so Longarm had taken a room for them at the Fenolio Hotel. It had been a long night and, predictably, neither of them had gotten much sleep. Dolly had been insatiable, and Longarm had kept responding to her urging for just one more time. Now, with only a few minutes left before the southbound train was due, they faced the inevitable parting that always convinces casual lovers they haven't had enough time together.

Longarm saw Dolly's eyes shift past him and her eyebrows pull together in a frown. He asked, "What's the matter?"

"Windy, is the law here in Fort Smith looking for you?"

"Not that I know of. Why should they be?" Then, realizing his mistake as soon as he'd asked the question, he added quickly, "There hasn't been time for me to get on the wanted list here in Arkansas, and I never have pulled any kind of job close to Fort Smith. Why?"

"There's a man over by the wall there who's been watching us. I thought once or twice he was going to come over to our table, but he never did."

Longarm swiveled in his chair to look where Dolly's eyes had been fixed. He saw nobody who seemed especially interested in them.

Dolly shook her head. "He's not there now. When I looked away from him to talk to you, he just disappeared."

"I don't reckon it amounts to anything. Could be he mistook one of us for somebody he knew."

"I guess that was it. And he left when he saw he was wrong."

"Something like that."

Outside the depot, the whistle of an approaching train sounded. Longarm said, "That'd be the Frisco southbound coming in; it's the only train that's due. Maybe we better get out on the platform. It only stops here for about ten minutes, just long enough for the baggage to be unloaded and the passengers to get on."

"I'd like to stay with you, Windy. You know that."

"Sure. I'd like for you to. But both of us know it just ain't in the cards, Dolly."

"No. Well..."

Dolly stood up. Longarm dropped fifteen cents on the table and they walked through the depot and out onto the platform. The train was just coming into sight. The engine passed them with a loud whoosh of steam from its cylinders as it slowed for the stop. The baggage cars slid by, and the porters and handlers began dragging their high, four-wheeled carts along, keeping abreast of the cars they'd be working. Passengers waiting to get aboard started shifting their positions to be where the day coaches and Pullmans would stop. From the coach windows, as the train finally halted, faces pressed against the windowpanes as those traveling beyond Fort Smith gazed out to scan the boarding passengers.

"Let's walk back to the observation car," Longarm suggested. "There's not usually anybody on the last car when a train makes a stop. It'll be a little bit more private than saying goodbye with all those people gawking at us."

Dolly slipped her arm through Longarm's as they walked slowly toward the back of the train. She said, "I don't know how long I'll be in Texarkana, but if you're ever down that way-"

"Don't worry, I'll stop in."

She smiled. "You don't even know which saloon I'll be at."

"Won't make any difference. Texarkana ain't all that big a town. I'll find you, if I come that way."

Dolly suddenly became serious. "I'll never see you again, will I, Windy?"

"It's hard to say. A man in my line of work don't know where he's apt to turn up from one day to the next."

"I don't know how I'll ever be able to thank you for everything you've done for me."

"You don't need to thank me for anything. You already have."

A pair of short blasts sounded from the locomotive's whistle, and the voice of the conductor called from the center of the train, "Boa-ard! All aboard!"

Longarm assisted Dolly up the steps of the observation platform, then followed her and stood on the bottom step. Dolly bent forward to kiss him goodbye. Their lips were still pressed together when the train began to inch forward. Longarm held his place until the observation car reached the middle of the station platform, then stepped off. Dolly lifted her arm to wave at him, and her expression changed from one of almost tearful sadness into a look of alarm.

"Windy!" she called. "Behind you! The man who was in the cafe!"

Longarm whirled. A burly man stood a dozen paces away, half-hidden by one of the latticed ironwork pillars that supported the roof over the platform. He was drawing a pistol from a shoulder holster.

Longarm drew as he dropped off the platform. The burly man had not yet cleared his revolver from its holster when he saw Longarm's lightning-fast move. He stepped behind the pillar. Longarm had anticipated the move. He held his fire, and when his booted feet hit the cinder roadbed a foot or more below the level of the platform, he curled his legs under him and leaned to one side. The edge of the wooden platform now hid him from the stranger.