Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) Read Free Page A

least an hour ago. Now saffron sunlight filtered through the ash and maple trees that the city of Denver had planted along the street outside his boardinghouse on the poor side of Cherry Creek. Shadows were long. Dust motes filtered through the prisms of light angling through the soot-streaked door panes and the window over the small eating table at which he’d never actually sat down to a meal.
    The indigo-haired she-tiger, portfolio of his naked pecker in hand, was probably heading into the far eastern reaches of Colorado now, maybe to Julesburg already, on her journey back to New York, where she’d display her sketches and oil paintings of him in the nude. She’d used him for a model last summer along the Arkansas River, up near the picturesque little mining town of Buena Vista, a two-day’s train ride west of Denver. Somehow, she’d coaxed him out of every stitch of clothing, and now he, in all his nakedness, was on his way to the most populace city in the country—one of the largest in the world!
    Oh, Lord—what if his boss, Billy Vail, learned that his most senior of federal law bringers was on full display in some highfalutin art gallery patronized by half the mucky-mucks on the East Coast? Or, worse yet, what if Cynthia’s regal, legendary, filthy rich clan headed up by General William Larimer himself, and the kindly, pious, albeit perpetually befuddled Aunt May, found out he’d been exposing himself to his favorite debutante in the tall and rocky when Longarm was only supposed to have been the girl’s unofficial bodyguard ?
    Two things settled the lawman down.
    One—Cynthia had likely been correct when she’d asserted that no one who knew the Larimers, let alone Chief Billy Vail, would ever see the art in the first place, let alone recognize the burly, naked gent lounging in the verdant grass along the river, his big cock in repose across his thigh.
    Two—the sun shining so brightly meant that Longarm was late for his nine o’clock meeting with said boss, Chief Vail!
    Longarm glanced at the small clock hanging above his bed. Yep, he was late, all right. A whole five minutes already.
    The big lawman shoved a wing of his dark brown hair back off his forehead, brushed a hand across his longhorn mustache that bore not one fleck of gray despite all his professional stresses and wild travails, and scrambled out of the bed still warm from the girl’s supple, eager body. He dug around in his secondhand armoire for fresh clothes, duplicates of those he’d torn off last night in his haste to fuck the general’s princess.
    Then he scooped his saddlebags, saddle, rifle, and war sack off the top landing of the stairs outside his front door, and kicked his McClellan saddle through the open door and into his flat. He preferred the cavalry saddle to the bulkier western stockmen’s saddle, but surely he wouldn’t need it today. Billy wouldn’t send him out of town on assignment the morning after he’d just returned from a three-week sojourn fighting back robbers out on the Kansas flats!
    He knew that wasn’t true, but he decided to risk it, for he was too tired from the journey, the fuck-tussle, and the abbreviated rest, to haul the heavy load up Colfax to the Federal Building.
    Balancing the gear on both shoulders, he headed on down the steps. He’d walked only half a block before he begged a ride in the back of a coal dray to Colfax Avenue, where he leaped off under the burden of his gear and tramped past the U.S. Mint. It might have only been a few hours since he’d reveled between Cynthia Larimer’s spread legs, but he grinned as he admired the female shop clerks and bank secretaries and hash throwers bustling to work in their lightweight summer frocks.
    He dragged his gaze away from one such buxom, round-assed little lass, blond as the sun itself, noting that his obvious admiration for the girl was lifting a flush in her chubby