“Before I take off my boots, there’s a few things you should know about me, honey.”
“Hush. I’m not out to hogtie you, darling. I know the rules of the… game is sort of wicked-sounding. Let’s just say I was hoping for at least two weeks with you before I go back to punching cows. You reckon we’ll last two weeks?”
“Maybe longer. Takes most gals at least a month before they’ve heard all a man’s stories and start nagging him about his table manners. I reckon that’s why they call it the honeymoon.”
“You must think I’m shameless, but damn it, I’m almost thirty and it’s been lonesome up in Crooked Lance!”
“don’t spoil the wonder by trying to put words to it, honey. We got lots of time to talk about it between here and Denver.”
And so they didn’t discuss it as he took off his boots, removed his clothes, and finished undressing her in the swaying, dimly lit compartment while she tried not to giggle and the engine chuffed in time with their hearts.
A good two hours later, as the night train rolled on for Cheyenne, Kim raised her lips from his moist shoulder and murmured, “Will you tell me something, darling?”
He cuddled her body closer and asked, “What is it, kitten?”
“Am I as good in bed as that hussy, Mabel Hanks?”
He didn’t answer.
She raked her nails teasingly through the hair on his chest as she purred, “Come on. I know you had her. She told me something about you that I thought at the time she had to be making up.”
“That why you tagged along?”
“Partly. But I’m afraid I might be in love with you, too. But, yeah, it pays to advertise. I thought she was just bragging, but I’m glad she was right about you.”
He decided silence was his best move at the moment. But she moved her hand down his belly and insisted, “come on. ‘Fess up. Am I as good as Mabel?”
“Honey, there ain’t no comparison. You’re at least ten times better.”
“Then prove it to me. Let’s do it some more.”
So they did. But even as her lush flesh accepted his once more, he found himself wondering. Did this make it Kim Stover and her mother-in-law, Kim Stover and her sister-in-law, or all three of the Stover women?
SPECIAL PREVIEW
Here are the opening scenes from LONGARM ON THE BORDER, second novel in the bold LONGARM series from Jove.
Even before he opened his eyes, in that instant between sleep and waking, Longarm knew it had snowed during the night. Like the hunter whose senses guide him to prey, like the hunted whose senses keep him from becoming prey, Longarm was attuned to the subtlest changes in his surroundings. The light that struck his closed eyelids wasn’t the usual soft gray that brightens the sky just before dawn. It had the harsh brileance that comes only from the pre-sunrise skyglow being reflected from snow-covered ground.
opening his eyes, Longarm confirmed what he already knew. He didn’t see much point in walking across the room to raise a shade at one of the twin windows. The light seeping around the edges of the opaque shades had that cold, hard quality he’d sensed when he’d snapped awake.
Longarm swore, then grunted. He didn’t believe in cussing the weather or anything else he was powerless to change. He was a man who believed swearing just wasted energy unless it did something besides relieving his own dissatisfaction.
Last night, when he’d swung off the narrow-gauge railroad after a long, slow, swaying trip up from Santa Fe to Denver, he’d noted the nip in the air, but his usually reliable weather sense hadn’t warned him it might snow. It was just too early in the year. It was still fall, with the Rocky Mountains’ winter still a couple of months away. Longarm hadn’t been thinking too much about the weather last night, though. All that had been in his mind was getting to his room, taking a nightcap from the bottle of Maryland rye that stood waiting on his dresser, and falling into bed. On another night, he’d probably have followed his habit of dropping in at the Black Cat or one of the other saloons on his way home, to buck the faro bank for a few cards until he relaxed. He’d started to cut across the freightyard to Colfax instead of taking the easier way along Wynekoop Street. What he’d seen happen in New Mexico Territory had left a sour taste in his mouth that the three or four drinks he’d downed on the train couldn’t wash away.
There was little light in the freightyard. The acetylene flares mounted on high standards here and there created small pools of brightness, but intensified the darkness between them. Longarm was spacing his steps economically as he crossed the maze of tracks, sighting along the wheel-polished surface of the rails to orient himself, when he sensed rather than saw the man off to his left. He couldn’t see much in the gloom, just the interruption of the light reflected on the rail along which he was sighting.
“Casey!?” Longarm called. He didn’t think it was Casey, who was the yard’s night superintendent, and more likely to be in his office, but if it was one of Casey’s yard bulls on patrol, using the boss’s name would tell the man at once that Longarm wasn’t a freightyard thief.
A shot was his answer. A muzzle-flash and the whistle of lead uncomfortably close to his chest. Longarm drew as he was dropping and snap-shot when he rolled, firing at the place where he’d seen the orange blast. He didn’t know whether or not he’d connected. He hadn’t had a target; his shot was the equivalent of the warning buzz a rattlesnake gives when a foot comes too close to its coils.
Faintly, the sound of running footsteps gritting on cinders gave him the answer. Whoever had tried the bushwhacking wasn’t going to hang around and argue.
