He nodded. “From a place called Florissant. You’ll see. Surely it’ll turn up in a day or two.”
“All right then. I expect I can forgive you. For a day or two anyway. But that letter had better be on the way, with the right postmark and date on it and everything, Custis, or I’ll be so mad you’ll wish you never came back.” Longarm grinned. And stepped inside Deborah’s foyer.
He managed to wait until the door was closed behind him and none of the neighbors might see. Then he took the gal—the whole wonderful armful of her—into his embrace and kissed her with all the intensity of a drowning man getting a breath of air.
Lordy, but he’d missed her. More even than he’d realized.
Chapter 22
“No, now let go of me for a minute, Custis. I have to get out of this uniform.”
“That’s pretty much what I had in mind too,” he confessed with a wink and a wicked leer.
Deborah laughed. And gave him a love tap on the head that damn near buckled his knees. He hated to think what it would feel like if she ever whacked him while she was pissed off. Likely it would knock him clean off his feet and send him ass-over-teacup rolling into the next room. All in all, he decided, it was a supposition he would rather not test in actual fact.
“Not before I have my bath, Custis. You know that.”
He nodded. Deborah was nothing if not clean. She was fanatical about it. Probably it had something to do with her training as a nurse, he suspected, but the first thing she always insisted on when she came away from work was getting herself scrubbed clean. And not just a spit-and-dab job of it either. She had to have herself a proper tub bath, and there wouldn’t be any peace to be found here if he tried to distract her or cozy her out of it. This was a gal who knew how to satisfy a man—which he was pretty sure had nothing at all to do with being a nurse, but a lot with being one hell of a woman—but she wouldn’t allow a finger on her, hardly, until she’d taken her bath.
“Do you need some help?”
“You can draw some water for me. It should be hot by now.”
Longarm went off to find the bucket while Deborah wrestled the slipper-shaped copper tub out of the kitchen pantry where she stored it during the day.
She didn’t need any help dragging it out onto the floor, heavy though it was, while he filled the bucket with water from the reservoir built onto the side of the wood box on the kitchen range. At least Longarm supposed it was still called that, even though Deborah burned coal in her stove. That was a question that had never occurred to him before. Anyway, he carried water to the tub until the reservoir was empty, then used the small pump built conveniently right onto the kitchen sink to draw more water, first to refill the hot water reservoir so it would be ready for the next time, then to add cold water to the tub until Deborah told him the temperature of the bath-water was to her liking.
“There’s room enough for two,” she suggested. Longarm took a skeptical look at the narrow tub. “Trust me,” she said, a somewhat impish look about her.
“If you put it that way …”
Deborah shed her uniform, its starch long since wilted and some unpleasantly red stains marring the white cloth after a day at the hospital, and Longarm hastened to shuck out of his clothes.
My, but this one was all woman. Proud of it too. There was no false modesty about her. She knew she looked good, and she made no attempt to hide herself from the admiration that was her proper due … and which he was pleased to give to her.
Her tits were big, but they barely sagged. Eventually they would, he supposed, but that time was still some years away. She had large, pale nipples and a dense thatch of reddish-blond hair at her crotch. Her belly was flat and her thighs smooth and pretty despite the heavy muscling that lay barely seen beneath the surface of her unblemished skin. She had delicate ankles and feet that seemed too small to carry her.
All in all, Longarm thought, she presented one dandy figure.
“Do you like?” she challenged, turning and preening and showing off for his pleasure.
“Plenty,” he admitted.
“You’re just buttering me up, aren’t you?”
“You want to use butter tonight?” he asked with a grin. “If that’s what you want …”
Deborah laughed, then stepped into the tub. She settled breast-deep into the hot water and closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again and said, “You can scrub my back if you really want to.”
“It’d be a pleasure, ma’am.”
“Oh, my. How formal.”
“Whatever the lady wishes,” Longarm said, trying to sound detached and proper about it.
He fetched a dish of soap off the counter near the sink and scooped a couple of fingers of it into his palm, then stepped over behind Deborah and began washing her. He washed her back. And continued on around to the front. Her breasts were full and heavy, slick and slippery with the combination of water and soap. He gently lathered them, giving special attention to her nipples, which by now were as hard and erect as Longarm’s stiff pecker.
“I thought I said something about washing my back,” Deborah declared.
“I can quit if you’d like.”
“Don’t you dare.”
He continued washing her, and Deborah closed her eyes and gave herself over to the sensations.
“Stand up,” he said. “I can’t wash what’s underwater, y’know.”
She nodded, and he took her hand to steady her as she stood in the tub. Lordy, but she was gorgeous standing
