He hadn’t been reading long when there came a gentle rapping on his chamber door. So he got up to wrap a hotel towel around his waist and follow his .44-40 over to the door to see who it might be.
He hadn’t really been expecting a raven. But he was surprised to see Fox Bancroft standing there in all her glory, or at least with no hat, her red hair let down, and the top buttons of her shirt neglected.
She pushed in and shut the door behind her with a boot heel as she softly said, “I don’t want anyone to see me in a strange man’s hotel room like this!”
To which he could only reply, lowering the muzzle of his gun at least, “Aw, I ain’t so strange and to what might I owe this honor?”
She dimpled up at him in the lamplight and confided, “I was aboard the same train out of Pawnee Junction. I couldn’t come forward to your smoking car because Rose Burnside was getting aboard just as I was. I waited until she’d gone to another hotel before I hired a room in this one, just down the hall.”
Longarm asked, “How come? I thought you were sore at me about the way I had to call the shots about little Timmy and his momma.”
She seemed to be herding him backwards toward the bedstead as she said soothingly, “I saw you had no other choice as soon as I got to thinking about it later. Rose Burnside was gushing about you on the train, by the way. She’s sold out and never means to return to Pawnee Junction and its painful memories. But she’s ever so grateful about the way you cleared her brother’s name, and she said you spoke to her gently as well. I understand you never got fresh with Rose, or that pretty Mavis MacUlric you did so much for either.”
“Does Miss Mavis think I’m swell too?” he asked her uncertainly.
The redhead suddenly planted her shapely but work-hardened palms against his bare chest to push him hard and spill him back across the bed as she demurely replied, “The Widow MacUlrich has her own beau. Let me tell you about the hateful man I met when my daddy sent me back East to this fancy school just before he died.”
She braced one hand against his bare chest and reached down to whip the towel from between them as she wormed a knee into his armpit on either side, saying, “He was the leader of the debating team, and he could talk the horns off a billy goat or the pantaloons off a country girl who’d never heard such big words from a man she was in a closed carriage with! The brute seduced me when I was barely seventeen!”
Longarm gulped and said, “I’m sure sorry you got seduced so young by a slick-talking college boy, ma’am.”
She moved a fold of her skirting out of the way as she sighed and said, “I wasn’t. It sure felt better than anything else I’d ever done. But a girl has to be so careful!” He’d already risen to the occasion, and damned if she didn’t seem to be trying to impale her sweet self on his raging erection as he told her he had some French letters in his frock coat across the room.
Then it popped inside her and she hissed in pleasure as she settled down to take it all the way, gasping, “Don’t be silly. I know how to cope with that worry. The real worry for a woman of property and some social standing is her reputation, and the way so many of you men carry on about your conquests! Why do you men have to crow like roosters and tell everyone for miles around that you liked it dog style?”
Longarm reached up to unbutton her denim shirt and expose nicer cupcakes than he’d pictured in his head while he told her women had been known to brag as well. So she swore she’d never tell on him as she whipped her skirt off over her red head.
Then he rolled her shapely form over to spread her pale thighs as wide as they could spread while he parted the red hair between them right. She moaned and begged for more as she clung to his questing shaft with her tight moist innards, and when he came in her he felt it all the way down to his toes.
For the willowy redhead combined the amorous acrobatics of the forceful Nancy from the Indian Agency with the softer submissive passion of little Ellen from that library. So a good time was had by both, and as they drifted back down through a blizzard of rose petals, he heard her murmuring, “Oh, Lord, I’d almost forgotten how swell that can feel! I never could have let myself go that way with you before I knew how considerate you’d been with Felicia Tendring, dear.”
He left it in her as he protested, “Hold on. I never trifled with that murderous kid’s momma! She was only acting that way with Pronto Cross to save her nasty brat! Who told you I was this considerate with her, damn it?”
Fox Bancroft moved her hips sensuously and puffed, “Nobody. I saw for myself how you’d covered her shame for her when somebody else told me her lawyer was named Ralph! You knew all along that Uncle George was really Pronto Cross, didn’t you?”
He thrust back, as any man would have, and replied, “I was naturally on to the recorded first name of a famous town-tamer. But as you said earlier, George is a more common name than Howard. What cinched it for me was Pronto saying young Howard Tendring was a good kid when his own mother had just told me the town marshal had warned her about the way he’d molested that little colored gal. Felicia and her monster called him Pronto Cross in public and Uncle George around the house. I reckon he spent a heap of time around her house, after he found that a widow woman with an awful brat and a warm nature would do most anything for an understanding lawman.”
He began to thrust in time with her sensuous movements as he went on. “There was no call for me to gossip about her and Pronto once we had him in the ground and her kid off to the lunatic asylum. She had enough to fret her heavy heart, and I doubt she or even Pronto knew the full truth before Pronto had taken the time to question little Timmy Sears closer than he let on. Once Pronto figured out what had really happened over at First Calvinist, the rest of the sad story followed as the night the day. He might not have told the real killer’s mother as much as he knew. But either way, she’s stuck with the simple fact that her only child is a degenerate half-wit, whilst her secret lover was a moral monster who’d murder two men, a woman, and a child just to enjoy some times like this on the sly.”
She began to move faster under him as she moaned, “Speak for yourself, dear! I’m not sure I’d be willing to kill for this fine a time on the sly. But I know I’d just die if anyone back in Pawnee Junction knew what I was doing this very minute with the lamp lit!”
He asked her if she wanted him to trim the lamp.
She gasped, “Don’t you dare stop! I only meant I couldn’t be this free with any man I couldn’t trust to keep my secret vices secret! I want to come this way again, and then I want to show you some other secret ways to have fun, you considerate sneaky thing!”
So he let her have her shocking way with him, and they never told a soul in Pawnee Junction or Denver what they’d been up to all that time in Ogallala, with the shades drawn and the lamp lit.
