Lenore cupped his balls in one palm while the fingers of her other hand steadied his cock and held it in place so she could better press herself onto him.

  “So big,” she mumbled once when she withdrew enough that his cock was poised at the opening of her lips.

  Then she pushed her mouth back onto him, shoving herself forward until his prick filled her mouth and drove on through, past the ring of cartilage at the back of her throat and beyond.

  The feelings she gave him were extraordinary.

  She stayed with him until the sweet pressure built beyond containing and he exploded into her mouth, his jism squirting in a nearly continuous flow.

  Lenore gobbled and gulped and at one point choked . . . but she stayed with him until he was done flowing. She swallowed everything he gave her and acted like she wanted even more.

  “Nice” was all she said when she finally withdrew.

  She sat up and smiled—ah, those dimples and lovely blue eyes—then quite happily arranged herself on the bed with her legs parted, ready for his entry.

  Longarm obliged, first taking her left nipple into his mouth and rolling it with his tongue. Lenore groaned and her hips began to lift and writhe.

  He slipped a finger into her pussy and found she was dripping wet and more than ready for him. He moved overtop of her, and Lenore reached between them to grasp his cock and guide it inside her, as Longarm lowered herself onto her. Into her. Deep. Deeper. Filling her body with his cock.

  He raised himself enough that he could see the rapt look on her face.

  Then he began to pump into her, slowly at first and then quicker and quicker, until he was pounding her belly with his own.

  Lenore’s moans filled his right ear, and her hips rose and fell in a frantic rhythm, until she cried out, clutching at him with arms and legs alike. And clenching his pecker tight with her spasming pussy.

  Longarm felt the rising of his sap, and for the second time in a space of only minutes he came, jets of hot cum squirting deep inside the girl’s body.

  When both were silent, sated, he looked into her eyes and said, “Remind me t’feed you right regular if that’s the reaction it gets outa you.”

  Lenore laughed and nibbled on his earlobe.

  “Careful, darlin’,” he said, “lest you get me started again.”

  “In that case,” she told him . . . and again began chewing on the earlobe.

  Longarm woke slowly and stretched. He had just awakened from a full night’s sleep but still felt drained.

  He was, he discovered, entwined limb to limb with Lenore Bailey, she being the reason he felt so drained.

  It was unusual for him to spend the night with a woman he did not know, but Lenore was an exception. She was . . . well, she was no virgin, that was for damn sure. But there was something about her that seemed almost innocent.

  He yawned and looked around. First at the way Lenore’s eyelashes looked so sweet and childlike against her cheek, then at the nearly empty room where they’d spent the night. There was daylight showing around the edges of the blind drawn across the window at the back of the room.

  He carefully disentangled himself from Lenore’s embrace, sat up, and retrieved his vest from the bare floor. He pulled out his watch and key, inserted the key into the Ingersoll and carefully wound it—in the activities of the night he had forgotten to do that—then checked the time. He should have time for a cup of coffee at the café before court resumed for the day. He was fairly sure he would be called to testify today, so he did not want to be late.

  “Darling Custis,” Lenore whispered, reaching for him. “Kiss me.”

  He did, one hand almost on its own finding her breast and kneading the soft flesh there, the nipple suddenly hard beneath his palm.

  “Take me, Custis. Do me.” She found his limp cock and toyed with it, quickly bringing it back to raging readiness. She cupped his balls and gently pulled, urging him onto her. Into her.

  Longarm considered the time. And smiled. He did not really have to have that cup of coffee.

  He climbed into the saddle yet again, once more amazed that a girl could look so sweet and yet act so bawdy.

  He stroked deep into her, deliberately pushing the rhythm so that the sensations quickly built then spilled over into a hard, hammering climax that might well leave the girl black and blue in her more tender parts.

  His climax was so hard, so complete that he cried aloud when the fluids gushed out of him and into her slender body. Lenore held him tight, wrapping her legs around him and holding on.

  Longarm tried to pull away from her, but Lenore held on all the tighter.

  “Now, looka here, darlin’, I have to get to court this mornin’. I’m gonna have to testify today. I’m pretty sure about that.”

  “No, Custis, don’t leave me. Please.” She pulled away but only long enough to slip down onto the floor and put her pretty head in his lap, lifting his cock, still wet and sticky from inside her body, and sucking it into her mouth. She lifted her head long enough to mumble, “Stay with me, Custis. You must. Please.”

  “I can’t do it, darlin’. Now, leave me be. I got to go.”

  He was pretty sure that now there was no time for that coffee. Not that he regretted the distraction. Far from it. Lenore Bailey was one sweet piece of ass. And she gave a mean blow job too.

  “Let go, darlin’. I got to get dressed.”

  Lenore continued to suck on him. The damn girl was becoming annoying.

  “Dammit, Lenore, I got to go now.”

  She quit stroking his balls and reached underneath the bed. When her hand appeared again, she was holding a four-shot Sharps derringer.

  Lenore raised her head and said, “I can’t let you do that, Custis. Don’t argue with me now. We’ll spend the day in bed, you and me. You won’t regret it, I promise. We’ll have us a fine old time fucking our brains out.” She gave him a questioning look and said, “Please, Custis? Please?”

  Longarm looked into the four barrels of the little Sharps. They were not very big.

  But the damn gun was big enough.

  “Stay with me, Custis. You have to.”

  She surely did seem to mean that too. As in You have to or I’ll put a bullet in your brisket.

  “Shit,” he murmured. “You don’t give a boy much of a choice, do you?”

  Lenore smiled. “Thank you, Custis. You won’t regret this. I promise.” She reached for his cock again.

  Chapter 4

  Fuck her? Longarm coldcocked her, his right fist slamming against the shelf of her jaw while his left brushed the little Sharps aside.

  Lenore reflexively jerked the trigger and the derringer spat smoke, flame, and a tiny bit of lead, but the bullet came nowhere near Longarm, winding up instead in one of the bedroom walls.

  He plucked the Sharps from her fingers while Lenore was trying to recover her wits, and dropped the pistol into the pocket of his coat, which was lying nearby on the floor.

  “Now, what the hell was that all about?” he demanded.

  Lenore shook her head, trying to clear the cobwebs that muddied her thoughts. After a moment she spoke. “I like you, Custis. Please stay here today. Please. I . . . I need for you to.”

  “Why, dammit?”

  “I am not the girl you thought I was. My name is not Lenore and I don’t come from around here. Never mind who I am or where I’m from. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you can’t testify at that trial, Custis. Please. Promise me that. Don’t go to court today.”

  “Willoughby hired you?”

  “I don’t know who hired me, Custis, and that is the truth. I was contacted . . . never mind by who. Whom? Who? I always get those mixed up.”

  “Never mind the English lesson. What are you supposed to do?”

  “All I am required to do is to keep you from testifying. How I do it, whether I have to kill you or not, was left up to me.” The girl began to cry. “I don’t want to do that, Custis. Please don’t make me.”

  Lenore reached under the bed again.

  Longarm did not intend to wait and see what she brought out this time. He punched her again. Harder and square in the face.

  Lenore’s nose broke with an audible crunch. Her upper lip split open and spilled bright blood down over her tits, and she toppled over onto the floor at his feet, out cold this time.

  If he’d had more time, he would have dragged the damn woman over to the Cheyenne city jail and booked her in on a charge of assault on a peace officer, but if he took time to do that he would surely miss the start of court. Lenore would have earned her pay after all.

  Instead he hurriedly dressed, scowled at the sight of the naked girl on the floor—she was just beginning to stir with the return of groggy consciousness—and strode out of the empty house.

  Whoever hired Lenore Bailey had a backup plan. Two men were waiting on the courthouse steps, one as far as he could get on either side of the doorway.

  The men wore matching dusters. That was not particularly unusual, but the bulges that showed in the front of the dusters were. Either those two had the world’s biggest hardons or they were hiding something else beneath the tan linen. And Longarm had a good idea what.

  He shifted direction before he mounted the steps and walked nonchalantly to his right, as if unsuspecting and innocent.

  The man closer to him pretended not to notice, although Longarm was sure the fellow would have a crawling sensation on the back of his neck, knowing that if he had to shoot he would have to swing the gun to his left, a difficult shift of aim for most men.

  The other, of course, could confront Longarm face-on. Which meant he would have to be taken out first and his partner afterward.

  Longarm drew his Colt, deliberately and with no hurry about it. Both gents in the linen dusters saw and reacted.

  The one to the left of the doorway pointed something under his duster—a sawed-off shotgun as it turned out—but had no time to fire before Longarm’s bullet smashed into his breastbone, taking first the breath away from him and then his life as he was launched backward against the stone building blocks.

  The man on the right, much closer to Longarm, tried to swivel around before the lawman could get a second shot off.

  He was late, and he damn well knew it. Instead of standing his ground to fire at the deputy who had already killed his partner, this one turned ghost pale and bolted for the wide open spaces.

  Longarm thought about putting a bullet in the bastard’s back, but there seemed no point to that. Instead he aimed a foot or so over the man’s head and triggered a .45 slug. He would not have thought it possible, but the fellow managed to run even faster after that sizzler pinked the crown of his hat, sending the hat flying and the man flying even faster.

  City police and sheriff’s deputies came boiling out of the courthouse in response to the sudden gunfire, but Longarm’s two shots had ended the conflict.

  “What the hell . . . ?”

  Longarm shrugged and reloaded his revolver. “I think somebody didn’t want me to testify this morning. You boys want to take charge here? I’ll give you my statement this afternoon, but right now I got me a date inside a certain courtroom.”

  James Willoughby, he noticed, looked almighty worried when he saw Longarm walk in unscathed. Had damn good reason to be worried too. It took no great powers of deduction to understand that Willoughby, or someone acting on his behalf, was behind these assaults.

  Six hours later, with Longarm’s testimony on the record and James Willoughby’s jury deliberating the man’s fate, Longarm returned to the house where he had left Lenore.

  The front door was locked and no one answered his knock, so Longarm unfolded his pocketknife and jimmied the lock tongue.

  There was no sign of Lenore—or whoever the hell she was—not that he’d really expected any. The narrow bed was there and the empty keg, but that was all that remained anywhere in the place.

  Longarm went next door and rapped lightly on that door. After a minute or so and a repeat of the knocking, a man wearing bib overalls and a sleeveless shirt answered. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a rather annoyed look on his face. Longarm guessed he’d interrupted the fellow’s lunch.

  “What is it?” the home owner growled. “Whatever it is, mister, I don’t want to buy any.” The gentleman’s expression changed when Longarm displayed his badge. “Mister, I done nothin’. You got to believe me about that.”

  “I believe you,” Longarm assured him. “I got no beef with you. Just need to ask you a question or two.”

  The man grunted his assent, took a sip of the coffee, and scratched his crotch with the other hand.

  “It’s about the woman who lives next door. Or is renting there, I suppose.”

  “Woman? Mister, there ain’t no woman over there. Hasn’t been since Margarite died six, maybe seven years ago that was. Old Jules lived there by hisself until last October. His daughter came up from Omaha then and took Jules home with her to live. They sold off all his stuff. Auctioned it, they did. That was in December. I remember clear because I bought a right handsome thunder mug for my Mabel. Got it for fifteen cents and quite a bargain it was.” He chuckled. “I gave it to my woman for Christmas, which is why I remember it so plain. The place has set empty ever since then.”

  “No one has had permission to live there?” Longarm withheld his opinion of a man who would give his wife a thunder mug for Christmas. And a used one at that.

  “No.” The fellow took another drink of his coffee, which in fact smelled tantalizingly good as Longarm still had not had time to get so much as a sip of the stuff all day. “No one there, though I hear tell the daughter will be putting the house up for sale. Jules won’t be coming back here, I’m pretty sure. He’ll likely stay with his girl until he dies.”

  “Thank you, sir. Sorry to have disturbed you, but you’ve been a big help.”

  The man grunted and withdrew, closing the door in Longarm’s face.

  Longarm grunted too. With disgust. He had been taken in by the girl, likely a high-priced whore from some big city, who called herself Lenore Bailey. Whoever she was, he was betting he would never see her again. If he happened to, he would arrest her.

  But damn, she was a prime piece of tail.

  He walked back to the courthouse, and beyond it to the café on the corner nearby. His belly was growling, and he was hoping he could induce the cook there to serve him up a platter of eggs and crisp bacon. Or ham. Maybe both. And coffee. Lordy, he did want some coffee now.

  His mouth was already watering as he stepped inside the café.

  Chapter 5

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?”

  “We have, Your Honor.”

  The judge turned his attention to the prisoner. “You will rise, sir.”

  “Fuck you,” Willoughby snarled.

  The judge did not argue the point. He did, however, nod to the deputies who were stationed in his courtroom. Without further direction, the deputies, big men both of them, walked over to Willoughby, took him by the arms, and lifted him bodily out of the chair where he had been insolently slouching.

  “You may publish your findings,” the judge said to the jury foreman.

  “We find James Henry Willoughby guilty of the crime of murder,” announced the foreman, a lanky chap whose accent suggested he was from Texas.

  “Thank you, jurors.” The judge turned his attention back to Willoughby, who still more or less dangled between the deputies. “James Willoughby, for the crime of murder, in which you shot down a man who was a far better person than yourself, I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. A date for your execution will be determined by the prison warden. Jurors, you are excused now. Deputies, you will take that sorry son of a bitch back to his cell now, please.”

  Longarm grunted. It was a right and proper outcome. He stood, reaching for a cheroot.

  By habit he looked across the room for the girl with the light brown hair, but of course there was no sign of her. She likely would not be seen again, at least not by him. Perhaps oddly, he hoped she had been paid for her services in advance. Otherwise she would have gone to all that trouble for no purpose.

  “Sir. Mister marshal, sir?” It was the old man again, without his broom this time but just as quietly insistent that he have a word with Longarm.

  Longarm reached into his pocket and drew out a scant handful of coins, some of which gleamed the yellow of minted gold. He selected a quarter and held it out to the old fellow, but the man shook his head.

  “I ain’t here to beg from you, Marshal. I got . . . I got t’talk to you if you’d be so kind.”

  “Oh?”

  “I need help, Marshal. That is, my grandbaby needs your help. Can we talk, sir? Please?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Would you like some coffee while we talk? We can go over to the café and—”

  “Oh, no, sir, I couldn’t go there, me being the local drunk and you being a proper gentleman. There’s folks who . . . wouldn’t take real well to me putting on airs.”

  “We could go to my room,” Longarm suggested.

  “But . . .”

  “It’s all right. I’m a deputy United States marshal, don’t forget. Nobody is going to stop me from talking to someone who needs my help. Come along now.” He smiled. “If you like, I can send a boy to fetch us coffee. Maybe some sandwiches.”

  The old fellow’s eyes lit up, and he tried to stifle a laugh but failed. “I’d like that just fine, Marshal sir. Me in that hotel being waited on. Oh, yes, sir, I’d like that just fine. But if you don’t mind, sir, it’d sit better with . . . with them folks if I didn’t do it quite that way.”

  Longarm’s eyebrows rose in inquiry. “Why not?”

  “It would go hard on me afterward. I’ll explain.”

  “I wouldn’t want to cause you troubles.”

  “Tell you what I could do instead, Marshal. I could go fetch a tray with coffee on it. If anybody saw, they’d figure I was waiting on you an’ that would be all right.”

  Longarm nodded. “That sounds reasonable. Let me give you some money then for the coffee. A sandwich too if you’d like. And don’t worry. Whatever I spend will be on my expense account. That means the government will end up paying for it.”