Longarm removed his cheroot from his mouth and pointed at the girl, dipping his chin and narrowing his eyes once more. “I ain’t threatened by no woman, Agent Delacroix. Never have been, never will be.”
“Oh, you’re threatened, all right,” she said, her self-assured smile vexing him further. “I threaten your manhood because I can take care of myself and because the only thing you know to do with a woman like me is to fuck me. But you’ll never, ever do that again as long as I live!”
Longarm ground his molars as he glared at her from beneath his down-canted hat brim and blew smoke out his nostrils. Now, she genuinely had his goat, and they both knew it, and the only words he could find with which to respond were: “Wouldn’t want to!”
He wheeled and stomped off into the brush. Seething and chewing his cigar, he took a piss. She had some goddamn nerve, telling him that he was threatened by her when they both knew it was the other way around.
Didn’t they?
Angry and confused, he pissed in a complete circle around a square rock and then stomped back over to the springs. Both horses had wandered over to the water and were drinking while she stood beside the steeldust, adjusting a stirrup on the other side of the mount from Longarm. He sat on a rock in the relative shade of a large boulder and energetically smoked his cigar.
He didn’t look at the woman.
Anger burned in him.
He wished like hell he’d never met her even the first time in Leadville. Never met her at all. What particularly burned him, he realized as he smoked, was that he couldn’t keep those devilish little images from their night together in the Grand Hotel from creeping into his brain and causing his balbriggans to pinch.
Had she been right? Was his real problem with her the fact that he couldn’t get the sexy memories out of his craw? That he wanted—needed—her again?
Well, if it was true, and he had to admit that that might be a small part of it, she sure as hell wasn’t going to find out about it. From now on, he wasn’t going to see her nor treat her any differently than he would a man trailing along with him. If she got herself in trouble for wagging those pretty tits in men’s faces, she could get herself out of it.
He took the last puff from his cigar, toed the butt out in the dirt, and stomped over to his horse.
“All right, goddamnit,” he said through a growl, pulling the mount’s head up from a patch of grass growing along the spring. “Time to get a move on.”
“That’s just fine with me,” said Agent Delacroix, slipping the steeldust’s bit through its teeth. She flashed her wrathful eyes at him. “The sooner we get this assignment over, the better.”
“Ain’t that a coincidence,” he said, chuckling as he swung up into the leather. “That’s just how I feel about it!”
“Oh, and another thing.”
Longarm looked at her.
“I didn’t have half as much fun the other night as I was letting on.”
Longarm laughed. “The hell you didn’t!”
He booted the roan on down the southern hills in the direction of Broken Jaw, laughing.
Chapter 11
“Well, look what the cat dragged in! If it ain’t ole Custis P. Long his own mean an’ nasty self!” said Arizona Ranger Roscoe Sanders the next afternoon as Longarm and Agent Delacroix rode up to the squalid-looking ranger outpost in the desert town of Broken Jaw.
“You keepin’ out of trouble, Roscoe?” Longarm asked the ranger kicked back in a hide-bottom chair on the outpost’s front porch that was missing as many floorboards as it boasted.
Ranger Sanders was a small, compact, middle-aged gent with a horsey face trimmed with a long, Mexican-style mustache and one wandering eye. He wore a shabby wool vest over a grimy, cream shirt with blue pinstripes, a tarnished silver watch chain dangling from his vest pocket. His baggy wool trousers were patched in several places, their cuffs stuffed down inside his ancient stovepipe boots that were as worn as Apache moccasins.
Apparently, Sanders hadn’t heard Longarm’s question. He was squinting his good eye at Agent Delacroix riding up beside Longarm and facing the crumbling adobe shack that served as a ranger post, and he was slowly sitting up straighter in his chair. He poked his battered, old sombrero up off his pale forehead and widened his good eye.
“Say, now…what you got there?”
Longarm glanced at his partner and turned his mouth corners down in disgust. “This here is Miss Haven Delacroix, Pinkerton Agent. She’s taggin’ along on account of the Pinkerton’s representing Wells Fargo in the matter of the stolen gold.”
He and Haven hadn’t exchanged more than three words since they’d left the springs, though they’d spent one night camped together afterward, in a crease in the hills a few miles south of it. Fortunately, the girl’s latest three admirers hadn’t shown up on their back trail, but Longarm wasn’t convinced they still wouldn’t. His lawman’s sixth sense told him they were being shadowed.
“Pinkerton agent, eh?” said Sanders, rising slowly, his stiff knees popping audibly, good eye riveted on the willowy, heart-twistingly beautiful brunette who had Longarm by the balls and knew it though Longarm was doing his best to convince her she didn’t.
A woman with that kind of power was a dangerous thing.
“Say, now, they’re comin’ in purtier packages these days, ain’t they? The last one I seen was uglier’n last year’s sin. Couldn’t hold his liquor, neither.”
“I can assure you I can hold my liquor,” Agent Delacroix told the ranger, giving a haughty little smile directed at Sanders but meant for Longarm as she added, “Though I, unlike some, prefer not to drink when I’m working.”
“You’re makin’ me thirsty,” Longarm said with a grunt, flaring his nostrils at her and trying not to even glance at the two generous lumps in her shirt.
“How could you be thirsty?” she said without looking at him. “You’ve been sneaking sips from that flask of yours since early this morning.”
“Sneaking sips!” Longarm said with an annoyed chuckle. “I don’t sneak nothin’, and I had two drinks all day to cut the trail dust and make the company I been keepin’ somewhat tolerable.”
“Say, now…” said Roscoe Sanders, rolling his good eye between the two newcomers, deep lines cutting across his pale forehead and spoking his eye corners as he sized up the pair. He looked like he was watching two half-feral cats meet in an alley and was determining when the fur would fly.
With an air of impatience, Agent Delacroix said, “Getting down to business, Ranger Sanders, we understand that you’re incarcerating one Frank Three Wolves here, who may or may not have some information leading to the cache of stolen gold as well as to the killer or killers of the three rangers and two deputy United States marshals.” She offered a smile, which Longarm grudgingly had to admit was radiant. “Could we visit with this man, please?”
Sanders swallowed nervously as he stared at the woman, the deep, leathery tan of his craggy cheeks darkening with a schoolboy blush. “Well, sure, sure, ya can.” He grinned, showing tobacco-crusted teeth.
When he said nothing more but just stood staring at the woman and probably imagining doing much more, Longarm swung down from the roan’s back and said testily, “I take it he’s inside?”
Sanders raked his eyes from the girl reluctantly, frowning as though trying to understand what he’d just heard, then said, “Oh, no! He ain’t in the jailhouse. I got him over to Slim’s drawin’ drinks, as the boys from the Prickly Pear Ranch are in town, and Slim’s been laid up since the doc cut his appendix out.”