As he lifted his saddlebags off the roan’s back and slid his Winchester from its sheath, setting the long gun on his right shoulder, he realized he had a semi hard-on. Grimacing, he brushed his hand across his crotch, adjusting his whipcord trousers so not to cripple himself.
He consciously wrestled the girl’s image from his mind and, only partly succeeding, stiffly stepped onto the stone paving, climbed the hotel’s entrance steps, and pushed through the heavy, giant, castle-like doors into the broad, high-ceilinged lobby.
There she was, ahead of him, apparently picking up her room key at the block-long, horseshoe-shaped front desk of gleaming cherry trimmed with silver and with ornate mahogany inlays. Over the lobby and between ornate balconies with rails of the same material as the front desk, hung a crystal chandelier the size of a Concord stagecoach.
Longarm only glanced at the lobby’s fine appointments, having found the young brunette to be as breathtaking as anything that humans could ever construct. Just now the liveried, gray-haired lobby clerk handed her a small parchment envelope, which she opened, slipping out the note tucked inside. She bowed her lovely head to read the missive as she made her way to the wine-red carpeted staircase with its gleaming, polished rails.
The liveried oldster twisted a corner of his waxed handlebar mustache as he watched her go, dipping his chin just enough to tell Longarm that he was admiring the girl’s ass. Longarm found himself admiring it, too, as he strode across the polished slate floor, saddlebags over one shoulder, Winchester hiked atop the other.
As the woman made her way up the stairs, slowly at first as she read the note, then more quickly when she’d read it, turning at the second-floor landing, Longarm set his gear on the desk and said, “Who in the roaring flames of the devil’s hell is that?”
The oldster gave him a disapproving glance, jerking his black silk waistcoat down. “I do apologize, sir, but I’m not predisposed to give out information about the Grand’s clientele.”
“Well, excuse me all to hell.” Longarm caught one last glimpse of the charming waif before she disappeared up the second leg of the stairs. “Don’t suppose you’d be predisposed to renting a room to this tired old jake for a night, would you, friend?”
He hated uppity folks, especially those he knew to be little better heeled that he himself was.
The middle-aged desk clerk gave the tall, sun-weathered, dusty, rifle-wielding gent before him the critical up and down before saying with a haughty sigh and a slow, reproving blink behind steel-framed spectacles, “If you can pay in advance, such arrangements can be made, I suppose.”
Longarm plunked the right amount of coins onto the desk, signed the register, gave the nasty old clerk instructions regarding the tending of his horse as well as his own person in the form of a hot bath delivered to his room, then pocketed his room key.
“Later, amigo,” he said.
“Of course, sir.”
“And don’t be skimpy on the roan’s oats,” he said as he crossed to the stairs, not looking behind him. “I need him rarin’ to ride first thing in the mañana.”
As he made his way to his room, striding along the second floor’s carpeted hall lit with gilded bracket lamps, he stopped suddenly, frowned, and glanced over his right shoulder. A door latch clicked, as though a door had been opened slightly, quietly, but not so quietly closed.
As if someone had been spying on him.
The girl?
Longarm’s broad face with its late-day beard shadow acquired a wistful expression. “Hmmmm.”
Chapter 5
Longarm lounged in the hot water that the young porter had filled his copper tub with, sitting back and smoking a three-for-a-nickel cheroot and sipping straight from the bottle of Maryland rye whiskey that the lad had also hauled to his room.
The lawman, grateful for the rare rye and to be able to sit right here in his nicely furnished digs without having to hammer the boardwalks looking for a tonsorial parlor or bathhouse, flipped the kid a three-dollar gold piece, and the kid—tall and gangly and looking like the sensitive black sheep of a mining family—left grinning.
When Longarm had scraped his jaws with his ivory-handled razor, he rinsed with a bucket of clean hot water the porter had also provided. Finding himself as hungry as a prisoner working the rock quarries, he scrambled out of the tub. He dressed in clean underwear from his saddlebags and then wrestled into the rest of his duds that he’d given a quick dusting with a horsehair brush. He’d cleaned his low-heeled cavalry stovepipes with a little spit and a gun rag.
He wrapped his gun and shell belt around his narrow hips, dropped his double-barreled, pearl-gripped derringer into the right pocket of his fawn vest, slid the old turnip watch into the opposite pocket, donned his hat, and headed down to the hotel’s stylish dining room to sup.
Just after he’d ordered the roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy with two hot buns and sides of fresh garden greens and buttered carrots, his heart stopped. His chest went tight, and his face swelled. It heated up like a pig carcass hanging in the full sunlight.
At least, he thought his ticker had seized up on him. Maybe it only felt like that. He was dead certain his lower jaw was sagging nearly clear down to his round table’s crisp white linen, twinkling silverware, and glistening crystal water glass.
Vaguely, as he stared into the hazel eyes of the queen he’d probably have met properly outside the hotel earlier if she hadn’t caught him staring at her tits, he considered summoning a sawbones but nixed the idea when he didn’t pass out but found himself looking at the top of the girl’s beautiful brown head as she perused her menu.
She was sitting across the room from him. And she’d been watching him. He knew she had. That’s what had almost killed him.
He’d been looking around the large room with its high, pressed-tin ceiling painted off-white, and then he’d found himself staring into those eyes that had been directed at him. Sort of furtively directed at him, over the girl’s menu.
Then she’d lowered those polished marbles quickly but somehow casually to her menu, and he was now studying the rich swirls of brown hair, his heart beating again. Not really beating but fluttering.
The comb she wore in her hair was cherry colored. It complimented her red, lace-edged dress perfectly, and it also brought out the deep reds in her skin, including the red of her wide, full mouth that had been so perfectly made by God to wrap itself around a man’s jutting cock, to suck him and deliver him to bliss.
She hadn’t been seated in the dining room when he’d walked in five minutes earlier. He was quite certain she hadn’t, because he’d looked around for her when the hostess had seated him at the corner table he’d requested, because he always requested corner tables, with his back to the wall. It was a safety precaution that he always took to prevent his ending up back-shot by one of the many men he’d offended over the years and finding himself facedown, dead, in a pile of potatoes and beef gravy.
The point being, he had a good view of the room, and he’d looked for her. But she hadn’t been here. Till now. She must have just been seated, maybe when he’d been perusing his menu, and now she was here. Which meant that there was a very good chance that it had been her who’d been spying on him earlier, when he’d been hunting for his room, and that she’d followed him down here now.
Could she be stalking him?
The idea was no less intoxicating for being utterly preposterous. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to ooze in his shorts like a love-struck schoolboy getting a peek through the half-moon in the privy door at his favorite girl with her frillies down around her ankles.