Instead he wandered the streets for a bit, smoking and pondering, not really wanting to go back to an empty room and a cold bed, and after a time he decided he might as well drop by to see, on the off chance sort of, if Deborah happened to be home and, well, not doing anything right at the moment. Just in case.
That decision accomplished, he commenced to feeling considerably better. And it wasn’t like he was taking time away from the investigation. There wasn’t anything he could do now until he got those names from Henry come tomorrow morning. Right? Damn right.
Satisfied, Longarm tossed the stub of his cheroot into the gutter and stalked off in search of a passing hack he could flag down and get to take him to Deborah’s place.
“Custis!” She sounded surprised. And kinda mad too, he thought. She said his name like she was reporting the presence of dog shit on the bottom of her shoe.
“Didn’t you get my note?”
“What note?”
“I sent you a letter. A couple days ago.”
“You sent me a letter a couple days ago? Last week you stood me up. I thought we were going to have a long weekend together. Did that slip your mind, Custis?”
“Dammit, Debbie, be fair. My boss was murdered. I’m sure you heard ‘bout that. All of us been busy as a kicked-over nest of ants, running around trying to figure out who done it. I had to go down south in the mountains. Didn’t have time to plan for it nor to come by an’ tell you what was up. But I sent you that letter from down there. I swear I did.”
“I haven’t seen any letter.”
“It’s only been a couple days, I told you. It’ll show up in another day or two.”
She sniffed haughtily. But he thought she looked a little less angry. Maybe. He hoped.
This one, this woman in front of him, well, Deborah was kinda special. That’s all there was to it.
Not that she was all that much to look at. At least not the first few times you looked at her. She was a big gal. Big all over, from the bones out. Tall, with wide hips and big tits, and likely she weighed almost as much as Longarm did. But then she was damn near as tall as he was too, and her weight was distributed in a mighty fetching series of curves and indentations.
She had high cheekbones, big lips that he happened already to know were plenty soft and mobile, big furry caterpillars of eyebrows over huge brown eyes, and a kinky-curly mass of strawberry-blond hair that no amount of brushing could ever quite tame. She was Irish and looked it, with her pale, lightly freckled complexion and strong jawline.
She was strong too, with arms that could pick up most patients to turn them over or wash them or whatever, and legs that, although shapely, were powerful enough to bust ribs if she ever decided to clamp down on a man in, say, a fit of passion or something.
She was … hell, she was fine. That’s all there was to it. She was fine.
And if she didn’t seem especially beautiful at the first or third or maybe tenth inspection, eventually a man had to ask himself why he was spending all that time staring at her, and when he did that he just naturally had to come to the conclusion that this big old Irish gal had something special about her. An air, an aura, something that happened to those close by when she was around.
Rooms seemed to open up and get brighter when Deborah walked into them. Colors became clearer and images sharper. Sounds were lighter and happier when she was nearby, and there was always joy and laughter trailing in her wake wherever she walked.
Longarm damn sure liked this handsome woman in her primly starched white dress and bird-shaped nurse’s cap. He hoped he hadn’t gone and alienated her. He removed his Stetson and held it before him in both hands, kind of giving the idea that he was wringing the brim, but at the same time being careful not to muss the felt. After all, it was a good hat and he didn’t want to ruin it while he was making like Little Boy Lost.
He kept his eyes down, a contrite expression on his face and a load of very genuine hope in his heart. “I didn’t go to make you mad,” he said. “I’m sorry that I stood you up. You did hear about Billy, didn’t you?”
She gave him a strange look that he couldn’t quite interpret. Then, after a time that seemed uncomfortably long to him, she sighed and stepped back out of the doorway, pushing the screen door open so he could come inside. “You really mailed me a letter?”
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.