Longarm and the Sins of Laughing Lyle (9781101612101) by Tabor Evans

but he could see her nostrils flaring as she spat out, “Who the
fuck
are you, and just what in the
fuck
do you think you’re doing—skulking around out here in the middle of the night. Be quick about it. I just love the sound of a gun’s roar!”
    â€œIs this quick enough for you? I’m Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long out of Denver. So if you trigger that smoke wagon, you’ll just be doin’ it to hear it roar, but you’ll be killing a federal lawman in the bargain. That’s a hanging offense. And, pardon me, but did you say ‘fuck’?”
    The girl didn’t say anything.
    She depressed the pistol’s hammer with a click.
    She giggled as she lowered the pistol, and starlight glimmered off her white teeth and her eyes as she smiled. “You won’t tell anyone, will you, Marshal? I save the farm talk for men skulking around my house of a night when my pa, the good Reverend, isn’t here.”
    â€œThey do that often, do they?”
    â€œOften enough that I keep Pa’s pistol loaded and on my night table with my Bible. Well, well, I’ve been expecting you.”
    â€œYou have?”
    â€œOh, yeah. Word travels fast in Nowhere.” She ducked under the railing and stepped up onto the porch. When she straightened, the coat she was wearing—an old, molting buffalo robe—flapped open slightly. Longarm caught a glimpse of creamy, jostling flesh. Lightning forked in his loins automatically.
    But he couldn’t have seen what he thought he’d seen. The preacher’s daughter couldn’t be naked beneath her robe. But then he hadn’t expected a minister’s daughter to curse like a muleskinner, either.
    â€œWhoops!” She folded the robe closed across her breasts, and giggled once more. “Yes, I’ve been expecting you,” she said, sidling past him, opening the screen door and pushing through the inside one. Around her was the faint odor of liquor. “Come on in. If anyone slipped inside while I was prowling around looking for whoever knocked over a stack of wood behind the house, no doubt trying to get a look through my bedroom window, you can shoot them for me in the name of the law.”
    â€œAll right—I’ll do that.”
    He went in and closed the door behind him. The house was small but neat. A lamp burned on the wall that divided the small kitchen to the right from a living area to the left. Stairs rising to the second story split the house in two.
    The living room was dominated by a large hearth in which the coals of a recent fire glowed umber. The sparse furnishings included a rocking chair near the fireplace, with a small table beside it, and a horsehide sofa against the wall to Longarm’s left, facing the chair and the hearth. There were a few bookshelves and oval-framed daguerreotypes. The air smelled of old pipe tobacco and coffee, and another scent—light cherry perfume, talcum, and brandy—that grew stronger as the girl passed him and strode into the room. She turned up a small, green-shaded lamp on the table and then plopped casually down on the sofa, lounging on her side and drawing her bare knees up toward her belly. When the coat had slid open, he thought he’d been given—accidentally, of course—a brief glimpse of the darker triangular area between her thighs and beneath her belly button.
    The light shone golden in her blond hair, which hung in a sexy tangle about her fair, plump cheeks and green eyes. Her small, pink feet were perfectly proportioned.
    â€œHave a seat, Marshal.” Her voice was as light and sonorous as glass chimes.
    Longarm doffed his hat and crossed the room to the rocking chair. “Miss Todd, I presume?”
    â€œYou presume correct, sir,” she said with a slightly jeering, teasing air. “Call me Beth.” She rolled her sparkling green eyes up and down his long, lean, broad-shouldered frame. “Damn, you’re