Longarm and the Banker's Daughter (9781101613375) by Tabor Evans Page A

and beamed at him. She slid her eyes once, snidely, toward Longarm, then slid them back to Shafter as if the gaudy, overwrought sissy were the man of her dreams.
    Longarm pinched his hat brim to the pair, then reined the grullo away from the fire and loped it back out to the main trail, the four gunmen looking after him curiously. When he was half a mile out from the camp, he started feeling better, looser. Or at least not as tight.
    Christ, that girl had a hold on him. But what man wouldn’t she have a hold on? He’d known a few women like that—women you could fall in love with after a single glance, as though that glance were a net they dropped over you, tightened up like Glidden wire and with which they drew you toward them and held you there, under an otherwordly spell you couldn’t break free of.
    Of course, it was a net that in reality men really only threw over themselves and paid dearly for doing it. But it couldn’t be helped. Girls like Lacy Sackett—and there were damn few of her caliber—quickly became the objects of men’s obsessions. Often several men at once. And they knew it from an early age, and they took full advantage of it.
    Why the hell not?
    As he put the horse up a long, low rise straight south of where he and the others had bivouacked, he came to the rock-hard conclusion that this girl, Lacy Sackett, was more of a succubus than any other siren on earth or elsewhere. This one really was a witch. Pure-dee dyed-in-the-wool evil.
    He snorted a wry, mirthless laugh.
    And what he wouldn’t give to be able to let his guard down and have her writhing under him one more time!
    He rode for another mile. To his right lay a shelving mesa about the size of a small frontier settlement. It resembled a sinking ship, and he rode up the sunken end to the prow of steep, crenelated sandstone.
    Dismounting the grullo, he reached into his saddlebags and pulled out a pair of army field glasses. He hunkered down behind a boulder at the lip of the mesa and cast his gaze out over the top of the rock to the south, adjusting the glasses’ focus until he had clear, broad view of his and the others’ back trail for a couple of miles.
    He studied the broad valley closely, spying nothing but two riders heading from his left to his right about a mile away. They were trailing a small herd of horses and likely worked for one of the area’s sprawling ranches. The only other movement was a trio of coyotes and several rabbits scuttling about between sage clumps.
    He’d just started to lower the glasses when something moved. He steadied them, turning slightly left until he brought up several riders riding toward him along his and the others’ back trail. His heart quickened. He continued to steady the glasses and squint through the two semicircles of magnified terrain. The figures themselves were loping their mounts, rising up and down, but as they came down a rise Longarm could make out the two lead riders.
    Heck Gunn was on the left, wearing his customary opera hat with a spray of wildflowers rising from the silk band around the crown. He also wore round-rimmed, steel-framed glasses, and a gold hoop ring dangled from his right ear.
    Orlando Cruz rode to Gunn’s left—a stocky Mexican in a bowler hat, with long black hair hanging to his shoulders, and cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest, over a short, Mexican-style leather jacket. He rode with a sawed-off shotgun hanging down his chest by a leather lanyard. Gunn’s own arsenal included three pistols holstered on his hips and over his belly.
    The ten or so men behind him and Gunn were similarly attired and armed. A rugged, mean, nasty bunch. And they were after Lacy. Sure enough, they had to be. What else could lure them back north—back in the direction of the last bank they’d robbed—instead of south to the safety and anonymity of Mexico?
    Gunn and Cruz and maybe all the others had gotten a taste