Longarm and the Wolf Women by Tabor Evans Page B

sure how long he’d been asleep before something woke him.
    He opened his eyes and blinked into the darkness. Lightning lit up the two west-facing windows, for half a second filling the room with a cold, violet light.
    Just enough light for just enough time for Longarm to see the hatted, jacket-clad figure moving toward him from the door. One flap of the jacket was pulled back behind a holstered revolver.

Chapter 5
    Warning bells clanging in his head, Longarm flung his right hand out toward the double-action .44 holstered on the chair back beside the bed.
    â€œHold on!” a female voice hissed, so drowned by a sudden thunderclap that Longarm was slow to comprehend.
    In an eyeblink, his pistol was in his hand, cocked, and aimed at the intruder’s belly. The intruder aimed a silver-plated Colt at Longarm.
    â€œIt’s Merle,” she said, keeping her voice low.
    â€œChristalmighty!” Longarm groused, still too shocked to release his grip on his .44. “What the hell you think you’re doin’?”
    She stood about five feet from the bed. He could see only her silhouette during lightning flashes. Rain pelted the windows, and the wind was kicking up.
    â€œYou holster yours,” she said, voice like steel, “I’ll holster mine.”
    Longarm wasn’t in the habit of dropping his own gun when another was being aimed at him—even when that other gun was held by a blond heart-stopper like Merle Blassingame.
    â€œYou first,” Longarm countered.
    â€œWe’ll do it together.”
    â€œOn the count of three.”
    Merle said, “One, two, three . . .”
    Neither gun moved a hair.
    â€œOh, for Pete’s sake!” she said, giving her silver-plated Navy a twirl and dropping it into its holster. “I came to fuck, not swap lead.”
    Longarm let his Colt sag. “Huh?”
    She doffed her hat, slung it toward a chair in the far corner, then began unbuckling her cartridge belt. When she had the belt off and was slinging it over the same chair holding Longarm’s belt and holster, he reached over toward the chair himself and, keeping his eyes on the girl, dropped his .44 in its sheath.
    He watched, by intermittent lightning flashes, thunder rumbling and rattling the windows, as Merle unbuttoned her shirt quickly, shrugged out of the loose-woven garment and her deerskin jacket, and tossed both in the general direction of her hat.
    â€œMind if I light a lamp? I like to see what I’m gettin’ into.”
    Longarm swallowed. “Right practical.”
    When she’d lit the lamp on the dresser, she kicked out of her boots and did a cobra imitation, wiggling out of her jeans and men’s skintight longhandles, then hopping around, full breasts jouncing beneath a lacy chemise, as she pulled off her men’s white socks.
    Finally, naked from the waist down, she stepped up to the bed, regarded Longarm wistfully from between the mussed wings of her long, blond hair, which the wan lamplight caressed lovingly.
    She crossed her arms and lifted the sheer chamise toward her neck. The material raked over her breasts, catching on the nipples, jostling them slightly before she pulled the garment up over her head. Her hair rose with the chamise and fell back down across her shoulders, sticking out here and there like straw from a shock, several strands framing the big, round, pink-nippled globes of her breasts.
    Assuming a mock bullfighter’s stance, she held the chamise out between the thumb and index finger of her left hand, as though it were a cape, then dropped it straight down to the floor. She tossed her hair out, giving Longarm an uncluttered view of her body.
    Her belly was flat, the hips nicely rounded, and the thighs arcing in a long, graceful curve—the hard, toned thighs of a woman who spent a lot of time on horseback.
    â€œYou like?” she said.
    Longarm swallowed. His heart was thudding like a Ute war drum. He always slept