Her desk was every bit as large as Bledsoe’s, and just as cluttered. A pink lamp burned on her desk, illuminating her cool, remote, severely Nordic beauty in the flickering light’s shifting planes and shadows.
Miss Langdon flipped a heavy curling lock of her red-gold hair back behind her shoulder, revealing wide cheekbones that tapered severely down to a fine chin and regal jaw. Her crystalline, lake-green eyes, long and slanted like a cat’s eyes, lingered on Pecos’s tall, broad-shouldered frame, raking him up and down. A dark cloak was pulled around her shoulders, over the purple velvet gown she wore so well. She reached for a shot glass on the desk before her, amidst the clutter of open files and dossiers and bound books on federal law, and took a sip.
Her eyes stayed on Pecos as she said, almost too quietly to be heard above the small fire crackling in the small sheet-iron stove flanking her boss, “Hello.”
Pecos seemed to be breathing hard. He cleared his throat thickly and said, “H-hello, there, Miss . . .” He remembered his hat, quickly doffed it, and held it before him. “Hello, there, Miss Langdon.”
Slash squelched a chuckle. Pecos had reacted to the remote beauty—whom Slash judged to be in her middle twenties, though with a decidedly more mature air about herself—the first time they’d met. Abigail Langdon had reacted similarly to Pecos. It was almost as though the two were giving off invisible sparks of attraction—a primitive reach for each other.
Bledsoe seemed to sense it now, too. Sitting back in his chair, hands behind his head, he studied the two with an amused half-smile, his eyes dubious.
He slid his gaze to Slash, his eyes vaguely curious. Bledsoe gave a dry chuckle, then leaned forward slightly and beckoned to the two cutthroats impatiently. “Come in, come in. We’re burnin’ moonlight. I have to get back to that consarned, infernal hellhole, Denver, for a meeting at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. I came out here to try to get a little work done in the peace and quiet of the bucolic countryside, and because I got a fresh job for my two over-the-hill cutthroats.”
He smiled at that, again mockingly. He enjoyed ringing men’s bells and watching for a reaction that might amuse him. Slash and Pecos had learned that the first time they’d met the man.
“If you really thought we was over the hill,” Pecos pointed out, indignantly, his voice rising angrily, “we wouldn’t have turned Jack Penny into a human sieve tonight, just like we done to the rest of his gang last year. And you wouldn’t have called us here, Chief Marshal. So why don’t you stop tryin’ to rub our fur in the wrong direction just ’cause you’re hip deep in bureaucratic sheep dip, and bored, and get down to brass tacks.”
Slash turned to his partner, brows arched in surprise. Even Miss Langdon turned to look over her shoulder in shock at the tall, silver-blond cutthroat who had just shoveled it right back to old Bleed-Em-So. Pecos rarely got riled or spoke out even when he was. It took a lot to get his dander up. It appeared, however, that the chief marshal’s riding him and Slash about their ages—in front of Miss Langdon, especially—had done just that.
Slash covered a chuckle by brushing his fist across his nose and clearing his throat.
Bledsoe stared across his cluttered desk at Pecos, tapping his fingers on his blotter. “Well, well, it is possible to get his neck in a hump, after all.”
“Oh, you can do it, all right,” Slash said. “Always best not to, though. It takes some doin’, indeed, but once Pecos has got a mad on, it takes a good long time to cool him off. Sometimes several days, and only after he’s turned a whole row of saloons to little more than matchsticks and jackstraws.” Slash chuckled dryly, switched positions in his chair. “That’s a bonded fact. I’m an eyewitness!”
He chuckled again.
“Duly noted,” Bledsoe said, impressed. He sipped from the shot glass on his desk. A tequila bottle stood near his right elbow, uncorked. He did not, however, invite the two cutthroats to imbibe with him and his assistant. It was one thing to employ two men he’d been, for most of his career, trying to run down and jail or execute, one of whom had crippled him, however inadvertently. But old Bleed-Em-So was not going to sink so low as to invite them to drink with him.
That would be like telling them he didn’t hold a grudge, which of course he did. Anyone would.
Smacking his lips, he set the glass back down on his desk and brushed two fingers across his lips. “All right, all right. What’s this about Jack Penny?”
“Gone to his reward,” Pecos said. “Which means he’s likely wielding a coal shovel about now.”
“Hmmm.” Bledsoe tapped his fingers on the blotter again. “Self-defense, I’m sure . . .”
“He bushwhacked us in the Thousand Delights. Baited us in with Jay.”
“I do hope the lovely Miss Breckenridge is unharmed,” Bledsoe said, sounding as though he meant it, though he was well aware that she’d once run with Pistol Pete and that Slash and Pecos had often holed up in her San Juan Mountain cabin between outlaw jobs. Still, it was hard for anyone to dislike Jay. Even old Bleed-Em-So.
“Fit as a fiddle,” Slash said. “A little shaken up is all.”
Bledsoe looked pointedly across his desk at “his” two cutthroats. “I hope I’m not going to read about this in the newspapers, gentlemen.”
Slash and Pecos shared another look.
“Jay’ll keep it out of the papers,” Slash said, adding with a definite edge in his voice and a burn in his belly, “She an’ the new marshal at Fort Collins are old pals, don’t ya know.”
Pecos glanced at him. Slash did not meet his gaze.
“Good, good,” Bledsoe said, leaning forward and entwining his hands on his desk. “All right, then, let us get down to pay dirt.”
CHAPTER 8
The willowy old chief marshal sagged back in his chair, thumbing his spectacles up his nose and entwining his hands once more behind his woolly head. “I got a job for you. Don’t let its simplicity spoil you.”
“A simple job,” Pecos said, smiling. “I like that.”
Bledsoe glanced at his assistant, who sat hunched over her desk, her back to the men. She appeared to be writing in one of the several legal pads surrounding her and her shot glass. Slash could hear the quick, unceasing sounds of her nib and the frequent clink as she dipped the pen into an inkwell.
“Do you have the file over there, Miss Langdon?” the chief marshal asked.
“Right here, Chief.” The gorgeous young woman plucked a manila folder off her desk and rose from her chair. She was a tall, big-boned young lady, a creature of the rocky fjords, yet she moved with the grace of a forest sprite. The air she displaced smelled of cherries and sage—just the right combination of sweet and spicy.
Slash heard Pecos draw a sharp breath as Miss Langdon leaned over the chief marshal’s desk to hand him the folder. Pecos squirmed a little in his chair. Slash elbowed him. Pecos glanced at him, scowling and flushing. Turning back toward her desk, Miss Langdon’s eyes met Pecos’s once more, and held.
Slash wasn’t sure, but he thought the beautiful Scandinavian quirked her mouth corners ever so slightly, appreciatively,
