Longarm and the Sidekick From Hell by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 11

Longarm had advised young squirts like Henry how easy it was to spoil what seemed a sure thing with the wrong remark when nerves were atingle. It was most often the gal, with more confounded feelings, who could shy like a spooked pony at a surprisingly dumb remark. But nobody enjoyed having the feelings they’d exposed splashed with the ice water of unconsidered observations about their inner selves. So Longarm felt a surprised thrill of resentment up in Risa’s room when she coyly asked, as she poured cognac from a carpetbag into hotel tumblers, how often he’d waltzed past a hotel desk, up to a lady’s room.

Still seated on the end of her bed, where she’d invited him to sit, Longarm wearily replied, “Not as often as I’ve often wanted, being a natural man. Would you like me to leave, now?”

She turned with a cognac in each hand to gasp, “Mon Dieu, what have I said to make you so angry, Canada?”

With a weary smile, he accepted the tumbler she was holding out and replied, “Not angry. Disappointed, Miss Risa. If I wanted to play kid games I’d scout up a kid, and it was your own grand notion to invite me up here. It was you who suggested we might have supper this evening, and as I recall, it was you who came up to me in the first place. I never forced my fool self on you.”

She sat down beside him, soothingly saying, “I know. Can’t you take a little joke?”

He said, “Jokes about us raging bulls chasing you helpless things until you catch us get less amusing after a time. Where in the U.S. Constitution does it say gals get to call it flirting when they give a man the eye, but they get to call a man a sex fiend if he even returns one wink?”

She flushed and looked away as she murmured, “Touché! One developes rude habits in my position, Canada.”

“What might your position be, Miss Risa?” he replied, sipping at his cognac to find it four star.

She said, “My brother and I were left a family business to conduct, and guess who got, how you say, stuck with running it? I have had to watch my step with men who came calling with all sorts of propositions and only half of them were after . . . my body. When one never knows what a man is after, one has one’s guard up at all times and, sometimes, a little high, n’est-ce pas?”

“I ain’t after your family business,” said Longarm, dryly.

She laughed and said, “Flattery will get you everything. I’ve already been seduced by a man who was after our money. Fortunately, neither Jacques nor myself alone can sign over the entailed inheritance. I shall spare you the tale of the très formidable argument we had over Jacque’s desire to go into the telephone business. Suffice it to say he met an inventor at his club who claimed to have invented the telephone.”

“Was his name Alexander Graham Bell?” asked Longarm.

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