by Ann Charles
She secured the necklace around her neck. “It’s beautiful.”
The porch light shut off.
“Lights out?”
“Dad’s going to bed.” She rose to her knees and moved closer, straddling him. Moonlight bathed her face in a luminous glow. “Now how can I thank you?”
He looked south of her chin, admiring the way her coverup accentuated her curves. “I can think of one or two ways.”
She reached inside the crocheted shirt and slid one arm out of her tankini top. “For example?”
He raised one eyebrow. “You want me to show you out here or in your bedroom?”
“Our bedroom,” she corrected, slipping off the other strap.
“Our bedroom,” he said. “But if we’re sharing, we need to talk about those flower pictures on the walls.”
“You don’t like the flowers? They are from a local artist.” She reached inside the coverup and somehow slipped the swimsuit top out through the deep neckline and over her head, tossing it aside.
He sucked air through his teeth at the thought of her half naked under those gaping threads. “Flowers aren’t very manly.”
“Would you rather I put up the pictures of my parents that used to hang there?”
He laughed up at the stars. “Please, no.” The last thing he needed was Marianne’s ghost haunting him while he was in her daughter’s bed. Correction, make that in their bed.
Angélica hauled him up, pulling him close. She smelled like beer and limes, a combination of flavors that made him want to lick her all over.
Her lips traveled along his jawline. “What then? Sylvester the pussycat?”
“You’re getting warmer.” He slid his hands under the fringe, feeling his way up her smooth skin.
“Au contraire, heartbreaker. I’m getting hot.”
“I’ve always had a fondness for that famous Raquel Welch movie poster where she’s wearing a Tarzan-like leather bikini,” he joked.
She bit his ear, making him laugh again. “Strike one, smartass.”
“How about the Maya equivalent of Kama Sutra poses?”
She reached down and pinched his stomach. “I’ll give you one more try. Otherwise, the flowers stay.”
“I know.” He sobered, his thumbs stroking over her breasts, making her arch and moan. If she kept moving her hips like that, they weren’t going to make it to their bedroom.
“What?” she gasped more than asked when he leaned down and licked her where she was sticking out through the threads.
“Dogs playing poker.”
Her husky giggle was sexy as hell. “No, Parker. The flowers stay for now.”
“Fine.” He flipped her onto her back on the other half of the towel, done talking about pictures. “But these go.” He tugged her swim shorts off. His followed.
She smiled up at him, her eyes and teeth shining in the moonlight. “I’ll make a deal with you. If you will tell me where we’re going tomorrow, I’ll reconsider the dogs picture.”
Sliding the fringe up over her bare hips, he shook his head. “No deal, boss lady. Now wrap your arms around me and tell me how mad you are for me.”
She tugged him down on top of her. “I could tell you, but I’d rather show you.”
He groaned and kissed her. He was a grade-A sucker for her and her sweet mouth. “You’re such a siren,” he whispered above her soft lips.
“I haven’t even started singing yet, sailor.”
El Fin … for now
Sneak Peek!
Nearly Departed in Deadwood
(Book 1 of the Deadwood Mystery Series)
If you haven’t read Ann’s Deadwood Mystery Series starring Violet Parker (Quint’s sister), here is a sneak peek from the first book in the USA Today bestselling, award-winning series.
Chapter One
Deadwood, South Dakota
Monday, July 9th
The first time I came to Deadwood, I got shot in the ass. Now, twenty-five years later, as I stared into the double barrels of Old Man Harvey’s shotgun, irony was having a fiesta and I was the piñata.
I tried to produce a polite smile, but my cheeks had petrified along with my heart. “You wouldn’t shoot a girl, would you?”
Old Man Harvey snorted, his whole face contorting with the effort. “Lady, I’d blow the damned Easter bunny’s head off if he was tryin’ to take what’s mine.”
He cocked his shotgun—his version of an exclamation mark.
“Whoa!” I would have gulped had there been any spit left in my mouth. “I’m not here to take anything.”
He replied by aiming those two barrels at my chest instead of my face.
“I’m with Calamity Jane Realty, I swear! I came to …”
With Harvey threatening to fill my lungs with peepholes, I had trouble remembering why I’d driven out to this corner of the boonies. Oh, yeah. Lowering one of my hands, I held out my crushed business card. “I want to help you sell your ranch.”
The double barrels clinked against one of the buttons on my Rebecca Taylor-knockoff jacket as Harvey grabbed my card. I swallowed a squawk of panic and willed the soles of my boots to unglue from the floorboards of Harvey’s front porch and retreat. Unfortunately, my brain’s direct line to my feet was experiencing technical difficulties.
Harvey’s squint relaxed. “Violet Parker, huh?”
“That’s me.” My voice sounded pip-squeaky in my own ears. I couldn’t help it. Guns made my thighs wobbly and my bladder heavy. Had I not made a pit stop at Girdy’s Grill for a buffalo burger and paid a visit to the little Hens room, I’d have a puddle in the bottom of my favorite cowboy boots by now.
“Your boots match your name. What’s a ‘Broker Associate’?”
“It’s someone who is going to lose her job if she doesn’t sell a house in the next three weeks.” I lowered my other hand.
I’d been with Calamity Jane Realty for a little over two months and had yet to make a single sale. So much for my radical, life-changing leap into a new career. If I didn’t make a sale before my probation was up, I’d have to drag my kids back down to the prairie and bunk with my parents … again.
“You’re a lot purtier in this here picture with your hair down.”
“So I’ve been told.” Old Man Harvey seemed to be channeling my nine-year-old daughter today. Lucky me.
“Makes you look younger, like a fine heifer.”
I cocked my head to the side, unsure if I’d just been tossed a compliment or slapped with an insult.
The shotgun dipped to my belly button as he held the card out for me to take back.
“Keep it. I have plenty.” A whole box full. They helped fill the lone drawer in my desk back at Calamity Jane’s.
“So that asshole from the bank didn’t send you?”
“No.” An asshole from my office had, and the bastard would be extracting his balls from his esophagus for this so-called generous referral—if I made it back to Calamity Jane’s without looking like a human sieve.
“Then how’d you know about my gambling problem?”
“What gambling problem?”
Old Man Harvey’s eyes narrowed again. He whipped the double barrels back up to my kisser. “The only way you’d know I’m thinking about selling is if you heard about my gambling debt.”
“Oh, you mean that gambling problem.”
“What’d you think I meant?”
Bluffing was easier when I wasn’t chatting up a shotgun. “I thought you were referring to the … um …” A tidbit of a phone conversation I’d overheard earlier this morning came to mind. “To the problem you had at the Prairie Dog Palace.”
Harvey’s jaw jutted. “Mud wrestling has no age limit.”
“You’re right. They need to be less age-biased. Maybe even have an AARP Night every Wednesday.”
“Nobody told me about the bikini bit ‘til it was too late.”
I winced. I couldn’t help it.
“So, what’re you gonna charge me to sell my place
?”
“What would you like me to charge you?” I was all about pleasing the customer this afternoon.
He leaned the gun on his shoulder, double barrels pointed at the porch ceiling. “The usual, I guess.”
No longer on the verge of extinction, I used the porch rail to keep from keeling over. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for the realty business. Did they still sell encyclopedias door-to-door?
“This ranch belonged to my pappy, and his pappy before him.” Harvey’s lips thinned as he stared over my shoulder.
“It must hold a big place in your heart.” I tried to sound sincere as I inched along the railing toward the steps. My red Bronco glinted and beckoned under the July sun.
“Hell, no. I can’t wait to shuck this shithole.”
“What?” I’d made it as far as the first step.
“I’m sick and tired of fixin’ rusted fences, chasing four-wheeling fools through my pastures, sniffing out lost cows in every damned gulch and gully.” His blue eyes snapped back to mine. “And I keep hearing funny noises at night coming from out behind my ol’ barn.”
I followed the nudge of his bearded chin. Weathered and white-washed by Mother Nature, the sprawling building’s roof seemed to sag in the afternoon heat. The doors were chained shut, one of the haymow windows broken. “Funny how?”
“Like grab-your-shotgun funny.”
Normally, this might give me pause, but after the greeting I’d received today from the old codger’s double barrels, I had a feeling that Harvey wore his shotgun around the house like a pair of holey underwear. I’d bet my measly savings he even slept with it. “Maybe it’s just a mountain lion,” I suggested. “The paper said there’s been a surge of sightings lately.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Harvey shrugged. “I don’t care. I want to move to town. It gets awful lonely out here come wintertime. Start thinking about things that just ain’t right. I almost married a girl from Taiwan last January. Turned out ‘she’ was really a ‘he’ from Nigeria.”
“Wow.”
“Damned Internet.” Harvey’s gaze washed over me. “What about you, Violet Parker?”
“What about me?”
“There’s no ring on your finger. You got a boyfriend?”
“Uh, no.”
I didn’t want one, either. Men had a history of fouling up my life, from burning down my house to leaving me knocked up with twins. These days, I liked my relationships how I liked my eggs: over-easy.
Harvey’s two gold teeth twinkled at me through his whiskers. “Then how about a drink? Scotch or gin?”
I chewed on my lip, considering my options. I could climb into my Bronco and watch this opportunity and the crazy old bastard with the trigger-happy finger disappear in my rearview mirror; or I could blow off common sense and follow Harvey in for some hard liquor and maybe a signed contract.
Like I really had a choice. “Do you have any tonic?”
Also by Ann Charles
www.anncharles.com
The Deadwood Mystery Series
WINNER of the 2010 Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense
WINNER of the 2011 Romance Writers of America® Golden Heart Award for Best Novel with Strong Romantic Elements
Welcome to Deadwood—the Ann Charles version. The world I have created is a blend of present day and past, of fiction and non-fiction. What’s real and what isn’t is for you to determine as the series develops, the characters evolve, and I write the stories line by line. I will tell you one thing about the series—it’s going to run on for quite a while, and Violet Parker will have to hang on and persevere through the crazy adventures I have planned for her. Poor, poor Violet. It’s a good thing she has a lot of gumption to keep her going!
Short Stories from Ann’s
Deadwood Mystery Series
www.anncharles.com
The Deadwood Shorts collection includes short stories featuring the characters of the Deadwood Mystery series.
Each tale not only explains more of Violet’s history, but also gives a little history of the other characters you know and love from the series. Rather than filling the main novels in the series with these short side stories, I’ve put them into a growing Deadwood Shorts collection for more reading fun.
The Jackrabbit Junction Mystery Series
www.anncharles.com
Bestseller in Women Sleuth Mystery and Romantic Suspense
Welcome to the Dancing Winnebagos RV Park. Down here in Jackrabbit Junction, Arizona, Claire Morgan and her rabble-rousing sisters are really good at getting into trouble—BIG trouble (the land your butt in jail kind of trouble). This rowdy, laugh-aloud mystery series is packed with action, suspense, adventure, and relationship snafus. Full of colorful characters and twisted up plots, the stories of the Morgan sisters will keep you wondering what kind of a screwball mess they are going to land in next.
Acknowledgments
I owe thanks to many people for this book, but let’s see if I can keep it to one page.
For starters, many MANY thanks to my husband for always listening to my what-ifs and for telling me I could do it when I worried that I couldn’t.
I want to thank my kids for putting up with me having my face buried in my computer or in a Maya research book. One of these days, I’ll take you to see the setting for these Dig Site books in person.
I’d also like to thank the following wonderful people:
My First Draft team: my husband, Margo Taylor, Mary Ida Kunkle, Kristy McCaffrey, Jacquie Rogers, Marcia Britton, Paul Franklin, Diane Garland, Vicki Huskey, Lucinda Nelson, Marguerite Phipps, Stephanie Kunkle, and Wendy Gildersleeve. Each of these readers has a unique skillset that I lean on to help me be accurate on various aspects of each story. They are part of what makes your reading experience go so smoothly and on this book they really shined.
My editor, Eilis Flynn, for her great job of not just fixing my grammar and spelling, but also making sure that my word choice was consistent with the first book in this series.
My Beta Team and Sue Stone-Douglas for once again stepping up to the task and giving me excellent feedback. You guys really kicked ass!
My brother, C.S. Kunkle, for his awesome illustrations and great original cover art.
My graphic artist, Sharon Benton, for making the cover rock!
My fans for cheering me on the whole way via email and social media. You all keep me motivated to continue plugging away at this writing gig.
Finally, my brother, Clint, for sending me funny Snapchats of himself that made me laugh in the middle of the night.
About the Author
Ann Charles is a USA Today Bestselling Author who writes award-winning mysteries that are splashed with humor, paranormal, romance and whatever else she feels like throwing into the mix. When she is not dabbling in fiction, arm-wrestling with her children, attempting to seduce her husband, or arguing with her sassy cat, she is daydreaming of lounging poolside at a fancy resort with a blended margarita in one hand and a great book in the other.
Connect with Me Online
Facebook (Personal Page): http://www.facebook.com/ann.charles.author
Facebook (Author Page): http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ann-Charles/37302789804?ref=share
Twitter (as Ann W. Charles): http://twitter.com/AnnWCharles
Ann Charles Website: http://www.anncharles.com
Make No Bones About It
Copyright © 2017 by Ann Charles
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means now known or hereafter invented, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author, Ann Charles.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business esta
blishments, events, or locales is coincidental.
Cover Art by C.S. Kunkle
Cover Design by Sharon Benton (www.q42designs.com)
Editing by Eilis Flynn
Print ISBN-13: 978-1-940364-47-6
E-book ISBN-13: 978-1-940364-51-3
LCCN: 2017903499