by Jessie Evans
Table of Contents
Title Page
All Rights Reserved
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PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
A Letter From the Author
Please enjoy this excerpt of DIAMONDS AND DUST
SUNNY WITH A CHANCE
OF TRUE LOVE
The Ballad of Ugly Ross
A Lonesome Point Novella
By Jessie Evans
All Rights Reserved
Copyright Sunny With a Chance of True Love: The Ballad of Ugly Ross © 2015 Jessie D. Evans www.jessieevansauthor.com
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. This contemporary western romance is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with, especially if you enjoy hot, sexy, emotional novels featuring alpha cowboys. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work. Cover image by Rob Lang c. Rob Lang/Roblangimages.com 2014. Cover design © by Violet Duke. Edited by Robin Leone Editorial.
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Lonesome Point, Texas, Series:
Leather and Lace
Saddles and Sin
Diamonds and Dust
Twelve Dates of Christmas: The Ballad of Lula Jo
Glitter and Grit
Sunny With a Chance of True Love: The Ballad of Ugly Ross
Chaps and Chance
Ropes and Revenge
Always a Bridesmaid Series
Betting on You
Keeping You
Wild For You
Taking You (Series Ending Novella)
The Fire and Icing Series
Melt with You
Hot for You
Sweet to You
Saving You (Series Ending Novella)
The Wild Rush Series (Edgy, Sexy New Adult Reads) written as J. Evans
One Wild Night
This Wicked Rush
One Perfect Love
This Sweet Escape-(Danny and Sam’s story)
One Beautiful Revenge (Danny and Sam’s conclusion)
PROLOGUE
Fourteen Years Ago
Ross
It’s not easy to fall in love for the first time.
It’s even harder when you’re only twelve and everyone at school calls you Ugly Ross. With a nickname like that all but tattooed on his forehead, Ross Dyer knew he was probably doomed to spend the rest of his life alone, let alone the rest of sixth grade.
But as he held a cardboard box for Elodie Prince, helping her empty out her locker on her last day of school at Lonesome Point Elementary, he felt something special slipping through his fingers. His chest ached like he’d been punched and his stomach had gone sour.
He didn’t want her to go, not yet.
Ross played with his friends Bubba, Mia, and Tulsi every morning during recess, but in the afternoons, he found Elodie’s hiding spot behind the bushes at the edge of the playground and spent a half hour bending creatures out of pipe cleaners and listening to her stories. Elodie had the best imagination of anyone he’d ever met and could make a story out of almost anything. He liked her scary stories the best.
Elodie was small, shy, and had a face like a fairy tale princess, but she had a secret spooky side that Ross found fascinating. Her wild imagination and tales of ghosts and Texas-sized monsters had captured his attention years before her crooked smile started to make his heart do funny things in his chest. But even when he realized that what he felt for Elodie was different than what he felt for his other girl friends—that it might even be love—he didn’t say a word. He was too afraid.
He was Ugly Ross and, unfortunately, lived up to his nickname. He was one of the tallest boys in sixth grade, but where his best friend Bubba was tall and strong, Ross was tall and scrawny. His bony knees and elbows stuck out at weird angles and his nose poked from the center of his face like a bird beak. His teeth were crooked, his clothes never seemed to fit right, and his eyes were the color of fresh cow poop—a comparison made by the other Ross in his class that had earned Ugly Ross the additional nickname of Cow Poop Face for most of third grade.
Elodie had her own unfortunate nickname that Ross knew made her sad sometimes, but to him she was simply…beautiful. With her long blond hair that she always wore in braids, big blue eyes, and hands that danced when she talked, she reminded him of Sleeping Beauty. If Sleeping Beauty were smarter and funnier and could tell stories scary enough to make the evil fairy pee her pants.
He just…liked the girl. A lot.
And now she was leaving. And he would probably never see her again.
“Thanks for helping,” Elodie whispered as she placed her pencil case and battered pack of pastels in the bottom of the box. She kept her eyes glued to the scuffed floor beneath their feet, where they’d been since Mrs. Nelson had announced to the class that Elodie was leaving to go to school in Houston, where her grandmother lived.
“Happy to.” Ross fell in beside her as she started down the hall toward the front of the school. “I mean, not happy you’re leaving, but I bet Houston will be fun.”
Elodie didn’t respond, but Ross still got the feeling he’d said the wrong thing.
“There’s more to do there, right?” he added, peeking at her out of the corner of his eye. “You know, in the city?”
Elodie sighed. “I don’t know. I haven’t been in a long time. My mom and grandma don’t get along.”
“Oh.” Ross frowned. “Then why are you going to live with her?”
“Because-” Elodie’s voice hitched. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Okay. Sorry.” Ross bit his lip. He always said the wrong thing. Always. His friend Mia said he needed a filter between his brain and his mouth, but by this point, Ross was pretty sure he’d been born without one. So he wasn’t really surprised when more words burst unexpectedly from his lips. “I’m going to miss you. A lot. I wish you didn’t have to go.”
Elodie stopped at the end of the hall, in front of the double doors that led out to the parking lot, where her grandma was waiting. “I’m going to miss you, too,” she said, lifting her eyes to meet his. “Thanks for always being so nice to me, Ross.”
Ross blinked in surprise. “Why wouldn’t I be? You’re great, Elodie. Really great.”
“Yeah?” she asked, shyly.
“Yeah,” Ross confirmed. “You the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
The smile that crept across Elodie’s face
in response sent a bolt of joy shooting through him from head to toe. She was so beautiful when she smiled. So beautiful and suddenly looking at him like maybe she saw something beautiful in him, too. And in that bright, brilliant moment, Ross decided to go for it. To go for his first kiss, to see if Elodie would kiss him back and maybe even give him her grandma’s phone number so they could keep in touch after she moved away.
He was leaning down, bringing his face slowly closer to hers—heart pounding, palms sweating, holding his breath and praying she wouldn’t push him away or laugh when she realized he was aiming for a kiss—when a voice called out from the other end of the hall.
“Oh look, y’all. Ugly Ross and Stinky Elodie are in love!”
The words were met by a burst of mean laughter. Ross flinched and Elodie’s shoulders curled until she looked like a flower that had gone too long without rain.
His face burning, Ross turned to see Ross Spencer and three of his jerk friends standing near the door to their classroom, library books in hand. They were always the first ones back from the library. They didn’t care what they picked out; they wouldn’t read the books anyway. They were too dumb and mean to appreciate a good story.
“Ross and Elodie sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” Chuck Atkins crooned in a sing-song voice. “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Ross with a baby carriage.”
“And an ugly, stinky baby,” Spencer added, summoning more guttural laughter from the other idiots.
“Shut up!” The words burst from deep inside of Ross’s chest. He’d never dared to stand up to the class bullies before, but he was so mad he felt like he was going to explode.
How dare they? How dare they open their big stupid mouths?
He hated them for ruining his goodbye and for making Elodie’s final moments at Lonesome Point Elementary another ugly memory to add to her collection.
“Come make me, Poop Face.” Spencer dropped his library book to the floor with a loud thwap and took two challenging steps forward. “Come show your stinky girlfriend how tough you are.”
“D-d-don’t, Ross,” Elodie said softly. “He’s not worth it.”
“But you are.” The moment the sentence was out of his mouth, Ross realized it was one of the truest things he’d ever said. He met Elodie’s sad, frightened gaze with a hard look, willing her to see he meant the words with every piece of his heart. “You’re worth it. You’re wonderful, and don’t you ever let some jerk like Spencer make you think you’re not.”
Elodie blinked and a familiar light flickered behind her big blue eyes. It looked a lot like the feeling that made Ross’s heart skip a beat whenever he sat close to her—like hope, wonder, and maybe even a little bit like love.
Just a little bit.
A little was all it took to send Ross charging down the hall toward Spencer, his bony fingers balling into fists as he ran. He’d never lifted a hand to defend himself, not in all the years he’d been Ugly Ross, Cow Poop Face, and the second to the last person chosen for dodgeball when Spencer and his friends were the ones to pick teams. No matter how mad Bubba would get on his behalf, Ross had never let Spencer’s meanness get to him, not really.
Deep down, Ross knew he was worth something. He had a family who loved him, friends who had his back, and dreams no bully could take away. Elodie had a mom and dad who hardly ever left their house—not even to go to the Laundromat—and sent their daughter to school in dirty clothes. She had a stutter that got worse when she was nervous and was even shier than Ross’s friend, Tulsi. She was too shy to come play with Ross’s other friends, too shy to answer questions in class, and too shy to even think of standing up to the boys who tormented her.
So Ross was going to do it for her. He was going to show her that there were some people in the world who weren’t afraid to stand up for the people they cared about.
For the seemingly endless ten seconds it took him to reach his challenger, Ross’s heart swelled with bravery and purpose. And in those seconds, anyone looking at the boy would have seen a hero in worn blue jeans and a faded Spiderman tee shirt. Because heroes come in all sizes and shapes, love is as real at twelve as it is at fifty-two, and love makes even the most timid hearts brave.
Even when Spencer bloodied Ross’s nose with one well-aimed punch and he ended up flat on his back on the floor with the bulkier boy straddling his chest, Ross didn’t regret his decision. Even when he got punched in the eye and the stomach before the vice principal pulled him and Spencer apart, he was glad he hadn’t backed down.
The only thing that made him sad was that, by the time he and Spencer were hauled down the hall to the principal’s office, Elodie was gone.
She was gone and she stayed gone.
Ross’s first love moved to Houston with her grandmother and never came back, not even to visit her parents. Eventually, Ross developed another crush, had his first kiss behind the gym at the ninth grade semi-formal, and fell in and out of love with girls who broke his secretly soft heart. He even broke a heart or two of his own, hearts belonging to women who realized too late that they’d found something special in his arms.
And then one day, the girl with the big blue eyes and the dancing hands came home.
And nothing was ever the same again.
CHAPTER ONE
February 2nd, Groundhog Day
Fourteen Years Later
Ross
Ross stood, bleary-eyed, beside his friend Tulsi, her daughter Clementine, and a few dozen other Lonesome Point citizens, clutching his coffee in the hazy, pre-dawn light that illuminated the isolated stretch of desert. He tipped the brim of his cowboy hat up a few inches and stared at the wide hole in the ground a few feet away, waiting to see if Adolf the Armadillo was going to make an appearance.
Would Adolf see his shadow and retreat back into his burrow? Would he come out facing the sun and go bravely into the February day? Did it matter either way, since he was an armadillo, and not a groundhog?
“All good questions,” Ross mumbled to himself, taking a sip of his coffee.
“Sh,” Clementine hissed beside him. “You’re going to scare him and we’ll have six more weeks of winter and I won’t get to go on a trail ride before I go home.”
“You’re talking more than I am,” Ross whispered. “I think you’re going to scare him.”
“Am not.” Clementine scrunched her upturned nose and tightened her blond ponytail with a determined jerk. “Animals love me. I’m probably an armadillo whisperer, I just don’t know it yet.”
Ross snorted and a smile curved his lips for the first time in two days. It had been two long, miserable days since Meg had dumped him outside of The Ticklish Iguana, in front of his friends and a crowd of curious onlookers, who were probably wondering what a gorgeous girl with jet black hair and two arm sleeves of tattoos was doing with an ordinary guy like Ross in the first place.
Two days during which he’d had time to look deep into the corners of his heart and wonder why he couldn’t seem to keep a girlfriend for more than a few months at a time. Two days during which he’d come up with nothing except the very real possibility that he walked to the tune of a drummer no one else could hear and would spend the rest of his life walking, dancing, and sleeping alone.
“All right armadillo whisperer,” Ross said, refusing to let his depressing love life ruin another morning. He hadn’t been in love with Meg, after all, and it was probably best one of them had called it off before they wasted any more time with a relationship that was never going to develop past the friends-with-benefits stage. “Then I expect you to talk that animal out into the open if he starts acting shy. I need the tourists to come back before I go belly up.”
“Things still slow at the restaurant?” Tulsi asked, a sympathetic look in her blue eyes.
“Yeah.” Ross sighed. “I should have listened to Mia and waited until spring to open. I just wanted to have the kinks worked out before then, you know?”
“I bet things will pick up.” Tulsi
patted him on the back. “The weather will get warm and sunny and pretty soon everyone will realize Ross’s Place is the best restaurant in Lonesome Point.”
“Unless you’re cursed,” Clementine said pleasantly.
“Clementine,” Tulsi chided, frowning at her daughter. “That’s not a very nice thing to say. Of course Ross isn’t cursed.”
“He might not be,” Clementine said. “But Miss Emily says every restaurant that opens up in the old Blue Plate Café closes in a few months. It’s because the first owner put a curse on it the night he ran away with his forbidden love.”
Tulsi rolled her eyes. “I think Miss Emily and I are going to have to have a talk about which of her stories are appropriate for children.”
“It was appropriate,” Clementine said, indignantly. “We were talking about the old days when black people couldn’t use the same water fountain as white people, like we were learning about in social studies, Mama. And Miss Emily said that in the fifties, Mr. Jim, who owned The Blue Plate, was in love with the preacher’s daughter, Miss Macy, who was white. But they couldn’t be together because a crowd of bad guys beat Mr. Jim up when they found out he and Miss Macy were in love. They said they’d kill him if he didn’t give her up, but he wouldn’t, so they ran away together.” She let out a long sigh. “Isn’t that romantic?”
“It’s sad.” Tulsi’s brow furrowed. “I hate that something like that happened in our sweet little town.”
“It’s only sweet if you don’t look too close. Bad things happen here all the time,” Ross said, his thoughts flying out of his mouth before he thought better of them.
He glanced down at Clem, hoping he hadn’t scared her.
But Clementine just nodded sagely, proving she was made of tougher stuff than most little kids. “That’s why Grandpa and I got hit by a drunk driver. Not everyone around here is sweet. And that’s the truth.”