Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Carolyn Brown
Cover and internal design © 2010 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Randee Ladden
Cover illustration by Aleta Rafton
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Table of Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
About the Author
Back Cover
Dedication
This is for my brother,Douglas Gray
Chapter 1
“Dammit to hell!” Larissa pushed the car door open, crawled up the embankment to the road, popped her hands on her hips, and started stomping toward the son-of-a-bitch who’d put her vintage Mustang nose-down in the ditch.
“Well, shit!” Hank Wells said when an oak tree brought the pickup truck out of a long, greasy slide. He unfastened the seat belt and opened the door to check the damage.
“Are you drunk?” the woman yelled, marching toward him like she was going to tackle him like a football fullback when she reached him.
Well, hells bells, it wasn’t his fault that the wreck happened. He hadn’t asked that stupid deer to play chicken with the front of his truck. He started toward her at the same speed. “Hell, no, but I could damn sure use a drink.”
“Who in the devil taught you to drive? Or do you even have a driver’s license? If my car is damaged, you are going to pay for it, and parts for a 1965 Mustang don’t come cheap. Can’t you drive any better than that?”
He threw up his hands in anger and pointed toward a dead deer on the other side of the road. “The damn thing jumped out in front of me. I broadsided him even though I stomped the brakes all the way to the metal. What happened to your car isn’t my fault, woman, so don’t come up here hollerin’ at me.”
They both came to a halt with a dead buck and ten feet of space between them. The car’s radio and the truck’s radio were tuned to the same station and the volume turned up loud enough to wake up everyone in Mingus, Texas. A double dose of Jo Dee Messina singing “My Give a Damn’s Busted” blared from both vehicles.
She ripped her sunglasses off and gasped. “That’s the God’s gospel truth. My give a damn is busted. I don’t care what you say, it is your fault, cowboy. You braked so I had to slam on my brakes or else crawl right up in the bed of that rusty bucket of bolts, so that makes it your fault.”
The devil was supposed to be a little sunburned critter with horns, a forked tail, and a pitchfork in his hands. He was not supposed to be wearing snug fitting blue jeans, an open chambray shirt flapping in the hot summer wind, and showing off a broad, muscular chest that was sexy as hell.
If it looks like the devil, smells like the devil, and sounds like the devil, chances are it does not have a halo or wings, Larissa thought.
Well, it damn sure looked like the devil bringing a dose of temptation with lips made for kissing and a chest made to cuddle up against so it had to be the devil. Right?
“Are you hurt?” the cowboy asked gruffly.
“No, are you?” It came out high and squeaky but she was lucky to find any semblance of voice at all. She was afraid to blink for fear he’d turn back into a permanently sunburned man with a forked tail and horns. Another five minutes and she would have been home instead of squaring off with a hunky cowboy on the side of the road with a dead deer between them.
“Hell no, but my dad is going to pitch a shit fit when he sees this truck,” he said.
“Your dad? You mean that isn’t even your truck?” she asked.
“Yes, I mean no, it is not my truck. Thank god it wasn’t my car,” he said.
“That’s real sweet of you,” she said sarcastically as she put her sunglasses back on. If anything they made things worse. His chest looked even more bronzed and sexy with the dark glasses than they did without them. Tingles skipped up and down her spine in spite of the blistering July heat.
“Don’t get smart with me, woman. My car is worth a little more than that rusted out piece of shit,” he said.
“You hear that song playin’ on the radio? Well, honey, that’s where I am today. My give-a-damn don’t give a damn if you drive a Mercedes or a rusted-out pickup. I just want to know if you’ve got insurance.”
“Hell, I don’t know what Dad keeps on the old vehicles. But insurance wouldn’t pay for your car. I never touched you. That was your accident,” he said.
“But you caused it,” she argued.
“It wasn’t me. Sue the damned deer.”
Larissa’s emotions began to let her down. She should be mad as hell that he was the cause of her precious car being tail-up, nose-down in the ditch. But all she wanted to do was kiss his lips.
“Oh, no!” she exclaimed and turned pale. Had the wreck stirred up the dormant genes she’d gotten from her mother? She was thinking like Doreen for the first time in her life! That was scarier than facing a forest fire with a cup of water and no backup plan.
He took a step forward. “What? Are you going to faint or something?”
“No, I’m not going to faint. What do we do now?” She’d give up chocolate before she told a perfect stranger that she’d been thinking about her mother. She didn’t even tell her best friends about Doreen. Hell, she didn’t tell her enemies about Doreen.
He removed his sunglasses and straw hat and looked at the two vehicles.
He had dark hair and whiskey colored eyes. She forgot all about the deer, the wreck, her mother, and even her fancy car. The late afternoon breeze carried his shaving lotion toward her. That did it! Stetson always made her think about satin sheets, candles, and vintage wine. He looked like the devil in disguise in that open shirt; Stetson made him smell like the devil; his voice was deep and southern and made her insides go all mushy. Lucifer had arrived in the flesh.
Every single thing that the former owners of the Honky Tonk, Daisy and Cathy, had told her they’d experienced the first time they’d seen their future husbands had happened in the past ten minutes—emotional roller coaster, physical attraction, and anger. Larissa Morley was not interested in long-term relationships, so he could take a teaspoon and dig his way back to hell with it. She was not taking the bait.
“That damn deer jumped right out in front of me. I stomped the brakes but hit it anyway. If yo
u hadn’t thought right fast, your car would’ve slammed into my truck. It was pretty damn good defensive driving,” he said in a deep Texas drawl that went from harsh to soft.
“Don’t try to butter me up, mister. If my car has so much as a scratch on the paint, you will fix it,” she said.
Larissa was beginning to understand her mother’s taste in men a hell of a lot better. Doreen would have taken time to touch up her makeup and spray on a bit of perfume before she got out of the car. She would have waited for the cowboy to help her up to the top of the ditch and then swooned so he’d catch her. All Larissa could do was keep her mouth shut to keep from drooling.
“I keep telling you that it’s the deer’s fault. Call the police and we’ll both tell them what happened. They’ll declare it a no-fault accident. Hell, I didn’t even see you in my rearview. I didn’t know you were there until I got out of the truck,” he said.
“Oh, all right. I’ll call Luther to come haul us out of the ditch. He can take you and that truck home. It isn’t going anywhere but the body shop or the junk pile. Want him to take it to one of them rather than back to your place?” she asked.
He shook his head slowly. “It’ll have to go home. That’s Dad’s favorite old truck. He may shed tears.”
Her voice sounded almost normal when she said, “That’s your problem, not mine. I’m calling Luther.”
“Does he work for a tow company?” he asked.
“He’s the bouncer at the Honky Tonk. He works for an oil company but he’s got access to a tow truck,” she said.
“Oh,” he said flatly.
He put his sunglasses back on so he could really look at the woman. It damn sure wasn’t the way he wanted to meet Larissa Morley. She was prettier than the pictures his investigator had taken and a lot smaller. He’d expected someone like Cathy O’Dell: six feet tall and practically bulletproof. But Larissa wasn’t anything like Cathy. She was smaller, had thick black hair, lips made for kissing, and a body that filled out those jeans really well.
She eased back down the ditch to turn off the car’s engine and retrieve her cell phone. Her purse had turned upside down on the floorboard and the phone had slid under the passenger’s seat. She looked like a contortionist as she stretched out across the driver’s seat and console and fished around until she finally found it.
Hank went back to the truck and groaned again when he saw the bashed-in door. His phone had been on the dash. It was lying in plain sight right where he’d been sitting and was playing Victoria’s ring tone. He put the phone on mute and shoved it in his shirt pocket. The engine had coughed and sputtered sometime after that song about my give a damn being busted. He turned off the engine and tucked the key into his pocket.
She had finished calling Luther when he made it back to the road.
“How long?” Hank asked. Victoria would throw a fit worse than Henry when he found out about his old truck if she thought he’d deliberately not answered her call.
“Ten minutes, tops. Might as well come on up on my porch and wait.”
He followed her. “You live here? That’s rotten luck. Another two minutes and you’d have pulled into your driveway.”
The house was a small frame house with peeling paint, a wide porch across the front, and a tiny back porch on the east side. Two rocking chairs that had once been white but with chipping paint worse than the house were on one end of the porch. It had the shape of a house built in the thirties when Mingus was an up-and-coming town. Back when it could boast a population of more than the two hundred and eighty-six that lived there nowadays.
“If you’d have hung on a little longer you could have crashed on the east side of my house rather than the west and I’d have made it home. I could have driven with a deer flattened out on the front of my car longer than you did,” she said.
“If that deer would’ve hit your fancy-pants car, it would have totaled the thing, so don’t give me a lot of sass.”
“I’m a good enough driver I would have missed him to begin with. Go ahead and sit down. I’ll bring out some iced tea. You take yours sweet?” She’d be hospitable and take him a glass of tea. She didn’t trust herself to revive him without mouth-to-mouth if he passed out on her front lawn. But she wasn’t going to invite him into the house even if it was cool inside and blistering hot out on the porch.
“Yes, ma’am, and thank you. I’m Hank Wells, by the way.”
“Larissa Morley.”
She disappeared into the house and braced herself on the kitchen cabinets. She fanned her face with the back of her hand. The reality of the accident hit her like a wrecking ball going after a wooden outhouse and her legs went all rubbery. Her hands shook as she set two Mason jars on the cabinet and removed an ice tray from the freezer and twisted the ice cubes out of it. She sloshed tea out onto the floor and swore as she cleaned it up.
Hank sat down, leaned forward, and looked down the road at the truck. The oak tree had broken the slide but the door and the whole rear quarter panel was scraped and mangled. It was a small price to pay if it netted him what he’d been trying to find out for months. He’d been trying to figure an angle to meet Larissa ever since she had taken over the Honky Tonk. And one horny old buck out chasing a doe across the road had provided him with the opportunity.
If he’d hit the tree on the driver’s side instead of the passenger’s, he’d have more than jittery nerves and a sore chest where the seat belt kept him from bouncing around inside the cab of the truck. If she’d have slammed into his truck with her fancy little car she might be dead and he’d have to start all over with the next Honky Tonk owner.
“Knowing your enemies is half the job of winning the war,” his mother’s voice said so clearly that he looked up to see if she was standing in front of him.
But Victoria wasn’t in Mingus and he would have had his head examined for a concussion if she had been. Victoria would never be sitting on the front porch of a house like this, drinking sweet tea while she waited on a tow truck driven by a man named Luther. But then Victoria would have never been in that stinking hot truck. She might have been in the little vintage Mustang. He wondered where Larissa had gotten a car like that. She wasn’t old enough to have had it from her youth and she wasn’t rich enough to have bought the thing. Another mystery for him to figure out now that he’d met her.
She carried the iced tea to the porch and handed a jar to him. Their fingertips touched and high-voltage electricity passed between them. She wrapped her hot fingers around the icy cold jar and hoped the heat didn’t melt the ice and boil the tea. Why had Hank Wells set her nerves on edge, anyway? She saw handsome cowboys six nights a week at the Honky Tonk and all she had to do was nod and they’d have fallen over their boots to dance with her or buy her a drink. The adrenaline rush must still be affecting her. By the time she drank her tea, she’d be back to her old sassy self and he wouldn’t look nearly so handsome.
Hank gulped down the cold liquid and stole a couple of long sideways glances toward her. She had straight black hair, brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a full mouth. There was no doubt that there was Indian heritage in her background. She might reach his shoulder, which would put her at about five foot six inches tall. His dad would say that she was built like a red brick outhouse without a brick out of place.
Jessi Colter! That’s who she reminded him of! She looked like Jessi back when she was younger. Henry still listened to the old vinyl records on an ancient stereo system. Jessi Colter was one of his favorites and Larissa Morley was a dead ringer for her.
“You sure you’re not hurt?” he asked. The anger had died and he was genuinely concerned for her, even if she was a hot little spitfire of a woman.
“Might be sore tomorrow but the car just slid into the ditch. It wasn’t much of a crash really,” she said. She couldn’t believe she was letting him off the hook that easy. Only minutes before she’d been ready to douse him in honey and throw him to the Texas fire ant population. Now she was being nice? Nothing ma
de a bit of sense.
“I’ll have a seat belt burn. We were pretty damn lucky,” he said.
“I guess so,” she agreed, still trying to make sense of her emotions. At least she was calming down and wouldn’t be stroking out because of high blood pressure. That should be a comfort, but it wasn’t.
The man that crawled out of the tow truck was as big as a side-by-side refrigerator. He wore bibbed overalls, a white undershirt, work boots, and a layer of dirt and sweat. Hank’s belt wouldn’t fit around Luther’s neck or his biceps, and the scowl on his face looked like he was going to kick ass first and ask questions later. Hank wondered if he should run or sit still. If he was as strong as he looked he could pick Hank up and snap him like a piece of uncooked spaghetti.
Luther shouted as he thundered across the yard. “Are you hurt, Rissa?”
“No, I’m fine. Want some iced tea before you pull us out of the ditch?” she offered.
Luther drew his heavy dark brows together and gave her a once-over. “You sure you’re all right? Want me to haul you to the doctor or call Angel to take you just to make sure? Did you bump your head? You look pale to me. There might be something broke inside of you that you can’t feel right now. This here’s the sorry sucker that made you wreck your fancy car?”
Larissa shook her head. “I’m fine, Luther. If I’m pale it’s because of fear, not pain. My life didn’t flash in front of me so it wasn’t even a close call. I’ll get you some tea. This is Hank Wells and truth is it wasn’t really his fault. He can’t help it if he can’t swerve and miss a deer.” She was glad for an excuse to get away from the scalding vibes dancing around between her and Hank. She’d heard that when folks kissed death that they had weird, unexplainable feelings. That was why she’d had such an attraction to Hank. Sure he was a fine looking man, but he definitely was not her type. Tomorrow morning when the adrenaline rush calmed down he probably wouldn’t even be good looking.
Luther sat down on the edge of the porch. “I’m Luther. And you are Hank Wells, the man that Rissa thinks can’t drive worth a damn?”
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