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CHAPTER 1
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my entire life.” Except when she’d traded her Easy-Bake Oven for Donna Martin’s Let’s Play Veterinarian! set back when she’d been six. And when she’d rescued her now beloved Jezebel from that kill shelter a few years ago. And when she’d turned down Marty Bezdeck’s marriage proposal—not once, but four times.
But this …
Jenna Evelyn Tucker glanced at the THREE LITTLE HIGGS CONSTRUCTION sign planted near the roadside mailbox and stiffened against the sudden fluttering in her stomach.
It wasn’t like she was selling the place.
She was just overhauling. Cleaning house. Tearing down the ancient two-story eyesore and most every other building on the property and putting something new and respectable in its place.
It was the smart thing to do. The most logical given the circumstances—namely that she was all alone at the run-down property since both of her sisters had fallen head over heels in love and moved out with their significant others. The old Tucker farmhouse was too big for one person. Too worn-out for a single woman to fix up all by her lonesome. Too notorious given that her granddaddy had blown himself and his moonshine still to smithereens just beyond the edge of the tree line. The explosion had happened over a year ago, but people were still talking about it.
Still laying bets on which Tucker would set up shop and follow in his footsteps.
Certainly not the eldest. Callie was too straitlaced to ever do such a thing. And Brandy? While the middle Tucker had, indeed, come up with her very own moonshine recipe a little over six months ago, she wasn’t in the backyard filling up jars and peddling them out of the back of her Buick. Rather, she’d taken a much more reputable route by selling her recipe to a cutting-edge distiller. She was now busy making cakes and pies for her bakery while raking in a decent royalty from Foggy Bottom Distillers.
No, Jenna herself was the likely choice. She’d always been ballsy and bold just like her grandfather. The first to speak her mind if the notion struck and go her own way, the world be damned. Why, no one would be surprised if she thumbed her nose at the law and started brewing her own hooch in this very backyard.
All the more reason to prove them wrong. If she wanted to change her image, to clean it up, she needed to start changing everyone’s perception of her.
No more flipping off the local gossips and doing her own thing. It was time to stand up. Grow up.
Think.
Which explained why her eldest sister was staring at her with nothing short of full-blown confusion. Jenna had never been known for using her head first and her heart second.
She let her emotions drive her, be it anger, happiness, desire, excitement, guilt. Jenna was all about feelings—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
No more.
She was going through with a major renovation, from demolition to rebuild. Until the Tucker spread looked nothing like the cover for her grandfather’s illegal moonshine activities, and everything like a working horse ranch.
That’s what this was all about. Erasing the past and building a brand new future. A life as a reputable vet and horse trainer.
While she’d seen herself following a different path as Rebel’s number-one veterinarian, she’d hit a roadblock recently and now was the time to backtrack and blaze another trail. Her promotion at the animal clinic had fallen through, and all because of her last name.
Her reputation.
She swallowed against a sudden lump in her throat and eyed her older sister.
Callie Tucker Sawyer had the signature blond hair and green eyes of most every other Tucker, Jenna included. But unlike her youngest sister, Callie had more curves where it counted. She wasn’t quite as voluptuous as their middle sister, Brandy, but close enough that she’d snagged the attention of her archenemy, Brett Sawyer, and married him much to the dismay of an entire town.
Not that Callie cared what everyone thought now the way she had when she’d been young.
She and Brett were still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship, having only been married a few months, but theirs was a love story that had been going strong since they were teenagers. A love that had drawn them together despite time away and a decades-long feud between their families that had tried to rip them apart.
“You look happy,” Jenna heard herself say and Callie’s frown eased into a smile.
“I am.” Her eyebrows drew together again. “But you’re not.” The smile eased back into worry. “What’s going on, Jenna? I can see you wanting to fix the place up a little, but this is way over the top. They’re going to tear down the house and build from the ground up. While I’m not overly sentimental when it comes to this place—I scrubbed too many floors and cooked too many dinners to get weepy over shaking things up, but you’re different. This is your home.”
“You and Brandy were my home, but you’re both gone now and that’s a good thing.” She smiled even though she didn’t quite feel it. “It’s time for me to do something for myself. I need a change, Callie.” A big one if she wanted to alter an entire town’s perception and stop living in the shadow of her legacy. She’d had her fill of the gossip. Of being wild and rambunctious and spontaneous.
And unreliable.
That’s what Dr. Morris Holiday of the Rebel Veterinary Clinic had told her last week right before he’d dropped a semi across her career path, passed her over for a full-time position, and hired a first-year vet from another county with zero experience.
Jenna had been his intern for nearly two years. Two freakin’ years. She’d worked overtime and weekends and loved every one of their patients as if they’d been her own beloved pets.
And while he recognized her hard work, he’d told her flat-out that it just wasn’t enough. He wanted someone who was steady. Rock-solid. And not a Tucker.
Because Tuckers, at least according to the Sawyers, were not to be trusted, and while Dr. Morris wasn’t a Sawyer himself, he had a lot of patients who were, particularly his biggest account—the Sawyer Bend Horse Farm.
No way would Thaddeus T. Sawyer let Jenna set foot on his precious three hundred acre spread, and so Dr. Morris had hired someone who could.
The truth still sat heavy in her stomach.
She’d wanted nothing more than to drive out and tell old Thaddeus exactly where to go and how to get there, but then that was exactly what he would have expected from her. From any lowly Tucker.
Because the Tuckers were volatile. No good. Trashy.
An opinion held for nearly one hundred years since Archibald Tucker had had the mother of all falling-outs with his best buddy, Elijah Sawyer. They’d been friends, business partners, and the masterminds behind the hottest-selling moonshine back in the day.
But then they’d had a vicious brawl in front of family and friends and several lawmen who’d been powerless to stop the inevitable
.
The two men had beat each other to a pulp smack-dab in the middle of the town square before going their separate ways, both intent on making a go in the moonshine business on their own. And while each had cooked up some halfway decent bootleg during the Prohibition era, none of it had ever compared to the ever-popular Texas Thunder that had made the two men famous at the height of their friendship.
A recipe that had been severed all those years ago after their bloody knock-down, drag-out fight.
The town had been divided, as well, as the Sawyers sided with their kin and the Tuckers sided with theirs.
It had stayed that way over the years as the descendants of the two men had kept up the fighting and the animosity, and given Texas its own bloody version of the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Things had calmed down in recent years. No one had actually shot anyone since Junior Sawyer had blown the big toe off Billy Tucker’s right foot a few years back at the annual Fourth of July picnic. But the Sawyers still hated the Tuckers, and the Tuckers still gave them tit for tat.
Except for Callie and Brandy. They’d both married Sawyers—Callie’s modest wedding had been a few months back and Brandy’s elopement just four short weeks ago—and were as happy as ever, which meant that anything was possible.
Jenna held tight to the hope that whispered through her. She knew she couldn’t change old Thaddeus’s mind, so she’d decided to give him a run for his money. He bred the best horses in the county, but not for long. Jenna Tucker was setting up shop and she was going to whip his proverbial butt in the equine business.
While she couldn’t change her bloodline, she could change her life. She was through feeding into the negative stereotypes that had defined the Tuckers for so long. No more running her mouth whenever the mood struck. No more dancing her ass off down at the local bar every Saturday night. And no more jumping from one guy to the next.
She’d smartened up and sworn off bad boys a few years back after a string of split-second relationships that had ended with Mr. Tall, Dark, and Bad-to-the-bone riding off into the sunset, often with another woman. Or two. And there was even that one time when Ronnie Darlington had left town with the Parker triplets, each of whom he’d dumped a few weeks later because hey, he was a rolling stone. A rodeo cowboy who couldn’t be tamed. A bull-riding bad ass who had caught her eye down at the local honky-tonk.
Ronnie had opened her eyes to her addiction and forced her to go cold turkey. No more hot, wild, disreputable men who were terrible at relationships but great in bed.
And so she’d moved on to not-so-hot, tame, reputable men who’d been great at relationships, but terrible in bed. Men who’d been devoted and faithful and so boring that she’d been the one to bail each and every time.
In a nice way, of course. So nice, in fact, that several on her long list of good guys had failed to take the hint. She was still getting flowers from a few of them. And open declarations of love. And there was even that marriage proposal a few months back.
Just the thought of spending the rest of her life with a man who loved The Bachelor as much as she did was enough to scare some sense into her. She was through with any and all relationships for now.
She was toning things down, rising above her name, and walking the straight and narrow all by her lonesome.
Step one—she needed to change her surroundings. She and her sisters had been living hand to mouth since their parents had died over ten years ago. But in the past year, things had turned around.
Callie and Brett had found the original Texas Thunder recipe and decided to sell it to a local distillery. Callie had generously split her share of the profits with Brandy and Jenna. Meanwhile Brandy had refined the original into something all her own and was now banking royalties from every batch sold of her popular Texas Tornado. With both of her sisters holding their own financially, they’d seen no need to hold onto the Tucker spread. They’d signed over their shares to Jenna and now she was the sole owner.
She’d taken out a homeowner’s loan for the renovations just last week and signed the paperwork with Brody Higgs from Three Little Higgs early that morning.
She shoved the construction sign into the dirt and drew a deep breath. Her gaze swept the horizon. The sun had started to set and orange edged the rich green that marked the height of spring in Texas.
Her attention shifted to the house and the shadows creeping in from the east. The paint was peeling, the porch sagging. The bottom step near the door had given way beneath her boot just yesterday and now sat cracked and splintered. The place was an eyesore, despite the warm light that gleamed in the windows and the smell of apples that drifted from the kitchen courtesy of a couple of Brandy’s famous turnovers warming in the oven.
Something tugged inside of her and she focused on the rain gutter that hung off the left corner. There weren’t enough turnovers to make her ignore the sad state of the place. She’d done that far too long already.
“The bulldozer arrives tomorrow,” she told Callie, dusting her hands off on her cutoff shorts, “which means I’d better get busy.” She started toward the house. “They’re going to start with the barn first, but that will go down within the week. I need to get everything out of the house in the meantime.”
“I can help,” Callie called after her. “I’ve already turned in my column at the newspaper. I could call Brett and let him know I’ll be late.”
“Thanks, sis, but you’ve cleaned this place long enough.” Jenna shook her head and didn’t let her steps waver. “It’s my turn.”
CHAPTER 2
Hunter DeMassi was about to get his ass blown to hell and back.
The truth coiled his muscles tight. Anxiety knotted his stomach and cranked the vise in his chest. He forced a deep breath. Rather than ease the tautness in his body, the extra burst of oxygen fed his worry.
It didn’t matter that he had a Glock strapped to his hip and a badge stuffed into his left pocket. If anything, those two items painted him as an even bigger target. It was one thing to fire a load of buckshot into some unknown sonofabitch who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and quite another to take out the one man intent on shutting down the biggest moonshine operation in the entire Lone Star state.
A setup not more than fifty yards away from where he crouched behind a massive oak tree. It was early evening, the sky overhead dotted with stars, but none of that light made its way down through the dense foliage.
He squinted, his eyes quickly adjusting to the darkness and the small clearing littered with debris. An old washing machine. An ancient tiller. A dingy John Deere missing all four wheels. A rusted-out shell of an ancient ’59 Ford pickup truck. His gaze zeroed in on the spiral of smoke whispering from the tailpipe. The scent of warm yeast filled the air and the hair prickled on the back of Hunter’s neck.
These guys were smart.
His gaze scoured the rest of the area, from what looked like a haphazard line of tin cans scattered near the tree line at the edge of the clearing.
Smart and a little bit old school.
Which made whoever was responsible for the setup even more deadly.
The old-timers came from a different era where the only law involved a Remington and a box of shells. A man did what he had to do to protect his livelihood. His life. Whether he was up against a stranger, or someone wearing a badge. The details made no nevermind.
It was all about survival.
Hunter had learned that a long, long time ago, on the knee of his great-grandmother who’d told him all about the old days and her daddy’s infamous Texas Thunder.
Not that Elijah Sawyer had been the one solely responsible for the state’s most notorious moonshine. He’d had a partner back then, a man by the name of Archibald Tucker. He and Archibald had been as close as brothers. But then they’d had a falling-out, ripped their precious recipe right down the middle so neither could keep brewing the popular stuff, and parted ways. Their fight had caused a riff that had run deep and divided
the entire town. But Elijah hadn’t wasted any time crying over the loss of his best friend or his meal ticket. He’d taken all the cash he’d stashed when Texas Thunder had been selling like hotcakes and gone the straight and narrow.
Which had been his plan all along.
While Archibald Tucker had fit the old moonshine mentality to a tee—he’d liked drinking just as much as he’d liked brewing—Elijah Sawyer had been looking at the stuff from a monetary standpoint. A means to an end. Legend had it that he’d never even touched a drop of the brew other than to taste for quality control. Instead, he’d kept his head clear and his mind focused. He’d wanted more than a few coins in his pocket and a Mason jar in his hand—he’d wanted to make something of himself, his family, and he’d done just that. He’d bought up the land around Rebel, Texas and turned it into one of the biggest cattle ranches in the South.
“You can make it, too,” his great-grandmother had told him time and time again. When he’d been eight years old and barely passing because a bad case of dyslexia had made school nearly impossible. When he’d called it quits his junior year at Rebel High to work at the local rodeo arena and help bust broncs. When he’d left town to travel the circuit because his choices had been too few and far between, and living on the edge had paid the most money.
He hadn’t listened to her. Not until he’d come home six years later for his youngest brother’s funeral. A brother who’d stayed the course, graduated at the top of his class, gone off to college, and then straight into the Marines. Travis had never run from anything difficult. He’d worked hard to make their parents proud. To make something of himself. To live up to the prestigious Sawyer name.
“It isn’t too late to step up and do the right thing,” Mimi had told him as she’d sat next to him in that first church pew, the smell of gardenias from the casket spray nearly suffocating him. “You can do this, Hunter. You can turn it around and be a steady hand just like Travis.”
She’d been right.
Tempting Texas Page 1