by Liza Kendall
Rhett tried to smooth his hair down and looked at Jules. He took in his car.
Scarlett was immaculate. She looked, if possible, better than the day he’d first sat in her, on the showroom floor in Dallas. There were no smudges on the cream leather seats, no dirty claw marks. She smelled once again like premium processed leather and pine air freshener . . . not even a whiff of roadkill.
Jules tossed Rhett the keys and leaned a denim-clad hip against the Porsche as he walked around, looking for any sort of a scratch that would give him an excuse to . . . what? Throttle her? Kiss her senseless? Throw her down on the hood and have his wicked way with her?
“So,” Jules said, her eyebrows raised. “Still going to have me arrested?”
“I just might.”
“Oh, c’mon—it’s in better condition than when I stole her. She’s washed, waxed, Windexed. She’s been vacuumed, wiped down, conditioned. I even shampooed the rugs and detailed the wheels!”
“It wasn’t okay for you to take my car without permission,” he said, looking at her from under lowered eyebrows.
She didn’t apologize. “But . . . ?”
“Thank you. She looks beautiful.”
“Did a good job, didn’t I?”
He nodded. “I’d say professional.”
“So the end justifies the means.”
“Maybe.”
“And I gotcha.” She grinned, a little too pleased with herself. “Fooled for Fool Fest.”
“You sure like playing with fire, Jules. Feral chickens in the firehouse shower. Grand theft auto detailing. What else do you get up to?”
She scrunched up her nose and thought about it. “Well . . . there was the time I put the pig in the teachers’ break room.”
“One of the Lundgrens’ hogs?”
“Way too big—and mean. This was just a piglet, really . . . but the teachers didn’t take it well. I would have gotten away with it, but Dolf Menges told on me. Little twerp.”
“What happened?”
“Got suspended from school for three days. Then grounded for a month.” She grinned. “Worth it, though. You should have heard Mrs. Fabian and Mrs. Kosinsky and Mrs. Dominguez shrieking. Jumping up on chairs, yelling for help. And skinny little Mr. Gallagher, trying to be a hero and running after it—he got stuck under a desk when his collar snagged on the armrest.”
“You’re a menace.”
“Always. Grady was the good kid. I had to take a different route.”
“So you’re the bad kid?”
She shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “Not bad, exactly. Irresponsible. Disappointing.”
“Disappointing?” He frowned. “To whom?”
“You know what—forget it. I need to get back to the horses.”
“You’re not disappointing, Jules. Not remotely.”
“Yeah? Then why wasn’t I given a chance on my own family’s land? With the business?” She swept her hair behind her shoulder. “Nobody even considered it. Not my dad. Not my mom. Not Grady . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Jules, it had nothing to do with them being—”
“Let’s not talk about this, Ever-Rhett.” She threw a too-bright smile over her shoulder as she started toward the door to Sunny’s. “Oh, I meant to ask you. Did you ever hear back from Fred’s Feed?”
Way to change the subject. “Yeah, I forgot to tell you. We’ve got a deal.”
She stopped in her tracks. “Oh.”
“I just forgot. There’s been a lot going on. It all happened quickly . . . on the phone. He’s actually very happy with the new terms.”
“Good. Glad to hear that,” Jules said. “Guess we did need a real businessperson around here.”
Oh, ouch. He hadn’t meant to make her feel cut out of the loop. He’d honestly forgotten to tell her. Rhett gazed helplessly after her. Why did every good thing he did feel like a bad one, around this girl? What could he say to that?
“You are a real businessperson, Jules.”
She waved a dismissive hand in the air as Grady and Jake strolled up. “I was just coming to find you,” she said to Grady.
“You going to go up to dinner with the ’rents like that?” Grady asked, gesturing to her sweatshirt. “I’m fine with it, but you know how Mom gets.”
“You think Mom isn’t going to like my sweatshirt?” Jules asked innocently.
“Nope.”
Jules grinned an evil grin. “Guess we’ll find out.” She took a step forward and stopped short. “Whoa.”
“You okay?” Rhett asked.
“Head rush,” she said.
Rhett laughed. “You weren’t sitting down.”
Jules shrugged.
“You want to come up for a family supper, Rhett?” Grady asked.
“Thanks, but, uh, I’m . . .” Rhett blanked for a moment, realizing that when Mom and Dad were alive, the Braddocks had a family supper, too. And since they weren’t here, he had no Sunday supper plans whatsoever even though all but one of his siblings were in town.
“I’m stealing him back for a little,” Jake said from behind him. “Sunny’s holding a table.”
“You jealous that Rhett likes me better?” Grady said, walking backward toward his truck. He shrugged with exaggerated helplessness. “It’s not my fault.”
Jake rolled his eyes.
Jules gave a wave. “See you bright and early Monday morning, Sunshine.”
Rhett watched her twist her hair up into the warrior’s knot again as she walked to Grady’s truck and hopped inside.
“See you bright and early, Sunshine,” Jake whispered in his ear.
Rhett whirled around. “You looking for a beatin’, Jake Braddock?” With a grin on his face, he punched his brother in the shoulder.
Jake punched him back, chasing him up the walkway, and they burst through the diner door like a couple of brawlers. Sunny came clucking down the rows of tables. “You boys behave yourselves in Sunny’s diner, you hear? I’ve just made a fresh cinnamon-caramel-apple pie. Who’s in?”
Rhett and Jake looked at each other and then back at Sunny, simultaneously saying, “Me!”
“Take a seat, boys,” Sunny said with a big cheerful smile and a wave of her coffeepot. “You want anything else to eat, or just coffee and pie?”
“Just coffee and pie, please,” Jake said.
Rhett nodded with a grin. “You’re going to put ten pounds on me easy, while I’m here.”
“That’s my job,” Sunny said.
Rhett looked around—the place didn’t seem that busy at the moment, and most of the customers who were there already had their food. “Can we buy you a cup of coffee?”
“Well,” said Sunny. “I’d rather that I was fifteen years younger and that it was a steak dinner and a ride in your Porsche, but that makes me feel like a dirty old woman, so sure. I’ll settle for some coffee.”
Rhett laughed and gestured to the seat opposite his.
“Hang on one sec, boys,” she said, and turned to the room at large. “Hey! Listen up—I got a question. Which one of you jokers put the bumper sticker on my van? Huh? The one that says ‘Kiss My Grits’?”
Everyone laughed. “That’s a good one, Sun. I didn’t do it, but I applaud whoever did.”
“Hear, hear!” A few more customers chimed in.
“I like it,” Sunny admitted.
“Happy Fool Fest, Sun!”
Shaking her head but unable to repress a grin, Sunny grabbed two plates of pie and three coffee mugs and then took a seat next to Jake, across from Rhett. She looked between the two of them. “All you Braddock boys. Lookers. Every last one of you. Jake here, knows I was crushing on Declan until you walked in. Now I’m tossing him aside. Want to get married, Handsome?”
“Well, I’m busy this week,” Rhett said. “But maybe next
?”
“Sounds good. And I can see why,” Sunny said, pulling a couple of napkins from the holder and sliding one each in front of the Braddock boys as a matter of habit. “Holt Stables is a busy operation and when Julianna isn’t happy she can be a handful.”
You could say that.
“How’s it goin’ with her?” Sunny asked.
Jake laughed. “You trying to bribe Rhett to spill some gossip with this here pie?” he asked.
Sunny’s eyes sparkled. “Why, Jake Braddock, what a thing to say! I’m the one people tell things to. I been in this town as long as anyone. I’m older than dirt, darlin’.”
“Not hardly. You don’t look a day over twenty-nine.”
“Puh-lease. You shameless fibber.” But Sunny fluttered her lashes, a smile playing on her lips.
“You got any questions for Sunny, Rhett?” Jake asked, trying to stop laughing long enough to take a swig of coffee.
Sunny cocked her head. “Oh, now, where to begin. Just look at your brother, Jake.” She gazed straight into Rhett’s eyes and told him, “You’ve got questions in your eyes, memories writ all over your face, and auld lang syne in the way you walk.”
“You Scottish, Sunny?” Rhett asked.
“Yes, sir. My granddad was a cowboy in a kilt. He was a scandal, that man.”
He chuckled at that. Sunny reached for the coffeepot and refilled the mugs. She took a sip and then added, “I think the only people in town who’ve ever matched him for scandal were Tom Fullery himself, the Brockhurst family in its entirety, and Sue Holt.”
“Sue Holt, huh,” Rhett said. “The scandal it wasn’t polite to talk about when I was growing up.”
“Sue . . . yes. That was some dustup,” Sunny said.
“What happened?”
“She was a year ahead of me at Silverlake High. Caught the home economics kitchen on fire, did Sue. Well, she was wild, that one. She’d been sneaking out at night to meet this no-good ranch hand from the Gonzalez operation. He was a hot tamale, and he was trouble with a capital T.
“They couldn’t be caught at any of the local watering holes, since she was underage. So he’d stop down the road from the Holt place and she’d run into the clear blue midnight to meet him, and out they’d drive to the ranch. He couldn’t take her into the bunkhouse with the other hands there, o’ course.
“So they’d go out onto the property, the fools. Gonzalez himself caught them skinny-dipping in the stock pond one night, of all things. They got dressed at the end of his rifle, and then he fired the hand, marched ’em both to his pickup, and drove ’em, still wet, out to see her father.”
Rhett raised his eyebrows and exchanged a startled glance with Jake.
“You’re beginning to get the idea,” Sunny said. “Well, Bart Holt, he didn’t want to see his daughter married to a half-baked ranch hand with nothing to his name, but she was already pregnant—just hadn’t told anyone. He wasn’t going to have his daughter disgraced in the community, and he wasn’t going to have a bastard grandchild, neither.
“So all’s a sudden, there’s a white wedding planned! And what do you know? The ranch hand is gonna take a job managing the Phillips 66 station closer in to town, owned by a cousin of Bart’s. Wild-child Sue is expected to stay at home and learn proper motherhood and wifeliness. She’s made her bed and now she’s gonna lie in it.”
Sunny had to get up to seat a couple of customers, take their orders, and pour their coffee, but she soon returned. “Now, where was I?”
“I take it things didn’t work out that way?” Rhett prompted her. “With Sue being the new model for domesticity?”
“No, they did not.” Sunny shook her head. “Our hero the ranch hand—”
“Did he have a name?”
“Yes, but nobody around here will say it.”
“Anyways. He was a heavy drinker, mean as a snake when he wasn’t having fun seducing young girls, and he didn’t take kindly to being domesticated, either. So he started hittin’ the bars and doing what snakes do when they slither off with their own kind. And he started comin’ home and beatin’ the livin’ daylights out of Sue.”
Rhett closed his eyes and swore.
“Sue bein’ Sue, she was too proud to go and tell her father, Bart, or even her brother, Billy. And that girl learned to shoot when she was, what? Ten? So after one particularly nasty go-round, she waits until Mr. Wonderful leaves hungover for his gas station job, and she runs out to the Holt place and borrows her daddy’s Remington.”
“Go on . . .” Jake said.
“Snake comes home obliterated the next night, knocks her around, kicks her in the stomach—”
“Oh God.” Rhett had a feeling he knew what was coming next.
“So she grabs the gun and blows him right out the side of the cabin. Silverlake’s Shotgun Divorce, they call it.”
Jake exhaled loudly.
“I take it he didn’t survive?” Rhett asked.
“What do you think? Shotgun, close quarters, in a cabin that’s twelve foot by fourteen foot, if that?”
“Yeah, no.”
“So there was a trial, the whole works. Sue got off, but it was one big ugly mess.”
He almost didn’t have the nerve to ask. “He kicked her in the stomach . . . What happened to the baby?”
Sunny swirled the coffee in her pot, losing all expression. “Poor little mite. Didn’t never have the chance to be born. Listen, darlin’, I got to get back to work. But you boys, come by and see me anytime.” She got to her feet, and he noticed with sympathy that her ankles were already swollen. Managing a diner and waiting tables was no picnic.
“What time do you get to work, Sunny?” Rhett asked.
“Got customers comin’ in by five thirty. So I’m up by four A.M.”
Jake grimaced.
“Thanks for the story,” Rhett said.
Sunny paused for a moment and said gently, “It wasn’t just idle tattling on my part. Sue ain’t had it easy. So—”
Rhett nodded. Undoubtedly Sunny knew that he’d been thinking about what to do with the saddlery. “Cut her some slack.” He filled in the blank easily. “I’ll do my best.”
Sunny raised her coffeepot to him and rocked back on her rubber heels. “You’re all right, Ever-Rhett. I don’t care what they say.”
He felt himself stiffening. Who’d been talking trash about him? And why?
Jake snorted a laugh as Sunny poked Rhett in the ribs. “Relax,” she said. “It’s a figure of speech. I’m just teasing. But you know what?”
“What?” asked Rhett and Jake at the same time.
“I only tease the ones I like. You know what else I like? Seeing Braddocks sitting down together in my diner. You know what I don’t care for? Seeing Declan left out of that.” She leaned over the table. “You don’t want to have any more regrets in this life than absolutely necessary, Rhett Braddock.” She stood up. “And you only have so much time to figure out what’s necessary. You hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rhett said with a lump in his throat. Sunny patted his cheek and went to swap out her coffeepot.
Chapter 14
On Monday morning, Rhett stole a travel mug with Jake’s name on it from the firehouse kitchen and grabbed two big pancakes off the stack Mick was piling up on a dalmation-shaped platter.
“They sure keep you busy,” Rhett said. “I don’t remember hiding in the kitchen being your style. Back in the day.”
“Nobody’s hiding. Nice thing about cooking here is that I don’t have to clean. Besides, cooking during Fool Fest is fun.” Mick gave him an evil grin that had Rhett double-checking the pancake he was eating. Now that was the Mick he remembered.
Mick leaned forward. “These are safe. Go ahead and take another for the road. Really. Go ahead.”
Rhett knew a dare when he heard one. And only
part of his mind actually worried that Mick had done something awful to the pancakes. The same part that suddenly remembered that they used to call him Mick the Menace. He grabbed one more pancake and pointedly took a giant bite, saying through a full mouth, “That’s got to be the ugliest platter I’ve ever seen.”
“It is. But Dottie and Libby gave it to us for Christmas one year, and nobody has the heart to get rid of it.”
Rhett chuckled and turned to head out for the stables. He got to the bottom of the stairs before Mick shouted, “You cork-sucking hound from hell! Give those back!”
“Pardon?” Rhett called.
A scrabbling of claws and the thunder of boots ensued.
“Not you,” Mick yelled. “Not-Spot just stole three pancakes!”
Rhett laughed.
“Dog, you’d better run . . . beware my spatula, you criminal counter-surfer . . .”
When Rhett got to the stables, Jules wasn’t anywhere in sight, which was good, right? Tamping down disappointment over that, Rhett went back to the desk he’d commandeered in the tack room and started going through various files on the business. The Holt tax returns for the past decade were stacked neatly in a drawer, and though they weren’t really any of Rhett’s business, he followed his instinct to look at them. Grady and Jules’s dad didn’t have any business training, and it didn’t look as though he used an accountant. Every penny mattered to Helen and Billy under the circumstances . . . Maybe Rhett could help.
The tax records were eye-opening. While Billy did regularly write off the property taxes and interest on the loan, he was missing countless opportunities to save money on his federal income tax returns. He wrote off the cost of feed, wood shavings for the stalls, and vet bills, but not repairs or maintenance or the contract labor he’d hired to do them. He wasn’t depreciating the value of any of his vehicles or farm equipment. He wasn’t writing off the office space. And he wasn’t deducting the expense of paying his daughter for the work she did. And didn’t Helen do something around here? She should take a salary of some kind, too.
All of this added up to thousands upon thousands of dollars . . . dollars that Rhett could get back for them, especially with the help of a tax accountant. His face split into a huge grin as he mentally totaled up the figure. He couldn’t wait to tell Jules the good news.
