by Leslie North
She honked the horn. The whimsical Aoooooh-gah sound, too close to the Marines ooh-rah for Wes to replace, caused her to bounce in the seat and clap her hands. He was pretty sure they woke up the entirety of Close Call, but he was pretty sure they’d both say they didn’t give a damn.
Her foot stomped the gas pedal.
He balanced on the running board and held on, the perfect union of the past and the future, what he’d wanted all along.
Olive had a shaky start. They both had. Together, though? Anything was possible.
Ooh-rah.
Epilogue
The newly-renovated garage on the highway south of Close Call, formerly known as Lezario’s Collision and Repair, now named Meier’s Custom Restoration, had just seen its latest group of veterans knock off for the day. The group of four—one Marine, two Navy, and one Air Force—piled into the shop truck to head back into town for dinner, drinks, and a room that didn’t highlight famous Southern lovebirds.
In the short year since the buzz surrounding Gulverson and the Company of Giants had single-handedly resuscitated the economy of a code-red town into a thriving tourist destination, Wes had talked his old garage buddy into selling and coming to work for him. The model was simple: vets who needed some space could bring any old car they wanted to restore, experience with cars not necessary. While the new restoration brotherhood helped each other set things to rights, the town welcomed them as if they were born and raised in Marin County—free room and board, free meals all over town, and free care that included mental health services, if requested. When the cars were restored, the vet had the opportunity to keep or sell. Wes’s only request was that the ones who moved on found a way to pay it forward to the next group. He still helped out at the ranch, stole Willie when he wasn’t busy because the guy could weave a story better than any therapy session, and worked on his own restorations to supplement the charity coffers.
Olive’s contribution was to decorate the place—not with art or girly crap or any of the other things Mona and January tried to talk him into. Olive’s contribution was to beautify. Every time she walked in the door, she still made him want to drop to his knees and give thanks that she became his wife.
Wes laid out on his back across the front bench seat of his latest beaut—a 1954 snow-white Packard Pacific 250 convertible—so that he could get a good look at the steering column. He believed the garage was empty.
Boy, was he wrong.
He heard the automatic bay opener sound. The door slid down and pinched out the late-afternoon sun. When the deadbolt slid into place on the shop door, he smiled but didn’t move an inch.
Well…
Through the windshield, he saw Olive set a picnic basket on the Packard’s hood. Her hair was twisted up; her lips were a ripe, unnatural shade of fuck me. She wore a black duster, cinched tight as all get-out.
It was June.
In Texas.
His cock damned near split a zipper.
He dropped his tools on the floorboard and placed his hands behind his neck to enjoy the show.
“What’re you doing, Amsterdam?”
She placed one white and black ribbon-laced combat boot on the old seat between his thighs, splitting the coat flaps and affording him a tantalizing view of flesh clear up to her...
“I brought you dinner.”
Wes laughed. “I see that. Did you finish making your next pecker out of clay yet?”
“I needed some…inspiration.”
After the nude subsequent to Gulverson and the Company of Giants, a museum in Copenhagen wanted four of them for a statement on civil liberties. Wes had no idea what four well-hung dudes had to do with civil issues, but he wasn’t above a little charity firmly directed at the cause.
She reached for the tie at her waist.
His mouth watered.
Her black duster fell to the garage floor.
“The mechanic blushes,” she said.
He reached for her hand. The moment she was his, he tugged her down into an embrace. They christened the convertible, taking full advantage of the no-roof option that the Packard Motor Car Company offered in 1954. And when the night was still young and the moon began its ascent, they rolled down the windows of Clem’s old truck going sixty, and Wes taught her a few more country songs.
Her hair lifted on the breeze, and she smiled at him. Artist as art.
End of Redeeming the Rancher
Meier Ranch Brothers Book Two
Tempting the Rancher, April 26th.
Redeeming the Rancher, May 3rd.
Claiming the Cowboy, May 10th.
PS: Do you love hard men? Then keep reading for exclusive extracts from Claiming The Cowboy and In Safe Hands.
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About Leslie
Leslie North is the USA Today Bestselling pen name for a critically-acclaimed author of women's contemporary romance and fiction. The anonymity gives her the perfect opportunity to paint with her full artistic palette, especially in the romance and erotic fantasy genres.
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BLURB
A rodeo star who’s as wild as a bull…
Rodeo rider Chace Meier has had enough of hard hits, wild women, fame and fortune. He’s ready to find a new dream, and being at his family ranch has always kept him grounded. So when he’s asked by a friend to help open a distillery in his hometown, he’s raring to go. Only one thing stands in his way—the prim and proper mayor of his Texas town. The sedate and sophisticated Gretchen de Havilland has not one red hair out of place on her gorgeous head, but not even her adorably aloof attitude will put Chace off. He’s looking to put his town on the map, and he’ll turn on all his charm to do so.
…and the woman who ropes him in.
Town mayor Gretchen de Havilland has her professional career all planned out. A few more years in local politics, and then it’s on to her dream of being attorney general. She’s hoping to make a name for Close Call, Texas as the perfect place to raise a family, and her vision definitely does not include having a distillery as a draw. Rough and ready Chace Meier may be used to getting his way, but if he thinks Gretchen can be swayed by his unruly hair, taut muscles, and sexy smirk, he has another thing coming.
The cocky cowboy needs to convince the town council to rezone in order to open his distillery, and the levelheaded local mayor is dead set on her political path. With both wanting to help Close Call, can they put their differences aside and create a future for the town and each other?
Grab your copy of Claiming the Cowboy
Available Book May 3rd 2018
www.LeslieNorthBooks.com
* * *
EXCERPT
For a string of days—Gretchen de Havilland had lost count, but something close to two years, because she started around the same time she became the youngest person and only female ever elected as mayor of Close Call, Texas, population 2,122—morning coffee at Cake My Day had been her thing. Not because the house roast was especially great—it had a faint whiff of singed beans and flat, square notes if it wasn’t masked with sugary cream or pumps of vanilla—but because it was an excuse to add the Clint Eastwood-inspired High Plains Sifter raspberry-filled powdered donut to her order. And because a town’s bakery was the tax-paying pulse of the community—frequented by those who rose
with the sun, attacked the day with purpose, and had a little extra in the mason jar to splurge on donut holes. No politician worth the air God gave her would make policy decisions based on constituents who frequented The Gritty Somewhere bar or the hourly-rate Starlite Motor Lodge.
On this drizzly morning in early April, however, Gretchen simply wanted to be invisible for five minutes. Ten, tops.
She didn’t feel like a leader at all. With bad humidity hair, an even worse disposition from being up most of the night working on budget spreadsheets, and no prospects to replace the lead organizer for the town’s sesquicentennial celebration happening in a month, she wanted—just for five minutes—for it to all be someone else’s responsibility. Not that she didn’t love being mayor. She did. But, she supposed, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t want to be Ruth Bader Ginsburg some days.
Close Caller-Times in hand, open to the Dear Agnes column, she sank her teeth into the blissful, yeasty, and absurdly powdery decadence that was her morning donut. The sugary pocket of raspberry jelly did not fill the pastry’s epicenter but squeezed a lop-sided burst at the corner of her mouth with the subtlety of a firehose. The carb load crowded her mouth while she scrambled for a napkin.
And found none.
Beside her table, a prime street-view that might as well have been engraved mayor for the regularity with which she occupied the space, a man entered her personal bubble.
Denim.
Tall.
Good gracious, but that was a big belt buckle.
Her hand shielded the blob dangling from her lips.
“Here.” He held out a paper napkin.
She accepted it, unable to make eye contact until the offending globule was no more and she could form words around the sticky dough. On an ambitious swallow, the bite vacated her mouth but left a powdery blizzard on her lips.
Gretchen glanced up—a serious challenge given the blinding, plate-sized, gold and silver crowning glory at the man’s trim waist. Past the retro white chambray shirt with the dark, tattoo-like embroidery at the shoulders, her gaze reached the face of the man sporting such extravagance. He was one of those Wrangler jeans models on the Tractor Depot inserts of the Sunday Houston Chronicle crossed with a dark-and-edgy-haired vampire actor. Ninety-nine percent bomb factory, one percent familiar.
She inhaled a tiny gulp.
The ensuing sugar blizzard at the back of her throat sent her into a coughing fit that twisted his slightly boyish features into a frown. Even in a moment of distress, he was a far cry handsomer than the usual morning crowd. And while she squeaked out an apology, washed the powder down on a heathy pull from her coffee cup, blinked back tears that had sprouted, and generally recovered from the urge to crawl under the table, that one percent clicked: championship buckle, Meier-brother cheekbones, a vague recollection of the least ambitious person in her graduation class.
“Folks in town said you’d be here. I wanted to catch you away from your office.” Chase Meier spun a chair backward and straddled the seat as if he was prepping to go a good eight seconds.
Seven second longer than she wanted to give him.
Gretchen kissed her privacy goodbye—again—and flipped a switch in her demeanor, a skillset she had perfected in law school. Her all-business countenance, a composed presentation that included the right cross of her ankles, the right measured words for a media response, and a veil of confidence she did not always possess.
“An aversion to City Hall?” she asked.
“More like an aversion to formality.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Meier?”
“For starters, you can call me Chase.”
Calling him Chase brought to mind his more infamous moniker around town: Chase the skirts. Oh, and most likely to bed a Nashville starlet—in the informal poll not publishable in their senior yearbook.
“Right. An aversion to formality. What can I do for you, Mr. Meier?” she repeated, gently apprising him of how the exchange would go down. She was no longer the freckle-faced, ginger girl who once spotted his jacket sticking out of his locker in an empty high school hallway and seized the opportunity to yank it free so that she’d have an excuse to talk to him when she told him she found it. The jacket had been bulkier than Gretchen anticipated, but she was nothing if not tenacious. She wrestled it low and pressed her heels against the locker’s lower vents for leverage. Chase picked that exact moment to visit the drinking fountain. They both froze, his jacket twisted between her thighs, his smile the precise degree of amused as at this moment. That charm he flexed all the way back to the single kindergarten ladies wouldn’t work on her. Gretchen was no longer the girl who needed an excuse to talk to anyone. Now, people wanted to hear what she had to say.
“I want to turn the old welding warehouse at the far end of Main into a distillery and tasting room.”
Ninety-nine percent bomb factory of a different sort.
He was direct, she had to give him that. In her line of work, chock full of bullshit, candor went further than chamber-of-commerce talk. She knew the property well. It was a fire-code-violating blemish on a town that was polishing up nicely during her tenure. That didn’t mean she wanted to see just anything replace it.
Grab your copy of Claiming the Cowboy
Available Book May 3rd 2018
www.LeslieNorthBooks.com
BLURB
He didn’t understand loyalty until she stripped it away…
Ex-NYPD cop Damian Stone was on the fast-track to an FBI career until a mafia ambush cost him his partner. He left the force and was recruited by an elite security team that leverages his hyper-protective instincts to protect the unprotectable--dangerous clients are Damian's bread and butter.
But he never expected her.
Alexa Volkov lived a privileged life—far from the messy underbelly of her father’s Russian mafia. But that doesn’t stop her from carrying the tattoo that makes Damian burn for revenge. As a crime boss daughter, Alexa is in a unique position to collapse the organization from the inside out. Her plan to testify against the mob patriarch puts a bounty on her head that would tempt even the most trustworthy cop—especially one hell-bent on punishing her for the sins of her father.
But the safe house part of Damian’s protection plan is anything but safe. In a place where alliances are not what they seem and the most dangerous heat bearing down on them is the forbidden burn of seduction, the only thing more at risk than life is a lethal hit to the heart.
Grab your copy of In Safe Hands from
www.LeslieNorthBooks.com
* * *
EXCERPT
This was the last time Damian Stone would ever let Rockwell assign him a woman.
He studied the two figures at the nearby gas station, slid his thermos from his console, and took a fortifying swig of espresso. Twenty minutes had passed since his first scalding sip, and the caffeine had yet to rouse him from his morning haze. But the sight of Alexa Volkov’s crisp, white blouse shrink-wrapped against her cleavage was enough to raise a corpse from the dead.
Pure triple shot.
Admittedly, there had been no precedent before her. Damian’s past clients included a sweaty Wall-Street type with an appetite for sex trade cash, an informant that had turned state’s evidence against a high-profile New York senator, and a retired real estate mogul whose trophy wife had hired half of Jersey’s parolees to make his death look like an accident. In every instance, the guys were foul-mouthed, ball-scratching, abysmal excuses for human life that Damian would have given his dying breath to protect.
This woman? Damian would have surrendered his dying breath and every damned other involuntary drive to extract himself from her protection detail.
Two red flags skewered his instincts.
First red flag: her dossier. The text was more than half obscured. Rockwell’s thick, black boxes would have made the State Department proud. And the grainy, paper-clipped photo of the blond may as well have been a police sketch from a drunk eye witness.
Damian had nothing to go on. Less than nothing.
Second red flag: Goddamn, but she was beautiful. Distractingly beautiful. Throw-a-top-security-agent-off-his-game beautiful.
Volkov's escort leaned against the company’s unmarked sedan, looking damn obvious—dressed all in black and wearing a pair of expensive shades. The man looked like he had been trained on a Hollywood set and released out into the wild in full wardrobe. He certainly didn't look like someone casually passing through Wyoming at dawn.
Damian made a mental note to have a word with Rockwell about some of the newer trainees.
Volkov wasn't doing much to improve her cover, either. Her stiletto heels peeked from beneath an expensive, wide-legged pantsuit; and despite a coat more inclined to fashion than function in the Rocky Mountains, a sleek belt at her waist amplified her shapely curves. But what most women aspired to, Volkov achieved effortlessly: long, lithe figure; wide-set, exotic eyes, straight blond hair pulled back into a high ponytail.
One glance at Alexa Volkov was like taking a blow to the head. The spark behind your eyes that kept you company when someone laid you out on the training floor at the police academy.
