Chapter 1

by Unknown

  “Well, we just lived through the first set of family,” she said.

  “One down. One to go. Thank you again, Jazzy.

  Good night.” He kissed her on the top of her head and rolled over to his side of the bed.

  It was a long time before she went to sleep.

  Chapter 7

  Only two days had passed.

  Two days before, on Saturday morning, Jasmine had unlocked the doors to the Chicken Fried Café just south of Ringgold and it was a normal day.

  On Saturday afternoon she had flown from Dallas to Las Vegas and it was a normal flight.

  On Saturday evening, June 9, she had married Ace Riley and what happened in Vegas was damn sure supposed to stay in Vegas. It should have been a normal night in Vegas.

  Now it was the second Monday in June and everything looked normal again.

  “But looks are deceiving and there’s no such thing as secrets,” Jasmine said.

  She mixed up two chocolate cakes and three pecan pies to offer for dessert that day. While those baked she made biscuits for the breakfast rush and started a crock pot full of sausage gravy.

  Bridget, Jasmine’s single employee, rushed into the café like a whirlwind, jogging from across the dining room floor and coming to a skidding stop in the kitchen to wrap Jasmine up in a fierce hug.

  “Pearl cal ed Lucy, and Lucy cal ed me, and it’s so exciting and romantic. I’m so happy for you. I cried when Lucy told me. I knew he was always around, but I had no idea y’all were even dating, and you are going to keep the café, aren’t you? I love it here and I’d hate to lose the best job in the whole county,” she gushed.

  Bridget looked far different than she did the first time Jasmine saw her. She’d shed the extra pounds she carried six months before, and she had a bright smile to go with her newfound confidence. She wasn’t that same little mousy woman who’d spent two years with an abusive husband. Now she walked with self- assurance and credited Jasmine and Lucy with every bit of her newfound happiness.

  “So you think Ace is a good man? You don’t think he’ll turn out to be…” Jasmine put Bridget to the test.

  “Ace Riley has the kindest eyes of any man I ever met. Now Ace likes to flirt and carry on with the women folks, but he’s not an evil man. Believe me, I can spot them and you got nothing to worry about. Besides, if he was to ever hurt you, either you’d kill him or I would.

  But you don’t have anything to worry about. He’s a good man and you’re going to be married the rest of your life. Now tell me all about it and promise me again that you won’t sell the café.”

  “I’m keeping the café and you have a job,” Jasmine reassured her. “The marriage was a spur- of- the- moment decision and we’d really planned to keep it a secret for a few months, but I guess when it airs on public television the secret is out.”

  “Well, I’m tickled for y’all. You sure enough sprung it as a surprise. I bet your momma and daddy was shocked,” Bridget said.

  Jasmine nodded. “That doesn’t begin to cover it.

  Momma says I have to get married again in the state of Texas.”

  “But them Las Vegas weddin’s is legal, ain’t they?” Bridget frowned.

  “Oh, yes! In everyone’s eyes but Momma’s.” Jasmine sighed.

  “Well, I don’t see nothing wrong with that. Ain’t you the only child?”

  Jasmine nodded again.

  “Then do it for your momma. Me and the sumbitch I was married to, we run off to Dallas and got married.

  Daddy never did like him, and Momma, well, she said he was a worthless bastard. They was right on the money, but it took me a month to figure it out and another two years to get out of it. Ace is a good man. He won’t mind havin’ another weddin’ for your momma.”

  “It’s not Ace. I don’t want to do it,” Jasmine said.

  “Then tell her no.”

  Jasmine smiled. “It isn’t that easy.”

  “Ain’t it the truth! But remember, if Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody goin’ to be happy. There’s the first of our coffee drinkers comin’ in to gossip. I swear men folks is twice as bad as the women. Hang around their table and you’ll find out more than you ever can around a bunch of women.” She tied an apron around her waist, picked up an order pad, and headed out to the dining room.

  People yelled from the checkout counter or popped their heads through the kitchen door to congratulate her all morning. By ten o’clock her plastered- on smile was hurting her face and it was still four hours before closing time.

  The morning lull came at ten thirty and Bridget poured a cup of coffee and propped a hip against the table in the kitchen. She kept a trained ear tuned in to the bell on the door and an eye in that direction while she kept up a running monologue about her softball team that was playing that weekend.

  “I been meanin’ to ask you to come with me and play because there’s this feller that plays for the Henrietta team that I just know you’d like but he’s done missed out because Ace slipped in the back door and sweet- talked you into marryin’ him. There’s the bell. Too late for breakfast so I guess he’s either here for coffee or breakfast.”

  Bridget set her cup down and breezed out into the dining room, a big smile on her face and a swing in her walk.

  “Good mornin’. Sit down anywhere you want to.

  Menu is on the table. Want some coffee?” She followed him to a back table.

  “I came to see Jasmine, so tell her I am here,” he said bluntly.

  “Well, she’s busy, but I’ll be glad to take your order.”

  “I’ll only give her my order.” His nose flared out in a snarl when he looked at Bridget.

  Her blood ran cold but she wasn’t going to let him or any man intimidate her again. “Do you have an appointment?” He eyed Bridget up and down and snorted as if he was looking at a pile of trash. “No, but she’ll talk to me.

  Just tell her Cole is here.”

  “And she’ll know who that is?” Bridget asked.

  “Oh, yes, she will definitely know who I am. This is a pitiful little place. She came up in the world over the weekend, didn’t she? I’m sure she’ll be more than interested in what I’ve got to say.”

  Bridget went to the kitchen and sat down at the table.

  “You got a man out there that’s mean and hateful. Says his name is Cole. I asked him if he had an appointment just because he was so ugly to me. Says he won’t give his order to me and he has to talk to you.”

  “Well, shit! What do you mean… appointment?”

  “He looked at me like dirt and talked down to me so I asked him if he had an appointment when he said he’d give you his order. I’m sorry if you know him,” Bridget explained.

  Jasmine wiped her hands. Her wide mouth turned into a narrow slit as she set it firmly and her hands balled up in fists.

  “You could’ve shot him on the spot and I’d have helped you tote his sorry carcass out the door. Hell, I’ll bring the shovels if you want to do it now. Don’t apologize, and he will give his order to you or he can damn well starve to death.” Jasmine stomped out of the kitchen.

  Bridget wiped her forehead with a paper napkin.

  “Whew!”

  Jasmine spotted him the minute she looked across the room. Other than a table of old cowboys who sat by the front window every morning and had coffee until eleven when they placed their order for lunch, he was the only person in the dining room. But that wasn’t why she would have known him. He had the same dark hair and body build of the dark- haired Riley brothers. The difference was in the face. His was round and didn’t have the character or rugged good looks that the other Rileys shared.

  “I’m Jasmine,” she said.

  He started at the toes of her Nikes, traveled up her bare legs to her knees where her khaki shorts started, stalled out at breast level for a second, and then took in her face and hair. His eyes said he wasn’t impressed.

  “I’ll have steak and eggs…”

  “Is that
the only reason you cal ed me out here?” Jasmine asked.

  Cole’s eyes met hers in a frigid gaze. “Of course it is. I thought you’d be delighted to see me. After all, we are related now.”

  Jasmine glared at him. “Does Garret or Ace know you are in town?”

  His grin was one- sided but not friendly. “Darlin’, there are two sides to every story.”

  “Well, darlin’,” she drug out the last word into six syllables, “Ace and I are married. You don’t get the farm. Everything is being filed this very morning at the Montague County Courthouse. It’s over, Cole. Go back to Dallas and lick your wounds.”

  A thick layer of ice covered his already dead cold eyes. “I have to accept it. I don’t have to like it. Living with Ace won’t be easy. He’s always liked the ladies and a quickie Las Vegas marriage license won’t change that. You can’t tame him. When you get tired of his cheating, call me. We’ll pull the rug out from under him and share the profit. Now I want the steak and egg breakfast and a short stack of pancakes before I head over to Montague. Did you think I’d take your word for it, or the lawyer’s either? Men can be bought. I’ll see the papers for myself.”

  “Bridget, will you please take this man’s order?” Jasmine yelled.

  “I could stay all week and make the first week of married bliss miserable,” Cole said.

  Jasmine leaned close to his ear and whispered, “You don’t intimidate me one damn bit. Stay and you’ll learn all about misery. I’ll invite Garrett and Megan for supper tonight. Then tomorrow night we’ll have the rest of the clan to clean up what they leave behind.” Bridget was at her elbow when she stood up.

  “Steak and eggs and a short stack of pancakes,” he said through clenched teeth.

  Jasmine didn’t even look back. She went straight to the kitchen and slapped a steak on the grill. Bridget brought the order and hung it on the revolving wheel.

  “That was intense,” she said.

  Jasmine noticed that he wanted his steak rare so she flipped it over. “He is pure evil.”

  “He’s beyond evil. My ex was evil. That man out there has sold his soul to the devil,” Bridget whispered.

  Jasmine nodded.

  “Here lately I’ve learned that if I had to do it I could take my ex down with one hand tied behind my back. I wouldn’t take on that man out there with a tire iron in one hand and a claw hammer in the other. What’s his problem with you?”

  “I married Ace,” Jasmine said.

  “I’ll get the shovels. But we need something more for his kind. You got a stake hidin’ in the pantry. We’ll need to drive it through his heart. I reckon I could do it with the shovel if you haven’t got a sledgehammer.” Jasmine giggled and part of the tension floated away.

  Ace wiped at his sweaty forehead with his shirtsleeve.

  The air conditioning was out in the tractor he was using that day, and the temperature was near a hundred degrees. It was going to be one blistering hot summer in more ways than one.

  Rye said that his whole life changed in a second when he first saw Austin on the riverbanks sifting her grandmother’s ashes between her fingers into the water. Ace’s changed when that Vegas preacher told him to kiss the bride. Nothing had been the same since that moment. He thought back on al the women he’d enjoyed: flirting, dating, the chase, the sex. All that was over.

  No more flirting.

  He liked Jasmine too much to give her a cheating husband even if it was a fake husband.

  No more dating.

  Jasmine wouldn’t cheat on him so he’d be good.

  No more sex.

  Ah, that one was painful, but the ranch was worth it.

  A wedding, a big one, with a reception and he was the groom.

  Saying the vows in Las Vegas wasn’t like saying them in front of a real Texas preacher, parents, friends, and even God. That made it pretty damn real.

  He’d slept with Jasmine two nights with no sex.

  He had not planned on sleeping with his bride in his bed in his house without sex. That was the bed and the room he’d saved for his real bride should the time ever come around that a woman got past the tat on his bicep and made her way to his heart.

  His mind had run around in circles all day as part of the crew cut hay; part of them raked what was already down; and the last third baled other fields. Hay and his situation were the same; like wiping his ass on a wagon wheel, there was no end to it. He’d been too busy to take a break and go to the café that afternoon, and he wondered how she’d fared. When he saw her park her truck in the front yard in the middle of the afternoon, he wanted to stop for the day, but there was plenty of day-light left and he’d wasted a couple of hours that morning going to the lawyer’s office.

  The marriage license hadn’t been filed in the state of Nevada until the courthouse opened there, so it was after ten when the fax came in to the lawyer’s office.

  He checked it, declared it legal, and Ace signed another round of papers. He and the lawyer walked over to the courthouse and closed out his grandfather’s will. Ace paid the man with a check and made it home at noon.

  He’d been on a tractor ever since.

  It was pretty cut and dried. It was over. The ranch was now legally his unless he didn’t stay married for a year and then Cole would have to file the necessary papers to contest the will. Too bad his life couldn’t be so easy, because in that area nothing made sense anymore.

  Jasmine parked beside Ace’s truck and hauled in another suitcase of her things. She was still stomping mad when she unpacked it, hanging her things beside his in the closet, putting her underpants, bras, and nightshirts in a drawer right below his. She kicked off her Nikes, went to the shower, and soaped up twice. Still she could feel the insolence in the way Cole looked at her, so she poured another puddle of shower gel into the washcloth and started all over again. She stood under the cool water and forced herself to think of something else.

  Bridget was right. Ace’s eyes were warm and kind.

  He’d never look at her like Cole.

  “Don’t think about him,” she said sternly.

  Ace was a playboy for sure. He liked women, but he’d never…

  “Don’t go there,” she yelled at the top of her lungs.

  Okay, lit le girl, looks to me like you need a gooddose of housework. Get that dust rag and get busy.

  Since you can’t clean his looks off your body or put hismemory in the trash can, then clean something else andtake your mind off him, Granny Dale’s voice whispered so close that Jasmine threw back the shower curtain to see if she was right outside.

  She turned off the water, dried herself, and dressed in cut- off jean shorts and a ragged T- shirt and headed for the kitchen. The oven was a holy mess with the ashes of too many boiled over TV dinners still crusted on the bottom. The refrigerator was almost as bad with sticky grape juice turning to gel on one shelf and something brown that looked suspiciously like spilled sweet tea stains running down the side.

  She found cleaners under the kitchen sink, sprayed the oven, and shut the door for the prescribed thirty minutes and went to work on the refrigerator. Everything, shelves and drawers included, came out and went into a sink of warm soapy water. She brought the trash can from the utility room and tossed everything that was out of date or growing layers of fuzz into it.

  There was a galvanized milk bucket in the utility room, so she filled it with cleaner and water and went to work on the refrigerator, mumbling that homes should have to pass the same inspection codes that restaurants did.

  “Can’t eat a hamburger in a café that has a speck of mildew on the door of the fridge, but you can grow enough bacteria for biological warfare in a home’s fridge.

  Don’t make sense to me. But then I guess it’s like they say about a license. Have to have a driver’s license to drive a car; have to have a fishin’ license to drop your line in the water; but anybody who can breed can have a baby. Cole is living proof that that law needs to be changed.” Don’t go
there, Granny Dale said firmly.

  Okay, okay. Now doesn’t that look better, and nexton to the oven. Gramps Riley was right. A ranch needsa woman.

  When Ace and the guys dragged their tired butts through the door at seven, she was sit ing on the sofa with her bare feet propped up on the coffee table.

  Ace kissed her on the forehead.

  “What is that smell?” Creed asked.

  “It’s the smell of clean, and the next time one of you boil something out in the oven or spill something in the fridge, you’d damn well better clean it up,” Jasmine said.

  “You didn’t throw out that container of dirt, did you?” Blake asked.

  “If it wasn’t edible, it went in the trash,” she said.

  “Well, shit! That was my rose hips I was working on germinating,” he said.

  “Go look in the trash bin. I tossed container and all,” she told him. “And if you want to grow something in dirt do it in the bunkhouse.”

  “Dexter would kill me,” Blake said.

  “I rest my case,” Jasmine told him.

  Creed laughed.

  “It’s not funny. I gathered those rose hips last fall and I’m just waiting on them to sprout,” Blake said on his way out the back door to retrieve his precious seeds.

  “So he’s a horticulturist?” she asked Ace.

  “Which kind of horti are you talkin’ about?” Dalton chuckled.

  Jasmine felt the blush begin to sting her neck but she willed it away. Hell, she’d stood up to Cole. She could damn well force a blush into oblivion.

  “I get the shower,” Dalton said.

  Creed nodded. “You can have it. I’d forgot en how much the first day of hay haulin’ can work on my muscles. I’m getting into a tub of warm water and soaking my aches away. What time is supper, Ace?”

  “Dexter says it’ll be on the table in half an hour.” They both took off down the hall toward the bathroom.

  “What put you in such a cleaning mood? I told you that you didn’t have to do anything around the house since you work all day at the café,” Ace asked.