If a heart could do a belly dance, hers did. Complete with jangling music and tinkling bells.
She swallowed twice and said, “Well, I’m here to help. Tell me what to do.”
Colleen appeared right behind Raylen. “I’ll tell you what to do. Come right on in. You can strip down the tables and I’ll wash them. Then Raylen can fold the tables up and stack them on the rack. I bet Gemma took extra appointments today on purpose, that rat!”
Raylen winked slyly at Liz. “We’ll make her work extra hard when we start putting up Christmas decorations tomorrow night, won’t we?”
“Oh, yeah,” Liz said. “You going to help us too, Colleen?”
“Can’t. This is my only day off this week and then I’m dealing blackjack for seven nights in a row. Six at night until six in the morning,” she said.
Liz followed them into the barn. “Lord, you’ll be wiped completely out.”
“Didn’t you work seven nights a week at the carnival?” Colleen asked.
“Guess I did in one capacity or the other. We were set up and running four nights a week. I did fortunes two or three of those. We were usually tearing down and moving two days and setting up one day. Those days it was all hands on deck from daylight to way past midnight. We slept and ate when we could,” Liz said.
“Miss it?” Colleen asked but she looked at Raylen.
“Of course. Would you miss blackjack?”
“Yes, I would. I’d miss the excitement. There’s something about people who gamble. They are…” Colleen stopped.
“Electric,” Liz finished for her.
“That’s it. There’s static in the air and excitement,” Colleen said.
“Carnival inside a building.” Liz smiled.
“And you can leave all that behind for a dog and a cat and a waitress job?” Colleen pressed on as she stripped a table of its orange plastic cloth, wadding it up and tossing it in an oversized trash can.
“What would it take for you to leave your job behind?” Liz cleared cups, plates, and napkins from the next table.
Raylen bit back a grin as he worked. Liz was holding her own against his most pessimistic sister. Not that Colleen would ever let him get away with calling her that. No sir, she’d say that she wasn’t pessimistic, she was realistic.
Colleen stripped off another tablecloth and shoved it into the trash can before she answered. “I’m not sure, but it would have to be huge.”
“How huge?” It was Liz’s turn to press.
“Bigger than a waitress job at the Chicken Fried and an old dog with arthritis and a temperamental momma cat,” Colleen said.
“In my world my job, Hooter, and Blister are huge,” Liz said.
She didn’t add Raylen or her house and land into the mix, but they were a hell of a lot bigger than Hooter, Blister, or Chicken Fried. Raylen had winked at her when she arrived, but that’s all she got, which wasn’t a lot after the hottest sex on the face of the earth. Maybe he wanted a friend with benefits as Blaze called some of his women. He could wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one filled up fastest, if that’s what he had in mind. Liz wanted a whole lot more than that.
Colleen’s cell phone rang and she dug it out of her hip pocket. “Hello… yes, I can… be there as soon as I can… good-bye.”
She flipped it shut and put it back in her pocket. “Sorry, but that was my boss. Girl who was working tonight has the flu so I’m drawing down some serious overtime. Have fun. Gemma should be here soon,” she said on her way out the door.
Liz heard the truck engine pull away from the barn before she crossed the floor of the arena and popped her hands on her hips.
“I won’t be a friend with benefits,” she spit out.
“I didn’t ask you to,” he said.
“Then why did you act like last night didn’t even happen?”
He grinned. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I didn’t know how you wanted to play it. If you want me to, I’ll crawl up on the barn roof and shout loud enough they can hear me over in Oklahoma that we slept together last night.”
She tried to bite back the giggle but it wasn’t possible. It erupted into a full-fledged guffaw that left her mascara running and her sides aching. “You. Wouldn’t. Dare.”
He took a step toward her. “Don’t ever dare an O’Donnell. Besides, I’m not ashamed that I had sex with you, darlin’. Are you? If you want me to show you the steps to get to the roof I’ll be right glad to do so. We can both do some yellin’,” he teased.
Not to be outdone, she moved closer until she was nose to nose with him. “I’m not quite ready for that,” she whispered as she moistened her lips.
One look at those delicious lips and he was lost. He circled her waist with his hands. She shut her eyes and rolled up on her toes to meet his slightly parted lips as they sought hers.
Hot desire filled every inch of her body as he made love to her mouth like he had the night before. Without breaking the kiss, he pulled her hips closer to him. She gave a little hop and wrapped her legs around his waist, his belt buckle pressing into her pelvic bone. She shifted and what was below the buckle was just as hard and pressed even more.
“Tack room?” he whispered.
She barely nodded and wrapped her arms tighter around his neck. She’d been in a relationship half a dozen times in her twenty-five years, but none of them had been as hot and steamy as one of Raylen’s kisses. None had made her throw common sense to the wind and agree to a wild romp in a tack room.
The kisses grew deeper and more passionate, each one turning up the heat more than the last one until she thought that steam was surely blowing out her ears. Her jeans were hot against her skin, her bikini underwear was sticky, and her bra suddenly felt two sizes too small.
She heard the tack room door open and then he kicked it shut with his boot heel. She fumbled with his belt, unzipped his jeans, and pushed her jeans and underpants down to her ankles. She shifted her weight until he was inside her. He braced her against the wall and kept his lips on hers, their tongues doing an ancient mating dance while she hung on during the fury of burning heat.
She’d had sex, but it had always been in a motel bed with the man on top. Never had she had a ride so wild or so passionate. She’d sure never felt the kind of heat that made her arch her back against the wall and beg for more. And she’d never wanted to do it again as soon as it was over.
“Hot damn!” she said.
“I take that as you are happy,” Raylen panted as he raked a table clean with a forearm and laid her down on it.
“Yes,” she panted.
He collapsed beside her, pulling her as close to his side as he could get her.
“Ready to go to the rooftop?” he asked.
“Damn near.”
His lips found hers with a fierce, hot kiss that got her ready for another round. He ran his palms from her chin, up across her cheeks, and tangled his hands in her hair.
“You…” he whispered.
“You…” she whispered back.
His hands were everywhere—on her hips, her thighs, probing, finding spots that made her forget everything but how much she wanted him.
“I want more,” he whispered hoarsely into her hair.
“Me too,” she said.
“When I touch you, the world disappears,” he said.
His eyes were dreamy and scorching hot at the same time. She stretched enough to brush a kiss against each of his eyelids and he moaned. Until that moment she wasn’t aware that a man could groan in a Texas drawl or that it would turn her heat knob up to high.
Raylen had never felt raw passion before that moment. He shifted his position and suddenly she was under him on the rough table. He ran a hand down her ribs and up her back, unfastening her bra. His touch made her gasp and arch her back for more.
“Please,” she begged.
With a long, slow, gentle thrust Raylen began a rhythm that drove her crazy and brought her to the edge of a cli
max. Then he slowed down until she thought she’d die with desire, and at the very moment when she could stand no more, she dug her fingernails into his back and said, “Now, please, Raylen.”
“Liz!” he said hoarsely.
The heat had melted them together on the narrow table when they heard a truck headed their way. They frantically searched for clothes and pulled them over their sweaty bodies, barely getting the job done before they heard Gemma yelling.
“Hey, anybody here?”
Raylen eased the tack room door open and gave the room a once-over. “I’m in here making room to store things,” he hollered.
“Is Liz with you?”
“Isn’t she out there?” Raylen asked.
“Don’t see her,” Gemma said.
“Guess she took a load of trash out the back door. We’ve been loading it in the bed of my truck and I’ll take it to the dump when we are finished.”
Liz looked at him with wide eyes and he winked. He laced his fingers in hers and led her to a door on the other side of the tack room and very gently opened it so it wouldn’t creak.
“Go on out and circle the barn and come back in the front door,” he whispered as he brushed a kiss across her lips. “Unless you want us to go out there together and start bragging about what we did.”
She slipped her hand from his and eased out the door, blowing him a kiss on the way. “Thank you,” she mouthed. But she missed that special time afterward, like the night before when they’d cuddled before she fell asleep.
Chapter 10
Fall in Texas can be colder than a brass monkey on the North Pole or hot enough to go swimming in the lake, sometimes both within a three-day span. It’s that time of year when folks turn on the heat in the morning but by midafternoon they’ve switched it to air-conditioning.
The afternoon that Liz called in the troops to help put up yard decorations was one of the hot days and felt nothing like Christmas. The day before had hovered down around forty degrees, but a southerly wind picked up and warmed Ringgold up to eighty degrees and she’d turned on the air-conditioning when she got home that afternoon. There was cold beer in the refrigerator. She made a pitcher of iced tea, a pot of coffee, and arranged store-bought chocolate chip cookies on a plate. And then she set a small CD player on the porch with a Christmas CD in it, put it on repeat so that the songs would keep coming. She turned it up as high as it would go and waited for the army to come help her do battle with her decorations.
They all arrived at the same time: Gemma, Raylen, Dewar, Jasmine, and Ace. The three guys grabbed a cold beer and went right to the barn while the ladies had a glass of tea, cookies, and half an hour of gossip.
“Reckon they got it figured out?” Gemma asked.
“What?”
“Men folks are different than us girls. They have to scratch their heads and measure and talk something to death before they get it done, right, Jasmine?” Gemma said.
“You got it. Then after they’ve done cussed and discussed, they do what we would have done to start with. They ought to be gettin’ the stuff down out of the loft about now so we’ll go on out and start loading lights,” Jasmine said.
Liz laughed. “It’s universal. You ought to be in the carnie business.”
The guys were still measuring the opening when they finally got to the barn.
“Guess we didn’t give them long enough,” Gemma said. “Let’s get the lights loaded on Liz’s truck while they play like engineers.”
Two hours later they’d figured it out enough that everyone was out of the loft, and all the pieces were unloaded up against the fence on the south side of the property. Now it was time for more head scratching and measuring.
“You’re the boss lady. You tell us where to put it,” Ace said.
“How many are there in all?” Liz asked.
“Thirty-six,” Raylen said.
“Then we’ll divide them. Eighteen on each side.”
“By theme, color, or what?” Dewar asked.
“Let’s lay them all out on the ground and then decide where to put them,” Ace suggested.
Liz swiped her hand across her forehead, smearing dirt and sweat from one side to the other. “That would take until next Christmas.”
She wore cutoff jeans and a faded T-shirt with Tinker Bell on the front; her hair was parted down the middle and pulled up into dog ears that bounced when she turned from one side to the other. Raylen thought she was cute as a new baby kitten and wished he could kiss her right then and there. But that would bring the decorating to a damn halt because when their lips met, it never was long until they were shedding clothes.
“How do they stand up when a strong wind hits?” Gemma asked.
Raylen flipped a snowman around and pointed to the bottom. “See that board with the holes in it? Stakes go through the holes and then two feet into the ground. Plus there’s a prop, kind of like the back side of an easel, that keeps them steady. We’ve got hundreds of stakes in the back of the truck yet. Haskell had them all cut and in two boxes. Looks like he did that this year because the cuts are fresh.”
Liz had thought she’d know exactly where to put each one. It was supposed to come to her like divine intervention. The grouping of snowmen would go there and the nativity scene there, but it didn’t work that way. She was totally bewildered.
“Help!” she said.
Jasmine pushed her brown hair behind her ears. “You really want a Griswold effect?”
Liz nodded.
“Okay, then take every other one and put it on the other side of the lane. Don’t pay a bit of attention to themes or content. Just arrange them haphazardly like you said.”
“Okay. That’s the way we’ll do it. But remember to fix them so one isn’t back behind another so they are all as visible as possible from the road and from the lane,” Liz said.
Ace picked up Betty Boop standing in front of a Christmas tree and carried it to the other side of the lane. Raylen grabbed a four-by-eight piece of plywood with a painting of three snowmen and a yellow puppy playing at their base.
“That must’ve been the year he got Hooter,” Liz said.
“And that’s this year, right?” Jasmine pointed to the cactus with the belly dancer sitting in the fork.
“You got it.” Liz grinned.
Dewar got a firm grip on Santa’s sleigh. “I’ll come back and get the reindeer that hooks up to this soon as I haul this little fat man to the other side of the lane.”
“Y’all take the ones that are left behind and arrange them where you want us to set them up. While we do that you can arrange on this side and then you can begin to string the lights while we set up that side,” Raylen said.
“Mr. Organization,” Gemma said.
“Miz Smart Mouth,” Dewar taunted.
“Oh, hush! You’d agree with him just because it’s guys against gals,” she told him.
Jasmine touched Liz on the shoulder. “They argue like that all the time. It wasn’t easy for me to get used to since I’m an only child. Pearl and I were friends and we argued some but not a lot. These O’Donnells fight like…”
“Irishmen.” Gemma giggled. “It’s fun. You ought to try it.”
“I know exactly what you are talking about.” Liz remembered the fights she had with Blaze. He hated to be wrong almost as much as she did, and their arguments could get heated. He was Irish too. Maybe that was the explanation. Their worst argument had been when he couldn’t talk her out of leaving the carnival and then he stayed in his trailer and refused to come out to wave good-bye to her.
“Okay, then, let’s put Mr. and Mrs. Claus with their welcome sign way back at the house. That way, when the folks get to the end, the old couple will be saying, ‘come right on in and have a cup of hot chocolate,’ and then…” Gemma started.
Liz was shaking her head emphatically. “No! I want them right here at the very front of the property to welcome everyone to the whole light show. Not way back there where you can’t even see
them. Put them right here in the corner.”
“I disagree,” Jasmine said. “I think they should go in the other corner since most people are right-handed, and that’s where they’ll look first.”
Liz moved to the corner beside the cattle guard and crossed her arms over her chest. “I want it right here.”
Jasmine and Gemma both cracked up.
“What is so damn funny?” Liz asked.
“You argued with us. I’m proud of you, girl. You might make an O’Donnell yet!” Gemma said.
“You two are…”
“Pigs from hell?” Jasmine asked. “Ever see Steel Magnolias? I love that line.”
“Yes, I did and love it. And that’s exactly what you are,” Liz said. “I’ve argued with an expert and you two barely qualify as amateurs.”
“You hear that, Raylen? She says she can out-argue us,” Gemma said.
“When hell freezes over,” he shot across the lane.
“Well, get ready for icicles on Lucifer’s boogers!” Liz smarted off.
Raylen stopped and locked eyes with her. “I don’t think so, darlin’.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think.”
Gemma cackled. “She’s pretty good, Raylen. You’ve met your match on the fiddle and in a fight, too.”
He grinned and carried a decorated Christmas tree to the other side. His arm brushed against Liz’s as they passed each other. He caught her eye and winked. All the arguing left her in an instant and desire flooded her body. She wanted to send her friends home and drag Raylen behind those snowmen for a session of wild, passionate sex. That session against the wall in the tack room the day before had sent her mind into a whirlwind. Now every place she saw became a place for seducing Raylen.
She chose a spot for the next lawn ornament, stuck a twig in the soft earth to mark it, and helped Jasmine and Gemma place it. But her thoughts stayed on the tingling place on her arm where Raylen had touched her. Did he think she was easy? Would he get tired of her? Or worse yet, did he have an ulterior motive like Dewar said in the café? Just how badly did he want her twenty acres?
Darn Good Cowboy Christmas Page 13
