“That’s crazy. My grandpa hated Big Jimmy.” James Harlin had hated most everyone who’d threatened his livelihood. Not that Big Jimmy had cooked up hooch that good. But he had gone so far as to try to push his stuff on James Harlin’s customers, and so her granddad had seen the man as a threat. At least he’d cussed up a blue streak whenever anyone had made mention of him.
“Maybe Granddad went there to threaten him. You know how territorial he was.”
“That’s what the Feds are thinking. The thing is, this place was deep in the woods. Far enough out that James Harlin would have had a devil of a time getting out there. It seems he could have run across Big Jimmy at any number of places without having to go to so much trouble. The diner. The VFW Hall. Cavanaugh’s General Store. There are a dozen places that don’t involve crawling onto a four-wheeler and roughing it three miles over raw terrain. Did he have access to an off-road vehicle?”
“Are you kidding? If his truck couldn’t get the job done, then he didn’t bother.” She glanced toward the old barn that sat several yards from the house. “There’s the old tractor, but it died years ago.”
“Which means it’s doubtful he headed out there on his own.”
She eyed him. “What are you trying to say?”
“That something’s off.” He seemed to think. “Something doesn’t add up.”
“Which makes you wonder about everything that does add up,” she added for him. He didn’t respond, but she didn’t miss the gleam in his eyes that said she’d hit the nail on the head. “You’re thinking there was more to the explosion, aren’t you?”
“No, no,” he said much too quickly to ease her mind. He pulled off his hat and ran a hand through his dark hair. “I went over the scene myself and didn’t find anything that would indicate the explosion was anything other than a terrible accident. It’s just…” He shook his head again. “I’m sure I’m just making a mountain out of an anthill.” He sat the hat back on his head. “But I’d still like to be sure. Maybe look around a little more just to ease my own mind.”
“Be my guest,” she said, motioning to the back. “But the dozers were already out plowing down everything so I can’t say that you’ll find much of anything besides crushed timber.”
“I’m not interested in poking around out back.” He shook his head. “I’d like to look around inside, if that’s okay. Your grandfather’s room, in particular.”
Because no one had even thought to go through his personal belongings. There’d been no reason to when all signs had pointed to a tragic accident and nothing more.
Until now.
The realization sent a whisper of unease through her. “Callie packed most everything away, but it’s all boxed up in his bedroom.” While her older sister had worked up the courage to face her demons where their grandfather was concerned, Callie hadn’t actually parted with any of his stuff. Rather, she’d left it for Brandy and Jenny to do away with as they saw fit. Since Jenna’s idea of dealing with things was to look the other way, the boxes had been left to Brandy, who’d yet to decide between the local Goodwill or the church donation box. “You’re welcome to have a look through them if you think there might be something helpful in there.”
“I’d appreciate that.” He waited while she unlocked the door and stepped inside.
She scooped up the white ball of fluff that met her and cuddled the yapping animal close while she motioned the sheriff in. “Hush, Jez,” she told the dog. “It’s just the sheriff.” But Jez didn’t care. She was a ballsy teacup–mutt mix that Jenna had brought home from the veterinary clinic, along with half a dozen other strays—two rabbits, two more monstrous dogs that lived on the back porch, and a small cat now camped out in the barn. While little more than a handful, Jez considered herself the ruler of the Tucker household and she meant to establish dominance.
Until the sheriff reached out a hand and tickled her behind the ears. The barking turned to panting and soon she was lapping at his fingers and wagging her tail excitedly.
“I think she likes you,” she told the sheriff as she led him down the hallway. Their footsteps echoed off the old hardwood floor the way they had done her entire life whenever she’d ventured to James Harlin’s room.
Not that she’d made the trek very often.
He’d been a mean old coot and so Brandy had avoided him for the most part, just as he’d avoided her. Callie had been the pain in the ass, facing off with him, calling him out whenever she had the chance, and Jenna had been the chip-off-the-old-block, giving him a good chuckle with her wild and crazy ways. Meanwhile, Brandy had been invisible to him. The nonexistent middle child. Until he’d come looking for cookies to chase down his liquor, that is. But even then, he’d rarely made eye contact with her. As if looking at her bothered him even more than the damnable hemorrhoids he complained about so religiously.
She’d hoped to coax a smile from him with her famous gingerbread.
But James Harlin hadn’t been capable of smiling. He’d gone to his grave with the same frown he’d worn throughout his life, leaving Brandy to wonder if he’d ever really liked anything.
Her cookies. Her.
That’s why she’d yet to part with the boxes. Because she was still trying to make up her mind about him, just as she was trying to decide what to do with his stuff.
She pushed aside the thought and focused on the panting dog. “She definitely likes you,” she told the sheriff.
“What can I say? It’s the animal magnetism.”
He grinned and she remembered their high school days when he’d asked her out a time or two and she’d turned him down. He’d been one of the few who hadn’t written anything about her on the bathroom wall, and so she’d always liked him.
“This is it,” she said, showing him into the small room that her grandfather had occupied near the back of the house. She pushed open the door and flipped on the light. “Take your time.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I shouldn’t be too long.”
She nodded. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.” She stalled for a split-second, drinking in the familiar smells of mothballs and moonshine that still permeated the small space. An empty Mason jar sat on the nightstand next to an old Reader’s Digest and a half-empty pack of Juicy Fruit gum. The man had liked his gum as much as his shine and so it had been all too typical to find him smacking away in between sips during his TV time.
Her gaze hooked on the worn quilt that covered the full-size bed and she remembered James covered up to his neck on a particularly cold night, a jar of hooch next to him, a frown on his face.
Until she’d handed him one of her homemade cookies. The expression had slipped then for just a heartbeat. Not a full-blown smile, mind you. Just the hint of something besides his usual disdain.
Then he’d shifted his attention back to Wheel of Fortune and she’d been left to wonder if it had just been her imagination.
Or if maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t invisible to him after all.
She shook away the past and turned to leave the sheriff to his work. Brandy spent the next half hour storing the extras she’d brought home from the bakery and cleaning up the mess Jenna had left in the kitchen. Her younger sister had never been strong on housework, not with Callie to pick up the slack. Since Callie had all but moved in with her fiancé and left Brandy and Jenna to fend for themselves, Brandy had taken over most of the domestic duties.
She cleaned the kitchen and was just picking up in the living room, Jez yapping at her heels, when the sheriff appeared in the doorway.
She arched an eyebrow. “Find anything helpful?”
“Not really. There sure are a lot of empty Bengay tubes.”
“I said Callie packed up.” She grinned. “I didn’t say she threw anything away.” Her sister had had a hard enough time putting away the old man’s belongings. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to toss out anything. Brandy had promised to do that for her sister when she found the time. Which, thanks to the bakery’
s demanding hours, hadn’t happened yet. “If you need anything else, let me know.”
He nodded. “Thanks for letting me look around. The Feds are probably right. James Harlin could be a determined SOB when he wanted to be. I’m sure he probably found a way out there to give those boys a piece of his mind for poaching on his business.”
Only he didn’t sound so sure.
A fact that followed Brandy around for the next hour as she showered and changed and tried to get some much-needed sleep.
Tried being the operative word.
Instead, she tossed and turned and thought about her granddad and the night of the explosion. There’d been nothing off about that night.
He’d gone out to work like always and she’d crawled into bed early in order to be at the bakery at the crack of dawn. She’d been sleeping like a rock, too, until the sound had rattled the walls. The next thing she knew, she was standing with her sisters, watching the flames lick at the pitch-black night while sirens wailed in the background.
A terrible end to a terrible man.
Right?
The question haunted her until she gave up trying to sleep and finally climbed out of bed. She curled up on the old vinyl couch in the living room and fired up the ancient console TV, a throwback to Christmas ages ago when she’d been just seven and her dad had brought home the cherrywood console as a surprise for her mother.
Brandy could still see the smile on her mother’s face, the kiss she’d planted on her husband’s lips. She’d been so thankful. So happy.
Most of the time, Brandy reminded herself.
But there had been those weak moments. The unhappiness. The longing. The regret.
Because she’d married too young and given up a promising career.
Not this girl.
Not now. Not ever.
Brandy held tight to the notion as she reached for the remote and pulled up a rerun of Ace of Cakes. But even that wasn’t enough to ease the unsettling feeling in the pit of her stomach. The only thing that did that was the image of Tyler McCall that rushed into her head when a particularly extravagant wedding cake topped with an exact likeness of the bride and groom filled the screen.
The figurine wore a cowboy hat and suddenly she saw Tyler wearing nothing but his hat tipped low and an expression that said he wanted her. Now.
Her lips tingled and her stomach hollowed out, and try as she might, she couldn’t seem to shake the crazy reaction. Not after two more episodes and a cold shower.
Because there was only one thing that could get him off her mind.
Anticipation coiled through her and need vibrated along her nerve endings. She glanced at the clock. It was half past midnight. Late for her, but early for most of the other folks in town when it came to a Saturday night. Was Tyler still out? Was he asleep? Awake? Restless?
There was only one way to find out.
CHAPTER 13
Tyler blinked, but Brandy didn’t fade and disappear the way she did in his fantasies.
Because this wasn’t a fantasy.
She’d come knocking on his door again, searching him out, fanning the flames that already blazed so fiercely between them.
And it didn’t matter that he was tired or worried or frustrated to the point that he wanted to put his fist through a wall. Nothing mattered but this.
Her.
She sat astride him, her skin pale and silky in the moonlight that drifted through the parted curtains and bathed the room in a celestial glow. She shimmied her body and hiked her sundress to her waist to free her legs. With the material out of her way, she spread wider and settled more fully over him.
She wasn’t wearing any underwear.
He’d known that the moment he’d opened the door and she’d pushed him back inside, to the edge of the bed. She’d lifted the hem and just like that, she’d been on top of him.
Her bare sex rested atop his cock that throbbed beneath his jeans. She gripped his shoulders, stared deep into his eyes, and rubbed herself against his length. Side to side. Back and forth.
She flung her head back and went wild for the next few moments and it was all he could do not to touch her smooth thighs or knead her sweet, round ass or slide his fingers into her wet heat.
But Tyler had been waiting for this moment all damn day and he wasn’t about to have it over with as quickly as it had been last night. He balled his hands into fists and let her have her fun.
“This feels so good,” she murmured, her voice low and breathless and oh, so stirring. The sound prickled the hair on the back of his neck and sent an echoing vibration along his nerve endings.
“Damn straight,” he managed, his own voice thick and raw and … Christ, but she felt amazing.
But for all her boldness, there was a hesitancy. As if she wasn’t as sure of herself as she should have been with that face and that body.
She wasn’t, and the realization eased some of the tension knotting his stomach. He knew then that Brandy hadn’t spent the past two years warming the sheets with another man. She’d waited for this. For him.
“I missed you,” he murmured, the words little more than a growl of appreciation at what she was doing to him with each slide and shimmy and … holy shit. He clamped his lips as a hiss worked past them and then the movement stopped.
“Really?” she breathed as her entire body went still. “You really missed me?”
“You bet your sweet ass.” His words reassured her and she smiled, a brilliant slash of white in the darkness of the room. “And it is a sweet ass. The sweetest.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she murmured, her smile fading into something more primitive and possessive and daring.
She wanted him to step up, to tell her that she was wrong. That she was his.
The thought stalled in his brain for a long, fierce moment before she moved again. That’s all it took to effectively distract him from reality. Everything scrambled into a furious swirl of pure, raw need and he stopped thinking altogether.
She kept riding him, rubbing herself up and down, creating a delicious friction before she finally leaned back. Soft fingertips reached for the waistband of his jeans. He was already so hard that the zipper caught and refused to budge.
“Easy,” he murmured, catching her hand with his.
He lifted his pelvis and guided her hand down, helping her work the zipper the rest of the way. Pushing his jeans down, he caught his underwear along with it and stripped both free until his erection sprang thick and heavy toward her.
Her touch was sure and purposeful as she reached out. One fingertip traced a throbbing vein up his rock-hard length, pausing just shy of the silky-smooth head.
Not because she was hesitant again. Hell, no.
She knew exactly what she was doing. Exactly how to drive him crazy. That’s what he loved about her. There was nothing tentative about Brandy Tucker when it came to the sex itself.
Even that first time, she’d been bold, provocative, erotic despite being naive. A woman who had no problem taking pleasure.
Or giving it.
She’d embodied every wild thing ever written about her on the bathroom wall and then some. A bad girl in every sense of the word, and he’d been the lucky man to touch her first.
To touch her, period, a voice whispered. A crazy-ass voice because no way was he fool enough to think that while she might have held off for the past two years, that it meant anything. That she’d waited because he was the only man for her.
The first.
The last.
Right.
But he was the only man at this moment, and so he meant to make it count.
* * *
Contrary to the back stall of the boy’s first-floor restroom at Rebel High, Brandy had never been all that mesmerized by the male member.
Until Tyler McCall.
Bold and beautiful, his penis jutted tall, throbbing beneath her steady touch. She caught her bottom lip, barely resisting the urge to lean down and lick the
engorged purple head. Instead, she circled the underside with a trembling finger and watched him suck in a breath.
The sound fed her confidence and she wrapped her hand around him. Heat scorched her fingertips and he arched into her grasp. Still he didn’t touch her with his strong hands.
Instead, he waited.
She didn’t waste even a second in taking the lead.
Her gaze trailed up over a ridged abdomen, a broad chest sprinkled with dark, silky hair, a corded neck, to the chiseled perfection of his face partially hidden in the shadow of his cowboy hat. It was her latest fantasy come to life, and heat rushed through her.
She took his hat off, set it aside, and stared deep into his bright-aquamarine eyes. There was no mistaking the raw, aching need that gripped him.
“I wasn’t sure if you would show up tonight.”
“Me either, but then I started thinking and it seemed like such a shame to waste this.” She touched the ridge of his penis, just a gentle sweep of her fingertip but enough to make him shudder.
“I’m glad you came,” he murmured.
“But I haven’t,” she said, stroking him again. “Come, that is. And neither have you. Not yet.”
The words seemed to feed something dark and primitive inside him. Before she could draw another breath, his mouth covered hers and his tongue thrust between her parted lips. The kiss seemed to go on forever and when he finally pulled away, Brandy couldn’t seem to catch her breath.
She fought for air while he reached down into the pocket of his jeans and retrieved a foil packet. A few seconds later, he slid the condom onto his erection, gripped her waist, and pulled her closer.
He pressed his hard sex between her legs. The plump head pushed into her a delicious inch until she felt her body pulse around the top of his thick shaft. She felt the wetness between her legs, drenching him and making the connection that much hotter.
A shiver ripped through her and she slid her hands around his neck. Her fingers plunged into his hair. Her nipples tightened, pressing against the thin material of her sundress, and her thighs trembled.
Red-Hot Texas Nights Page 8
