“Yeah. I guess we should have known every one of them would look at the situation from the lens of ‘me.’” Parker met his brother’s gaze. “We did the right thing, and I do not regret it.”
“Neither do I. It’ll be good to visit with the cousins for a bit,” Dale said.
“I’m looking forward to seeing that museum Jackson told us about,” Parker said. Then he smiled. “And meeting Ari and Charlotta and Laci…and those two men Addison married, Mike and Terry. I’d like to see Grandma Kate again.” Then he grinned. “And if we get the chance to go to Divine, the two men Veronica married, too. I’d personally like to thank Travis McDaniel for his contribution to nailing those two little Maxwell fuckers. Killing those feral horses. Despicable.” It was the reason Liz Maxwell’s sons were in prison. They’d stolen horses that had been under the protection of the Bureau of Land Management—horses that had been on land Jesse and Barry had offered free of charge to the government for that purpose.
“What do you think about that? About all our cousins here being in ménages? I know what the rest of the family thinks, but you and I have never really talked about it.”
Parker shrugged. “I recall being really surprised when we first heard about it—and then finding out that our Grandpa Emerson’s folks were three, and not two. But you know what? I look at what we have back home—the way George and Norah have always been fighting, and the way none of the families really get along. I look at the way our brothers behave and how our cousins Randy, Carl, and George are—they’re all so-called normal. So I say, if our Texas cousins are happy, then they should be able to live however the fuck they want.”
“I’m looking forward to this vacation, Parker. God knows we’ve never had one, and that never bothered me before. Hell, I could work year after year with a few just days off at a time to kick back and fish or hunt or just read. Never needed to go anywhere—not until they all turned into complete assholes back home.”
“I’m with you. It’ll be nice to take a break from all that meanness.” They finished their coffee, and Parker left money on the table and then took a trip to the can. When he exited the restaurant, Dale was waiting, the keys to his truck dangling from his finger.
“I changed my mind. You can drive.”
They got in, buckled up, and headed south, out of town. Parker pulled into a gas station and filled the tank. Then he followed the GPS’s directions to Highway 84, heading east.
He cast a glance over at his brother, who was already dozing off. Parker wasn’t sure exactly what they’d discover when they got to Cord and Jackson’s place. But he found himself hoping that the version of family waiting for them was a hell of a lot more welcoming than the one they’d left behind.
Chapter Two
Dale glanced over at his brother, not one bit surprised that Parker looked about as dazed as he felt.
This had been the most remarkable family gathering he could recall. He and Parker had pretty much mostly listened, and watched, as the huge group of Benedicts around the table—some their first cousins and some brand new-to-them cousins—ate and talked and bantered their way through a very tasty meal of roast beef and potatoes, as well as some Tex-Mex sides he didn’t recognize, but liked.
He made to get up to help clear the table.
“Naw, you two sit. Tonight, you’re guests.” Jackson smiled as he said that then swooped in and kissed his pretty wife, Ari. Dale did blink when Cord did the exact same thing. The other men present—Jesse and Barry, Trace and Lucas, and the new cousins, Chase and Brian—all helped with the clearing, all also kissing their wives.
Jesse and Barry also each took a moment to tickle their nearly seven-month-old son, Patrick, making the cute baby giggle in a way that put smiles on everyone’s faces.
“Sorry we were late arriving.” Carrie Benedict, the new cousin married to the new cousins, flashed a grin he thought was cute. “Junior here has been giving me fits the last month or so.”
“No need to apologize, Carrie,” Parker said. “Baby comes first. Is everything okay?”
Carrie blushed. “Well, I had a lot of morning sickness the first few months,” she said.
“And then there was June twenty-sixth,” her husband Chase said. He’d come back into the dining room to scoop a few more things, and to kiss Carrie again. He left his hand on her shoulder and looked at Parker and then him. “We refer to that as the Night of the Tornado.”
Dale felt his eyes go wide. “The what?”
“You’d think living in Texas all our lives that wouldn’t be such a big deal, right?” Chase said. “But believe it or not, that was the first tornado to touch down in Lusty—well, since there’ve been Benedicts and Jessops and Kendalls here, anyway.”
“Was anybody hurt?” Dale asked.
“Minor injuries.” Brian said that, and he smirked. There were a few snickers, and Dale immediately had the sense that there was a story here.
“Let’s get these pies cut up and passed around,” Cord said. “Then we’ll tell you all about our little dustup with Mother Nature.”
“You won’t forget the part about how it was mostly the women who saved your bacon, will you, sweetheart?”
Cord looked at his wife and then leveled a look at every other woman at the table. Then his laughing eyes landed on Ari again. “Red, y’all are making real sure none of us ever forget that part—for which we’re all grateful, of course.”
“Wow, Cord.” Laci’s smile looked huge—and teasing. “That ‘y’all’ sounded downright Texan!”
“Thank you, cousin. I’m working on it.” His smile was accompanied by a wink.
Dale noticed three extra dessert plates were set on the table at about the same time the front door opened and then closed.
A feminine voice said, “I hope we’re not too late for pie!”
Dale and Parker—and all the other men—got to their feet as the woman entered with two strapping men in tow.
“Addison! You’re looking good!” Dale was the first to reach her. He held out his hand intending to shake, and she hugged him instead. Then she reached for Parker and hugged him, too.
“These are my husbands, Mike Jones and Terry Jessop.”
Handshakes instead of hugs followed those introductions, more chairs were brought to the table, and people adjusted to make room for the newcomers.
When they’d first come into the house, Dale had thought this was one huge table. Now he saw while it was still big, it was nicely big enough for the Benedicts seated around it.
“You are in time for pie and a story.”
Addison grinned. “Oh, goodie.” She rubbed her hands together and smiled at him and Parker. “We weren’t here when it happened. Michael builds furniture, and we were at a trade show in Oklahoma and then were taking two days for a mini vacation afterward—so we missed all the fun.”
“You have a sick definition of fun, sister,” Jesse said. He was smiling, and Addison stuck her tongue out at him in response.
Then Jackson ruffled her hair before he took his seat.
Dale could never recall his cousins—his Uncle George’s kids—all getting along as well as they were right then. I think I might be witnessing a miracle.
“The fun started when a bachelor party we were having at our ranch had a party crasher—Mother Nature.” Chase grinned as he looked around the table. “Some of the men sitting here—namely, Jackson and Lucas—were on the volunteer firefighter roster that day. There’d been a call in the afternoon, a grass fire caused by a lightning strike, at the other end of the county. So they missed all the fun, too.”
“Lusty has a well-equipped fire department, and our full-time firefighters, Grant and Andrew Jessop, are very well trained,” Brian said. “They’ve even taken smoke jumper training in California. Most of the men of Lusty spend a month or so a year on that list, which includes training and practice time. Not many of us have actually had to fight a fire.”
“They organize the lists so that, usually, only one
husband per household is on the roster at a time,” Cord said. “Which was why Jackson and Lucas were, but Trace and I weren’t.”
“And neither of us went—our cousin Steven went in my place—because the man we were honoring was our long-time foreman, Ricoh Stone,” Chase said.
“While some of the men were off playing Smokey the Bear and the rest were eating, drinking, and playing poker at the foreman’s house at our ranch, most of the women, except me because junior here was acting up, were at the Big House attending a shower for Ricoh’s fiancée, Angela.” Carrie shook her head. “Sorry, the Big House is what we call the house where Grandma Kate and her sons and daughters-in-law live.”
“We’re really looking forward to seeing her again,” Parker said. “How is she?”
“Still living life at sixty miles an hour,” Jackson said.
The woman has to be in her nineties! Dale could only marvel at that.
“To make a long story short, what happened was a tornado formed and then immediately hit the foreman’s house. We had about ten seconds warning, if that. We’d been playing poker, shooting the shit, when our cell phone alerts went off. We all dove under the two large tables we were using—all twenty of us—and that was what saved our lives. Ricoh had made them out of very strong hickory, and they held up when the house fell on top of them and us.”
“I recalled telling the man when he was showing me those tables in progress that they were going to be heavy as hell to move,” Mike Jones said. Then he grinned. “Ricoh said that once they were in his house, he didn’t expect to be moving them around much.”
Dale was intrigued. “So how did the women save your bacon?”
“Yeah, you have to tell us that part!” Parker grinned and looked at the women.
Jesse and Barry’s wife, Charlotta, gave him a huge smile. “I like these cousins!”
“Well, I heard the explosion of the house collapsing. I’d been in our house several hundred feet from the foreman’s house. I was supposed to be at that shower at the other end of town, but as I said, morning sickness, morning, noon, and night. As soon as I made my way outside and saw the damage, I hauled myself to the Big House.”
“Where the rest of us were,” Laci said. “Including Brittany Phillips, soon to be Kendall. She’s a lieutenant in the Marine Corps.”
“Brit just started giving orders, got us moving, and stopped us from diving in first thing to dig the guys out,” Charlotta said. “She understood enough to know, just from what we could all see of how the house came down, that someone had to make sure we wouldn’t do more harm than good trying to rescue our trapped loved ones.”
“The whole house had come down, and there were only minor injuries?” Parker’s eyes were wide as he looked around the table. “That’s a miracle!”
“It is, isn’t it?” Addison nodded. “We arrived home the next day but had already been texted by the women here. So, we drove to the ranch…” She closed her eyes briefly. “I started to shake when I saw what was left of Ricoh’s house. I knew Veronica had already heard about the incident, so I sent her a picture of what was left of the place. We both agreed the only word for the outcome was miracle.”
“Ricoh had a sprained ankle, his best friend, Julián, a broken wrist,” Trace said. “There were cuts and bruises and abrasions—and one ass injury.”
Dale raised one eyebrow. “An ass injury?”
All the men were smiling, and the women just shook their heads.
“One of our two ranch hands, Duncan Moore, had just slammed down a natural royal flush.” Cord grinned. “He somehow ended up with a shard of glass in his butt.”
“Doctor Robert said the odds were probably greater on the shard of glass than the royal flush.” Jackson chuckled. “Which made Duncan an awesomely lucky man that night.”
The men were laughing out loud, and Dale just shook his head.
“Addison isn’t the only Benedict with a sick sense of humor,” Dale said. Of course, he was smiling, so he knew his cousins understood there was no offence intended.
“The family runs in it,” Chase said. “Montanan, Texan, hell, even New York, there’s no difference that I’ve ever seen.”
“And since there is no difference,” Lucas said, “we were wondering.”
“Wondering what?” Parker asked.
“If the two of you would like to stay here permanently and work with us.”
Dale looked at Parker. They both set their forks down. He gave his brother a slight nod. He always preferred it if Parker did the talking for the both of them.
“We were looking for work, but…we’re not sure we want to work with family ever again,” Parker said.
Dale didn’t think they’d really have to explain that to their cousins. But one thought entered his mind. If it’s hell working with family, how come they all seem to have a really tight relationship? Dale nearly chuckled. That wasn’t the first time in recent memory his good angel had spoken up. One of the benefits of leaving the family home.
“We know exactly how you feel,” Trace said. “That was us when we got here, too. So how about, after we finish up eating, you hear us out first?”
Parker nodded, and Dale turned to his cousins. “I guess it can’t hurt to listen.”
* * * *
Jenny considered herself a practical, level-headed woman with simple ambitions and simple tastes. She also had supposed that some day she might meet a man who attracted her. It hadn’t happened yet. She’d believed herself in love in college when she’d taken her first serious boyfriend and given him her virginity.
She’d been mistaken.
Jenny didn’t like to think that her disappointment with Jerry was the reason she’d left college with nothing more than a four-year college degree in business management.
She’d moved to Houston after graduation, had joined a large company, and considered, very seriously, climbing the corporate ladder. It didn’t take her long to figure out why they called it the rat race. So she left the big city and ended up in Waco, where her career ambitions were where her heart happened to be. She didn’t need huge dollars or an important, high-stress job. She just needed to make a living and feel as if she was doing something to put a smile on people’s faces.
Jenny was at a place in her life now where she supported herself with a job she liked, she had friends, and a nice apartment in a small town with a somewhat spicy name. Really, everything was going well. Great, even.
So why, then, did they have to walk into Angel’s Roadhouse, making her all twitterpated and everything? She had no answer to that self-posed question. She only knew they had, and she was.
Why them? Why now? Jenny had seen so many handsome, sexy, perfect men since she’d come to Lusty. She would have begun to wonder if there was maybe something in the food or the soil or the air or even the water that helped to grow ’em that way, except that a good number of those fine-looking specimens of manhood hadn’t even been born and raised in Texas! There were some from New York and some from Montana and even a couple who’d arrived not that long ago from Wyoming.
“Hey, girlfriend, you’re off shift now, right?” Ari Benedict’s voice preceded her appearance, as her short friend was in amongst all the tall Benedicts who’d just entered…with them.
“Yes, just now. I was just going to—” Jenny intended to tell her bff that she was on her way home.
“You were just going to come over and sit with us!”
Jenny had always thought Ari’s wide smile and sparkling eyes were two of her friend’s finest features. Until now. Now, they just looked like trouble. Trouble for Jenny.
“Red.”
Cord’s warning tone as he used his pet name for Ari put an extra sparkle in her friend’s eyes. Ari turned to him and batted her lashes. “Yes, dear?” Then she didn’t give him a moment to even reply. “Oh! Oh, I am so remiss! Of course, I need to make introductions.” She turned back to Jenny, and then she pulled them closer.
“Jenny, these are Cord and
Jackson’s cousins from Montana. Meet Parker and Dale Benedict.
Jenny had avoided looking at them directly as soon as they’d entered the roadhouse and stolen all the oxygen from the room and sped up her heart. Now, however, she had no choice. She had to be well-mannered. Mentally bracing herself, she pasted a smile on her face and looked up, and up. Her gaze met Parker Benedict’s. He focused so singularly on her that she wondered if he could see down to her very soul, and her heart leapt when his very kissable lips slowly slid into a sexy, “c’me-here-baby” smile.
She reached out her hand, just wanting to be polite, and wondered why the act of his hand encapsulating hers caused her nipples to turn hard and her pussy to turn soft. Her girl parts never did that.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Jenny.”
“Um…hi.” She waited for him to release her hand, and when he finally did, she sought refuge by turning to his brother, and felt the bottom fall out of her world.
Dale’s reaction to her and her response to him was every bit as electric as what had just happened between her and Parker.
Dale took her hand and held it between both of his, all the while cradling her gaze in a magnetic caress. Parker pressed just slightly closer, and she felt as if she were cocooned between them. Heat seeped into her, and she could have sworn everything and everyone else disappeared from the planet, except for the three of them.
Jenny gasped and blinked. It took every bit of her will to come back to the real world.
“You were saying, Cord?” Ari’s tone sounded superior.
“Never mind.” Laughter bracketed those two words.
Jenny chose to pretend she hadn’t heard that quick exchange between her friends or seen their expressions dripping in humor or, worse, that she hadn’t understood them perfectly.
“Come on, girlfriend, we’ll sit and let the guys sort things out.” Ari slipped her arm through Jenny’s and led her to the back tables that had the reserved sign on them. There seemed to be a few more chairs set around than usual, so she guessed other members of the family might be joining them, too.
Love Under Two Montanans Page 3
