Hotter than Texas (Pecan Creek) (27 page)

Ramon had been the very same. And she’d fallen for it all over again.

The thing about Jake was, when he was sincere, he was the kind of man who melted your heart. He’d totally melted hers.

The rat.

And she was alone tonight, when she’d hoped to spend the night making love to Jake.
Super-rat.

Putting up with Averie’s shenanigans was nothing compared to the realization he intended to do nothing to help her with the town council. What a bunch of old crows, Sugar thought. And Jake was a wienie for not standing up to his controlling mother.

She put her clothes back on, petted Paris and made sure she had fresh water. Then she wandered into Lucy’s room to grab up her laundry. She’d get Maggie’s too. It had been a long day for them—
and since they both have love lives and I don’t, I might as well break out a good book and sit in the laundry room to read.

She flipped on the light in Lucy’s room and went to pick a few pieces of discarded clothes off the floor. This wasn’t like Lucy—Lucy was a control freak. She picked up a lacy cami and a pair of comfy shorts, her gaze bouncing to the bed to see if any clothes were hidden atop the comforter.

Her eyes went wide—and she screamed bloody murder, dropping the clothes basket to run down the stairs, Paris at her heels. She dialed Jake’s number with shaking fingers.

“Jake.”

“Sugar!” He sounded so happy to hear from her.

Sugar swallowed back panic. “Please come back.”

“Gladly. Can be there in five.”

“Bring Sheriff Goody. And hurry.”

“A threesome?” Jake said, his voice teasing and very Jake-like. “I don’t think the sheriff’s into those.”

“Jake,” Sugar said, shivering almost violently, feeling sick, “there’s someone in Lucy’s bed. A man.”

“Well, Bobby won’t bother us. Don’t worry about him.”

Sugar walked away from the house, then decided she wanted to be closer to the circle of light beaming from the porch. “Jake, hurry!”

“Coming up the drive. Have to say, I’ve never heard you this eager, but believe me, I’m happy. I was so afraid you’d never talk to me again. And I swear, Sugar, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Shut up, Jake.”

He did, and she closed her eyes. The next thing she knew, he was pulling up the drive. She ran to him, crushing his forearms with trembling fingers.

“I called the sheriff,” Jake said. “Are you all right?”

Sugar didn’t have to hold up any longer; she didn’t have to hide behind bravery. She crumbled against Jake’s chest. “There’s a man in my sister’s bed.”

“I know. It’s Bobby. Isn’t that all right? You’re not uptight about sex, Sugar. Everybody else in this town is, uptight is what we specialize in, but you—”

“It’s not Bobby.” She felt like she was probably squeezing the blood out of his arms, but she desperately needed his strength to keep from freaking out worse than she was.

“Who is it?”

“I’ve never seen him before. And I’m almost certain he’s dead.”

“Oh shit. That’s news I can use,” Jake said. He rubbed her back and hit some numbers on his cell phone. “Sheriff, listen, you might have an ambulance sent out to the old family place too. There may be someone who requires transport.”

He hung up. “Sugar, it’s going to be okay.”

She started shaking uncontrollably. “He was staring at the ceiling, Jake.”

Christ, Jake thought. He held Sugar tighter, wondering why this had to happen to her, why life in Pecan Creek was never normal. “It’s okay,” he said, running his hand down her soft auburn locks. “It’s going to be all right.”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment. Jake closed his eyes, feeling her trembling almost in his soul. “God, I’m sorry, Sugar. When I rented you this place, I didn’t know it was going to be a haunted house.”

“You warned me that there were ghosts,” Sugar reminded him.

“Yeah, but they’re ours. And I was just trying to sell you on the joint.”

“By scaring the hell out of me?”

Jake held her a bit tighter, hoping to help her feel more secure. “People love ghost stories.”

“I don’t.”

“I just wanted to keep you,” Jake admitted. “I loved your legs. I would have told you there was gold buried in the backyard if that would have helped, but I sensed you were only interested in pecans.”

“Yet you were looking at my legs?” Sugar asked with a slight sniffle against his chest.

He locked her in his arms, loving how her head wedged right underneath his chin. “And your ass, I confess. As I mentioned, I am no hero.”

“I know.”

Sheriff Goody’s truck sprayed gravel up the drive as he parked near the house. The sheriff hopped out. “What’s going on at the old homestead, Jake?”

“I haven’t checked it out in person, but you might want to step up to one of the guest rooms.” He spoke in code, trying not to upset Sugar. He’d just calmed her down, marginally. At least she wasn’t vibrating like a guitar string anymore.

“Ah. The
Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
room, or the Belle Watling room? No one ever slept in the
American Gigolo
room,” the sheriff said. “Whatever’s up there, I know it didn’t pick that room. Vivian’s decorating went off the rails with that room.”

Jake winced. “Head for the Belle Watling room. I’ll wait down here for the ambulance.”

“Should be right behind me. Evening, Miss Sugar.” Sheriff Goody bounded up the porch steps and into the house.

Sugar looked up at him. “Does everyone know about your mother’s decorating taste?”

“Hard to keep something like that quiet. Contractors tend to talk.” Jake sighed. “Besides which, she did a spread in a small national magazine looking for B&B customers, until she decided she’d rather rent the place. I think it was the cooking she hated.”

Only they hadn’t ever rented the house.

“Your mother doesn’t want me to lease the town billboard because I’ve got ‘hell’ in my business name, but it’s okay to have a virtual chicken ranch that everyone knows about?”

He pulled Sugar over to a chair in the garden, pushing her down. Paris settled at her feet in a furry circle of gold. Jake knelt down beside Sugar. “I can’t explain everything about Vivian. She’s a queen bee.”

Sugar sniffed. “Her real problem, Jake, is that she’s afraid I’m going to steal you away from her. I’m different, I’m an out-of-towner, and I just might drag you away from her queenship, Pecan Creek.”

Jake blinked. “You might have a point.”

“Well,” Sheriff Goody said, coming back outside, letting the screen door slam behind him, “that’s one dead body you got up there, Jake.”

“That sucks,” Jake said.

“Yep.” The sheriff pulled out his radio. “Rigor mortis has set in. Body’s been there a few hours.”

“Oh my God!” Sugar buried her face in her hands, and Jake sat next to her in the chair. She gasped, pulling her hands away from her face. “Sheriff, my sister didn’t kill anyone. I’d swear it on the biggest stack of Bibles Pecan Creek has.”

“Of course Lucy didn’t kill anyone,” Jake said, surprised but seeing the logical conclusion Sugar had reached. “She was out with us all evening, and she was with you and Maggie all day getting her cancer check-up in the big city.”

Sugar raised her head. “That’s right. We weren’t here for most of the day. We left early this morning. And Lucy didn’t spend the night here last night.”

“No one murdered him,” Sheriff Goody said. “He looks like he popped one, if I had to guess. We’ll see what the ME has to say.” He wandered off, making some more calls.

The ambulance pulled up, its red lights flashing in the dark. “Sugar, Lucy wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Jake said. “She literally doesn’t have a bit of mean in her.”

Sugar looked at him. “How do you know?”

He knew about the dishonorable discharge that involved an officer—and that could only mean Lucy’d probably turned down an asshole but didn’t kill him—and he knew Sugar had a bit of a temper on her due to the story the ex had inappropriately shared. He looked at the woman he loved. “Your sister’s still a child at heart. It’s why she and Bobby make such a great couple. He needs all that innocence in his life.”

“Lucy?” Sugar blinked at him, her eyes rimmed with tears.

“Well, yeah. Sugar, she’s still your little sister. She’s always going to be that. She’s happy being the baby. She acts tough. She even fooled me in the beginning. But trust me, Lucy is a candle of innocence in a dark world.”

“Oh my God,” Sugar said, her voice awed, “J.T. Jake Bentley, you may have just gotten crossed off my list of rat bastards. Maybe.”

“Leave me on a little while longer. If I’d known all I had to do was say nice things about your family to win you over, I’d have been under your window with a guitar, singing odes to Cassavechia women.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sugar said. “You might be more of a hero than you realize.”

Not really. But as long as she thought so, Jake was willing to bask in the glow of hero worship—at least for a little while.

The ambulance took the dead man away about an hour later. Lucy and Bobby had arrived, and so had Maggie and Lassiter, and no one spoke in the darkness. They sat around on the porch glumly, not sure if they should be sad for the dead man, or worried about why a dead man had showed up in their house.

“It’s gross,” Lucy said. “Why’d he pick my bed?”

Bobby rubbed her shoulders. “Probably because it was just right,” he said, but the joke kind of fell flat. It didn’t seem to matter; her sister snuggled up on Bobby’s chest anyway, fairly repulsed by the turn of events.

“Why’d he pick our house?” Maggie wondered. “Paris, did you even bark at him?”

Paris waved her golden plume and smiled her enthusiastic, welcoming smile. If anything, Paris would have let the stranger in, if she’d had opposable thumbs with which to open a door, Sugar thought. “Paris isn’t a guard dog. She’s just a companion.” She hugged the golden retriever’s neck, burying her face in the fur for comfort.

“We’ll know what happened soon enough, I hope.” Jake settled on the porch next to Sugar. She put her knee next to his, enjoying the warmth.

Sheriff Goody joined them on the porch. “Well, I think I have a general preliminary idea of what brought our visitor to Pecan Creek.” He held up a piece of paper. “This was in his pocket. It’s a Google map of this house and some notes on the side that reference something on the Internet called
Nuts, Grunts and a Mutt—A Hot Home Business Gets A Sexy Start
.”

“Uh-oh,” Lucy said.

They all looked at her. “That’s my blog,” Lucy confessed.

“What?” Sugar stared at her sister. “Why do you have a blog?”

Lucy looked embarrassed. “You remember when we decided to do the whole diary thing?”

Sugar and Maggie looked at her.

“Diary, not blog,” Sugar said. “Go on.”

“Well,” Lucy said, “it was boring writing in a journal.”

Sugar looked at her sister. “A blog was better?”

“Well, I could sex up a blog, so to speak,” Lucy said. “It kind of grew faster than I thought it would. And then I thought what a great idea it would be to start sort of preselling your business, Sugar. We need a bigger platform, a national platform, if we’re going to sell anything. And goodness knows we weren’t ever going to get any support here in Pecan Creek.” She glared at Jake.

That was true. Lucy had thought of a great way to get traction for the business, before she’d ever known whether or not it would be successful.

Jake had done everything he could to shelter Pecan Creek from her business and her family.

“I’m so sorry, Sugar,” Lucy said, and Sugar said, “Why? Except for the dead body, you’ve given the business a great advertising vehicle.”

Jake stood. “Bobby and I are going upstairs for a minute. We don’t want anybody in the house until we say so.”

“Why?” Sugar looked up at Jake, curious. He looked dark and determined, not his usual devil-may-care self.

“We’re going to do a run-through of the house. Stay down here.”

Jake’s tone implied he was in full landowner mode, and to be honest, Sugar appreciated it. She had a full-blown case of the creeps. She watched as he and Bobby went inside.

“Think I’ll join the boys,” Lassiter said, rising.

Sugar looked at her mother. Maggie’s red hair flew in mussed red puffs from her plucking at it. She’d had a long, stressful day, and this was no celebration to her good news. “Lassiter, would you mind taking Maggie to your house?” Sugar asked. “There’s no reason for her to be here.”

He looked at Maggie. “Come on, beautiful. Let’s get you a drink and a warm bed.”

Maggie got up gratefully. “I feel like I’m abandoning my daughters.” She looked worried.

Lucy got up to hug her mother. “Mom, we’ll invite you to the next haunted house party we have, promise.”

“That’s right,” Sugar said. “Go with Lassiter and spend the rest of the evening staring up at the stars.”

“I shouldn’t leave you here,” Maggie worried. “I feel like a bad mother.”