Twelve Dates of Christmas: The Ballad of Lula Jo (Lonesome Point) (10 page)

Mia Sherman had lived in Lonesome Point almost her entire life, and knew how to take a sleepy Saturday night, and turn it into the stuff legends were made of. As the only twenty-something in town who could trace her lineage back to the Wild West days when the town was settled, Mia felt practically obligated to cause trouble. Someone had to liven up Lonesome Point, and in addition to being related to half the town, her uncle was the chief of police, and her grandmother had been mayor for as long as anyone could remember. Mia was an old hat at wiggling her way out of trouble when she was unlucky enough to get caught filling the fountain in the square with bubble bath, or “borrowing” Becky Lynn Barrett’s new car for the night so Becky’s little sister could replace it with a toy Mustang and film Becky’s reaction the next morning.

Getting caught wasn’t a deal breaker, but it was much preferable to escape unseen from the scene of the crime, and one couldn’t underestimate the importance of a solid pranking plan…

“I’ll take the south side of Main Street, and the square,” Mia whispered, sinking down behind the shrubs at the edge of The Blue Saloon Hotel parking lot. Her two best drinking buddies, Bubba, and Ugly Ross—so nicknamed, not because he was ugly, but because he had the misfortune to be
uglier
than the only other Ross in town—squatted beside her. “You boys take the north, up around the bend headed toward Old Town.”

“All right,” Bubba said in his well-deep voice, the one that made all the girls swoon when the burly, brown-eyed hottie sang “Would You Go with Me” at karaoke night at The Ticklish Iguana. “We’ll take the bin with the bras in it.”

“No way.” Mia wagged a finger in front of his shadowed face. “I’m taking the bras, they’ll look better up the flag pole.”

“Oh come on.” Ugly Ross gouged her in the side with his bony elbow. “At least give us a couple.”

“Huh-uh. My sale bins, my rules.”

Ross frowned. “What if I gave you five bucks?”

Mia shook her head, sending her red curls flying and making the world spin…just a little. Maybe that third shot of whiskey as the hotel bar was closing hadn’t been such a great idea, after all.

But hell, it was Saturday night. When she’d first moved back to town after grad school, Mia had kept Lavender and Lace open on Sundays, but after a few weeks, it had become clear that no one wanted to shop for panties on the Lord’s Day. She also sold homemade lotions, soaps, and an assortment of quirky, ghost town souvenirs for the out-of-towners who wandered into her shop. But panties were her stock-in-trade, and apparently not Sunday-friendly, which meant she got to sleep in tomorrow, and she intended to make the most of her small town Saturday night.

“We’ll work with the panties,” Bubba said, nudging her shoulder with his much larger one. “But you take some too, Mia. Put ‘em on the garden gnomes in front of the tea shop.”

“Brilliant,” Mia said, admiring Bubba’s pranking genius. “But I can’t. Lula would catch me.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” Bubba said. “She’s got to be sleeping.”

Mia peeked over the top of the shrubs, not surprised to see a light on in Lula’s second floor window. “I doubt it,” she mumbled.

Both Mia, and Miss Tallulah Watson—Mia’s third cousin, on her mama’s side—lived in the apartments above their shops. But whereas Mia took advantage of her prime location to sleep until the last possible moment before rolling out of her bed to open Lavender and Lace, Tallulah used her proximity to Tea for Two as an excuse to work twenty-four seven. If she wasn’t actively serving customers, she was cooking cakes and scones, knitting lace doilies to sell in her retail store, or painting faces on the ceramic dolls she entered in craft fairs.

Her cousin didn’t condone wasting time or cutting up—or have any discernible sense of humor, so far as Mia could tell—and Lula would
not
find waking up to discover lace panties on the heads of her thirty-seven garden gnomes amusing.

Which made the temptation nearly irresistible…

Mia wasn’t as wild as the mean-spirited soccer moms of Lonesome Point would have people believe. She didn’t have a single tattoo, had never smuggled horse tranquilizers across the border, and hadn’t so much as kissed Bubba or Ugly Ross, let alone gone to bed with both of them—at the same time, according to Regina Simpson. Sure, Mia drank a little too much on Saturday nights, and kept forgetting not to cuss in front of her grandmother, but overall, she led a relatively boring life. She worked hard and played hard, but she spent as much time babysitting her best friend Tulsi’s daughter, as she did getting into trouble.

But when it came to pranks…

Damn, if she didn’t have a hard time saying no.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” she said, waving off the high five a well-lubricated Ross aimed at her shoulder. “Congratulate me after the mission is complete. Rendezvous in twenty minutes at my place for beer.”

“Good luck, soldier.” Bubba chucked her on the shoulder, before grabbing one large canvas bin full of sale panties and heading north, Ross hot on his heels.

Mia snatched her own bin full of underpants and the few reduced price bras she hadn’t been able to sell—sale bras always did better than panties, especially panties that were the color of radioactive vomit—and hustled down the street in the opposite direction.

She had purchased the hideous undies at a deep discount, thinking she could move lime green underpants as long as they were cheap enough, but when the lingerie had arrived, the color was even more obnoxious than it had looked on the website. The shipment was non-returnable, so she’d done her best hard sell—advertising the underpants as Shock ‘Em Dead Knickers, guaranteed to catch your man’s eye in the bedroom—but in six months she’d only sold two pairs.

It was time for the panties to go to a better place.

Mia circled the square, draping underpants from the decorative metal curlicues at the base of the antique gas lamps the Lonesome Point Betterment Society had put in a few years back, before clipping all four bras to the flagpole in the middle of the square, and running them up to the top. The rope squeaked a bit as it slid through the pulleys, but Mia’s footsteps as she hurried out of the square and down the street, were completely silent.

When she was in prank mode, Mia moved like a ninja warrior, at one with the sidewalk, the warm summer breeze, and the parking meters she graced with extra-small neon thongs as she swept by. She pantied the barbershop pole at Justin’s Cuts, the front porch of Harmon and Harmon, Attorneys at Law, and the swinging wooden plaque advertising ghost town walking tours before reaching the delicate white picket fence surrounding Tea for Two’s front garden.

With catlike grace, Mia jumped the fence—the latch on the gate creaked when it opened—landing with only a slight crunch in the gravel, and tiptoed through the rose bed to the stone path that wound through the impeccably maintained yard. In just a few minutes, she had blessed each of Lula’s
Takes One to Gnome One
Collector’s Edition garden gnomes with a bright green panty hat, before emptying the rest of her bin into the bone-dry birdbath.

She took a moment to admire the way the puddle of panties glowed in the moonlight like the mucus of a diseased alien before turning back toward the fence—

And running right into Lula’s gardening stool, knocking it to the ground.

Mia froze, silently praying that the falling stool hadn’t been as loud as she thought, but then she heard it—the scrape of chair legs against a hardwood floor, coming from the second floor of Tea for Two.

“Shit,” she cussed beneath her breath, leaping the fallen stool and sprinting for the gate. She reached the picket fence and vaulted over, but when she landed on the other side, and started for the curb, she was jerked back into the boards.

The fence rattled, and Mia cussed again as she reached behind her, fumbling to liberate her tee shirt from the top of the fence post, cursing her decision to embrace the retro trend and wear an oversized cropped shirt over her purple spandex tank top. She had just wiggled free, when Tea for Two’s front porch light flicked on behind her, casting jagged, fence-post shadows across the sidewalk.

It was a deadly omen if Mia had ever seen one.

Without risking a glance over her shoulder, she sprinted off the curb and across the street, gunning it for the protection of the Blue Saloon’s hedge with everything in her. Her fists pumped like pistons and her thighs burned with the force of her exertion, but she knew she wasn’t going to make it before the door opened behind her, not unless she did something drastic.

Later, Mia would blame it all on the whiskey, but in the heat of the moment, diving into the bushes and rolling onto the parking lot pavement on the other side seemed like a perfectly acceptable plan. Sure, she might end up with a few scrapes, but she would escape without being made as the Panty Bandit, and that would make it all worth it. The fact that anyone with half a brain would know that the prank-inclined owner of the lingerie shop was responsible for pantying downtown didn’t matter. If no one caught her in the act, she would still have plausible deniability.

And so she jumped, diving arms first through a narrow opening in the hedge, bracing herself for impact with the pavement on the other side. But instead of flying through the air, and starting her roll as she lost momentum, Mia collided with a wall of firm, human flesh.

Mia stifled her bleat of surprise—Lula was no doubt standing on her front porch by now, and her hearing was excellent—but the man she’d body-slammed let out a loud “Oof” as she toppled him. The man’s larger form cushioned her fall, but Mia winced as his body collided with the pavement.

That had to have hurt.

“So sorry,” she whispered, scrambling to get off her poor victim, but only succeeding in slamming her kneecap against his before she fell on top of him again.

He cried out in pain just as Lula called, “Who’s there?” from across the street.

“What the—”

Mia’s hands flew to cover the man’s mouth, trying to silence him.

“—hell is going on?” he finished in a way-too-loud voice, his lips moving beneath her hand.

“Shhh!” she hissed. “Please, be quiet.”

“Who are you running from?” he asked, at the same moment Lula shouted—

“Do I hear your voice Amelia Louise Sherman?”

Panicked, Mia knew she had only one course of action. She couldn’t see much in the shadows behind the bushes, but the man beneath her had recently shaved, and smelled of leather and soap—something crisp that reminded her of floating the Rio Grande in springtime. He was obviously clean, and in excellent shape, if the rock hard chest she was sprawled on top of was anything to judge by. She had probably kissed worse in her lifetime, and right now there was only one way she could think of to shut him up before he lured Lula off her porch and across the street.

“Did you hear me?” the man asked, his voice so deep it made Bubba’s sound girly in comparison. “Are you okay? Who are you—”

Mia leaned in, covering his mouth with her own, silencing him with a kiss.

At first his lips remained hard, immovable—chiseled marble every bit as muscled and unrelenting as the rest of him. Mia’s pulse spiked with anxiety, worrying that she had just added assault-with-unwanted-lips to her list of sins against this man, but then it was like a switch flipped inside of him. His mouth came to life beneath hers, and Mia’s blood pumped faster for reasons that had nothing to do with nerves.

The stranger’s big hand threaded through her hair, pulling her closer as his tongue slipped between her lips, swirling through her mouth with a skilled sensuality that took her breath away. He tasted of salt, summertime, the desert wind, and a dozen mysterious, manly things she couldn’t put names to. She only knew that they made her body ache, her fingers dig into his shoulders, and her tongue spar eagerly with his. He was…delicious, and each taste of him only made her want more. She angled her head, deepening the kiss, moaning softly when his fingers fisted in her hair, tugging at her scalp as his free hand skimmed down her back.

Down, down, until his wide palm cupped her bottom and Mia’s nerve endings sizzled, even as a voice in her head insisted this was getting out of hand. She didn’t even know this man’s name, or exactly what he looked like. He was a complete stranger, who had been wandering around The Blue Saloon Hotel parking lot in the middle of the night. For all she knew, he could be an axe murderer, or a Peeping Tom, or a closet stamp collector, or one of those guys who aspired to eat an entire car, piece by piece.

Or he could be a genuinely nice guy looking for a consenting adult to take home and pleasure all night long with his wickedly talented tongue. And while Mia had no doubt this man would deliver in the bedroom, she wasn’t in the market for a one-night stand, or a boyfriend, or anything else. She’d made a promise to herself when she came back to Lonesome Point—no romantic entanglements. Between her gruesome family history, and the nightmare she’d lived through in Los Angeles during her last year of graduate school, she knew better. The only way to keep everyone safe was to keep her relationships with the opposite sex purely friendly.

Thankfully, just as she was trying to figure out how to extricate herself from the man’s arms, when something stubborn inside of her insisted it would rather stay and kiss him senseless, she heard footsteps coming from the far side of the parking lot. If she were lucky, it would be Bubba and Ross, returning from their mission. If she were unlucky, it would be Tallulah, circling around the shrubs with her shotgun, intent on punishing the defacer of her precious garden gnomes.