One Hot Cowboy Wedding (13 page)

The marriage license hadn’t been filed in the state of Nevada until the courthouse opened there, so it was after ten when the fax came in to the lawyer’s office.

He checked it, declared it legal, and Ace signed another round of papers. He and the lawyer walked over to the courthouse and closed out his grandfather’s will. Ace paid the man with a check and made it home at noon.

He’d been on a tractor ever since.

It was pretty cut and dried. It was over. The ranch was now legally his unless he didn’t stay married for a year and then Cole would have to file the necessary papers to contest the will. Too bad his life couldn’t be so easy, because in that area nothing made sense anymore.

Jasmine parked beside Ace’s truck and hauled in another suitcase of her things. She was still stomping mad when she unpacked it, hanging her things beside his in the closet, putting her underpants, bras, and nightshirts in a drawer right below his. She kicked off her Nikes, went to the shower, and soaped up twice. Still she could feel the insolence in the way Cole looked at her, so she poured another puddle of shower gel into the washcloth and started all over again. She stood under the cool water and forced herself to think of something else.

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Bridget was right. Ace’s eyes were warm and kind.

He’d never look at her like Cole.

“Don’t think about him,” she said sternly.

Ace was a playboy for sure. He liked women, but he’d never…

“Don’t go there,” she yelled at the top of her lungs.

Okay, lit le girl, looks to me like you need a good
dose of housework. Get that dust rag and get busy.

Since you can’t clean his looks off your body or put his
memory in the trash can, then clean something else and
take your mind off him
, Granny Dale’s voice whispered so close that Jasmine threw back the shower curtain to see if she was right outside.

She turned off the water, dried herself, and dressed in cut- off jean shorts and a ragged T- shirt and headed for the kitchen. The oven was a holy mess with the ashes of too many boiled over TV dinners still crusted on the bottom. The refrigerator was almost as bad with sticky grape juice turning to gel on one shelf and something brown that looked suspiciously like spilled sweet tea stains running down the side.

She found cleaners under the kitchen sink, sprayed the oven, and shut the door for the prescribed thirty minutes and went to work on the refrigerator. Everything, shelves and drawers included, came out and went into a sink of warm soapy water. She brought the trash can from the utility room and tossed everything that was out of date or growing layers of fuzz into it.

There was a galvanized milk bucket in the utility room, so she filled it with cleaner and water and went to work on the refrigerator, mumbling that homes should have to pass the same inspection codes that restaurants did.

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“Can’t eat a hamburger in a café that has a speck of mildew on the door of the fridge, but you can grow enough bacteria for biological warfare in a home’s fridge.

Don’t make sense to me. But then I guess it’s like they say about a license. Have to have a driver’s license to drive a car; have to have a fishin’ license to drop your line in the water; but anybody who can breed can have a baby. Cole is living proof that that law needs to be changed.”
Don’t go there
, Granny Dale said firmly.

Okay, okay. Now doesn’t that look better, and next
on to the oven. Gramps Riley was right. A ranch needs
a woman.

When Ace and the guys dragged their tired butts through the door at seven, she was sit ing on the sofa with her bare feet propped up on the coffee table.

Ace kissed her on the forehead.

“What is that smell?” Creed asked.

“It’s the smell of clean, and the next time one of you boil something out in the oven or spill something in the fridge, you’d damn well better clean it up,” Jasmine said.

“You didn’t throw out that container of dirt, did you?” Blake asked.

“If it wasn’t edible, it went in the trash,” she said.

“Well, shit! That was my rose hips I was working on germinating,” he said.

“Go look in the trash bin. I tossed container and all,” she told him. “And if you want to grow something in dirt do it in the bunkhouse.”

“Dexter would kill me,” Blake said.

“I rest my case,” Jasmine told him.

Creed laughed.

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and I’m just waiting on them to sprout,” Blake said on his way out the back door to retrieve his precious seeds.

“So he’s a horticulturist?” she asked Ace.

“Which kind of horti are you talkin’ about?” Dalton chuckled.

Jasmine felt the blush begin to sting her neck but she willed it away. Hell, she’d stood up to Cole. She could damn well force a blush into oblivion.

“I get the shower,” Dalton said.

Creed nodded. “You can have it. I’d forgot en how much the first day of hay haulin’ can work on my muscles. I’m getting into a tub of warm water and soaking my aches away. What time is supper, Ace?”

“Dexter says it’ll be on the table in half an hour.” They both took off down the hall toward the bathroom.

“What put you in such a cleaning mood? I told you that you didn’t have to do anything around the house since you work all day at the café,” Ace asked.

“Cole.”

“Cole?” Ace asked.

Jasmine told him about the day and how bad she wanted to poison his steak.

Ace sat down on the sofa and threw an arm around Jasmine. Sweat, remnants of the morning shaving lotion, and soap blended together into a heady combination.

The dirty bad boy didn’t usually appeal to her, but it sure did at that moment. She felt safe and warm, and something else akin to steamy hot.

“That sumbitch. He had no right to come to your place of business,” Ace growled.

“I took care of it. He’s gone. He said he was going to the lawyers or the courthouse to see the license because OneHotCowboyWedding.indd 109

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he didn’t trust y’all. I thought about bleaching down the chair where he sat and throwing the plate he used in the garbage,” Jasmine told him.

Ace fetched his cell phone from the carrier on his belt loop and punched a few buttons. “Understand you’ve been harassing my wife, now.”

A second of silence then he said, “I don’t give a damn.” Another few seconds of silence.

“That remains to be seen. I know Jasmine and she is…” he caught himself before he said, “as good as her word.”

“She’s what?” Cole’s raised voice came through the phone loud and clear.

“She loves me.” Ace chuckled. “Why else would a woman marry a straggly old cowboy like me two times?” He snapped the phone shut and looked at Jasmine.

“He told us to go to hell.”

“No, thank you. I’m not spending eternity with him anywhere around me.”

Ace kissed her on the cheek. “He won’t be back.

Wouldn’t have surfaced this time if Gramps hadn’t put that in his will. And Dexter says supper is on the table at seven thirty so we’d better get a move on it. I’m going to take a quick shower. I smell like sweat and dirt,” Ace said.

“Supper?” Jasmine asked.

“Summer schedule is breakfast in the bunkhouse, sandwiches out in the field at noon that we take with us from this house, and supper back in the bunkhouse.

Dexter stops a couple of hours before we do and gets it ready,” Ace explained. “It’ll be nice to have a woman at the table.”

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The rich cooking smells permeated out from the bunkhouse and across the yard between it and the main house. The three younger Riley brothers walked ahead of Ace and Jasmine, the scent of their shaving lotion mixing with the aroma of baked bread and something with cinnamon coming from the bunkhouse kitchen.

Ace had been quiet since the phone call with Cole.

Jasmine had given him his space like she’d learned to do back at the first of their friendship. In those days, he would pull up a chair in the kitchen and she’d slap a burger on the grill. In a while he’d start to talk and they’d hash out whatever was on his mind, but he had to have time to mull it over.

The wind whipped her hair into her face, and she tucked it back behind her ears several times before they reached the porch. The guys had already gone inside and she could hear male voices talking and laughing. Just a hint of the cool air that had escaped when they opened the door still lingered on the porch, but the hot summer night was replacing it rapidly.

She’d just put her foot on the bottom step when her ring tone said that her mother was calling. Hoping that she could get away quickly, she kept one foot on the grass and the other on the step.

“Hello, Momma,” she said.

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“Where are you? I hear cows and men’s voices,” Kelly said.

“Ace and I are about to walk into the bunkhouse.

Dexter makes supper every night and it’s ready.” She hoped her mother would get off the phone.

“Dexter?” Kelly asked.

Jasmine’s stomach growled. “Ace has four full- time hired hands. Sam has been here for forty years, Dexter and Buddy for about twenty years, and Tyson just got hired last year. Ace’s brothers also work for him in the summer. His younger three brothers are working here this summer. Well, at least two of them are here for the whole summer. Dalton and Blake will be here until fall. Creed is only here for a week or so. I’m hungry, Momma, and they’re waiting for me.”

“They won’t start without you. Younger three? How many are there?”

“Six. Three here and with Ace that makes four, plus four full- time guys that live in the bunkhouse. I’m living in a testosterone- filled world of cowboys, spurs, boots, and bullshit,” Jasmine said.

“That’s no way for a new bride to talk in front of her husband and al his hands. God Almighty, Jasmine.” Exasperation came through the phone.

Jasmine could see her mother’s expression without shutting her eyes. The only time that she got God Almighty- ed was when she’d done something like watering down John Richland’s prime whiskey, or when she and Eddie Jay broke up the year before. Those two times got her a God Almighty in bright flashing neon colors. It floated in the air for a full five minutes after her mother raised her voice and put it out there. Evidently OneHotCowboyWedding.indd 112

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mentioning testosterone and bullshit was a sin as big as breaking up with a cheating son- of- a- bitch or water-ing down high- dollar whiskey. Her mother should have given her a book when she stepped over into puberty entitled
God
Almighty
Sins
.

But Jasmine would bet her café that that book of eti-quette was stored right next to the one that Ace talked about being in the nightstand drawer in Vegas concern-ing the rules of the town. Both were secret books and could never be found in common bookstores.

“Well, aren’t you going to say a word?” Kelly asked.

“I was thinking about a couple of books,” Jasmine said.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! I swear, you are more like your father every day of your life.”

Kelly King only hollered for help from Jesus and his parents when God Almighty had failed. They were held in reserve for really tough times. And it took a long time to work her mother through those times.

Jasmine sat down on the step.

Ace sat down beside her.

“Well!” Kelly said.

“Sorry, Momma. Have you seen Marcella yet?” Jasmine changed the subject. Get her mother onto the wedding plans and everything would be fine.

“Of course I have. I called her last night and she’s been here since morning. We’ve been sitting at the kitchen table making plans all day. You should be here,” Kelly said.

No, I definitely should not be there. We would yank
each other’s hair out if I was there because my idea of a
real wedding is what Liz and Raylen did last Christmas.

Propose, go stand before the judge the same morning,
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and be married by noon. What Ace and I did in Las
Vegas was too big to suit me.

“Are you going to say a word?” Kelly asked.

“Momma, I’m sure you and Marcella will do a wonderful job. Tell me what you decided today,” Jasmine said.

“This morning we decided on invitations. I need your fiancé’s, and that’s what he’s going to be to me until you marry him in a real church in Texas… I need his list by the end of the week. I have the King and the Dale lists already done. We have two invitations picked out. I’ll send them to you over the Internet and you can make the final decision. One is ecru with apricot ribbons and pearls; the other is white with embossed doves on the front.”

“Which one do you like?” Jasmine stopped at the porch of the bunkhouse, and Ace motioned for the guys to go on inside.

“The white one. It’s more formal.”

“Then that’s the one I want. You aren’t planning on apricot dresses, are you?”

“What’s wrong with apricot? It’s a summer wedding after all,” Kelly said.

“I was thinking about red with multi- colored bouquets,” Jasmine said.

“Dear God!”

That wasn’t quite as bad as the God Almighty, but it was only a notch down the ladder. Jasmine smiled up at Ace.

He pointed at her hip where the John Deere tat was located.

She smiled at him. “I guess that means green is out OneHotCowboyWedding.indd 114

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