One Hot Cowboy Wedding (14 page)

of the question. Then how about a very formal wedding with metal colors? Pewter, gold, silver, bronze, and calla lily bouquets.”

Silence.

Her stomach growled again. She was going to starve to death sitting on the front porch of the bunkhouse.

“If you don’t make up your mind I’m going to starve to death with food not fifty feet from me. If that happens you can bury me in the wedding dress and all the bridesmaids can wear their apricot dresses and stand behind the casket for a picture to go above the mantel.

Do you want Ace to weep into a hanky or sit on the end of the casket?”

“God Almighty! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! That is a horrible thing to say to your mother. I was thinking that I like the idea of the metal colors. I’m picturing it in my mind, but Marcella and I’ll have to go back to the drawing board for the invitations. Something in a very formal off- white with gold lettering. Oh, yes, I can see it all now. Go eat your supper, and don’t you ever say that about a casket to me again! Marcella is still here and we’ve got the books out on the table. I expect that list by Friday. We have to put a rush order on them as it is in order to get them out two full weeks before the wedding.”

“I trust you and Marcel a to figure it al out. How many bridesmaids do I need?”

“Pearl will be the maid of honor, so we’ll need at least five more since your groom has six brothers. If he has some very close friends, don’t be stingy. I don’t care if you have a dozen of each. It will make a lovely picture to go above the mantel. Not a word. Not a single word, OneHotCowboyWedding.indd 115

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Jasmine Marie, and I mean it. Let me know dress and shoe sizes by Friday too.”

“I promise I will. Good- bye, Momma.”

Ace chuckled. “That was slick.”

“What?” Jasmine giggled.

“You know very well. That casket thing was ingenious.”

“You know me much too well, my friend. Now that I gave Momma something elegant to work with, she’ll be off and running and I won’t hear from her for days. But…”

“That but is about the dress, right?”

She nodded. “Pearl is too big to traipse around looking for a dress. Liz and Raylen are at a horse thing in Dal as this weekend. Lucy can’t leave the motel on Saturday afternoon. Please, Ace!”

“Sure. We’ll all knock off early. Dalton and Blake wil like that so they can have more time to get al spruced up to go tomcattin’.” Ace owed her far more than an afternoon looking at wedding dresses. Hell, she’d just saved the ranch.

Blake poked his head out the door. “Dexter says he’s puttin’ it on the table and cold gravy ain’t worth eatin’.” Jasmine slipped her phone into her hip pocket. “What was Cole saying on the phone?”

“That you wouldn’t even stay around the full year and he’d made you a proposition. Half the money from the sale to leave me.”

“Why should I give that son- of- a- bitch anything? I can get half by leaving you anytime I want. We don’t have a prenup, darlin’.” She looped her arm through his.

“Lead the way, Ace.”

“I’m dreading meeting your momma,” Ace groaned.

“Why?” she asked.

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“If she can control you, she’s Superman’s daughter.” Jasmine was smiling when she stepped inside with him.

The bunkhouse was unlike anything she’d ever seen.

The living room and kitchen were one big oblong room with two closed doors on each side. The big room had a long table at one end with benches on the sides and a heavy chair at each end. Cabinets made an L with an enormous refrigerator on the short end of the L and the stove and sink in the longer leg. A couple of comfortable sofas faced a fireplace that was stone cold in the middle of a Texas summer. Everything was in pristine condition, down to the rag rugs in front of the sofa and the fireplace.

“Welcome to supper, Miz Jasmine. We hope to see you out here every night,” Dexter said.

Size- wise, he looked more like a bouncer than a cowboy. His huge head was shaved bald, with the back laying in folds on his enormous neck. Biceps as big as Ace’s waist and a chest about an acre wide looked out of place in a snap- front Western shirt. His jeans bunched up over the tops of buff- colored cowboy boots with sharp toes. Maybe a bouncer in a honky tonk instead of a big city club.

“Thank you. It sure smells good. I’m not used to sitting up to a table with food that I didn’t cook,” she said.

Dexter motioned for her to sit at the end of one of the benches. “This’ll be your place. When the boss died, we give Ace his place at the head of the table. Sam sits at the other end because he’s been here more than forty years now. Me and Buddy and Tyson take the other side and the boys can line up beside you. Now Sam, it’s your turn for grace.”

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Sam thanked God in his deep Texas drawl for a new woman on the Double Deuce and for the food they were about to eat.

Jasmine was thinking about her mother’s God Almighty and whether He’d accept the farce wife sitting at the table with all the men of the Double Deuce and didn’t hear Sam say, “Amen.”

Ace touched her arm and she raised her head to see the men all looking at her.

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

They continued to look at her as if waiting for her to deliver a speech or maybe sing a song. Wel , they were going to have a long wait for either. Jasmine King, now Riley, could not sing, and she wasn’t too fond of speeches either.

“You start the food around,” Ace whispered out the side of his mouth.

“I see. I’m used to being in the kitchen, not in the dining room. I’ll know next time.” She picked up the platter of meatloaf, put a chunk on her plate, and handed it to Ace. Conversations began as the food went from her fingers to Ace’s, brushing in the transfer and sending more of those spicy shivers down her back every time.

“You evvvver worrrk on a rrranch?” Buddy stuttered.

He was as tall and lanky as Sam, but where Sam’s thick hair was silver and curled up on his shirt collar, Buddy’s was dark brown and clipped close to his head.

His arms filled out his shirtsleeves, but the waist bunched up in pleats where he’d tucked it inside his jeans.

“No, but my best friend, Pearl, who married Wil Marshall last year, lived on a ranch. So I spent lots of weekends on one,” Jasmine answered.

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“D- d- d- rive a trrractor any?” Buddy asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Jasmine answered with a giggle.

Tyson looked up from across the table. He was the youngest of the hired hands. Thirty years old and had spent twelve years in the Army— three tours of Iraq. His carrot red hair was still worn in a military cut, and his shoulders were still squared off in military posture. His eyes reminded her of a two- way glass in a police station.

He could see out but no one could see inside. She wondered what secrets were back there and if that haunted look would ever be released.

Ace chuckled. “She and Pearl sampled John

Richland’s fancy whiskey and refilled the bottle with water. When he found it, she and Pearl got to plow a whole week in open cab tractors.”

Tyson nodded, but he didn’t smile. “Been on one since then?”

“Oh, yeah. Pearl lets me drive Momma Tractor sometimes just so I don’t forget how,” Jasmine said.

“What’s a M- m- momma trrractor?” Buddy asked.

Jasmine looked across the table at Buddy and wondered if he’d stuttered all his life or if something had set it off at a particular stage somewhere along the way.

“She and Wil bought three tractors one day and she calls them the Poppa Tractor, the Momma Tractor, and the Baby Tractor. She’s the only one that gets to drive the last one. Selfish that way, she is.”

Dessert was an apple cinnamon cake that did bring the hint of a smile to Tyson’s face and lit Buddy’s up like a neon sign.

“I thought I smelled cinnamon floating out across the yard,” Jasmine said when Dexter set the Bundt cake OneHotCowboyWedding.indd 119

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in front of her and handed her the knife to cut it. “It looks scrumptious.”

Tyson held his plate across the table. “I want a fat piece.”

“You’ll learrrrrn,” Buddy stammered. “He llllikes cinammmmon.”

“Do you?” Jasmine asked.

Buddy nodded and held out his plate. She cut a fat piece out for him and looked at Sam. “How big?”

“One of the slim pieces. I like it but I like meatloaf better, and I’m pretty well stuffed.”

Dexter brought a full coffee pot and cups to the table, and Creed passed them around. When it reached Jasmine and she filled her cup, the pot was nearly empty.

“This is wonderful,” she said when she finally tasted the cake.

“Fresh apples,” Dexter said. “They had some good Granny Smiths at the grocery store this week. Bought enough for a cake tonight and a couple of pies later in the week.”

“Sounds great to me. I’d like your recipe for this too, please.”

Dexter nodded.

Tyson, Creed, and Blake shared the last two inches of the cake and Jasmine picked up the plate to carry to the cabinet. She didn’t mind cleanup after a good meal like that. She’d wash and she’d make Ace do the drying and putting away.

Dexter took the plate from her and shook his head.

“Oh, no! It’s Blake and Tyson who does the clean up tonight. Tomorrow it’ll be me and Sam. Then Buddy and Dalton on Thursday. You and Ace get the chore on OneHotCowboyWedding.indd 120

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Friday night. Saturday and Sunday we don’t have supper out here. I’ll write off the recipes for you.”

“Mind if I use them at the café?”

Dexter smiled. “I’d be right honored. You two run on now. Honeymoon ain’t much as it is.”

Q

Jasmine was propped up on pillows watching the cooking channel when Ace waltzed into the room wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. She raised an eyebrow, but it did absolutely nothing for her racing pulse.

Dammit! She’d gone a year without sex so why were those pheromone things flooding her body now? And why in the hel did they decide to multiply and at ack with Ace? He was so sexy standing there with water droplets still clinging to his broad back and his curls kinked up to his scalp. She needed to fan her face at the naughty thoughts racing through her mind, but she couldn’t figure out a way to do it without him realizing just how hot he made her.

“I forgot my sleepin’ clothes. I’m not used to having a woman in the house and sure enough not in my bedroom,” he said.

He opened a drawer and pul ed out a pair of boxer shorts and a white gauze muscle shirt. He slipped the boxers up under the towel but she caught a glimpse of his butt cheeks when the towel dropped before he got the boxers up around his waist. He turned around as he put on the shirt and then stretched out on his side of the king- sized bed.

“What?” he asked.

“You’re not used to a woman in your bedroom?

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Come on, Ace, I’m your best gal pal and you expect me to believe that?”

“Jasmine, I swear on my granny’s grave, there’s not ever been a woman in this bedroom. I saved it in case someone got past the barbed wire tat and into my heart.

This has been my sanctuary and it’s never been open to women. Now what are you watching?”

She was stunned. So the playboy had a severely romantic side and he’d left one door closed to the women in his life. Knowing that she was the first one in there put a little extra kick in her heartbeat.

“Well?” he asked.

“Oh, sorry. I’m watching the cooking channel. Paula Deen is making gooey cake tonight. I’m going to make it for dessert on the day I make Dexter’s meatloaf at the café.”

Ace didn’t care what she was watching; he just wanted to hear her voice. It was clear and sweet, like a soprano singer’s voice. You’d think with a voice like that and a body like she had, plus that beautiful face, she’d be the next big thing in Nashville, but she could
not
sing. He’d caught her singing along with Miranda Lambert’s “Gunpowder and Lead” one afternoon when she didn’t know he was in the café. And that clear, sweet voice was all over the musical scale.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked when he just stood there staring at her.

“Food,” he lied. There was no way in hell he’d tell her that she couldn’t sing. “You said you were making meatloaf and cake. Whenever you make it, let me know. I love Dexter’s meatloaf and I never met a cake I didn’t like.”

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She looked over at him at the same time he looked at her. Their eyes locked and in one swift movement she was in his arms and his lips were on hers. Sweet at first, then teasing and finally deepening into something that erased every sane thought from Jasmine’s head. It was more than the wedding kiss, more than the kiss in the living room of his parents’ house the night before.

It made all the kisses she’d ever had combined pale in comparison. She leaned into it and pressed her body against his, wanting more and more.

It set her ears to ringing and created liquid spasms down deep in her gut that threatened to explode like a volcano. The heat was unbearable, and yet she was drawn to it like a starving woman to a box of chocolates.

Stop! Right now! You are not a real bride. This is Ace
and he’s not a real husband and you’re about to ruin
your friendship.

She shut out the inner voice and ran her hands over his chest, teasing his nipples into peaks as the blistering hot kisses kept fueling that liquid heat in her gut.

His hands moved under her shirt and up her back.

They were rough as sandpaper and felt like firebrands as they massaged her skin, moving around to cup a naked breast already begging to be touched. “You feel like you are made out of silk.”