Page 2 of Tempted at Thoroughbred Lake

Ruby stepped from her car, scowling at the scalding Texas heat that was at sauna-level, with an icky amount of humidity to go along with it. The heat would linger for a while, too, despite it being past six in the evening.

She had barely gotten started on placing the sign on the curb when she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Ruby looked up and spotted the dark blue pickup turning into the driveway. Her first thought was this was an eager potential buyer who wanted to get first dibs on the property, but then she got a closer look at the vehicle. And the driver.

Brennan Dayton.

She sighed because this was no buyer. Brennan already owned the Thoroughbred Lake Ranch, with its own charming house that’d been passed down several generations. He definitely wouldn’t be looking for another place to hang his Stetson, especially anything in the “downtown” area.

Nope.

This wasn’t a visit to tap into her Realtor skills but rather to talk to her about what had happened—she checked the time—twelve minutes ago.

Gossip was in the “speed dial” mode in Last Ride, and Ruby was betting plenty of that speed-dialing had been aimed at Brennan to inform him of, well, something he likely wouldn’t have wanted to be informed about. Still, here he was, so he either wanted to know how she was going to handle things or to tell her that he didn’t want to be a part of that handling.

Brennan stepped from his truck, and Ruby immediately got the same old jolt she always did when she looked at the man who could have won any and all hot cowboy competitions. The man had been causing that reaction in her for as long as she’d been aware of such things.

Once, he’d helped that jolt along with some serious kissing and some scalding touches, but that was more than two decades ago when they were in high school. There’d been no such recent activity.

Not on his part, anyway.

Ruby was certainly having some scalding thoughts about him right now.

Brennan was lean, tall and drop-dead gorgeous in his great-fitting jeans and snug T-shirt that somehow managed to make him look part bad boy, part rock star. He strode toward her, the wind taking a swipe at his storm black hair.

“You got here fast,” Ruby remarked.

Brennan nodded, his cool blue eyes sweeping over her. “I was at the feed store. I called your office, and your assistant said you’d likely be here.”

Since Last Ride was the textbook definition of a small town, all the shops and businesses were close to each other. Ditto for the various neighborhoods. Even if Brennan hadn’t asked her assistant, Tammy Granger, where she was, he could have still easily found her.

“How many people called and texted you about the drawing?” Ruby came out and asked.

The breath he dragged in was long and weary. “Eleven.”

She shrugged. “Considering there were about seventy people at the Last Ride Society drawing, I’m surprised there weren’t more.”

“I turned off my phone after the eleventh one,” he informed her.

Ah, that made sense. The Last Ride Society was filled with both do-gooders and gossips. Many fell into both categories, but the gossips were especially skilled at spreading the news.

Many nonmembers considered the Last Ride Society a pain in the butt and a way for the town’s first family, the Parkmans, to spend the overabundance of time they had on their hands. For Ruby, though, it definitely wasn’t about gossip, do-gooding or filling time. It was about fulfilling a duty that had been drilled into her since she was old enough to understand such drillings.

The gist of this particular Parkman duty was the Last Ride Society had been formed decades ago by the town’s founder and Ruby’s ancestor, Hezzie Parkman. Hezzie had wanted her descendants to preserve the area’s history by having a quarterly drawing so that one Parkman descendant would then in turn draw the name of a local tombstone to research. After the research was done, a chunk of money would be donated to the researcher’s town charity of choice. Ruby intended to give hers to help cover the costs of fixing up the playground at the town’s park.

First, though, she had to get past the research.

And that started with getting past Brennan.

“You drew Alice’s name,” he said.

Obviously, it wasn’t a question, and considering those eleven callers and/or texters had likely verified it, Brennan knew that she had, indeed, drawn his late wife’s name.

Ruby nodded and continued to wrestle with the for-sale sign. Either this part of the ground was a chunk of limestone or else the spikes on the bottom of the sign weren’t doing their job.

“Don’t worry,” she muttered. “I’ll only write nice things about her.”

Though that would be a challenge. And Ruby would then have to deal with the memories of Alice and Brennan’s betrayal.

For Ruby, it’d been a double whammy.

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