One More Taste (One and Only Texas #2)
Melissa Cutler
Chapter One
Not everyone was lucky enough to drive a haunted truck. Then again, lucky wasn’t a word Knox Briscoe would use to describe his current predicament. On a prayer, he turned the key in the ignition, but the Chevy offered him nothing but a dull click in response.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said, although if anyone had actually heard his declaration, it’d have to be ghosts, or perhaps some unseen wildlife. Because there was nothing or nobody in this stretch of backcountry other than him and his truck, a roadside sign proclaiming Briscoe Ranch Resort straight ahead in three miles, and a wide, calm lake nestled in the Texas hills.
He tried the key again. Nothing but that maddening click.
He tapped a finger on the steering wheel, denying himself any more grandiose a reaction because Knox was nothing if not a man in command of his emotions.
He popped the truck door open to the crisp October day. His freshly buffed black dress shoes hit the gravel with a crunch. Given the statement he’d planned to make on this, his first day as part-owner of Briscoe Ranch, it wouldn’t do to soil his suit with engine grease. He shrugged out of his sports coat, hung it on a hanger he kept in the back seat for just such a purpose, tucked the ends of his blue silk tie into his shirt, and rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbows before pulling the truck’s hood up.
He’d never considered himself much of a car guy until he’d inherited this one through his dad’s will three years earlier. It’d taken a lot of YouTube videos and conversations with his mechanic for him to get up to speed on maintaining the thirty-year-old truck, but it’d been worth every hour and dollar spent. None of that new knowledge was going to help him today, though. Nothing obvious was broken or out of place, and the engine had plenty of oil and other fluids.
Knox patted the truck’s side. “Okay, Dad. Message received. You don’t want your truck on Briscoe Ranch property. I get it. But don’t you want to be there to see poetic justice done, even if it’s just in spirit, with your truck?”
God, he felt like a moron, talking to his dead father, but what other explanation was there for the ’85 Chevy Half-Ton’s mystifying quirks or the neck-prickling sensation that he wasn’t alone every time Knox got into the cab? Even in death, it seemed, his dad had decided to stubbornly hold his ground against the father and brother—Knox’s grandfather, Tyson, and his uncle Ty—who’d excommunicated him from the family before Knox’s birth. Even in death, his dad refused to let his prized truck lay one spec of rubber down on Briscoe Ranch property. Which sucked, to be honest. It would’ve been icing on the cake to have his dad’s spirit there, watching Knox take control of the very business his dad had been robbed of.
Behind the wheel again, he gripped the key in the ignition and closed his eyes. Please work. Please.
Click. Click. Click.
“Okay. But this sucks. I didn’t want to show up for the meeting in a Town Car with a driver like a mobster goon who’s there to shake everybody down. Would you at least let me get to the entrance of the resort before stalling the truck again?”
Wow. Bargaining with a ghost. Knox’s freak flag was really flying this morning. “Never mind. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
After another futile turn of the key, Knox grabbed his messenger bag and stepped out of the truck, then rummaged around the copies of the Briscoe Ranch shareholder contract his lawyers had prepared until he found his cell phone.
As the phone rang with his office in Dallas, he spotted a for sale sign ahead of him, demarcating a gated driveway a few yards from the lake. He walked along the road to it, the phone to his ear. Was there a house at the end of that twisty, tree-lined driveway? Did the property border the resort? Looked like it might. Perhaps he’d buy it and expand the resort even more than he’d originally planned.
Shayla, his younger sister, who also worked as Briscoe Equity Group’s office manager, picked up on the fourth ring. “Don’t tell me Ty Briscoe’s giving you shit already. I told you that you should’ve brought Yamaguchi and Crawford with you.”
Maybe another boss would’ve bristled at such insubordination, even by a blood relative, but Knox had developed a deep mistrust of kiss-asses over his years as an entrepreneur, which was why he valued Shayla’s loyalty and honesty so much. And, in this case, she was absolutely correct. Linda Yamaguchi and Diane Crawford were his firm’s lawyers, who Knox should have brought along today as he usually did for business acquisitions. But Knox wanted to close this deal on his own, eye-to-eye with the uncle he’d never met before they’d started this negotiation—the uncle whom Knox was going to ruin, just as Ty had ruined Knox’s family.
“You can tell me ‘I told you so’ later, but that’s not why I called. My truck broke down three miles from Briscoe Ranch. I need a driver, and I need him to get here in—” He lifted the flap of a clear plastic box affixed to the for sale sign and pulled out a flier.
The photograph gracing the center of the flier drew his eye. A grand, modern house sitting on a hill overlooking the lake. It was exactly the kind of dwelling Knox was hoping to move into somewhere in the vicinity of Briscoe Ranch since he couldn’t very well run the show from his home base of Dallas, five hours away.
“Hello? Are you still there?” Shayla asked.