One Texas Cowboy Too Many (Burnt Boot, Texas #3)(92)

“I don’t think so, Granny. You don’t have the power or enough money to do that,” Leah answered. “Hey, Honey, catch this.” She threw the bouquet right at her cousin, but it went over her head and landed in Betsy Gallagher’s lap.

“Some eligible bachelor needs to catch this!” Rhett yelled.

He popped the garter out across the room and it hung on Declan Brennan’s ear.

“Well, how about that?” Leah said.

“I’m not even sure God could make that come true.” Gladys giggled.

*

Rhett carried Leah over the threshold with Dammit right behind them. “Welcome home, Mrs. O’Donnell. I do like the way that rolls off my tongue.”

“Tastes like a double shot of Jack, doesn’t it?” She smiled.

“Better. Much better. Supper awaits in our room, with the door shut to the dog and the cats,” he said.

“Dessert first or after?”

“Your choice.” He grinned. “Now wouldn’t it be something if we sealed your brother’s fate with Betsy Gallagher’s, since they caught the garter belt and bouquet?”

“I’ll shoot him before I let him get tangled up with that hussy. Now carry me on into the bedroom. I’m thinking I want dessert first.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.





Read on for a peek at What Happens in Texas (previously released as The Blue-Ribbon Jalape?o Society Jubilee), coming soon in mass market format

*

If Prissy Parnell hadn’t married Buster Jones and left Cadillac, Texas, for Pasadena, California, Marty wouldn’t have gotten the speeding ticket. It was all Prissy’s damn fault that Marty was in such a hurry to get to the Blue-Ribbon Jalape?o Society monthly meeting that night, so Prissy ought to have to shell out the almost two hundred dollars for that ticket.

They were already passing around the crystal bowl to take up the voting ballots when Marty slung open the door to Violet Prescott’s sunroom and yelled, “Don’t count ’em without my vote.”

Twenty faces turned to look at her and not a one of them, not even her twin sister, Cathy, was smiling. Hell’s bells, who had done pissed on their cucumber sandwiches before she got there, anyway? A person didn’t drop dead from lack of punctuality, did they?

One wall of the sunroom was glass and looked out over lush green lawns and flower gardens. The other three were covered with shadowboxes housing the blue ribbons that the members had won at the Texas State Fair for their jalape?o pepper entries. More than forty shadowboxes all reminding the members of their history and their responsibility for the upcoming year.

“It appears that Martha has decided to grace us with her presence once again when it is time to vote for someone to take our dear Prissy’s place in the Blue-Ribbon Jalape?o Society. We really should amend our charter to state that a member has to attend more than one meeting every two years. You could appreciate the fact that we did amend it once to include you in the membership with your sister, who, by the way, has a spotless attendance record,” Violet said.

Violet, the queen of the club, as most of the members called it, was up near eighty years old, built like SpongeBob SquarePants, and had stovepipe jet-black hair right out of the bottle. Few people had the balls or the nerve to cross her, and those who did were put on her shit list right under Martha, a.k.a. Marty, Andrews’s name, which was always on the top.

Marty hated it when people called her Martha. It sounded like an old woman’s name. What was her mother thinking anyway when she looked down at two little identical twin baby daughters and named them after her mother and aunt—Martha and Catherine? Thank God she’d at least shortened their names to Marty and Cathy.

Marty shrugged, and Violet snorted. Hell, if they wanted to write forty amendments to the charter, Marty would still do only the bare necessities to keep her in voting standing. She hadn’t even wanted to be in the damned club and had only done it because if she didn’t, then Cathy couldn’t.

Marty slid into a seat beside her sister and held up her ballot.

Beulah had the bowl in hand and was ready to hand it off to Violet to read off the votes. But she passed it to the lady on the other side of her and it went back around the circle to Marty, who tossed in her folded piece of paper. If she’d done her homework and gotten the numbers right, that one vote should swing the favor for Anna Ruth to be the new member of the club. She didn’t like Anna Ruth, especially since she’d broken up her best friend’s marriage. But hey, Marty had made a deathbed promise to her mamma, and that carried more weight than the name of a hussy on a piece of paper.

The bowl went back to Violet and she put it in her lap like the coveted jeweled crown of a reigning queen. “Our amended charter states that only twenty-one women can belong to the Blue-Ribbon Jalape?o Society at any one time, and the only time we vote a new member in is when someone moves or dies. Since Prissy Parnell got married this past week and moved away from Grayson County, we are open for one new member. The four names on the ballet are: Agnes Flynn, Trixie Matthews, Anna Ruth Williams, and Gloria Rawlings.”

Even though it wasn’t in the fine print, everyone knew that when attending a meeting, the members should dress for the occasion, which meant panty hose and heels. Marty could feel nineteen pairs of eyes on her. It would have been twenty, but Violet was busy fishing the first ballot from the fancy bowl.