Hotter than Texas (Pecan Creek) (2 page)

He was.

“Jake,” his mother, Vivian, said, and Jake automatically said, “No.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he told her, and the three other ladies staring at him with apprehensive smiles beamed.

Charlotte Dawson, vice president of Pecan Creek’s town council, said, “How are your new renters?” She gazed at him with interest through her spectacles. Dodie Myers, the treasurer, and Minda Hernandez, the secretary, stared at him too, eager for gossip.

He didn’t want to go into details. Sugar Cassavechia’s effect on his libido had him a bit confused. He shouldn’t have been lusting after those long, slender legs, that bouncy rack and sweetly curved ass when she’d been ragging him about the house. The legs especially had been delightful, and the rack, well, what red-blooded male didn’t love a great set of breasts? Jake was sideswiped by a wave of heat and had to force himself to focus on the four pairs of bright eyes watching him as if he were a renowned magician.

Sugar would be a perfect foil for his plan. He had every intention of putting her name in the hat for president of Pecan Creek’s town council, once she’d been here a bit longer.

Say, maybe in about three weeks.

That would give him time to launch her on the Four E’s, pitting her squarely against his mother, of course, but he could back Sugar up. He was pretty certain Sugar could hold her own. She was determined, forthright, opinionated—everything Vivian would hate in a younger woman, and just what Pecan Creek really needed.

If they wanted to bring in men, they needed man magnets—babes who didn’t mind living two hours from the nearest city—hot babes like Lucy Cassavechia. Where Sugar was passion under wraps—at least that was what he was hoping—it was clear that Lucy had a more opportunistic eye for the male sex. Sugar had barely given him the time of day, raking him businesslike over the coals, but Lucy, like their mother, Maggie, had given him a very feminine once-over.

Naturally, he had to go for the hard-to-get, you’ll-really-work-your-ass-off-for-this types, and Sugar was his age, besides. He’d glanced at her driver’s license as she’d filled out the paperwork on the lease and saw that she was an organ donor, fibbed slightly about her hair color (it was chestnut, not blonde, not even in the strawberry family), and maybe her height. He placed her about five-five and no more, though she had pegged herself at five-seven. He’d run her credit, and she was clean as a whistle. As far as he could tell, she had a lot of the qualifications Pecan Creek could use, and if he could shove this job off on Sugar, he planned to spend his days fishing, drinking beer and playing pool on the secret pool table in the Pecan Creek Bait and Burgers basement.

It was all he and his buddies had that the pillars of the community didn’t have dominion over, and he intended to keep it that way.

“Tell us about them,” his mother urged. “Are there men in the family? Men would be good.” She sighed. “Someone to pick up your duties once you become more involved with the council.”

He ignored the hint. Sitting on this council would never happen to him. “No men,” he said, “but the new people paid us four months’ cash up front.”

That would soothe Vivian. Four months for the Cassavechias to find out living in the old family home wasn’t going to be a picnic. Wait until they met this crowd too.

Fur was going to fly. The Cassavechias were red meat to these pros. He was going to have to help them learn the Pecan Creek ropes and creed, which was
don’t talk about anything
, which concisely meant religion, politics or sex. Especially not sex.

The Cassavechias had struck him as a bit free-spirited for such intolerance. He figured Lucy would be gone in less than a month. Spotty Internet, and no guys her age. Yeah, she was a short-timer, unless something drastic happened to keep her. Very little drastic came up in Pecan Creek. If it did, the Pillars put it down in a hurry.

Maggie could go either way. The Salesladies of Sex would either accept her or toss her out on her super-tanned, flower-printed, Virginia Slims-smoking butt. It was a coin flip.

“I’ve got to go,” Jake told the Pillars, and his mother said, “But are they nice? I know you’d never rent our family home out to people who aren’t
quality
.”

Vivian was worried about quality renters when she’d decorated the family home like a madam’s orgasm. There was irony for you. A lady didn’t talk about sex, but she certainly profited from it—quietly.

Tall, athlete-thin, no-nonsense Charlotte Dawson made willy warmers of all shapes and sizes, custom-ordered in some cases, and sold them over the Internet. Dawson’s Willy Warmers was her Internet business name, which he’d discovered only after a particularly large shipment had gone out last year (record cold temperatures in the frozen North and everywhere else). He’d done some digging around to find out what was in the boxes. He’d once heard his mother refer to Charlotte’s offerings as
Charlotte’s damn peter heaters
under her breath, which had shocked him, because he hadn’t known she knew anything about the Internet at the time. The willy warmers were very popular at Christmas, and the small, one-room mail office was filled with boxes labeled with Charlotte’s silvery return labels.

Still, the ding-dong covers were never mentioned by the ladies in their circle. The post office added an extra truck run, but no one mentioned that they knew exactly what was being shipped out of Pecan Creek, the Most Honest Town in Texas.

That’s what the welcome sign said, anyway.

“I only talked to them for about twenty minutes,” Jake said, “but I’m pretty sure they aren’t serial killers.”

“Jake,” Vivian said, “this is serious business.”

Charlotte, Dodie and Minda nodded. “Very serious. We want
good
people in Pecan Creek,” Dodie said. “We count on you to bring people of untarnished credentials to our town.”

It wasn’t just Charlotte who was contributing to Pecan Creek’s “honest” reputation. Sweet, silver-haired Dodie Myers made chocolate in her kitchen and sold that over the Internet, luscious, nude body parts she billed as Dodie’s Doodahs. He’d found this out by accident when he’d seen the DBA paperwork in the courthouse. The next time he visited Dodie’s home, he slipped into her kitchen and snagged himself a boob. He’d had to admit it was pert, smooth and tasty, though not as good as the real thing, despite the well-placed cherry on top.

Jake sighed. “Give them a week to unpack and adjust. Don’t scare them.”

“Jake!” Vivian said. “Why ever would we?”

“You wouldn’t mean to,” he said in his best Jimmy Stewart tone, soothing and rational. “It’s just they’ve had a long drive, and they have a lot to do.” Like spread the word all over town that they intended to sell Hot Nuts. At first he’d thought it was heavily ironic that the new people intended to open an online business. They’d fit right in—right?

But then he realized they didn’t understand the Rule of Southern Silence. Vivian would proclaim them brassy. The others would follow her lead.

“Look,” he said, “we’re just set in our ways here. You know what I mean. And they’re from Florida. People are more free and easy there.”

“Really?” Minda’s brows rose. “Just how free and easy?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Vivian said. “Jake wouldn’t allow any free-and-easies to rent the home where I raised him. Just the two of us, I might remind you, and there was no free-and-easy going on in our home.”

Maybe there should have been something a little less rigid than your cockeyed rules, Jake thought and then shrugged. “I didn’t vet them to see if they fit some type of Stepford mold. And if you want new ideas and creativity to liven this place up, you’re going to have to understand that there’ll be changes. Not everyone is like us.”

Like you, he thought. Personally, I like the idea of someone who doesn’t try to be a holy-roller.

“But no men,” Minda lamented. “It’s men we need to scatter the seed and whatnot.”

Vivian stiffened, her entire body in its shirt-dress casing a quivering lightning rod of affront. “Minda!”

“It’s true,” Minda said. “Seeds must scatter for saplings to grow.”

“Honestly,” Vivian said. “Less literal before my morning coffee, if you please.”

Perhaps the best-kept secret was his old fourth-grade teacher Minda Hernandez’s online business, The Secret Pearl. Love elixirs guaranteed to make a man wild for a woman: potions and enhancers and tasty, slippery stuff, veritable nectar of the goddesses. He wouldn’t mind having a bottle of Secret Pearl #5 and a night alone with Sugar in the Madam’s House of Orgasm, but he was pretty certain Sugar was upright and not interested in kinky sex. But in the overall picture, though Sugar’s vision of home might not exactly square with his old family place, she was perfect for Jake’s needs.
Sugar for president of Pecan Creek’s town council.

Damned perfect
.

“I’ve got to go,” Jake said.

“Why? Are the fish biting?” his mother asked, and he thought he detected a certain level of acidity in her tone.

Which was nothing new.

“Absolutely,” he said, kissing his mother’s cheek. “Your morning coffee and the fish biting are two things I count on to let me know the sun has risen on a new day.”

She wasn’t mollified. Dodie, Minda and Charlotte shook their heads.

“There are things still to discuss,” Charlotte said. “Like the budget for the town Christmas decorations.”

“And the parade,” Dodie said. “Tourists love the parade.”

“And tourists bring money to our honest town,” Minda said. “We need all the tourists we can get. They buy baked goods.”

And willy warmers, and body candy, and sexual slip-n-slide potions.

Jake wondered for the hundredth time why he’d taken on the role of responsibility bearer for the Bentley name when it would be so much easier to move to Dallas. Atlanta. New York City. You didn’t drink in the open in Pecan Creek, although he knew very well that the ladies loved to share a tipple in the privacy of their little meetings. One also didn’t curse around the grand dames of Pecan Creek, though he was guilty of that sin and didn’t care. It was a bit stiff-collared in Pecan Creek, yet he loved it here, which was why he stayed in a place he knew would probably never number more than a hundred people on a good day, where women ran the show with iron fists in their lacy little gloves.

“The Cassavechias are just what we need for Pecan Creek,” he said to the ladies as he went out the door, grinning as he heard the excited babbling burst behind him. He wasn’t about to spill the beans on the Hotter than Hell Nuts nutjobs. The Entrepreneurial Pillars would launch into a frenzy of self-righteousness that such a loud and obvious thing would exist in their community, and he wanted them to meet the Cassavechias before judging. It wasn’t the fact that they were running an online business that would be unacceptable. It was that they intended to do it in the open, and with a cuss word in their business name. Not only that, Sugar had asked him about the empty billboard on the main road into town. If his mother found out that the main road to Pecan Creek might soon be marked by a Hotter than Hell Nuts advertisement, she’d probably faint. She would do it in an orderly, ladylike fashion, but she’d still hit the ground or at least sink into a soft chair.

The only thing worse than what Sugar was planning would be if Dodie advertised some candy body parts, maybe a sweet pair of white-chocolate breasts and a peppermint-chocolate penis—

“Jake! Are you listening to me?” his mother called after him.

He waved a hand to indicate that he was, though he wasn’t. When the DBA application for the Cassavechias’ business crossed the desk in the county courthouse, the tongues would start wagging. “There’ll be some hot nuts all right, and they’ll be mine,” he said, not too regretfully, and got into his truck. He planned to plead innocent. Innocent but interested. Excited, even.

The Cassavechias had no idea what they were in for, but if he was a good listening ear for Sugar when her business met the certain opposition, maybe he’d wind up with more than just a candy breast.

Since she was given first choice as the youngest, Lucy Cassavechia chose the Belle Watling room because she had a thing about red velvet drapes and gold-tasseled bedding, and the décor of a madam’s bedroom tickled her wild side. “One thing Mrs. Bentley obviously is is a lady of wicked good humor,” Lucy said, sitting cross-legged on the opulent bed. She considered the red diary she’d bought to match Sugar’s accounting journal. Somewhat excited and petrified by their new venture, she and Sugar had each gotten some sort of red book in which to chronicle their move. Knowing Maggie wouldn’t write much, they’d bought a red purse calendar for her notations of the first truly “together” moments they’d had in years. When they’d presented it to Maggie on their way out of Pensacola as a bon voyage gift, Maggie had told them to wake her when they got to Texas, and to screw the journaling.

Lucy opened her diary, the new spine making a cracking sound.
My name is Lucy
, she wrote,
and I’m the voice of reason in the Cassavechia family. Stuck between Kate Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, my role is to be the red-haired dose of reality. Every family has a tie that binds, and if it wasn’t for me, we’d only get together at Christmas for deli turkey slices.

It’s not that our family didn’t want to be close. Sugar and I are far apart in age—five years—and Mom was always too busy working at the diner and taking in sewing to be a mom. Our father died when I was young; Sugar barely remembers him. Mom remarried, but husband #2 left for destinations unknown in the middle of the night when I was eight. I thought Mom would be upset, but she said “Tough shit”, and that was the extent of her mourning process for husband #2. I can’t even remember his name because she never speaks of him. Military brats know things can change on a dime, and we learn to accept a lot, either with therapy or without.