Hotter than Texas (Pecan Creek) - By Tina Leonard Page 0,3

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