Hotter than Texas (Pecan Creek) - By Tina Leonard Page 0,4
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