Sunrise Ranch - Carolyn Brown Page 0,13

unless you’re the highest bidder.”

He chuckled. “But I will keep trying until the very last second. Bring home a couple of steaks, and I’ll grill them for us tonight.”

“There are two in the fridge”—she waved over her shoulder—“that I bought in Claude last evening.”

“Y’all have fun,” he called out just as she slammed the door of her truck.

She gave him a thumbs-up sign.

“What in the hell have I done?” she moaned as she drove the short distance from the bunkhouse to the ranch house. “I haven’t been that drunk in years. It’s a wonder I didn’t do something totally stupid, like have sex with him.”

She took a quick shower and washed her hair, dried off in a hurry, and threw on a pair of clean jeans and a shirt. She usually let her hair dry naturally, but that afternoon she used a blow dryer before she whipped it up in a ponytail. Her phone rang just as she picked up her lipstick.

“Where are you?” she asked when she saw Abby Joy’s name pop up on the screen. “I thought y’all said thirty minutes. I’ve been ready for a while now.”

“We just passed the cemetery,” Abby Joy said.

“I’m headed out now. You don’t even have to honk.” She ended the call and hurriedly put on her lipstick.

She’d just picked up her purse when she remembered that she hadn’t fed the dogs, so she hurried back inside and filled their bowl with dry food. She thought her head would explode when she bent over and hoped that she’d remembered to refill the aspirin bottle that she carried in her purse. She took her time crossing the yard, but her head was still pounding when she got into the backseat of her sister’s van.

“You’re flushed like you’ve been runnin’ around in circles,” Shiloh said.

“I don’t think it’s from runnin’.” Abby Joy shook her head as she backed the van out of the driveway. “She wasn’t in church this morning, and she’s glowing. I heard someone say that she was at the Sugar Shack last night and got into a little catfight with Sandy Hamilton. I betcha they were arguing over some good-lookin’ cowboy, and our sister won. That look on her face”—Abby Joy looked up at her in the rearview—“tells me she brought that cowboy home with her, and the two of them had sex.”

Shiloh turned around in her seat as far as the seat belt would allow and stared at her youngest sister. “Is that true? Who was it? Is he still in the house? What is Rusty goin’ to think of that?” She fired off questions too fast for anyone to keep up with.

Bonnie shook her head and then grabbed it with both hands. “I don’t kiss and tell. No one is in the house or was last night. I don’t think I need Rusty’s permission to bring a man home if I want to. After all, in six months the ranch will belong to me, and he’ll be working for me if I decide to keep it.”

What was the matter with her anyway? She had no intentions of keeping the ranch. The moment it was in her hands, she planned to have a Realtor put a sign out beside the road announcing that it was for sale.

“What makes you think he’ll stick around? If you decide to stick around, you’d better be putting out some feelers for a new foreman,” Shiloh said.

While Bonnie was mulling that over in her head, Abby Joy spoke up. “You went home with someone, didn’t you? No one glows like you are right now if they haven’t had sex for the first time since Christmas.” She glanced up at her youngest sister in the rearview mirror again.

“Or unless they’re pregnant,” Shiloh said. “The both of you are glowing. I’m beginning to feel left out. Y’all are going to have babies that will grow up together, and my poor little children will be so much younger that they’ll get picked on by their older cousins.”

Bonnie wanted children someday, but not right now. She had some heavy decisions to make about her life, and a pregnancy at this point would complicate the hell out of things. Her upbringing had taught her that when she got ready to have kids she would settle down in one place. She damn sure wouldn’t jerk them out of school in the middle of a semester. Bonnie had lost count after twenty at how many schools she’d attended from kindergarten through graduation.

“You