Page 490 of Summer Heat
“If you give me any woman to start a war, it better be this one,” I sneered in his face. I remember the stale stench of whiskey and cigars as I turned my back on him, leaving the knife where it was. With the tip of it stabbing the shoulder of the enemy’s daughter. The shoulder her father’s large hand was clenched around tightly.
His pride and joy, and one and only heir.
I didn’t think he’d ever have the balls to take her and offer her to me.
“A gift?” Daniel questions with his brows raised and then picks up the photo.
“Yes,” I answer him impatiently, quick to hide my depravity.
The photo of the one thing I asked for—Aria Talvery.
“In exchange for a war … she’s mine.”
* * *
Carter’s story, MERCILESS, is next.
Read now!
MARRIAGE MATERIAL
Barbara Samuel
Chapter One
Lance Forrest hit Red Creek, Colorado, much the same way as he always did—radio blaring so loud it seemed as if his car were floating on the sound. Rock and roll, naturally. Through the windows blew a light, dry mountain wind, combing playful fingers through his always too-long hair. He breathed the air deep, all the way to the bottom of his lungs, smelling the sharply evocative mix of sunlight and crushed pine needles on earth just faintly damp.
He’d been living in Houston, where the air weighed three hundred pounds per square inch, and nothing could have been finer than the sweet mountain air of home. He hung his elbow out the window, feeling a faint hint of September bite. The aspens, shaking their gold-coin leaves against a sky the color of a little girl’s Easter ribbon, already showed autumn had arrived.
Red Creek wasn’t much of a town. Barely three thousand people if you didn’t count the tourists and skiers and the new crop of rich folks building million dollar “retreats” on enormous parcels of land buried in the trees. Lance didn’t. Not many of them stayed year-round. Even fewer had the faintest clue what Colorado really meant.
As he reached the outskirts of town, he noticed a few changes—the grocery store had been revamped to look like any big-time supermarket. A brand-name pizza parlor camped next to the lone motel. Next to the old drugstore, where Lance had spent many hours over ice-cream sodas, a gourmet coffee shop and French bakery offered upscale breakfast goodies.
Not so bad. It would be unrealistic to expect the place to stay completely preserved year after year. Lance could live with a few changes. Cheerfully, he waved to everyone he saw, grinning at the double takes they did at his car.
His car. It was a beauty, all right. A 1965 Ford Fairlane, silver-gray, with white walls and an engine designed when gas was a quarter a gallon. It rumbled like a street rod as he ambled up Main Street, the engine purring even at nine thousand feet above sea level. It was his pride and joy, this car, fully restored down to the last detail.
His father would have loved it.
Glancing in the rearview mirror, Lance saw the black-and-white sheriff’s car that had fallen in behind him. He grinned. Right on time. Sheriff Holloran never let him get past the Kwick Shop without a tail, and it hardly would have felt like a proper homecoming without the escort. Holloran no doubt hoped to catch him swigging from an open beer, but not even Lance was fool enough to drink and try to navigate the mountain passes over which he’d driven. He half wished he had one now, though, just to nettle Holloran. The old man must have missed Lance after so long a time—who else would give him so much to do?
At the traffic light by the courthouse, Lance lifted his green bottle of soda pop, and waved at the sheriff over his shoulder. Damn, it was good to be home.
Even if it was for a funeral.
* * *
Tamara Flynn wiped glasses desultorily and glanced at the clock. One more hour and she was free. She put the glass neatly in its place on the rubber matting behind the bar and turned to pick up another, trying to hi
de a yawn by lowering her head.
Not that anyone would notice. There were only a handful of customers at the Wild Moose Inn this early in the day. A pair of retirees had taken up permanent residence over a backgammon board in the booth in the corner. A closemouthed traveling salesman who drove through Red Creek on Mondays and Fridays on his way to and from Denver, nursed his single beer. A handful of construction workers, off for three days to mark the passing of old man Forrest—he’d dropped dead of a heart attack right at this bar, one hand on a whiskey, the other reaching for a waitress’s behind—played pool in the back room.
Late afternoons were always like this—slow and lazy. Tamara used the time to prepare the bar for the late shift, stocking the cooler full of bottled beer, and making fresh gallons of Bloody Marys and margaritas for the crowd that would come in later for the buffalo steaks, venison stew and antelope burgers that had made the place famous for twenty-five years.
Tending bar in an eccentric mountain bar and restaurant wasn’t everyone’s idea of a great job, but for Tamara, it was perfect. It let her squeeze in a half schedule of accounting classes at the community college every morning before she arrived at eleven, and let her off in time to fix dinner for her son, Cody, and spend some time with him before he went to bed.
A lock of hair escaped the fat band she used to hold it back, and Tamara took a second to tuck the errant strand back in. She glanced at the salesman’s beer. He nursed one for almost an hour, and never had a second, but habits might change. This one hadn’t. The beer was still half-full.
