Lone Star Blues. Delores Fossen
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“There was a bra and a dress on the front porch this morning.”
Obviously, Lucian had missed the strappy silver shoes. “They’re mine.” Dylan said it with as much cockiness as he could manage. It also had more than a smidge of anger since he wasn’t especially happy with Lucian right now.
“You’ve started cross-dressing?” Lucian managed some cockiness of his own.
“Yeah, I started it right about the time you decided to get me to take a vow of celibacy when I was drunk.”
“A vow you’ve already broken. There’s a naked or seminaked woman in your bedroom, isn’t there?”
Since Lucian almost certainly knew the answer to that, Dylan went with the truth. “Yeah, but I don’t know who she is, and I didn’t have sex with her. I’m figuring you planted her there. Maybe even paid her.”
Lucian gave him a flat look. “I wouldn’t have to plant or pay. Naked women gravitate toward you and your bed. I’ve even heard there’s a Dylan Granger Sex Bingo Game being played around the county.”
Sadly, that last part was true.
Tiffany Kelly, a cocktail waitress at the Longhorn Bar, had indeed started a bingo game that involved sex categories—specifically sex categories with Dylan—and she had distributed variations of the cards to women around town. The one card he’d seen had things on it like give Dylan a BJ, Dylan gives you a thigh hickey and a double orgasm from Dylan to you. Apparently, once a woman had her card filled, Tiffany would give them a drink on the house.
So far, there’d been four winners.
Okay, there were five, but one of them had cheated. No way had Susan Finkley had two orgasms since he’d had to work for nearly an hour to give her just one.
While Dylan wasn’t especially proud of those winners or the game itself, it was obvious Lucian was only bringing it up to take the attention off the fact that he’d been a dick. A busy one. Because while he was riling Dylan with this conversation, he was also answering an email. And ignoring the three lights that were flashing on his office phone. Apparently, Dylan wasn’t the only person who wanted to have words with Lucian this morning.
“I didn’t have sex with the woman in my bedroom,” Dylan repeated once he got his teeth unclenched. “But even if I had, there’s no way in hell I’d let you hold me to a promise that I made while I was drunk.”
“You didn’t just make the promise to me. You sent a copy to Mom and your lawyer.”
Well, shit. Dylan didn’t care about his lawyer knowing. He’d sent her drunk texts before. Heck, he’d had sex with her, too.
But their mom, Regina, could be a problem.
She was always nudging him to quit sleeping around and find Ms. Right. This was despite her own failed marriage that’d happened nearly two decades ago. Apparently, his mother wore a pair of massive invisible rose-colored glasses when it came to love and such. Dylan tended to see things a lot clearer than she did. Ironic because her marriage had been to an asshole. Dylan’s had been to, well, a woman who wasn’t an asshole.
Jordan.
Dylan hated how she just kept popping into his head. Even the remnants of the booze-haze didn’t stop it. Neither did sleep. Time. Or anything else he’d tried.
He went closer to Lucian’s desk and leaned in so that his brother wouldn’t miss a word or any of the ice-ray glare he was giving him. “I don’t care if I sent that text to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, it’s not a binding agreement. And it was pretty low-down and dirty for you to come up with it.”
Lucian quit typing on his computer keyboard only long enough to spare him a glance. “It wasn’t my idea. It was yours.”
Dylan just rolled his eyes because there was no way he would believe that.
“It started off as a friendly conversation between Lawson and you,” Lucian continued after he huffed. “And Lawson mentioned your reputation around town and the sex bingo. Folks call you the cowboy rake, you know?”
Yeah, he was well aware of that, too, though Dylan always tried to make sure that a commitment was never on the table, or in the bed, when it came to sex. He always hoped that would lessen the chances of a broken heart, but he knew it had happened a time or two.
“How the heck did all of this lead to my celibacy?” Dylan pressed. He actually remembered snippets of the conversation from the night before, but the logic behind it—if there had ever been logic, that is—was lost in the clomping stampede that was still going on in his head.
“I tried to convince Lawson that you could give up sex if you really wanted to do that,” Lucian went on. “He laughed. Actually, everyone in the Longhorn laughed. A lot. That’s when you got mad and said you’d show them, that you’d make a celibacy vow. Lawson’s the one who pressed for the vow to have consequences when you failed.”
Clearly, he needed to have a chat with Lawson for egging him on to do something this stupid.
“So, who came up with the charity donation?” Dylan demanded. “And are there any other specifics that I don’t know about?”
Another shrug. “You’d have to ask Lawson. That’s about the time I left, and Lawson and you were still hashing things out.” Lucian’s huff was louder and more impatient this time. “Look, I’ve got three hours of work that I need to do in the next twenty minutes. Just finish sobering up, deal with the woman in your bedroom and don’t miss the meeting you’ve got first thing tomorrow morning with the new feed supplier.”
Oh, he was sober all right, and Dylan didn’t need a reminder about the meeting since he had been the one to set it up. Lucian never seemed to remember that he didn’t run the ranch 95 percent of the time. Dylan did. But that was an annoyance for another day. Today, he needed to deal with the naked woman right after he spoke to Lawson.
Dylan took out his phone, called Lawson, but it went straight to voice mail. Not really a surprise. After all, it was the morning after his bachelor party, and Dylan was betting Lawson had gotten as shit-faced as he had. Also, it was possible Lawson would be unable to recall what’d actually happened. If so, Dylan might never discover if the rodeo payout held some other special level of hell he didn’t know about. He wanted any and all specifics that he could pass on to his mother when she called.
Which she’d already done.
That’s when Dylan saw the five missed calls from her on his screen. He’d had his phone on silent, but it had only been three minutes in between the time when he’d sent out the celibacy video and her first call.
“Remember, you’ll need to apologize to Walter Ray,” Lucian threw out there. “Maybe send him a bottle of scotch to smooth things over. He favors single malt.”
Dylan only knew one Walter Ray. “Judge Walter Ray Turley?”
“That’s the one,” Lucian verified with a layer of smart-assery in his tone.
Dylan got a jolt of more memories, and these were the clearest yet. Walter Ray had shown up at the bachelor party, but things had gotten a little ugly when the subject of the Dylan Granger Sex Bingo had come up.
Because Walter Ray’s daughter, Melanie, was one of the winners.
The judge hadn’t approved. Dylan hadn’t approved of the threats that Walter Ray had doled out. Threats involving neutering or a shovel to the head if Dylan didn’t “put a ring on it.” His brother Lawson and his cousins Garrett and Roman had broken things up before they got ugly, and Walter Ray had stormed out.
“We do business with plenty of Walter Ray’s friends and family,” Lucian went on. “Best not to let this sort of thing fester.”
It was already past the festering point. About three months ago, Dylan had gone out with Melanie, and they’d run hot and heavy for a couple of weeks. Longer than most of Dylan’s