LITMIR.BIZ

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your assessment of something any fool can see is a disaster, I thought—thought,” she said coldly, glaring at Travis and Caleb again, “that I could trust them.”

      “You can,” Travis said quickly. “We never—”

      “And,” Addison said, ignoring the interruption, “because I was also foolish enough to believe your brothers were my friends, I said, okay, I’d give the Ranch Guru five minutes of my time.”

      Jake wanted to laugh. Ridiculous, when he was so ticked off. Instead, he folded his arms over his chest.

      “How generous,” he growled.

      “Addison. Jake. You guys are both—”

      “Which is why,” Addison continued, with a withering glace at Caleb, “which is the only reason I came to this—this hail-the-conquering-hero party where I endured being hit on by every dumbass cowboy over the age of twelve, and the way the women looked at me, as if my sole purpose in life was to steal their homely, fat, drooling husbands.”

      Travis made a choking sound. Caleb rubbed his forehead. Jake had a hard time keeping from doing the same.

      “And I waited, patiently, for the main event.”

      “The what?” Jake said.

      “The main event, Captain. You. I waited and waited, and you finally showed up, but did your sainted sisters or your magnificent brothers introduce us?”

      “Our sisters don’t know anything about this,” Travis said. He looked around. “And could we take this in another room? We really don’t need an aud—”

      “I watched the three of you standing there, swilling beer—a disgusting beverage but then, what could anyone expect from Texans?”

      Dammit, Jake thought, the McDowell woman was some piece of work. Beautiful. Tough. And flawlessly delivering insult after insult, as if this whole thing wasn’t her fault.

      It was, of course, and he disliked her intensely, but he had to admire her for her guts.

      “Beer, from the bottle,” she added, with a visible shudder. “And you looked at me. Talked about me.” Addison extended her hand, poked Jake in the chest. He jumped in surprise. “Although actually, Captain, you didn’t look. You stared.”

      He felt heat rise in his face. “I did not stare.”

      “Oh, please! You stared. And when I got tired of it, tired of cooling my heels and waiting for you to come over, you know, do the polite thing, introduce yourself, shake my hand, I thought, okay, if he doesn’t have any manners, I do. So I gave you a little salute.”

      Jake frowned. The raised wineglass?

      “I even smiled.”

      Yes. Yes, she’d smiled, but—then she’d taken that slow, sexy sip of vino …

      “You didn’t so much as blink, so I drank a little wine to give you the chance to start moving in my direction.”

      Caleb cleared his throat.

      “Addison, if you’d calm down—”

      “I am calm,” she said coldly. “Very calm. And, by the way, the two of you are fired.”

      “Why fire them? I’m the one you’re ticked off at.”

      “Your DNA is their DNA. That’s good enough for me.”

      “That’s brilliant.”

      “It is, indeed.”

      “Well, that’s fine. Because if you’ve dumped my brothers, there’s no need for me to hold back.”

      Addison barked out a laugh.

      Jake’s mouth thinned.

      “That ranch you own? It’s worth exactly what you paid for it.” He smirked. “Unless, of course, you put a higher price on what you gave the poor sucker who left it to you than those services were truly worth—”

      Addison slapped his face.

      Hard.

      The imprint of her hand stood out on his cheek in crimson relief.

      “Oh, man,” Travis said, but the words were lost in the sound of a hundred shocked party guests dragging air into their lungs all at the same time.

      “No wonder your brothers want to keep you where they can see you,” she said. “You can’t be trusted in polite society.”

      His dumbfounded expression told her she’d just scored a perfect shot.

      Why hang around and ruin it?

      Addison turned her back and faced the crowd.

      “Move,” she said, and a path opened like the parting of the Red Sea.

      She stomped down that path … and stopped, halfway to the front door. What the hell, she thought, and she turned to face him one last time.

      “You’re also a nasty, egotistical, despicable jerk.”

      The crowd gasped again, then erupted in a frantic buzz of delighted whispers.

      She’d given Wilde’s Crossing enough to talk about for the next decade.

      So what?

      She was out of here. Not just the Wilde house. She was out of the town, out of the state of Texas.

      Back home, at least, she knew the enemy. She wouldn’t be taken in by a pair of brothers who looked like they’d stepped out of an old John Wayne movie, or by a man so tragically beautiful he’d made her heart ache.

      Someone stepped out in front of her. A Wilde sister, Emma or Lissa or whatever in hell her name was.

      “Miss McDowell. Please—”

      “It’s Ms. McDowell. And you have my deepest sympathy.”

      Addison stepped around the sister, yanked open the door and stepped into the night.

      Travis and Caleb watched her go.

      Then they looked at each other, grabbed Jake by the elbows and quick-marched him in the other direction, out the French doors that led to the patio.

      “You,” Caleb said, “are an effing idiot.”

      “You two are the idiots,” Jake snarled. “Thinking a woman like that could use her wiles to keep me in town—”

      “Her wiles,” Travis said to Caleb. “He thinks we set it up so Addison would use her wiles.” His dark blue eyes narrowed. “Nobody’s used their ‘wiles’ since the nineteenth century, Jacob. And even if she had wiles, do you really think we’d ask her to use them?”

      “Listen, I understand. You want me to hang around. And she’s a hot piece of—”

      “She’s our friend,” Caleb said coldly. “At least, she was, until you got your nose out of joint because you realized she wasn’t coming on to you.”

      Jake reddened.

      “Why would I want her to come on to me?”

      His brothers barked out matching laughs.

      “Okay, she’s good-looking. But she was only coming on to me to get me to work for her.”

      “Not even you can possibly believe that.”

      Jake thought about it. And felt his belly start to knot.

      “Okay. Maybe I, ah, maybe I overstated it, but—”

      “Here’s how it went down, Jake. You wanted her to come on to you. And when you found out she wasn’t, you were too damned ticked off to admit that was what you wanted, so you decided to accuse her of coming on to you.”

      “That,”

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