Fool's Gold (A sexy funny mystery/romance, Cottonmouth Book 2) Read Free

‘little
stories?’”
    Carl slumped in his chair. Doodle answered
the question. “She’s got this really special website. You tell her
your fantasy in simple terms, all the details you want her to be
sure to include, then she writes a hot, hot story. The wife’s
always emailing her little snippets to work up.”
    Brax had never heard of anything like it.
“She writes custom pornography?”
    “It’s not pornography,” Carl snapped,
still concentrating on his beer.
    Why did it bother his brother-in-law so much
when Brax described her writing that way? A man didn’t blush like
that around a pretty woman unless his thoughts about her weren’t
pure.
    Damn. He did not want to believe Carl
was having impure imaginings about Simone Chandler. Or worse, that
he’d acted on them. Was Carl one of her customers?
    Brax had used his sister’s email as a reason
to head out of his hometown of Cottonmouth for a couple of weeks.
To gain a little perspective. A good man, a friend, had been
murdered; Brax blamed himself for not reading the warning signs. He
should have been able to stop it. That was his job, his obligation,
and his responsibility. One in which he’d failed. Miserably.
    Now he’d landed himself in the middle of
another mess. His sister’s marriage was on the rocks, and he’d met
the woman who might be responsible for Carl and Maggie’s
trouble.
    Simone Chandler couldn’t be more than thirty
years old, and Carl was pushing fifty-five. Imagining her in bed
with his brother-in-law was downright pornographic.
    He had to prove it wasn’t so. For his
sister’s sake. He owed Maggie an investigation.
    He turned to Doodle. “What’d you say that
website was?”
     
    * * * * *
     
    People not in the know thought the desert was
unbearably hot in the summertime. But Goldstone was high desert,
and during the day, July was a comfortable ninety-five degrees in
general. At night, the temperature dropped to a lovely mideighties.
There was no finer place on earth. Okay, the winters could be
bitingly cold, and the air so dry it hurt to breathe. Out in the
icy wind, a person’s bones creaked, but inside Simone’s trailer,
the pellet stove kept everything toasty warm. In the summer, you
couldn’t use an air conditioner because there wasn’t a lick of
moisture in the atmosphere with which to run it. But when the cacti
bloomed in the spring, my oh my, the desert was heaven on
earth.
    A warm summer breeze fluttered up Simone’s
skirt, flirted with her hair, and caressed her face like the
lightest of fingers. Earlier, she’d walked the four short blocks to
Flood’s End. Nothing was too far to walk to in Goldstone. She only
drove the truck when she had to shop in Bullhead thirty miles to
the north. Goldstone didn’t have a grocery store, only the minimart
on the highway at the edge of town.
    The walk home gave her a quiet moment to
think about euphemisms for tallywhacker. She needed something
scintillating, not the same old tired phrases. Her thesaurus was
completely useless. Of course, pondering tallywhackers renewed the
slight blush that had heated her face when Mr. Doodle brought the
subject up in front of Carl and his brother-in-law, Tyler Braxton.
Brax.
    Maggie Felman had been a fountain of
information about her brother. He was thirty-eight, divorced for
five years, no kids, no girlfriend, a good steady job and a minor
mortgage. Maggie, older by four years, used to beat him up when
they were kids until he got big enough to hit back. Which he never
did, Maggie had added. All in all, he was a well-rounded guy, but
Simone hadn’t expected him to be such a hunk. With an engaging
smile, short, semi-unruly blond hair, piercing blue eyes and
bulging biceps the size of sand dunes, the man set a woman’s heart
aflutter. He hadn’t even gotten mad when Mr. Doodle embarrassed him
with the tallywhacker question.
    Hunky Mr. Nice Guy with a sense of humor. His
sister was definitely setting the matchmaking stage here. Was she
hoping