Texas! Lucky Read Free Page A

after her in hot pursuit.
    Miss Prissy wasn't going to get away with brushing him off like that. He'd risked his life for her. Only good fortune and well-timed quick-stepping had prevented him from getting more than the tip of Jack Ed's knife.
    His eye was swollen nearly shut now, and his skull felt as if a drilling bit were going through it. He would look like hell for days on account of this ungrateful redheaded chippy.
    Redheaded? He thought back. Yeah, sorta red. Dark reddish-brown. Auburn .
    How was he going to explain his battered face to his mother and Chase, who just this morning had stressed to him the importance of keeping their noses absolutely clean? Tyler Drilling Company was faced with bankruptcy unless they could persuade the bank to let them pay only the interest on their note and roll over the principal for another six months at least. Lucky shouldn't be seen around town sporting a black eye. Who wanted to extend credit to a brawler?
    "Since Daddy died," Chase had said that morning, "everybody's been skeptical that you and I can run Tyler Drilling as well as he did."
    "Hell, it's not our fault the price of crude fell drastically and has stayed so damned low." It was an argument that didn't need voicing. The faltering oil market and its disastrous effect on the Texas economy weren't of their making, but they were suffering the consequences just the same. The equipment Tyler Drilling leased out had been so inactive over the last several months, they had joked about storing it in mothballs. The brothers were frantically trying to come up with an idea for diversification that would generate business and income. In the meantime the bank was becoming less and less tolerant of any outstanding loans. Though most of the board members were lifelong friends, they couldn't afford to be sympathetic indefinitely when so many banks across the nation, and particularly in Texas, were failing.
    "The best we can do," Chase had said, "is show them our intent to pay when we can, try to drum up business, and stay out of trouble."
    "That last remark is aimed at me, I guess."
    Chase had smiled good-naturedly at his younger brother. "Now that I'm settled down with a loving wife, you're the tomcat of the family. You're expected to sow a few wild oats."
    "Well, those days might be coming to a close," Lucky had remarked unhappily.
    His brother, shrewdly picking up on the veiled reference, asked, "How is Susan?"
    Being reminded of her now made Lucky groan. Or maybe he groaned because, when he turned the Mustang onto the entrance ramp of the interstate highway and pushed it through the forward gears, the cut across his belly pulled apart again and started to ache.
    "Damn that woman," he cursed as he floorboarded the convertible in order to close the distance between him and the winking taillights he was following.
    He wasn't sure what he was going to do when he actually caught her. Probably nothing more than demand an apology for the snooty way she'd treated him after he'd risked life and limb to protect her from sexual harassment.
    However, thinking back on the contemptuous way she'd looked him over, as if he were a piece of bubble gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe, he figured an apology wasn't going to come easily. She didn't seem the simpering type.
    Women. They were his bane and his delight. Couldn't live with them. Sure as hell couldn't live without them. He had vowed to abstain numerous times after particularly harrowing love affairs, but he knew it was a vow he'd never keep.
    He loved women—their clothes, their paraphernalia, their scent. He liked their giggles and their tears, and, even though it often drove him to distraction, their persistent attention to detail. He liked everything about them that made them different from himself, from their maddening habit of paying with change in favor of breaking a bill to the way their bodies were made. In Lucky's educated opinion, about the best thing God ever created was a woman's