The Deputy's Bride & Sitting Pretty Read online

  Two brand-new stories in every volume…twice a month!

  Duets Vol. #35

  Featured authors are Liz Ireland, who creates “sassy characters, snappy dialogue and rip-roaring adventures…” says Romantic Times, and popular historical writer Cheryl Anne Porter, who always delivers “a funny ride—a roller coaster of fun and adventure.”—Romance Communications

  Duets Vol. #36

  Voted Storyteller of the Year twice by Romantic Times, Silhouette writer Carol Finch “presents her fans with rollicking, wild adventures…and fun from beginning to end.” Also making their Duets debut is the writing team of Selina Sinclair, who writes “a fast-paced, funny and spicy…novel.” —Women’s Fiction Exchange

  Be sure to pick up both Duets volumes today!

  The Deputy’s Bride

  LIZ IRELAND

  Sitting Pretty

  CHERYL ANNE PORTER

  Contents

  The Deputy’s Bride

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Sitting Pretty

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  The Deputy’s Bride

  LIZ IRELAND

  “Let’s do it!”

  “What?” Cody couldn’t believe what he had just heard from Ruby’s lips.

  “Let’s lose these do-gooder brothers of mine and let ’em think we’ve gone wild.”

  “How are we going to lose them when they’re ten feet away?”

  “The bathroom trick,” Ruby replied. “I’ll go to the ladies’ room, and while Buck and Farley are loitering around the lobby, playing pinball and pretending not to be following us, you go get the car and take it to the theater’s emergency exit. I’ll pretend I left my purse under my seat and sneak back into the theater and voilà! We escape!”

  Cody shook his head. “This is what you dream about in your free time?”

  She wriggled impatiently. “Will you do it?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Why do I have the feeling I’ll regret this?”

  She laughed. “You won’t. I promise, Cody Tucker, this will be the best night of your life!”

  Dear Reader,

  In a small town, a reputation can be a hard thing to shake. Book two of my Lone Star Lawmen trilogy deals with two Heartbreak Ridge natives, both with very different—polar opposite, in fact—reputations!

  Cody Tucker is a shy sheriff’s deputy…the last person on earth a notorious town hell-raiser like Ruby Treadwell should be interested in. So why, suddenly, is Ruby wheedling the handsome deputy into spending Friday nights alone in jail with her?

  I hope you enjoy reading Cody and Ruby’s story as much as I enjoyed making them send shockwaves through their tiny lovelorn town. And as you’ve probably guessed, Cody’s heartbroken brother, Cal, is due for a romance of his own next month in The Cash-Strapped Cutie!

  Best wishes,

  Books by Liz Ireland

  HARLEQUIN DUETS®

  14—SEX AND THE SINGLE COWPOKE

  22—THE LOVE POLICE

  33—THE SHERIFF AND THE E-MAIL BRIDE (Lone Star Lawmen I)

  1

  “THAT GAL’S drivin’ me plum crazy!” Cap Murphy, owner of the Chugalug saloon, looked as if his eyes might bug right out of his head. “If’n you don’t get her out of here this second, I swear to you, Cody, I’m gonna wring her neck!”

  In measured response, Deputy Cody Tucker pushed back his hat brim and surveyed the chaotic scene at the Chugalug.

  He’d never seen such a ruckus, even in this broken-down old booze trap. Bruce Springsteen—the only non-country and western option on the jukebox—was pumped up so high, he could hardly think. Added to Bruce’s caterwauling were the cheers and jeers and hand-clapping of a score of soused patrons. Red-blooded adult men, who normally saw fit to raise their voices only when working cattle or watching pro football, pumped their fists in the air and howled like teens at a rock concert. The whole building thumped. And it wasn’t just the noise that drowned out reason. A confettilike spray of Cheddar goldfish and salted pretzels rained through the air, accompanied by whoops and wolf whistles.

  You should have become a rancher, Cody scolded himself. A rancher had to deal with animals. Animals were ornery. People were impossible.

  And if he needed evidence of that fact, all he had to do was glance at the cause of all the commotion—Ruby Treadwell, who, standing atop one of Cap’s pool tables, was performing the most bizarre-looking tap dance Cody had ever witnessed. Her hops and grinds created a cross between coochy-coo come-hither sexiness and downright youthful exuberance, but Cody had to admit it was an amazing display. Amazingly nutty, in his opinion, but stunning. Mostly because Ruby Treadwell had a stunning body. Compact, yes, but curved in all the right places. Her short black hair was spiky and boyish, but with a lock or two pin-curled against her dusky cheeks, reminding him of one of those twenties flapper vamps his grandfather would sometimes go into rhapsodies about—rhapsodies that never failed to bring a slap upside the head from Grandma.

  In fact, as he gaped at Ruby Treadwell strutting her crazy stuff and felt a whoop building in his throat, Cody knew he could use a slap upside the head himself.

  “That girl needs to be locked up, I tell you!” Cap yelled over the cacophony of Springsteen and rednecks.

  Cody couldn’t agree more. But to his way of thinking, the cell Ruby needed was the kind with padded walls.

  For an instant, those shiny dark eyes zoomed in on him, taking in his brown uniform from head to toe, and she sent him a long, suggestive wink to roars of approval from her enthusiastic, inebriated public.

  Cody looked quickly away, wanting nothing more than to get the heck out of there. And he didn’t particularly relish the idea of having Ruby in tow when he left. “Aw, Cap, I don’t see anything particularly, um, out of order here.”

  A goldfish thwacked him on the head and fell to his shirt collar.

  Caps’s bug eyes bulged in outrage. “Nothing out of order? Look what she’s doing to my place!”

  Cody nodded sympathetically at the mess. There were enough crackers on the floor to feed the world’s parrot population for a year. “But Ruby’s not the one throwing things.”

  “Those boots of hers are ruining my pool table!”

  Cap was right. Ruby’s trademark red boots weren’t exactly treading daintily on the green felt surface. He would have to do something, although he suddenly realized he was having a hard time keeping his eyes off Ruby’s shapely legs. Between the shin-high boots and her teeny miniskirt, there was plenty to gawk at.

  “The gal’s been comin’ in here every Saturday night and carryin’ on like this,” Cap barked insistently. “Last week she dumped a pitcher of Dos Equis over my waitress, who quit on me! She’s a menace and a hell-raiser.”

  As if Ruby Treadwell being the town hell-raiser was a big news flash in Heartbreak Ridge.

  “She’s a shame to the whole Treadwell family!” Cap raved.

  That was the real puzzler. Ruby’s four older brothers were regular pillars of the community. Churchgoers. Ex-high school football stars. Hard workers who, ever since their father’s death from cancer years before, had taken on the burden of both the sprawling family ran
ch and the rearing of their little sister. One enterprise was a rousing success. The other…well. She’d managed to offend even the owner of the Chugalug. Enough said.

  He hated to take her in, if for no other reason than he hated to bother the rest of the Treadwell family, who he had all the respect in the world for. Of course, it was hard not to respect men who each looked as if they could best a rhinoceros in hand-to-hand combat. But beyond that, they’d been fairly nice to him over the years. In fact, Buck Treadwell had sold him some chickens just a few months earlier.

  You can’t let chickens stand in the way of your duty! he scolded himself.

  He sighed, trying one last time to appease Cap. “But you’ve got to admit, she’s not—”

  Just then, the she in question tossed off her shirt, demonstrating for every single soul at the Chugalug the glories of WonderBra. Red satin WonderBra.

  A whole new wave of excitement rolled through the male crowd, and Cap quivered with rage. “You see? You see?”

  Unfortunately, Cody saw. Only Herculean effort enabled him to tear his gaze away from Ruby’s very shapely, pert breasts and to view her objectively as a lawbreaker. Creating a public disturbance, his uncle, Sheriff Sam Weston, would call it.

  But having it and flaunting it might be a more accurate name for the display. Who would have guessed such delights could lurk beneath a plain T-shirt?

  “If that gal removes one more article of clothing,” Cap declared, “she’s gonna incite a riot!”

  Or else cause poor Cap to have a stroke.

  “Okay, stand aside,” Cody called in his most authoritative voice.

  Cody had been through police training. He had been a deputy under his uncle for a year. He came from a long, proud line of West Texas lawmen. His uncle Sam was the sheriff, and his father was a retired Texas Ranger. But every time Cody had to step in and assert his authority, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he was an imposter, like a kid dressed up as the Lone Ranger for Halloween suddenly plunked down into the gritty reality of keeping the peace.

  Maybe if he’d been a deputy in a bigger place, it wouldn’t have been so agonizing. Houston or someplace where he would have been handling the problems of strangers and could work up some objectivity. In Heartbreak Ridge, population sixty-four, he knew everybody, and what’s more, he mostly liked everybody, too. It made for awkwardness. How was he supposed to give a speeding ticket to the baby-sitter who’d taught him to sing “I’m a Little Teapot” when he was four? Or lock a friend from high school in a jail cell for fighting? Or slap fines on businessmen whose stores he’d been patronizing since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, the same men who’d kept jars of Tootsie Rolls on their desks for him when he was a kid?

  And here was another case in point, he thought as he pushed through the crowd. He’d known Ruby Treadwell forever—not intimately, of course, and thank heavens for that!—but enough to know that she was more bark than bite. And now he’d have to talk to her brothers, who he respected, and explain all this to them.

  Maybe he could leave out the bit about the WonderBra….

  “Well, if it isn’t Wyatt Earp!” Ruby shouted in her foghorn voice.

  Cody took a deep breath. “You’d better come with me, Ruby.”

  She planted her hands on her hips, tossed her head and laughed. “It took you forever to get here! What’d you do, ride in on an old nag, Wild West style?”

  Cody shook his head and sighed. Lord, he didn’t want to be doing this. “Get your shirt and let’s go.”

  He was pummeled with a spray of pretzels.

  A rancher, he thought, shaking the snack food off his collar. Why the heck hadn’t he become a rancher?

  Ruby lifted her hands in surrender and spoke to her disappointed public. “Sorry, boys, I’m being hauled off to the pokey.”

  She accepted Cody’s hand, a touch that affected him more than it should have. Not to mention his gaze seemed to be drawn instinctively toward Ruby’s WonderBra-enhanced cleavage.

  At ground zero, Ruby planted her hands on her slim hips. “Mr. Earp wants me to put my shirt on, boys. Which one of you fatheads took it?”

  The shirt was not forthcoming.

  “Just give the shirt back,” Cody said. “Ya’ll don’t need a souvenir.”

  The sea of familiar faces stared stonily at Cody as if he were the world’s biggest spoilsport.

  Cody waited a moment—praying the shirt would be forthcoming—then reluctantly tugged Ruby’s arm. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “Aren’t you going to handcuff me?” Ruby sassed him. “I thought all you lawmen types were into bondage.”

  More jeers and hoots.

  He gritted his teeth. Unlike Ruby, he hated being the center of attention. For one thing, he tended to blush like a baby, which was an irresistible cause for ribbing from those who were inclined to heckle him.

  “This way, Ruby,” he said, ducking his head.

  The crowd shuffled after them as far as the front door, headed by an only slightly soothed Cap. “Cody, you tell your uncle I don’t wanna see that gal in here again. Ever!”

  Ruby turned and twiddled her fingers at them all. “Hear that, boys? This was my farewell performance!”

  “Bye, Ruby!” someone yelled as Cody led her to his old police cruiser that had Heartbreak Ridge Sheriff’s Department in gold lettering on the door. “We’ll bake you a cake with a file in it!”

  “Don’t you worry, Bubba,” Ruby shouted. “They’re just gonna keep me in the hoosegow till I sober up!”

  Cody frowned. Ruby might be loud. She might be only partially clad. But she was also sober as a judge; he’d bet money on it. In Heartbreak Ridge, where murders happened on Perry Mason reruns and burglaries were usually a matter of bored kids stealing watermelons, drunk and disorderly was the lawman’s stock in trade. Disorderly as Ruby was, he knew she wasn’t inebriated.

  She balked when he opened the passenger side door for her. “Shouldn’t I ride in back, like a prisoner?” She sounded offended, as if she wasn’t getting her money’s worth as a taxpayer.

  Crazy. In Heartbreak Ridge, the consensus on Ruby had always been that her fiddle wasn’t tuned right. Cody was hearing the squawking firsthand. “We save the back seat for real criminals,” he informed her.

  Ruby cocked a glance at the pristine back seat covers then looked at him, grinning. “I guess this town’s not exactly Gotham City, is it? In fact, I’ll bet if Bruce Wayne lived here, the Batmobile would be up on cinder blocks in his driveway.”

  In spite of himself, he felt his lips tug into a smile in response. Not only that, he found his gaze straying to that red bra again.

  He went to the driver’s side, trying to get a grip on himself. He hoped Sam was at the sheriff’s office when he got there so he wouldn’t be forced to sit around with Ruby for long. She was just too…too much.

  He got in and hazarded a glance at her—she was grinning at him but momentarily quiet—and suddenly had the feeling that he was shut in a confined space with a wild, unpredictable animal. An unpredictable female animal who was only partially clad.

  He reached into the back seat and brought up a blanket. “Here, you can cover yourself with this.”

  She blinked innocently at him. “But I’m not cold.”

  “Put it on anyway.”

  To his dismay, she laughed. “Far be it from me to offend your delicate sensibilities, Deputy!” She draped the heavy wool blanket around her shoulders like a Southern belle arranging a lacy shawl. “There. That better?”

  The blanket was around her shoulders, all right, but her red bra was still poking out. The creamy skin of her breasts seemed almost to glow in the moonlight.

  “Fine.” Cody bit out the words, starting the engine. As usual, he had to coax it for a while before it would go.

  Ruby laughed teasingly. “Cody Tucker, the demure deputy!”

  He pulled the car out of the Chugalug’s parking lot, barely resisting the urge to spin his tires in the dirt and g
ravel and peel out of the place like a teenager. Good heavens, what was the matter with him?

  He sighed. He wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, that’s what. Paperwork, he could do that. He could even manage handing out the occasional speeding ticket that was the sheriff office’s bread and butter. But hauling half-naked girls around wasn’t his specialty.

  At his lack of response to her teasing, Ruby crossed her arms and flopped back against the seat, then reached forward and flipped down the visor mirror. She shrieked.

  The piercing sound curdled his blood, and Cody slammed on the brakes.

  Ruby screamed again as she was thrown forward and back against the movement of the car. “Are you crazy?”

  “You were the one who yelled,” Cody said. “Is something wrong?”

  “Of course there is!” she snapped. “I look like Vampira with a buzz cut!”

  “Good grief.” He rolled his eyes and stepped on the accelerator. The car shuddered, then lurched forward. “Is that all? You practically busted my eardrum.” Not to mention, from the genuine horror in that shriek of hers, he’d expected there to be a tyrannosaur in the rearview a` la Jurassic Park.

  “All?” She clucked her tongue as she rubbed the back of her hand against her lips, which only succeeded in smudging her scarlet lipstick all over her face. “I look like a freak!”

  He had to hide a grin. “Nobody was looking at your face.”

  She chuckled almost happily. “Say, I hope I’m gonna be in jail for a good long time.”

  “Why should you be?”

  She gaped at him. “Why?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m drunk!”

  He laughed. “Sure, I’ll bet you’ve had at least two cups of coffee.”

  Her jaw dropped open. “Try five whiskey sours!”

  “You weren’t even weaving when you walked.”

  She jabbed her thumb toward the rear window. “Didn’t you get a load of how I was acting back there? You think that was the performance of a sober person?”

  “A sober lunatic, maybe.”