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

“Tyler Braxton.” He stuck out his hand. “But
everyone calls me Brax.”

She shook it with a firm grip of soft, warm
flesh.

Leaning closer, she said softly, “Mr. Doodle
didn’t mean to embarrass you. He’s really a sweet old
pussycat.”

“Oooh, she called me sweet,” Doodle cooed. “I
think I’m gonna faint.” Then he waggled his bushy white eyebrows.
“Now that you’ve been introduced, can we ask him what he calls
his
tallywhacker?”

Brax didn’t know whether to laugh or get the
hell out. He was the closest he’d been to blushing since elementary
school when he’d gotten caught sending Mary Alice Turner a love
note.

Simone sat back and folded her arms beneath
her full breasts. Ogling women wasn’t one of his pastimes, but Brax
couldn’t help himself. He looked. Briefly, very briefly. But one
look was enough to make him lose his voice again.

“Mr. Doodle,” she chided. “You really have to
stop that.” She nodded at Carl and patted his hand still curled
around the water glass. “Carl is apoplectic over what
I
said, and Brax”—said with a gentle pucker of her lips—“is going to
leave town thinking we have no manners here in Goldstone.”

Brax wasn’t sure he could think at all. The
woman simply bowled him over. Beautiful and sexy, yes, but her
smile, her sincere flattery of two old geezers, the way she said
his name with that kiss-me pucker, those things held far more punch
than the stunning package God had wrapped her in.

“Thank you for that delicious glass of wine,
Mr. Doodle, but my mother always says a lady shouldn’t overstay her
welcome. So I’m off.”

She stood and gathered her books in her arms
before Brax could make a move to stop her. With a smile for the
room at large, she sashayed out the door, leaving the bar in a dull
vacuum.

Silence reigned in the small saloon at least
a full minute before Brax found his voice. “Just who exactly was
that woman?”

Carl busied himself with a slug of beer.

“Simone Chandler’s our local porn queen,”
Doodle elucidated as he sidled back behind the bar.

Brax put his palm on the edge of the table
and pushed back to look at the man over his shoulder. “Porn queen?”
She was the furthest thing from sleaze he’d ever seen. And being a
cop, he’d seen a lot.

The bartender nodded and beamed a toothy
smile.

“She doesn’t write porn,” Carl muttered.

“So she’s a
writer
, not an actress.”
Though most didn’t refer to porn stars as actresses.

“Yeah. It’s called
erotica
.” Carl’s
face flushed an even deeper red.

“Isn’t that another name for housewife porn?”
Brax had read the description somewhere. He couldn’t imagine the
beautiful Simone penning classless drivel.

“No. Her stuff is very”—Carl hesitated as if
searching for the best descriptor—“tasteful.”

Doodle snickered. “Oh, it’s tasty, all right.
The wife loves reading Simone’s little stories. They get her pump
primed, if you know what I mean.”

Brax was sure he didn’t want to know. The man
was seventy if he was a day, and the idea of any pump priming
involving the Doodles was as disturbing as advising Carl on how to
communicate with Maggie.

It was Carl’s reaction to Simone and the
telltale stain on his face that unsettled the beer in Brax’s
stomach. Being a sheriff, Brax listened to what people didn’t say
in addition to what they did. He watched for more subtle nuances as
he asked, “So, how do I get to read one of these ‘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 they’d fall madly in love during his short visit?

Not likely. Love took much longer to grow,
and even then, you couldn’t count on your partner to completely
accept everything about you. Nor to stick around when the going got
tough or your life imploded.

There was no question that Simone would ever
leave Goldstone. Though she’d only lived here a little over three
years, this town had become her haven. She’d lived in a lot of
places, but Goldstone was the first she’d ever called home—much to
her mother’s complete and total horror when Simone told her about
Goldstone. “Oh my heavens, you’re trailer trash,” she’d gasped with
shock, followed by a weird little sound that might have been
retching.

So, what about a short, casual fling? Simone
liked sex. Sometimes she was very noisy during it. Too noisy.
Andrew, her ex-fiancé, had found it a little off-putting. All
right, she’d embarrassed the heck out of him. Men didn’t like women
who lost control of themselves. She should have listened to all her
mother’s lectures about excess and exuberance. The breakup had been
a bit demoralizing. Okay, it had been devastating and had badly
shaken her confidence in the sex department. She’d learned that you
had to know a man before you exposed that much of yourself,
figuratively and literally. Short and casual was definitely
out.

Still, she could fantasize. In fact,
fantasizing was what she did best. What was the old saying?
“Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach.”
For Simone, it
was
“Those who can’t, write.”
She made a darn good living
conjuring up fantasies in which her heroines enjoyed hot, noisy,
screaming sex and weren’t ashamed of it. And their men loved it.
Tyler Braxton provided excellent hero material. She could always
pretend he liked that sort of woman. Hmm, maybe she’d include him
in a short vignette she could post on the website as a teaser.

A shadow shifted in the chair to her left as
she stepped onto her sunporch.

“Hey there, pretty lady.”

Simone jumped and dropped her armload of
books, the screen door banging her butt.

“How did you get in here, Mr. Lafoote?” Darn.
She should have noticed his car parked across the road in front of
her neighbor’s trailer, but she’d been too preoccupied.

“The door was unlocked,” Jason answered
reasonably.

No one locked their doors in Goldstone. But
neither did anyone walk in uninvited. Not usually.

Jason Lafoote fancied himself a big-time
developer, but in Simone’s opinion, anyone who dreamed of turning
the Goldstone Hotel into a gambling resort had to be small
potatoes. Some of those baby potatoes with the yellow skins. In
fact, Jason’s skin was sort of jaundiced, and he was thin as a
scarecrow. The comparison maligned scarecrows everywhere. Jason
might have a brain, but it was definitely slimed.

“It’s late.” After nine o’clock. He’d killed
that pleasant, sensual buzz she’d gotten thinking about Brax. “I’m
ready to turn in for the night.” She didn’t mention the word
bed
. He might mistake it for an invitation.

He rose from the chair and glided across the
green indoor-outdoor carpeting to stop directly in front of her.
Moonlight gleamed in his eyes. “I could tuck you in.”

Yuk.
He’d taken her words for an
invitation anyway. Simone gave him a proper setdown. “No
thanks.”

She’d sidestepped him and put a hand on the
front doorknob before she remembered her books. They lay scattered
at his feet, but no way was she bending down to retrieve them, not
in her short skirt.

“Have you spoken with the judge about pushing
those permits through for me?” he asked, half turning to face
her.

That’s what he really wanted from her. The
awkward attempts at seduction were a disguise.

“I told you I wouldn’t talk to Della about
it.”

“I thought perhaps you’d reconsider when you
realized how much prosperity a renovated hotel could bring to this
town. All it would take is a few words from you and those permits
could materialize. The judge respects your opinion.”

The judge was her friend, and Simone wouldn’t
abuse a friendship, even if she’d believed in Jason’s dreams. She’d
seen pictures of the old hotel in its heyday back in the early part
of the century, before the gold ran out, before the flood and the
fire destroyed most of Goldstone. She’d fallen in love with the
stately winding staircase, the thick carpets covering the hardwood
and the graceful palms in huge pots. Turning it into a resort for
gamblers wouldn’t bring back those glory days. Besides, the people
of Goldstone already had prosperity, of a different kind.
Prosperity of the spirit.

“No one wants a resort here, Mr.
Lafoote.”

“Not even a beautiful young woman such as
yourself?” He licked his thin lips, his gaze touching on her
breasts, then lowering to her bare legs.

He had that eye-touching thing down to an
art, but if he ever laid a finger on her, she’d belt him. His gaze
creeped her out.

“Nope, not even me.”

“A lot of wealthy men would suddenly be part
of Goldstone’s landscape. Powerful men who know how to take care of
a lady.”

Gross.
The implication was clear.
“Does that smarmy, rich playboy act work with most women?”

He laughed. It didn’t reach his eyes.
“Simone, you’re the exception to the rule.”

“Maybe it’s because I really don’t need a man
to take care of me.”

He looked left, then right, the length of her
screened-in porch, and finally his eyes rested on the metal siding
of her trailer. “You could do so much better than this. I could
even see to it that you had a job at the hotel. Manager
perhaps.”

With a key to the executive suite? In which
Jason would reside? Not on your life. “I like my trailer just
fine.”

“You’re a jewel buried beneath Goldstone’s
dust. I can help you get out of this loserville.”

The image of this man shining up her jewels
was barfy. The slur on her beloved town just plain got her blood
boiling. “Goldstone didn’t have any losers until you came to
town.”

It was a mean thing to say, but the people of
Goldstone took her in when she hit rock bottom, and she’d never
forget that.

His eyes gleamed. “I like a woman with sharp
claws.”