Seduction of Saber (Saving the Sinners of Preacher's Bend #3)

Seduction of Saber

Jevenna Willow

Seduction of Saber

Saving the Sinners of Preacher’s
Bend

Jevenna Willow

Saving the Sinners of
Preacher’s Bend

series

(Book 1)

120 MPH

(Book 2)

Roundabout Road

(Book 3)

Seduction of Saber

(Book 4)

Maddy’s Dad

copyright ©2014

Jevenna Willow

All work in this book is made up in the mind of the author. No
names, dates, or places are real, and only in the imagination of its creator. I
thank you for respecting my work. No copying or reproducing of this book, in
any form, paper, digital, audio, visual is allowed without written permission
from the author.

Pirating author’s work is a crime, so please respect my years
of hard work. If you did not make a monetary purchase of this copy, you are in
violation of its copyright.

Cover art by Linda Kage

To Jaz, who loves a
‘cowboy’ as much as I do.

In the small town of Preacher’s Bend, doing something
beneath an educated person’s abilities was taboo. No matter how Julia Hillard
wanted to dress it up, then teach it to kill; the aged Tressle Boarding House was
the equivalent of calling a cat a tiger. And every day it loomed over her head like
an overfed, pompous, self-opinionated lap warmer waiting to be fed.

And every day the familiar quake started at her toes,
reaching right up to her knees.

She dumped the dregs of last night’s coffee down the
drain. Her sigh burned through her chest, figuring this wasn’t about to change,
no matter what she did today. Dust-covered windowpanes and spoilt linoleum, somehow,
in a roundabout way, left her feeling empty inside. Efforts at sprucing up the old
place hadn’t done her any good. Paint slapped on the clapboards just wasted one’s
time. A good dose of scrubbing and polishing didn’t achieve much with a house
this old. What the boarding house needed was a complete overhaul.

Damn. There was nothing that seemed capable of pulling
her from the doldrums toward potential stagnation—even here, the most sacred
place in all Preacher’s Bend. Odd, something should’ve stirred her into action;
pinched her arm to get her ass into high gear.

She should probably clean the windowpane; her eyes
fixated on the splatter from bird and occasional in-the-corner cobwebs. But her
heart wasn’t in this old place just yet. She’d eased into inevitable numbness,
almost dis-attached by disillusionment to her surroundings; disillusioned to
life, in a way. Her entire existence wasn’t supposed to have turned out this
way.

Petty shouldn’t have died, either, but her
great-grandmother was indeed six feet under, covered with a mound of dirt and a
cluster of wildflowers.

Petty might have been old, okay really old, but still,
she’d not left her family prepared for the passing. Julia missed her
great-grandmother’s uncanny wisdom, and all of that got swept away into that
huge dustpan called death. She needed Petty’s practical advice, especially now.

The Hillards had been told to sell this old place,
repeatedly; remodel it into a couple of two-bedroom apartments. Preacher’s Bend
had a great need for vacant apartments. A two story, one hundred-fifty-year-old
home, with outside access to the upper floor would be a piece of cake to
remodel. The right guy with the right tools, and anything was possible.

Her thoughts drifted off to
was there this right
guy in Preacher’s Bend?
Their town was growing by leaps and bounds and need
outweighed want on most days, apartments at the top of that list. Surely she
could finagle into the budget a handyman. When a town old as dirt contained a
humble building from the Jurassic era, a body was required to take up the
duties of caring for it. There had to be someone she could ask.

But the Hillards were stubborn folk. Mix that with a
little watered-down Tressle blood and you had on your hands a small group of
individuals who would not bend to the wishes of others,
especially
when
those unasked for opinions came from know-it-alls too stupid to keep any opinions
to themselves. Or dared voiced any right in her face. It was bad enough they’d
done so at Petty’s funeral. But a repeat of it while she’d been picking out
selections of meats at the grocery store?

The funeral had been hard on all of them, but they’d
survived, each taking up the slack. What Petty had done for Preacher’s Bend, she’d
done for almost fifty years.

Maybe most of this town was right. Like any other
Hillard, Julia did hang onto things far outweighing their need. However, the
boarding house needed her, more than she needed it, and guilt was forcing her
hand. Guilt to letting down the ghost of her past.

Julia grabbed the silver tray of muffins off the
kitchen counter, heading to the low coffee table out in the living room. Screw
those spiders and bird poop covering the windowpanes. Both could remain right
where they were for all of eternity, for all she cared.

The huge sigh burning through her chest, twice as hard
as before, and certainly faster than expected was her answer to leaving things
as they were. She set the muffins down, stretching her arms high above her head;
added an audible groan perhaps to appease her conscience. Apparently nothing
was going to work to ease the trepidation that she’d be stuck with this place
for the foreseeable future…
if not `efin forever.

But muffins?
Damn. Not one of the four male boarders inside the Tressle Boarding House was
of the muffin or pie type. All four men were sleeping off their rather late
night. Steak and potatoes for breakfast, a beer to wash it down with, a hooker
before nine a.m.—if they could actually find one—these guys were the real deal.
They hadn’t come to Preacher’s Bend to see the sights or to explore its rich,
mid-western history shadowed by beer, bratwurst, and polka music. They were
here for the upcoming rodeo, nothing more. Translation: a little hard-headed, very
hardened around the edges, and a little arduous for the younger generation to
deal with most of the time.

Julia taught mathematics at the local high school.
Teenagers, she worked her magic on, on a daily basis. It was men with tireless
libidos that were a real buzz kill to women stuck in permanent stagnation mode.
And damn, if rodeo men didn’t seem to make this mode more pronounced out for
spite.

Preacher’s Bend was about to be filled with loud
trucks, cattle trailers, and a bunch of temperamental horses. There’d sure to
be a few ornery bulls thrown into the mix to get a mistrusting crowd a lot more
interested. Not to mention a few hundred men intent on driving those loud
trucks, riding the backs of those temperamental horses, and staying at least
the full eight seconds on a supposedly randomly-chosen bull, without being
killed.

Yeah, good luck with that!

Talk was if this worked out, the three big money
promoters of the traveling rodeo would hold this as an annual event. This was
to be Preacher’s Bend’s test of endurance. If the town failed, everyone within
it failed. No one wanted blame for failing an entire town. Julia was using the
bribery of assorted muffins to insure her part of that.

Her houseguests were, to put it mildly,
old;
fifty
plus, if not a day over. She was looking for someone a bit younger than a
father figure to whet her whistle or turn the eye. She glanced down at the bakery
goods and grimaced. She should’ve gone with the apple pie. Her boarders
would’ve gobbled it down just the same. A twenty-eight-year old woman, a
man-less
woman that is, should never feed stodgy, libido-driven men
muffins. She’d meant to use the bakery goods as bribery to a bunch of old horn-dogs
still sleeping off their unexpected late night because they’d nothing better to
do than throw away good money on pure foolishness and mental stagnation, same
as most. But rodeo men tended to do everything down to the very last second. It
came with the job description.

Another heady sigh split apart her chest. She couldn’t
take another mundane day in this hell hole, sucking the life out of her. Her
smile faded as she turned her head, facing the hall mirror.
Red hair tied up
in a ponytail
? Who was she kidding? Age was creeping in and the ponytail
only made her look foolish. Fool once, she didn’t desire the label of fool
again. But there wasn’t time to change her hairstyle.

She was losing daylight. Her being a natural redhead
wasn’t her fault. It was her father’s side of the family who’d produced her
genes. And her father had gained enough cold shoulders over the sins of his
daughter’s unforgettable past long ago. She highly doubted anyone around town could
forget what she’d put the man through.

She’d done things in life not specifically the garnishing
to a reputable teaching career. But who hadn’t? If they couldn’t forget they
could at least forgive, couldn’t they?

The more she thought about what she’d gotten away with,
the more she should place full blame on her father’s genes for everything that
ever failed her goals. The heart had to follow that direction, unfortunately. Gill
had his ups and downs, but he’d survived.

Julia, the eldest, Cody going on eight, and her
stepmother pregnant and about to give birth, there wasn’t one day passing in Preacher’s
Bend when her father wasn’t smiling over the blessed event of a third child. A baby
in the Hillard household was sure to stir things up.

Thank God, she’d had the foresight to take over the
running of the boarding house, directly after the funeral and
before
any
smelly diapers got into her hands. She wasn’t quite ready to have kids, but she
wasn’t at all available toward taking care of someone else’s.

As the familiar red pickup pulled into the drive, she
could see through the living room window her father’s permanent grin. Nothing
else over the last eight months stayed plastered on his face, and he was
whistling, as always.

She padded across the living room and went straight
for the front door to let the man in.

“Hey, Pops. What brings you into town so early?”

Gill Hillard took in a deep breath of what had always
felt like home to every Tressle ancestor. Although her great-grandmother was no
longer here in a physical way, a body could just sense Petty’s ghostly presence.
Julia knew he’d gotten a good whiff of sunshine and lemon furniture polish. The
smells were drenching the place, if not totally overpowering it.

“Just came by to see if everything is all right.” He
planted a wet kiss on the side of her cheek. “Everything is all right, isn’t
it?”

A dusty cowboy hat hung loosely in his left hand, same
as always.

“Fine, Gill. Everything is just fine. I can run a
boarding house as well as anyone else.” She hadn’t meant the words to smart.
Unfortunately, her tone a little too crisp for the hour that it was, her
father’s eyebrow had risen.

She’d long ago stopped calling him Dad, the day his
second wife, Brittany swept into town and never left. From that point on,
they’d become equals.

“Damnit, Julia! I don’t mean to question what you can,
or can’t do. I just worry about you. It’s my right as a parent.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s been a long night. Want a
muffin?”

She tried her best to smooth ruffled feathers and
change the subject, quickly, mindful to keep her voice to a minimum. There were
four grown men asleep inside this house. Four grown men and were paying
customers for another two weeks. She didn’t dare raise their hackles by draining
their civility before eight a.m., or on a Sunday.

Three out of the four had been with Carol, who ran the
local boutique, seen throwing back a few down at
Mel’s Palace of Pleasure.
Around
town,
Mel’s
was famously known to be the hot spot on a well-earned
Saturday night. It was also the place that drew the rough characters out of the
woodwork.

Julia had been filling her car with gas and various
groceries for the coming weeks, planning ahead for what was to hit the town. She’d
driven past
Mel’s
, noticing the men’s big SUV parked out front. There’s
no telling what four hundred hungry men could do to a town this small, or if
there’d be anything left after they were gone. Food could become a highly
sought commodity. As well as much needed gasoline. She hadn’t wanted to be
caught without either. Yet she hadn’t expected her house guests to be so out-right
conspicuous of their conquests.

“No. Already ate breakfast; drove into town to get a
few supplies down at the mill. You need anything? Food? Stuff? Car filled with
gas? Mail picked up?”

Crap! She’d forgotten the mail
.

Petty kept the same P.O. Box for fifty years. She’d
like to socialize when getting her mail, and no one thought to change this when
she died.

“No, Gill. I’m fine. I’ve got all I need right here
because I, unlike you, thought ahead. I’m all set for at least a month.”

He nodded, but still wouldn’t leave the foyer,
switching his hat to his other hand. He only did this when he had something
unsettling running through his head.

“Was there something else you wanted this morning?
Something you
really
came all this way for?” Julia eyed her father, who
was now eyeing the silver tray of muffins. He turned his head from the
assortment of bakery goods, a sly grin on his face.

“No. Not really. Just came by to see if you have
everything you need.”

She couldn’t help but release another sigh. Good
grief! Was this to be pattern today? Every other breath too deep to compensate
and her gut tightening?

Wasn’t at least one day supposed to be special?

“You do know you are perhaps one of Preacher’s Bend’s
worst liars?” she dared say to him.

Next to Rachel Rosebud, the owner of the café, and
duly ignorant granddaughter of their newly appointed matriarch, Theodora
Rosebud, Julia felt her father was the King of liars if Rachel its Queen. He
only did it when it suited his needs, and that seemed on a regular basis.
Perhaps it came with the bloodline. She’d been known to tell a whopping fib or
two. Okay, at least ten thousand; and only nine of those ten thousand ever gotten
away with.