Wild Nights in Texas Read online

  She can make Lone Star Ridge’s sheriff break every rule...

  Former child star “Badly” Hadley Dalton can’t shake the nickname she got on Little Cowgirls, the reality show that made her famous. Another thing she can’t shake: her attraction to hometown heartthrob Leyton Jameson. After their teen make-out session was televised, Leyton ended their relationship, and Hadley left town. But when she learns her beloved Granny Em has gone missing, Hadley returns home and immediately lands in hot water...

  Leyton has wanted Hadley since he first knew what desire was. Searching for Em together makes all that heat—and all their differences—impossible to ignore. Hadley’s past is riddled with bad decisions—ones that are suddenly rearing their ugly heads. Believing she’s too much trouble for a good-guy cop, Hadley doesn’t think Leyton can ever overlook her faults. But Leyton will sign up for a lifetime of trouble if it means this wild ride never ends...

  Also includes a bonus Lone Star Ridge novella, Hot Summer in Texas!

  Praise for USA TODAY

  bestselling author Delores Fossen

  “The plot delivers just the right amount of emotional punch and happily ever after.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Lone Star Christmas

  “Clear off space on your keeper shelf, Fossen has arrived.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Lori Wilde

  “This book is a great start to the series. Looks like there’s plenty of good reading ahead.”

  —Harlequin Junkie on Tangled Up in Texas

  “Delores Fossen takes you on a wild Texas ride with a hot cowboy.”

  —New York Times bestselling author B.J. Daniels

  “An amazing, breathtaking and vastly entertaining family saga, filled with twists and unexpected turns. Cowboy fiction at its best.”

  —Books & Spoons on The Last Rodeo

  “Romantic Suspense fans are going to love this book.”

  —Harlequin Junkie on Safety Breach

  “Fossen certainly knows how to write a hot cowboy, and when she turns her focus to Dylan Granger...crank up the air conditioning!”

  —RT Book Reviews on Lone Star Blues

  Also available from Delores Fossen

  and HQN

  Lone Star Ridge

  Tangled Up in Texas

  That Night in Texas (ebook novella)

  Chasing Trouble in Texas

  Hot Summer in Texas (ebook novella)

  Wild Nights in Texas

  Coldwater Texas

  Lone Star Christmas

  Lone Star Midnight (ebook novella)

  Hot Texas Sunrise

  Texas at Dusk (ebook novella)

  Sweet Summer Sunset

  A Coldwater Christmas

  Wrangler’s Creek

  Lone Star Cowboy (ebook novella)

  Those Texas Nights

  One Good Cowboy (ebook novella)

  No Getting Over a Cowboy

  Just Like a Cowboy (ebook novella)

  Branded as Trouble

  Cowboy Dreaming (ebook novella)

  Texas-Sized Trouble

  Cowboy Heartbreaker (ebook novella)

  Lone Star Blues

  Cowboy Blues (ebook novella)

  The Last Rodeo

  To see the complete list of titles available from Delores Fossen, please visit www.deloresfossen.com.

  DELORES FOSSEN

  Wild Nights in Texas

  Table of Contents

  Wild Nights in Texas

  Hot Summer in Texas

  Wild Nights in Texas

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE ROOSTER STARTED IT.

  Sheriff Leyton Jameson saw it all go down from the window of his office at the Lone Star Ridge Police Department. Squawking and flapping its wings, the Rhode Island Red came out of the alley at lightning speed. A blur of feathers and spindly yellow legs, it arrowed off the sidewalk by the hardware store and into the street.

  And right in front of the Jeep.

  The driver swerved to avoid hitting the rooster. Barely. The brakes squealed before the Jeep slammed into the four-foot-high concrete cowboy boots sporting the name Hank’s Hardware. Leyton heard the sound of crunching metal, followed by a spewing radiator.

  Leyton set his coffee aside and hurried out of his office, through the now empty bullpen for the deputies, past reception and out onto Main Street. Even though he hadn’t dawdled, he wasn’t the first to make it to the wrecked Jeep. That honor belonged to Carter Bodell, the town’s mortician, who was sporting a T-shirt that read I Will Bury You. Since that probably wasn’t something an accident victim would want to see right off, Leyton muscled Carter aside and stepped in front of him.

  Leyton immediately spotted the airbag. It had deployed like a tire-sized marshmallow and was now squished against the driver’s face. A fog of the talcum powder that had come out with the airbag fluttered around the cab of the Jeep, falling onto the woman’s black hair.

  “Crap,” the driver grumbled, batting away the bag and sending some of that powder right at Leyton. The motion caused the dozen or so thin silver bracelets she was wearing to jangle. Her earrings did some jangling, too. There was a trio of what appeared to be Goth fairies in her right earlobe.

  He helped her with the batting, unhooking her seat belt, but Leyton stopped her when she tried to get out. “You need to stay put,” he told her. “I’ll call for an EMT to come and check you.”

  Leyton fired off a text to the dispatcher to get that started. Since the hospital was just a couple of blocks up the street, it wouldn’t take them long to get there.

  “Crap,” she repeated, turning her head in his direction.

  Their eyes met. Familiar dark blue eyes. And despite the fact the woman’s face was covered in talc, the rest of her was familiar, too.

  Hadley Dalton.

  Leyton got the jolt he always did when he saw Hadley. Which wasn’t very often. But it was sort of a gut-punch mixture of red-hot lust and cold, dark dread. The lust because, well, this crap-muttering woman would apparently always ring his manly bell. The dread was because there wasn’t another woman on earth who could give him as much trouble as Hadley.

  It’d been a while, years, since Leyton had seen Hadley, but he had heard that she’d come back for a visit about six weeks earlier. A short visit where their paths hadn’t crossed. Considering how small Lone Star Ridge was, that likely meant she’d purposely avoided him. Judging from the scowl she gave him, she would have preferred for that avoidance to continue.

  “It’s Badly Hadley,” Carter said, as if making an announcement to the entire town.

  Hadley immediately shifted her scowl from Leyton to Carter. With good reason. Badly Hadley was the nickname Leyton knew she hated. She’d gotten dubbed wit h it when she and her two sisters were the stars of the reality show Little Cowgirls, which documented the triplets’ lives. It was filmed right here in Lone Star Ridge, at her grandmother’s ranch, and was on the air for a dozen years. A dozen years of TV viewers tuning in to see just how bad Badly Hadley could be.

  Leyton knew for a fact that she could be very, very bad.

  “Are you drunk?” Carter asked, because he, too, knew about the very, very bad. In a generic sort of way, that was. Unlike Leyton, whose knowledge of Hadley was a bit more...personal.

  “No, I’m not drunk,” she snarled. She blinked as if trying to focus and looked at Leyton. Her gaze slid from his face to the badge clipped to his belt. “I wrecked because I dodged a chicken.”

  “A rooster,” Leyton corrected.

  Though the rooster was now nowhere in sight. He made a mental note to find it so it didn’t cause any other accidents. There were plenty of ranches and farms nearby that had poultry, but this was a first for one making its way into town.

  Still scowling and groaning, Hadley turned in the seat and would have gotten out had Leyton not stopped her again. “Just wait until the EMTs get here.”

  “I’m fine,” she insisted. “But I need to move this unicorn horn. It’s poking my thigh.”

  Of all the things Leyton had thought she might say, that wasn’t one of them. “Unicorn horn?” he questioned.

  Hell. She probably had a concussion or was maybe in shock if she was hallucinating about something like that.

  Hadley nodded as if she’d just explained everything to him, and she practically oozed off the seat. Leyton caught her in his arms. Good thing, too, because Hadley wobbled when she stood, and she looked down. Leyton followed her gaze, and that was when he saw that there was indeed a, well, unicorn horn.

  It appeared to be a hat with a hard plastic horn jutting out from the rainbow-colored head. The horn was jammed and tangled into the laced-up side of Hadley’s black jeans. She yanked it out, winced, and Leyton saw some blood. Not much, but it appeared to have broken the skin.

  “It’s something my grandmother wanted me to make,” she said, her voice a little steadier now. “It was on the seat next to me when I wrecked.”

  Hadley was a costume designer in California, so that made sense. Well, sort of made sense. Her grandmother Em wasn’t the most conventional person, but a unicorn hat seemed on the strange side even for her.

  “You’re bleeding,” Carter blurted out the way a weatherman would warn of a tornado bearing down on him. There was volume, urgency and panic in his voice, and he hooked his arm around Hadley’s waist.

  Hadley gave Carter a look that could have frozen lava. “Carter Bodell, if you’re going to shock me or have some kind of device on you to make farting noises, I’ll knee you in the nuts,” she snarled.

  Unlike the unicorn horn, this particular comment hadn’t come from left field. Carter was a prankster. One with the sense of humor of a third grader. He often had shocking or farting devices on him that went off when he shook hands with someone or slapped that person on the back.

  “And if you try to feel me up again like you did in high school,” Hadley added to the snarl, “I’ll also knee you in the nuts.”

  Leyton wasn’t sure if Carter had intended to do any feeling up, but that got the undertaker to back away from Hadley. She didn’t give the same warning to Leyton, however, which was ironic, since he had indeed felt up Hadley many times. Not now, though.

  Definitely not now.

  Hopefully, not ever again. He needed an entanglement with Hadley about as much as he needed a unicorn horn in his thigh or a wreck-causing rooster on Main Street.

  “Is she okay?” someone called out.

  Ty Copperfield, the young, fresh-faced EMT, was running up the sidewalk toward them. Leyton knew him, of course. He knew everyone in town and vice versa, since Leyton had lived in Lone Star Ridge most of his life.

  “I’m fine,” Hadley grumbled, and she wiped some of the talc from her face.

  With enough of the airbag powder gone, Leyton got a better look at her. No cuts or nicks as there sometimes were with an airbag deployment.

  “Her leg’s bleeding,” Carter said, pointing in the direction of the wound.

  “It’s just a scratch,” Hadley insisted, but that didn’t stop Ty from stooping down and checking it for himself.

  “You’re right,” Ty said a moment later. “Just a scratch, but you’ll need to have it cleaned.”

  Ty waved a little penlight in front of her eyes and made a sound of approval. Then, as Leyton had done, he continued to check Hadley for other injuries. So did the “crowd” that was gathering on Main Street. But the crowd did it from a respectable distance.

  Everyone who’d been in the shops and businesses was now outside, and the possibility of heatstroke from the sweltering July temps wouldn’t stop them from milling around to find out what was happening. Leyton saw a lot of texting and calling going on, and soon it would be all over town that Hadley was back and had been involved in a wreck. There’d be embellishments to the gossip, no doubt. Gossip that might include him, since he still had an arm around Hadley.

  Ty halted his once-over exam of Hadley and snagged her gaze. He grinned. “Hey! You’re Badly Hadley. Man, I can’t believe it’s you. I used to see you on that TV show when I was a kid.”

  “Little Cowgirls,” Carter supplied, as if being helpful. “Hadley used to be a star.”

  Talk about some ego slamming. Used to be a star was the same as saying a has-been, and Ty’s when I was a kid remark sure hadn’t helped. Hadley was just thirty-three, only a year younger than Leyton, but to the twenty-two-year-old Ty, she probably did seem oldish. Added to that, Little Cowgirls had been off the air for eighteen years now, so Ty had indeed been a kid when he’d watched the show.

  “I need to go,” Hadley muttered, and she stepped out of Leyton’s grip so she could turn and look at the Jeep.

  Hadley groaned, then cursed when her gaze skimmed over the airbag debris in the front seats, the bashed-in front end and the spewing radiator. The Jeep would have to be towed.

  She certainly made an odd picture standing there in loose-fitting laced-up jeans, black tank top and bloodred flip-flops. Her long, straight hair was black—which he knew was dyed from her natural dark brown—and pulled back in a ponytail. Not fussy, but that only seemed to draw more attention to it. Just like the woman herself. Hadley might have been born and raised here, but she looked city. And very much out of place on a small-town Main Street where a rooster could cause a wreck.

  “I need to go,” she repeated, this time aiming her comment at Leyton. Ty resumed his exam and began checking Hadley’s head. “I have to see Em.”

  It wasn’t a surprise that she’d want to see her grandmother. Em had practically raised Hadley, her sisters and their brother since their own parents had been pretty much scum. But there was a high level of concern in Hadley’s voice that made him think this was more than just a visit.

  “Is Em okay?” Leyton asked. When Hadley didn’t jump to answer, Leyton felt a knot form in his gut.

  “I’m not sure,” Hadley finally said.

  And just like that, the knot tightened. Em had always been good to him. Unlike plenty of others in town. Em had never judged him, either, for being a “love child” instead of being born with the Jameson name.

  Hadley batted away Ty, who was now examining her neck, and she grabbed her purse from the passenger seat of the Jeep. “Em called me late last night and insisted I come home,” Hadley told Leyton.

  She opened her mouth, no doubt to add to that explanation, but she must have realized she had Ty’s and Carter’s complete attention. The attention of the dozen or so other townsfolk, too.

  “I’ll call the rental company and report the accident,” she continued, still gripping the unicorn hat in her left hand. “First, t hough, I need to see Em.”

  Leyton hesitated, nodded. He should probably insist on taking her to the ER and getting her statement about the accident, but the gut knot won out. Those things could wait. “I’ll drive you.”

  And just like that, their uncomfortable past washed over her expression. “I can walk.”

  Yeah, she could, since it was less than a half mile, but Leyton had no intention of letting her do that. “I’ll drive you,” he insisted, and he grabbed the large suitcase from the back seat of the Jeep.

  Since he wasn’t sure if she was steady on her feet, Leyton took hold of her arm and maneuvered Hadley and her suitcase around the crowd and across the street to the police station parking lot, where his cruiser was parked.

  It occurred to him had this been her sisters, Sunny or McCall, more folks would have greeted her. There would have been more smiles, too, and “Welcome home!” would have been offered to the friendlier sisters. But Hadley always seemed to wear an implicit “back off” sign.

  “I’ll need to have the Jeep towed,” Hadley muttered, glancing back over her shoulder at it before she got into the cruiser.

  “I can help with that.” He could also arrange for anything else in the Jeep to be brought out to her grandmother’s ranch. For now, though, he wanted answers. So, he put her suitcase in the cruiser, got in and started the engine. “What do you think is wrong with Em?”

  She shook her head, causing more of the talcum to fall and her ponytail to swish. “Like I said, she insisted I come. I asked her why, and she said she just had something important to tell me.” Hadley cursed under her breath. “She also asked me to bring her the unicorn hat.”

  Leyton met Hadley’s gaze before he pulled out of the parking lot. “Why the hat?”

  Hadley made a frustrated sigh. “She said it was for a costume party at the preschool where she does story time. She sketched out a picture of what she wanted and asked me to make it for her. Apparently, she already has the actual costume but wanted the hat to finish off the look.” Look went in air quotes.