HOT IN THE SADDLE
Four tales and love, passion and magic in one boxed set.
Four ranchers as hot as the Arizona desert - men more than willing for a night of loving, but who all think that love is not in their cards. Oh boy does life has some surprises in store for them. They just might come to believe in love after all ... and a whole lot more.
Chase and Ana - Chapter One
The car coughed. Literally coughed. Then it died. In disbelief, Ana pumped the accelerator. Nothing. Like an elderly animal giving up the ghost, it coasted down the road for a few hundred yards, each passing foot getting slower and slower until it was barely moving.
She steered it off the side of the road and just sat staring through the front windshield. She was screwed. Here she was on—she had to check the map that lay on the passenger seat to determine just where—Highway 70 in Bumfuck, Arizona, with a broken-down car, no water, no phone and very little money. Yep, she was officially screwed.
Ana let her head fall forward onto the steering wheel. Either she was paying off some really horrible karmic debt, or she was having one of the worst runs of luck in the history of man.
Her summer had started off badly. First the Wicca shop she worked for went bust. Literally. The owner got busted for growing hydroponic pot in the basement of the store. That left Ana without a steady job. Teaching yoga and belly dancing three nights a week at the senior citizen center, and the occasional card reading wasn’t going to keep her in organic veggies and tofu for long.
Fergi, her ferruginous hawk, attacked her husband Giovanni, who tried to shoot it. Ana used a broom to knock the gun away, and Giovanni shot out the kitchen window and the refrigerator. Fergi got pissed and took off and Ana was not able to get her to come back to the house until the day Ana packed her bags.
Then someone let her rabbit out of the house and it got eaten by a Doberman pinscher, grossing out the guy walking the dog and scaring the crap out of two kids playing on the sidewalk. Not to mention earning her a fine from the department for animal control. She still didn’t understand that.
The next blow came in the form of Jimmy Lowe, a sweet thirteen-year-old boy two houses down, who was several bottles shy of a six-pack. Ana was taking a shower trying not to let water go all over the bathroom. The shower curtain was missing, torn off when her best friend Cecilia and her new boyfriend decided to have a nooner in Ana’s shower. Apparently Cecilia slipped on the soap, fell into her new honey man who toppled over, grabbed the shower curtain and ripped it off on his way out of the tub.
Lucky for Ana he had decided not to sue her for the four stitches it took to close up the gash in his head caused from whacking the toilet on his way to the floor.
Ana rinsed the soap off her face and turned to rinse the back of her hair. That’s when she saw Jimmy, standing at the bathroom window, masturbating. She yelled at Jimmy. Jimmy fell. And now Jimmy’s mother was threatening to sue Ana for contributing to the delinquency of a “mentally challenged” minor.
And all that happened before the end of the first week. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was when Ana’s husband, Giovanni, slugged her. Actually balled up his fist and punched her in the gut. And all because she disagreed with his narrow-minded stance on same-sex marriages.
She’d heard that love can’t die in a day, but knew beyond a shadow of a doubt the moment Giovanni hit her that the saying was wrong. There wasn’t a drop of love left in her heart for him. Truth be told, there hadn’t been that much for half their married life, which was only three years. She’d put up with him because she felt it was her own fault that she fell for the act he put on when he was chasing her. Once the ink was dry on the marriage contract, he became someone she didn’t know, and didn’t particularly like.
