Hot Pursuit - Denise A. Agnew [0]
To my husband Terry, who always encourages and supports me no matter what.
To all the ladies of the Wednesday night discussion group for giving me plenty of laughs, encouragement, and unending support. You are the best.
Chapter One
New Year’s Eve. Three hours to midnight. Clarksville, Wyoming.
Lucy Creed walked into Dixie’s Den with the full intention of finding a one-night stand.
In military terms, this would be a single engagement. A hot pursuit. She wouldn’t be denied satisfaction.
She stood at the entrance just inside the double doors, bombarded by music from the old-fashioned jukebox. A country singer wailed a pitiful melody of love lost and love found. The steel guitar twanged. The man’s voice throbbed low with sorrow and mimicked the pain in her chest. Her heart twinged along with him.
No. Don’t go there. You’re here to scratch an itch. To forget that scum bucket, low-down, dirty dog Mendoza.
Now that had all the makings of a song. Low-Down, Dirty Dog.
She’d move on to staid men in business suits, accountants or maybe men who worked in the high-tech industry. Just no more soldiers, sailors or marines.
God, that sounds so bad.
It made her sound and feel like a military hanger-on. A groupie who liked military men for the alpha male mystique. Like the women who wanted to get laid by a Navy SEAL because they figured the men were all studs. Sure, she respected the military for what they represented, and she’d run into a lot of people in the military who didn’t fit the stereotype of alpha male. At the same time, she had to wonder at her rotten luck with military men. What was that all about anyway?
Lucy didn’t care if her closest friends, Freddie, Marisa and Neena were married to military or ex-military. She wasn’t doing military again even if he looked like a god.
Chatter echoed all around her, the place packed and the room decorated for New Year’s Eve from one end to the next. The large bar area smelled like peppermint, alcohol and the piney nuance of the real eight-foot Christmas tree in the corner. Old-fashioned decorations gave a Victorian air to the tree.
Low lights gave the bar and restaurant intimacy, and yellow and silver streamers hanging from the ceiling twirled and bounced shiny sparkles around the room.
Laugher broke out occasionally, especially at one big round booth in the back. Six women who could have been sextuplets giggled like girls at a birthday party in grade school. They wore party hats over their cascades of long blonde hair and she instantly was reminded of Felicia DeAnza. Blonde. Buxom. Gorgeous Felicia.
The woman she didn’t want to hate, but had to.
“Good riddance, Mendoza. You and Felicia deserve each other,” she said out loud. She glanced at the women again. “Honestly. Six blonde women at one table?”
Surely one of those gigglers was a bottle blonde.
She glanced around to see if anyone had heard her mumblings. No one cared. The crowd seemed to have grown by twenty people since she’d walked inside. It was early but the place rocked. Good. She hoped there were a lot of men here. Eligible. Hot. Yeah, hot as hell would be a real bonus.
Determination motivated each step as she sauntered through the crowd that spilled over from the bar into the restaurant. Dixie’s Den had opened a month ago, a country-and-western theme predominate in the decorations that were sprinkled throughout the bar and restaurant areas. She wanted to wash the memory of her ex right out of her hair by christening the place with a new man. Huh. Christening wasn’t exactly the right word for what she needed.
Mindless, wonderful, screaming sin sex.
Anything less…well, she’d had less. She wanted more for a change.
A man who’d treat her like a princess and make love to her like he never wanted to let her go.
As she gazed around, she didn’t expect to see what she did. A room full of cowboy hats, most of them on the heads of older men averaging age sixty and their going-grey wives. Okay, so maybe this wasn’t the best place on a New Year’s Eve to forget about a two-timing asshole. Then some of