Dixie wasn’t worried about Adam, either. She had a new plan. This morning she’d heard from Dylan’s secretary, Hazel, that he’d bought a puppy for his son. Dixie figured that after she closed the shop for the day, she’d go home and squeeze her biggest assets into a skimpy halter. She’d swing by with a big, juicy bone for the new dog. That finally ought to get the kid’s attention. Just like her double D’s ought to finally get his daddy’s attention. If Dylan didn’t notice and take advantage of what she offered him, then he was just plain queer.

Of course, she knew he wasn’t. Back in high school, Dylan Taber had been a wild man, tearing up the streets of Gospel in his black Dodge Ram, one hand on the wheel, the other on some lucky girl’s thigh. Most, but not all, of the time, that lucky girl had been Dixie’s older sister, Kim. Dylan and Kim had what Dixie would call a real fire-and-ice relationship. It was either hot or cold. Nothing in between. And when it was hot, it heated up Kim’s bedroom like an inferno. Back then, Dixie’s mother spent most of her time at one of the local bars, and Kim had taken full advantage of her absence-not that her mother would have noticed if she had been home. Before she’d become born-again, Lilly Howe had spent most of her time drinking, drunk, or passed out.

Dixie might have been only eleven at the time, but she’d known what the sounds coming from the other side of the bedroom wall meant. The choppy breaths, deep throaty moans, and sighs of pleasure. At eleven, she’d known enough about sex to figure out what her sister was doing. But it wasn’t until several years later that she could appreciate how long they’d made those springs squeak.

Dylan was thirty-seven, the sheriff of Pearl County, and he had a son to raise. He was respectable, but Dixie would bet her last bottle of blond hair dye that beneath the uniform, he was as wild as ever. Dylan Taber was a big man in the community now, and the rumor around town was that he was big where it counted, too. It was time she found out for herself.