Free One Texas Cowboy Too Many (Burnt Boot, Texas) by Carolyn Brown

left this bar stool?”
    “That would be Leah Brennan,” Jill yelled.
    “Mavis Brennan’s kin?”
    Jill nodded.
    “Man would be crazy to mess with that. I’ll be on my way.”
    Rhett spotted Leah at the Brennan table, with Kinsey on one side and Honey on the other. He wondered what in the hell they were trying to talk her out of or into, but he could not read lips.
    At eleven, he sent Sawyer and Jill home and unplugged the jukebox. “Last call. Closing time,” he yelled, and the last three customers left.
    He was busy sweeping the floors when Leah poked her head back inside the bar. “I hate to bother you, Rhett, but my truck won’t start. I think I left the lights on and ran the battery down.”
    “Give me a minute to finish picking up this trash, and I’ll come out and jump-start it for you. We keep a set of cables under the bar for times like this,” he said.
    “I’ll wait right here,” she said as she hiked a hip on the first bar stool.
    Rhett had barely finished his job when Betsy Gallagher poked her head in the door. “Rhett? Well, look at this. So it’s true about you two, is it?”
    Leah’s chin raised an inch. “I’m too tired to argue or to fight with you, Betsy.”
    “I’m sure you are, screwing around with Rhett all afternoon yesterday down at the river and then burning down our school.”
    Rhett stopped what he was doing and moved across the floor toward the bar. “What do you need, Betsy?” he asked.
    “I’ve got a flat tire. My spare is flat too, and my phone is dead. I need a lift home when you get done.”
    “Soon as I give Leah a jump start, I’ll be glad to take you home.”
    “Thanks.”
    He picked up the orange jumper cables and motioned for the women to follow him. Leah led him straight to her truck while Betsy waited in the shadows. It only took a couple of tries to realize that the batter was completely dead in Leah’s truck and there was no way it was going to start.
    “I’ll take you both home,” he said. “But my truck is like the bar, the church, and the store in that it is neutral territory.”
    “It doesn’t look that way to me,” Betsy said coldly. “Kind of hard to deny the rumors when here y’all are together after-hours.”
    “Don’t be sarcastic,” Leah said.
    “Hey, you don’t have any right to tell me how to be,” Betsy smarted off.
    “I told you this is neutral territory,” Rhett said in exasperation. “I think you live closest, Leah, so you’re going first,” Rhett said.
    Betsy smiled. “Does that mean I get to sit in the middle?”
    “No, it means Leah does. I like her better than you,” Rhett said.
    All he wanted to do was go home, wash away the smoke in a cool bath, and fall into bed. But they were both damsels in distress and he didn’t have a choice but to take them home.
    “You ain’t no fun at all.” Betsy pouted.
    Rhett didn’t give a damn right then if Betsy pouted until Judgment Day. Six o’clock came early, and there was ranch work to do. Maybe, if he was lucky, he’d dream about Leah without being awakened by Sheriff Orville.
    Leah put the console down and slid into place between him and Betsy. A Brennan and a Gallagher that close together. Lord love a duck, as Granny O’Donnell used to say. There would be a brand-new war come morning when folks found out they’d ridden in the same truck together.

Chapter 6
    River Bend Ranch was a conglomeration of several ranches. The main ranch had started off with a couple of sections of land more than a hundred years before, but as the family grew and children moved out, they’d acquired more land until it stretched twenty miles west from the original house. They’d built their school when indoor plumbing was still a luxury that was unheard of, and in the beginning, there had been two little whitewashed buildings on the back side of the school property, one with a star on the door for the boys and one with a quarter moon for the girls.
    Sometime in the late forties, after