Free August (Prairie Grooms, #1) by Kit Morgan Page B

frightening as it was to watch, his riding finesse was impressive.
    The wagon caught up with her. “Show-off,” she heard Logan Kincaid mutter under his breath as he pulled the team to a stop.
    All of them watched August run his horse through a series of figure eights, around sagebrush, and even jumping over a log before he spurred it toward them at frightening speed. He came skidding to a stop before Penelope, his horse kicking up dust and dirt. She covered her eyes against the flying particles and coughed a time or two. She also making quite a show of fanning the air about her with her other hand, if for no other reason than to hide the fact his recent display had her starry-eyed. Not to mention utterly infatuated ... at least for the moment.

Six
    “S ee? I told you I could ride one-handed.” With those words he was off again.
    Well, Penelope had no doubt he could easily outride her. She didn’t follow, but instead kept pace with the wagon and her sisters. “I dare say, but is it always this dusty?” she asked Logan.
    “No, ma’am. It gets dustier, the further along into summer we get.”
    “Lovely,” she commented.
    “Let’s go to the mercantile first, Logan,” Edith called from the back of the wagon. And so they did.
    Penelope hadn’t paid too much attention to the little town when she and her sisters first arrived. For one, they’d been sleeping when the stagecoach rolled in, and didn’t realize they had reached their final destination. And when they did realize it, they didn’t want it as their final destination if it could be helped. At the time, they were so shocked at the lack of any actual town, they just wanted to hightail it out of there. Penelope smiled as she realized she’d just used a Western colloquialism in her own thoughts.
    The town did have a few amenities. There was the mercantile, of course – a rather large one for a town so small. It also had a saloon, which, to hear the Cookes tell it, was a social gathering place where people ate and did a little drinking, but not a lot – more like an English public house than the usual conception of a Wild West barroom. There was a livery stable, a feed store which was new, a barber shop (also new), a bank, and the crown jewel – the hotel.
    Penelope’s eyes widened along with her sisters’ at the sight of the beautiful blue building with white and red trim. “Oh,” she breathed. It was so beautiful it looked out of place in the tiny town, and she wondered why on God’s green Earth Cyrus Van Cleet had chosen to build his gleaming hotel out in the middle of nowhere. “Are there even any guests?” she asked no one in particular.
    “Nope,” Belle said from the back of the wagon. “Not at the moment. But there will be ... one day.”
    Penelope looked at her. The woman sat staring at the place like it was holy ground, as did all the others save her sisters.
    Which didn’t mean they weren’t interested. “Can we look inside?” asked Constance.
    “Sure, just don’t spend all day in there,” said Edith. “I’ll introduce you to my sisters.”
    Logan brought the team to a stop in front of the mercantile and helped the women down as Penelope found a suitable spot to dismount. She tied Juliet to a hitching post and stared at the sign overhead. “DUNNIGAN’S” was painted in big, fancy letters on the building itself, with “MERCANTILE” on a sign underneath.
    “Hotel or mercantile first?” asked Logan.
    “Let’s mosey down to the hotel first; that way we’ll have an excuse to leave,” Edith said. She leaned toward Penelope and her sisters in a conspiratorial fashion. “My sister Sally is a talker – if she gets going, we may never get out of there.”
    Eloise giggled, took Constance by the hand, and followed Edith down the street. Penelope lagged behind a moment and watched for August to come riding around a building, but there was no sign of him. Hmmm, that’s rather rude, she thought. He invites me to ride to town with