Jasmine narrowed her eyes at him. “You’d better be careful. I can have you at the altar in a heartbeat. I know lots of women who’d take your sorry old hide any way they could get it. And if you aren’t nice to me, I’ll forget to have them sign the prenup.”

“Look what you got me into, Dewar. I was mindin’ my own business drivin’ stakes and now I got to watch my back.” He pointed at a barbed wire tat around his upper left arm. “You see this? Me and Rye got them to protect us against witchy women. Rye’s wife Austin either got over or under Rye’s barbed wire, but ain’t no woman never goin’ to get me to drop down on one knee. It ain’t happenin’, Jasmine darlin’. Not even you have got that much power.”

“Power hasn’t got nothing to do with good old- fashioned sleeping pills,” Jasmine told him. “But it is time for me to get home. Y’all are about done here anyway. If you need help another night, just call me. I’ve got to make peach cobblers before I go to bed tonight, and it’s startin’ to get dark, and you’ve got chores to do. Your hired help was fussin’ yesterday about you getting lazy.”

“They were not! They know I work harder than any of them out there on that ranch,” Ace protested.

Jasmine pointed her forefinger at him and pretended to shoot him. “Gotcha! But seriously I do need to get back to the café.”

“Us too.” Dewar nodded toward Gemma. “All that’s left is putting a few lights into the last half dozen cutouts and taking the empty boxes back to the barn, and Raylen can help with that.”

“I’ve got early appointments in the morning, but when you get ready to do the lights on the fences, I’ll be here,” Gemma said.

“Want to go with me, Liz?”

Ace unloaded two more boxes of stakes from the bed of his truck before he held the passenger’s door open for Jasmine. They waved and drove off down the lane, honking when they reached the end. Dewar and Gemma got into his truck and fell in behind Ace’s truck when they turned north toward Ringgold.

Raylen looked over at Liz and opened his arms. She walked into them, and they closed around her. She looked up to find his eyes closed and his lips coming toward hers. She snapped her eyes shut and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. The kiss was hard and fiery and crackled the air around them.

“I can’t stay. Mama and Daddy are expecting me to go over books with them tonight, but I had to kiss you. Are you ready to get up on that rooftop and tell everyone that we’re dating?”

She shook her head. “But we aren’t. We haven’t been on a single date.”

Raylen brushed soft kisses across her eyelids and forehead. “That can be fixed real quick. This is Wednesday. Tomorrow we’ll finish this job. Friday, I’ve got to be in Wichita Falls for a horse meeting. So Miz Liz, would you have dinner with me on Saturday night? You don’t have to work on Sunday, so we won’t have to be home early.”