Men! Can’t live with ’em, and if we shot ’em all, we’d be out of business,” Mitzi grumbled as she entered through the back door of the custom wedding-dress shop that she owned with her friends Jody and Paula.

“Ain’t it the truth.” Jody adjusted her beaded headband and filled three cups with herbal tea. She threw her long blonde braids over her shoulder. “Some days I could poison Lyle.”

“And yet if anyone else even mentioned that, you’d burn them at the stake.” Paula picked up a cup of tea and carried it to the table. She’d gotten her dark hair and dark eyes from her Texan mother, but all the superstition came straight from her Louisianan father. She waved a hand over the cup three times before she tasted it. At thirty-five, she’d never been married—but then technically, neither had any one of them. Jody had lived with Lyle since they’d graduated from high school, but they rejected the tradition of a marriage license.

Jody’s brown eyes flashed. “Oh, honey, I wouldn’t waste gasoline or wood to burn anyone. I grow my own food, remember? I’d poison the tomatoes, and it would look like whoever bad-mouthed my boyfriend had had a heart attack. And you don’t have to do that with your tea. I wouldn’t dream of poisoning you.”

At almost six feet tall and fitting into size-eighteen jeans, Mitzi had learned to be comfortable in her skin but not until she was an adult. Before that she’d endured lots of bullying about her size. Of course today it came rushing back, all over a wisecrack a man had made in the tiny little pastry shop on Main Street in Celeste, Texas.

“Dammit!” she swore. “I forgot to bring in the doughnuts. I’ll be right back.”

Someone must’ve forgotten to inform the people who made calendars that in East Texas, hot weather didn’t wait until the last days of June. The official first day of summer was still three weeks away, but this day—in May—the weatherman said it would reach three digits. Mitzi’s dad had joked that he’d already seen a few lizards carrying canteens.