Chapter 5
Chapter Five
N oelle loved waking up on Thanksgiving morning almost as much as she loved waking up on Christmas morning. The family farmhouse was always filled with the tempting aroma of roasting turkey and her mama’s fresh-baked cinnamon rolls.
Her mama made cinnamon rolls every Thanksgiving and Christmas morning. Mostly because she didn’t have time to cook her usual big breakfast because she was already busy making the holiday feast they would eat later. This year, there would be an even bigger feast with five new family members—six if you included Corbin’s sister. And how could anyone not include Sunny Whitlock? She was like a bright ray of sunshine that filled any room with laughter and light.
Like the rest of her family, Noelle had fallen in love with Sunny at first sight and was thrilled she had accepted Mimi’s invitation to stay at the ranch for Thanksgiving. But since Noelle had gotten home so late last night from Nothin’ But Muffins, she hadn’t had a chance to see Sunny. Something she intended to remedy this morning.
Jumping out of bed, she made her way to Cloe and Sweetie’s old room, breathing in the wonderful scents of the holiday as she padded down the hallway in her snowman flannel pajamas.
She tapped on the door lightly before she eased it open. Sunny was sprawled face down on one of the twin beds like a starfish, her long arms and legs dangling off the too-small bed and all the blankets on the floor. A thick mass of long hair covered her face, loud snores emanating from the strawberry-blond waves.
Noelle had heard people snore before. Her daddy snored louder than a hibernating bear. But not even Daddy’s snore could compare to Sunny’s. Noelle stifled her laughter with her hand and started to pull the door closed. Before she could, Jelly Roll, Hallie and Jace’s mangy black cat, streaked into the room and jumped on the bed—or more like Sunny’s butt. The snoring stopped and Sunny sprang up, sending Jelly sailing.
Luckily, cats were good at landing on their feet.
“Wh-h-at!” Sunny pushed her hair out of her face and glanced around in confusion. When she spotted Noelle standing in the doorway, her big brown eyes widened before she released an excited gasp. “Is this another Secret Sisterhood initiation? What do I have to do? Race through the halls singing ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’? Muck out the horse stalls in my pajamas? Not talk all through Thanksgiving dinner?”
Ever since the Holiday sisters had invited Sunny into their secret sisterhood club, she had been dying to prove herself worthy of the invitation. When the sisters had informed her the club didn’t have any initiation rituals, besides skinny-dipping at Cooper Springs on a full moon, Sunny had looked so disappointed that Noelle and her sisters had agreed to give Sunny the occasional initiation dare just to make her happy.
As she stepped into the room, Noelle scooped up a disgruntled Jelly and considered Sunny’s suggestions. Since Hallie had been looking forward to sleeping in with Jace this morning, she wouldn’t appreciate Sunny running through the halls singing at the top of her lungs. And Noelle would never ask any woman to muck out stalls in their pajamas—especially if they were cute designer satin ones like Sunny wore. And no one at the Thanksgiving table would be happy if Sunny was silent. She was too entertaining.
But . . . it might be fun if someone else, someone who shouldn’t even be invited to Thanksgiving dinner, was punished by the dare.
Noelle sat down on the opposite bed and smiled evilly. “Whenever someone says turkey today, you have to sock the person closest to you in the arm.”
Sunny stared at her intently as if she’d just been given the Mission Impossible briefs that would explode at any second. “What if I have two people sitting on either side of me? And how hard do I sock them?”
“You can choose either one to sock and as hard as you want.”
“But what if it’s Mimi or Darla, there’s no way I can hit them. Or Sweetie or Cloe when they’re pregnant. And if I sock Hallie, she’ll knock me out.”
“Then I’d choose to avoid them and try to sit next to someone at dinner who can take it.” She knew exactly the womanizer who would rush to sit next to Sunny. Not that Sunny would mind. She had made it clear she was interested in Casey. Which meant Noelle needed to talk to her now before she saw the video and thought Noelle had broken the Secret Sisterhood rule of not poaching on another sister’s man.
Noelle stroked Jelly’s ratty fur. “There’s something I need to talk to you about, Sunny.”
Sunny got an excited look. “Is there an addendum to the dare? Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
“No. This has to do with a freaky thing that happened the other night when I was videotaping my post for Holiday Kitchen .”
“Oh, you mean Casey showing up and rescuing you.” Sunny sighed. “If that wasn’t the most romantic thing in the world, I don’t know what is.”
Noelle stared at her. “You follow me?”
“Of course I follow you. Don’t all your sisters follow you?”
“No. My sisters rarely have time for social media now that they’re married.” Which in this case was probably a good thing.
“Well, I wouldn’t hold it against them. They have been kind of busy getting married and preparing for babies.” Sunny never held anything against anyone. It looked like she wasn’t even going to hold a grudge against Noelle for taking a man she was interested in. Her smile was bright and her big brown eyes danced with deviltry as she joined Noelle on the bed. “So tell me all the juicy details. When did you two start secretly meeting? And is he a good lover?” Noelle’s face heated, which made Sunny giggle with delight and bounce up and down, causing Jelly to jump off Noelle’s lap and leave the room. “I knew it! The man looks like he knows his way around a bed.”
Noelle shook her head. “I haven’t been to bed with Casey and I have no desire to go there.” She didn’t know why an image popped into her head of her straddling him on the floor of Nothin’ But Muffins. With that image came the memory of how it felt to have all those hard muscles pressed against her.
It had felt good. Extremely good.
Which was wrong. All wrong.
A chuckle pulled her from her thoughts. Sunny watched her with a knowing look in her eyes. “You sure about that?”
“I’m positive.”
“Then why are you dating him?”
Noelle sighed. “I’m not.”
Sunny stared at her with confusion. “I don’t understand. You said yourself on your last post that you two are dating. He brought you gorgeous red roses. Why would he do that if you’re not dating?”
Noelle released a frustrated huff as she flopped back on the bed. “It was all a lie. He didn’t bring me roses. I bought them for myself.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I’m an egotistical idiot who is addicted to social media likes. Casey being my cowboy hero was all a mistake—something I planned to explain to my followers. But then I started getting all these likes and follows. The more I talked about Casey, the more likes and follows I got. And now I’ve dug a hole so deep I can’t seem to dig my way out.”
Sunny lay down next to her and stared up at the ceiling. Noelle expected disbelief and judgment. She should have known better. Sunny wasn’t one to point fingers.
“I can see how that could happen. Everyone loves to be liked.”
“Not so much that they’d perpetuate a lie.”
“I don’t know about that. I think there are a lot of people who would do just about anything for one of their posts to go viral. People use their spouses, pets, kids, and random people on the street to stage all kinds of things to get social media followers and likes. Even the people who aren’t doing that, only show what they want people to see. And that’s pretty much a form of lying. So you shouldn’t feel too badly.”
Noelle turned her head to look at her. “How did you get to be so nice?”
Sunny shrugged. “I’m not that nice. You should see me when I lose my temper.”
“What? Do you stomp your foot and call someone a poopyhead?”
Sunny laughed. “Something like that. So tell me exactly what happened.”
Noelle told Sunny everything about Casey showing up when she was filming and about discovering she’d gone viral and deciding to perpetuate the lie that she and Casey were dating. When she was finished, she rolled to her side to face Sunny.
“But I want you to know that it’s all a hoax and I would never break the Secret Sisterhood oath of trespassing on another sister’s man. I know you like Casey and, believe me, he’s all yours.”
Sunny didn’t look relieved. In fact, she looked more than a little disappointed. But maybe it was just a trick of the sunlight pouring in through the window. Because a second later, the look was replaced with a big smile. “Nice to know. So how long is this hoax going to continue? And does Casey know about it?”
“He knows about the video, but he doesn’t know that I’m pretending we’re still in a relationship.”
“And you’re not going to tell him, I take it.”
“There’s no need to. The only people who would know it was Casey who rescued me the other night are the townsfolk and, like Casey, most of them aren’t even on social media. The ones that are know Casey and I are like kerosene and a lit match. So once I implement my plan—” A plan she’d been up all night concocting. “They’ll just think they misunderstood what was going on that night.”
“You’ve lost me,” Sunny said. “What plan?”
Noelle smiled. “I plan to give my followers exactly what they want—the baker and the hot cowboy.”
“And how do you plan to do that without Casey?”
Noelle smiled. “Casey isn’t the only tall, hot cowboy in Wilder.”
The rest of the morning flew by as Noelle helped her mama get everything ready for dinner. Due to Holiday Kitchen posts, the pies were baked and lined up on the counter waiting to be sliced and complemented with big scoops of homemade whipped or ice cream. But there were still dinner rolls to make and all the sides that went with the two turkeys roasting in the ovens and the ham simmering in Dr Pepper in the Crock-Pot.
Usually, they ate Thanksgiving dinner at the big kitchen table. But this year, with their enlarged family, they needed much more seating. So it was decided—mostly by Liberty and Belle, the family event planners—that everyone would eat in the barn.
Noelle had to hand it to the twins. They did a great job of decorating. The night before, they had set up portable banquet tables to make one long dining table and then covered it in white linen. They hung over thirty mason jars with tea light candles on a wire they had their husbands string from the rafters over the table. More mason jars were filled with wildflowers and used as centerpieces. Once the great-grandmas’ china, silverware, and crystal glasses were placed on the table, it looked like it belonged in a country lifestyle magazine.
Although the real credit for making the setting perfect went to Daddy, Hallie, Jace, Corbin, and Jesse who had released all the horses into the paddock early that morning and cleaned out the stalls so the barn smelled like fresh hay rather than fresh horse poop.
Once the table was set and most of the food prepared, Noelle slipped upstairs to shower and get ready. She chose her favorite dress printed with bunches of cherries hanging from green stems. Not only was it cute and stylish, but also the high waistline gave her tummy plenty of space for extra pie and dinner rolls. The shorter hem showed just enough leg to catch the attention of a certain assistant ranch manager without being too inappropriate for a family gathering.
She had been thrilled when Mimi had told her Reid Mitchell and his niece, Sophie, would be coming to Thanksgiving dinner. Reid was the perfect cowboy to take Casey’s place on her social media platform. He even owned a black Stetson. It would be easy to just exchange one cowboy for another. And now that she thought about it, maybe fate had set up the entire fiasco with Casey just so she would end up with Reid.
A hard rap on the door startled her. Assuming it was one of her sisters, she finished tugging on a red cowboy boot as she yelled for them to come in.
But it wasn’t one of her sisters who stepped into the room.
It was the cowboy she wanted to exchange.
Except Casey didn’t look like the cocky, carefree man she knew and hated. His signature black Stetson was missing and his hair looked like a windswept wheat field. Gone was the annoying smirk and in its place was a stern frown. His eyes weren’t twinkling teasingly. In fact, they were dark and intense as they pinned her.
Suddenly, all the oxygen seemed to be sucked out of the room and Noelle struggled to catch her breath as he spoke in a deep, growly voice she’d never heard before.
“You said you were going to take the video down. Not turn me into your fake, rose-delivering boyfriend.”
Crap. He knew.
She grabbed her other boot and tried to bluff her way through. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Casey Remington, but you can’t just barge into a woman’s bedroom.”
“I didn’t barge. I knocked and you invited me in.”
“Because I didn’t know it was you.”
He stepped closer to the bed, and when she finished tugging on the other boot and straightened, her gaze was level with the part of his anatomy she’d been struggling to forget. The fly of his jeans wasn’t as bulging as it had been the other day, but it still made her feel like she had been tossed in a preheated five-hundred-degree oven.
He placed those work-calloused hands on his hips as if showcasing his virility. “Who did you think it was? Your hot cowboy hero?”
She pulled her gaze away from his fly and lifted her gaze to his eyes. He was mad. Spitting mad. She had never seen him like this before. While she was always ticked off at him, he had never been ticked off at her. There was something about their reversed roles that caused her world to tip on its axis. She could deal with teasing, smug Casey. She didn’t know how to deal with angry, intense Casey. And not because she feared him. Fear had nothing to do with her breath getting hung up in her lungs or the tingling heat that settled low in her belly.
“So?” he said, taking a step closer until his jeans brushed her knees. “Are you going to explain?”
She stood, hoping that would help her get control of whatever was happening to her body. But that only put her closer to another tempting part of his. His lips. Lips that she had only seen curved in a teasing smirk. Never pressed in an angry line that highlighted a tiny scar. She had never noticed the scar before, and the sight of it cutting into the top curve of his lip make her feel even more unbalanced.
“What happened to your lip?”
Those lips parted in a surprised huff. “As if you don’t remember throwing that pencil with deadly aim in fifth grade.” She did remember throwing the pencil at him for something mean he’d said to her, but she hadn’t thought she’d scarred him. He’d walked away laughing . . . and obviously bleeding. “And don’t think you can change the subject.” He gripped her arms, not roughly, but with just enough pressure to make her extremely aware of his strength. “I want an explanation, Ellie. And I want it now.”
The commanding tone made her feel even more strange and breathless. But before she could figure out what in the world was going on with her, Sunny walked in.
“Hey, Elle—oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Whatever weird spell Angry Casey had cast over her broke and Noelle jerked away from him.
“You’re not interrupting. Casey was just—”
“Lost.” He flashed Sunny a charming smile, all anger gone. “Would you be so kind as to point me in the right direction of the bathroom, Sunny?”
Sunny glanced at Noelle in question before she nodded. “Of course. I’m an expert at showing people the way.” She turned to leave and Casey followed. But before he stepped out of the room, he glanced back at Noelle, his fiery blue eyes branding her with their intensity.
“This isn’t finished, Ellie.”