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CHAPTERONE
When you grewup in a place as small as Lonesome Point, Texas—a bend in the road, sustained by tourism to a ghost town, barely clinging to its dusty spot on the map—you learned to make your own fun.
Mia Sherman had lived in Lonesome Point almost her entire life, and knew how to take a sleepy Saturday night, and turn it into the stuff legends were made of. As the only twenty-something in town who could trace her lineage back to the Wild West days when the town was settled, Mia felt practically obligated to cause trouble. Someone had to liven up Lonesome Point, and in addition to being related to half the town, her uncle was the chief of police, and her grandmother had been mayor for as long as anyone could remember. Mia was an old hat at wiggling her way out of trouble when she was unlucky enough to get caught filling the fountain in the square with bubble bath, or “borrowing” Becky Lynn Barrett’s new car for the night so Becky’s little sister could replace it with a toy Mustang and film Becky’s reaction the next morning.
Getting caught wasn’t a deal breaker, but it was much preferable to escape unseen from the scene of the crime, and one couldn’t underestimate the importance of a solid pranking plan…
“I’ll take the south side of Main Street, and the square,” Mia whispered, sinking down behind the shrubs at the edge of The Blue Saloon Hotel parking lot. Her two best drinking buddies, Bubba, and Ugly Ross—so nicknamed, not because he was ugly, but because he had the misfortune to beuglierthan the only other Ross in town—squatted beside her. “You boys take the north, up around the bend headed toward Old Town.”
“All right,” Bubba said in his well-deep voice, the one that made all the girls swoon when the burly, brown-eyed hottie sang “Would You Go with Me” at karaoke night at The Ticklish Iguana. “We’ll take the bin with the bras in it.”
“No way.” Mia wagged a finger in front of his shadowed face. “I’m taking the bras, they’ll look better up the flag pole.”
“Oh come on.” Ugly Ross gouged her in the side with his bony elbow. “At least give us a couple.”
“Huh-uh. My sale bins, my rules.”
Ross frowned. “What if I gave you five bucks?”
Mia shook her head, sending her red curls flying and making the world spin…just a little. Maybe that third shot of whiskey as the hotel bar was closing hadn’t been such a great idea, after all.
But hell, it was Saturday night. When she’d first moved back to town after grad school, Mia had kept Lavender and Lace open on Sundays, but after a few weeks, it had become clear that no one wanted to shop for panties on the Lord’s Day. She also sold homemade lotions, soaps, and an assortment of quirky, ghost town souvenirs for the out-of-towners who wandered into her shop. But panties were her stock-in-trade, and apparently not Sunday-friendly, which meant she got to sleep in tomorrow, and she intended to make the most of her small town Saturday night.
“We’ll work with the panties,” Bubba said, nudging her shoulder with his much larger one. “But you take some too, Mia. Put ‘em on the garden gnomes in front of the tea shop.”
“Brilliant,” Mia said, admiring Bubba’s pranking genius. “But I can’t. Lula would catch me.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” Bubba said. “She’s got to be sleeping.”
Mia peeked over the top of the shrubs, not surprised to see a light on in Lula’s second floor window. “I doubt it,” she mumbled.
Both Mia, and Miss Tallulah Watson—Mia’s third cousin, on her mama’s side—lived in the apartments above their shops. But whereas Mia took advantage of her prime location to sleep until the last possible moment before rolling out of her bed to open Lavender and Lace, Tallulah used her proximity to Tea for Two as an excuse to work twenty-four seven. If she wasn’t actively serving customers, she was cooking cakes and scones, knitting lace doilies to sell in her retail store, or painting faces on the ceramic dolls she entered in craft fairs.
Her cousin didn’t condone wasting time or cutting up—or have any discernible sense of humor, so far as Mia could tell—and Lula wouldnotfind waking up to discover lace panties on the heads of her thirty-seven garden gnomes amusing.
Which made the temptation nearly irresistible…
Mia wasn’t as wild as the mean-spirited soccer moms of Lonesome Point would have people believe. She didn’t have a single tattoo, had never smuggled horse tranquilizers across the border, and hadn’t so much as kissed Bubba or Ugly Ross, let alone gone to bed with both of them—at the same time, according to Regina Simpson. Sure, Mia drank a little too much on Saturday nights, and kept forgetting not to cuss in front of her grandmother, but overall, she led a relatively boring life. She worked hard and played hard, but she spent as much time babysitting her best friend Tulsi’s daughter, as she did getting into trouble.
But when it came to pranks…
Damn, if she didn’t have a hard time saying no.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” she said, waving off the high five a well-lubricated Ross aimed at her shoulder. “Congratulate me after the mission is complete. Rendezvous in twenty minutes at my place for beer.”
“Good luck, soldier.” Bubba chucked her on the shoulder, before grabbing one large canvas bin full of sale panties and heading north, Ross hot on his heels.
Mia snatched her own bin full of underpants and the few reduced price bras she hadn’t been able to sell—sale bras always did better than panties, especially panties that were the color of radioactive vomit—and hustled down the street in the opposite direction.
She had purchased the hideous undies at a deep discount, thinking she could move lime green underpants as long as they were cheap enough, but when the lingerie had arrived, the color was even more obnoxious than it had looked on the website. The shipment was non-returnable, so she’d done her best hard sell—advertising the underpants as Shock ‘Em Dead Knickers, guaranteed to catch your man’s eye in the bedroom—but in six months she’d only sold two pairs.
It was time for the panties to go to a better place.
Mia circled the square, draping underpants from the decorative metal curlicues at the base of the antique gas lamps the Lonesome Point Betterment Society had put in a few years back, before clipping all four bras to the flagpole in the middle of the square, and running them up to the top. The rope squeaked a bit as it slid through the pulleys, but Mia’s footsteps as she hurried out of the square and down the street, were completely silent.
When she was in prank mode, Mia moved like a ninja warrior, at one with the sidewalk, the warm summer breeze, and the parking meters she graced with extra-small neon thongs as she swept by. She pantied the barbershop pole at Justin’s Cuts, the front porch of Harmon and Harmon, Attorneys at Law, and the swinging wooden plaque advertising ghost town walking tours before reaching the delicate white picket fence surrounding Tea for Two’s front garden.
With catlike grace, Mia jumped the fence—the latch on the gate creaked when it opened—landing with only a slight crunch in the gravel, and tiptoed through the rose bed to the stone path that wound through the impeccably maintained yard. In just a few minutes, she had blessed each of Lula’sTakes One to Gnome OneCollector’s Edition garden gnomes with a bright green panty hat, before emptying the rest of her bin into the bone-dry birdbath.
