Curvy Girls: Claimed By The Cowboy (The BBW and the Billionaire Rancher) Read Online Free PDF Page B

because of the storm, so I called the ranch house and asked Drew if he’d seen you, and he said no, but he told me that Ty had left to look for a trespasser on the far east side of the property. Which is where you had headed.  Then around midnight, when I called Drew to see if you’d made it back to the main house, he said no, and he told me you guys were probably out at the Settler’s cabin.” Pause. “Fucking like bunnies.”
    “He did not say that!” Abigail gasped, mortified. Drew Monroe had been the ranch manager on the Jackson property for thirty years.
    “Something very much like that. Come on, he’s a rancher. They spend all year breeding animals. They’re very earthy.”
    Abigail buried her face in her hands. Great. Cheyenne was right; everyone in town would know.
    “We should talk about your sex life, Cheyenne. I’m sure it’s much more interesting than mine,” Abigail pleaded.
    Cheyenne’s current conquest was Franklin Vandermere the Third, a wildlife biologist who was spending the summer in a rented cabin in Crooked Creek, writing about pronghorn antelopes for his dissertation.
    “Nahhh. We’ve heard Franklin sex stories for a month straight. I feel like I know his private parts as well as my husbands’,” Carlotta said. “Don’t tell my husband I said that. You, on the other hand, hardly ever get any nookie, and then things end because it just doesn’t feel right, or whatever. Spill it.”
    “Okay, fine.  Not that it matters. He owns a ranch in Wisconsin, and he’s going back there in a few days. He only came to town for his father’s funeral and to talk his brother out of plowing over the Jackson ranch – Betsy, put that notebook away! I have got a fork, and I’m not afraid to use it.”
    Like a fast-motion cartoon character, Betsy had whipped her reporter’s steno pad out of her purse, and held pen poised over paper.
    “Pshaw. Nothing scares me; I have four older brothers.” She shot Cheyenne a look. “Two of whom you’ve slept with.”
    Cheyenne shrugged. “Eh. They were kinda uptight. I think it runs in the family.”
    “We hold very public positions in this town; we have our reputation to think of,” Betsy said primly, then turned back to Abigail. “So, the potential development is not going through?”
    It had been the talk of Crooked Creek for months now.
    Everyone knew that Boone Jackson’s father had created some kind of mysterious trust governing what would happen to the ranch once Boone died; nobody was sure exactly what the terms of the trust were. The Jackson property sprawled over 20,000 acres; whatever happened to the ranch would affect the tiny town of Crooked Creek forever.
    Boone’s health had been in decline for some time, due to his heavy drinking; when he was admitted to the hospital with end stage cirrhosis of the liver, and given weeks to live, his son Clayton hadn’t wasted any time.
    Clayton hadn’t bothered to visit his father in the hospital, but he’d invited property developers out to the ranch even before Boone took his final breath.  In town, they’d bragged about the casino and the condominiums and the new thousand-home subdivision they were going to build, along with the spa directly on top of the hot springs on the Jackson property.
    Crooked Creek, which the town was named after, was a tributary of the Colorado River, feeding directly into it, and it ran right through the Jackson property, which bordered the river, so the land had enormous value.
    Currently, the town had a population of 351.  Clayton’s plans would change the character of the town forever;  once he was done, he might as well have wiped the town off the map.
    For now, the developers had been stalled.  Nobody could proceed until Boone died and the land passed into his son’s hands.
    But now that Boone was gone, what would happen to Crooked Creek? Nobody in town knew.
    Abigail sighed. “I don’t have anything official, Betsy. Ty told me that he was going to make