A Slow Dance Holiday
Also by Carolyn Brown
Lucky Cowboys
Lucky in Love
One Lucky Cowboy
Getting Lucky
Talk Cowboy to Me
Honky Tonk
I Love This Bar
Hell, Yeah
My Give a Damn’s Busted
Honky Tonk Christmas
Spikes & Spurs
Love Drunk Cowboy
Red’s Hot Cowboy
Darn Good Cowboy Christmas
One Hot Cowboy Wedding
Mistletoe Cowboy
Just a Cowboy and His Baby
Cowboy Seeks Bride
Cowboys & Brides
Billion Dollar Cowboy
The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby
The Cowboy’s Mail Order Bride
How to Marry a Cowboy
Burnt Boot, Texas
Cowboy Boots for Christmas
The Trouble with Texas Cowboys
One Texas Cowboy Too Many
A Cowboy Christmas Miracle
What Happens in Texas
A Heap of Texas Trouble
Dear Readers,
Every now and then a story just isn’t completely done. Some of my readers have written and asked me what’s going on at the Honky Tonk these days. Well, dear hearts, it had fallen into a bit of disarray with so many managers coming and going. It needed some tender loving care from folks who owned it and respected its history and charm instead of just managing it and going home when the evening was done. Merle realized this and gave the Honky Tonk to a couple of her friend’s grandkids. That’s where the trouble began…
I give you A Slow Dance Holiday, and hope that you enjoy another trip to the Honky Tonk for a night of dancing and visiting with Cameron and Jorja. I’d like to take a moment to thank a few folks for giving me this opportunity to revive the old bar in Mingus, Texas. Thank you to Deb Werksman and the crew at Sourcebooks for asking me to do a novella, and for the brainstorming ideas. Thanks to my agency, Folio Literary Management, and to my agent, Erin Niumata, for all you do. Thanks to Mr. B for all the encouragement and eating pizza or burgers too many times to count so that I could finish one more chapter. And big thanks to all my fans who continue to read and support my writing habit. You are all loved and appreciated. Thanks also to Mr. Merle Haggard for recording “Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star.” I must have listened to it more than a dozen times while I was writing A Slow Dance Holiday.
Until next time,
Carolyn Brown
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2020 by Carolyn Brown
Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Stephanie Gafron/Sourcebooks
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Excerpt from Honky Tonk Christmas
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
About the Author
Chapter 1
Jorja Jenks had never been one to take risks.
She wasn’t the type of woman to quit her fantastic job in Nashville, Tennessee, on a whim to move to Mingus, Texas (population two hundred), but she did. She had worked in the accounting department of a big record company ever since graduating from college eight years before. She had never even thought about owning and operating a bar, but she was about to do just that.
When her mama and daddy found out what she had done, they were going to have a hissy fit that went way beyond the one they’d had when her grandparents took her to the Honky Tonk on her twenty-first birthday. She was a preacher’s daughter and she didn’t belong in bars—according to what they thought.
She dreaded telling them that she was now the half owner of a bar, that she’d left a lucrative job in Nashville, and moved to Mingus, Texas. She would have to come clean with them within the next week because they would be expecting her to come home for the holiday. Guess what? She wasn’t going to be in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, for Christmas dinner.
She’d only been to Mingus one time in her life, and that was on her twenty-first birthday. Her maternal grandparents had taken her out for what they thought was her first legal drink. The Honky Tonk was a pretty neat little place back then, but that had been nine years ago. If the bar had changed as much as she had, there was no telling what it looked like now. Back then, she had danced with a couple of good-lookin’ cowboys, but that wasn’t anything new. In Nashville, where she went to college, she could have kicked any bush from Church Street to the Ryman Auditorium and a dozen cowboys would come running out wanting to sing a sad country song.
Jorja had been wishing for months that she could get away from the big city and do something less stressful with her life. When her grandparents, George and Lila, and their friend, Merle Avery, had come to Nashville and Merle had told her that she was retiring and wanted to give her half rights to the Honky Tonk, Jorja had thought she was kidding. The offer of owning her own business, even if it was a bar in the little bitty town of Mingus, seemed like an answer to a prayer. She could leave the city, live closer to her grandparents, and she’d own her very own business. The only problem was that she had no idea what all was involved with securing ownership. She had thrown caution to the wind and signed the papers on impulse. Now that she was minutes away from Mingus and driving in a mixture of sleet and snow, she wondered what in the hell she had done.
“I don’t take risks,” she whispered.
But you did this time, her grandmother’s voice singsonged in her head, and you did it without batting an eye or asking a single question about Cameron Walsh, your partner in this new adventure.
“I just hope the co-owner makes a good roommate, like my old high-school friend, Cam. I should call her this week and tell her about moving here. She’ll never believe it.” Jorja heaved a sigh of relief when she eased into a parking space. Her SUV was loaded with ev
erything she owned these days. She located the key to the back door in her purse and pushed the driver’s door open. Icy-cold wind whipped through the car, and sleet stung her face when she stepped out onto the slippery concrete parking lot. Her red hair blew across her face as she hurried to unlock the back door. She brushed it away and attempted to insert the key into the lock, only to find that it was filled with ice.
“Dammit!” She swore and ran back to her vehicle. Sitting in the driver’s seat again, she glared at the door, but her go-to-hell looks didn’t melt the ice caked around the keyhole. Finally, she remembered the cigarette lighter in her emergency kit. She opened the console, found it, and said a silent prayer that it still had some fluid in it—the thing had been in the bag of unused items her father had given her for at least ten years.
“One more time,” she muttered as she opened the door and braced herself against the cold. She tried to jog from vehicle to door, but the second time her feet slipped out from under her and she almost fell, she slowed down the pace. She held the flame close to the lock, but the sleet kept putting out the tiny bit of fire. Finally, after a dozen tries, a bit of water trickled from the metal hole and she was able to unlock the door. She reached inside and found the light switch, flipped it on, and stepped inside her new apartment.
“Holy damn hell!” She hadn’t known what to expect when she swung the door open, but it damn sure wasn’t what she was looking at. Merle had told her the apartment in the back of the bar hadn’t been lived in for ten years, but that had to be wrong. No way could that much dust accumulate in only a decade. Jorja was looking at forty years’ worth of stuff, at the very least.
Two twin-sized beds were shoved against a far wall to make one bed. That would never work. Jorja would share an efficiency apartment with another woman, but she wasn’t going to share a bed. At the far end of the room was a small kitchenette with barely enough space on the right side of the sink for a dish drainer and on the left side for a coffeepot. The apartment-sized stove sat on one end and a small two-door refrigerator on the other. She walked across the floor, leaving footprints in the dust behind her, and found that the stove worked, but the refrigerator was unplugged. She pulled it out enough to get it going, killed two big-ass spiders that ran out from under it, and then pushed it back in place. When she opened the doors, she found it empty but at least clean.
She opened several doors—one to a big closet, another to a bathroom, and finally the last one got her the utility room with a stacked washer-and-dryer combination and cleaning supplies and another door at the far end that led into the bar. She peeked inside and found it hadn’t changed since she’d been there all those years ago. She filled a bucket with water and another one with cleaning supplies and carried both out into the apartment. When it was spotless, she’d bring her things inside. If it wasn’t clean enough by bedtime, she’d drive back over to Mineral Wells and spend the night with her grandparents.
“Where are you, Cam?” she groaned. “If I get this all cleaned before you get here, then you have to do the weekly cleaning for a month.”
* * *
Cameron Walsh was a big risk-taker.
He didn’t care what other people thought about his decisions. He made them. He lived with the consequences, so basically whether they were related to him or not, it was none of their business.
He didn’t hesitate about quitting his job or moving from Florida to Texas—not one minute when his grandparents, Walter and Maria Walsh, called and told him that their friend, Merle, wanted to give him half ownership of the Honky Tonk.
God, he loved that old bar, and when he visited his grandparents in Stephenville, he had spent too many nights there to count. To be half owner of his own bar was a dream come true. He could live in the apartment behind the Honky Tonk with some guy named JJ. His favorite cousin, Jesse James, was nicknamed JJ, and they’d shared too many hangovers and good times together to count on their fingers and toes combined. He only hoped this new co-owner was half as much fun as his cousin had been. Just thinking about him being gone put a lump in Cameron’s throat that was hard to swallow down.
The digital clock on the dashboard of his truck turned over to 11:11 when he rounded the back corner of the bar and nosed his vehicle in beside a bright-red SUV. “So, you’re not a cowboy, JJ.” He chuckled. “I sure hope you at least like a beer now and then.”
When he stepped out of the truck, the wind whipped his cowboy hat off and sent it rolling like a tumbleweed across the snow- and ice-covered parking lot. He chased it down and settled it back on his head. Another gust sent it flying across the lot again. This time it came to rest on a low limb of a huge pecan tree. He retrieved it a second time and held it tightly in his hands all the way to the back door of the Honky Tonk.
Merle said that the apartment hadn’t been used in years, so he wasn’t expecting much. Hopefully, it wouldn’t take long to clear off his bed and throw a set of sheets on it. Cameron was dog tired after driving for more than eighteen hours. Using the key Merle had sent him in the mail, he opened the door and stepped into a small apartment that smelled like lemon-scented cleaners. From the looks of the place, JJ was a neat freak and had chosen the twin bed across the room. Red and green throw pillows were tossed onto an off-white comforter, and the chest of drawers on that side had a doily on it.
“Sweet Jesus! What have I gotten myself into?” Cameron muttered as he crossed the room and opened the first door to find a utility room. The second door opened into a bathroom that was complete with the standard toilet, a wall-hung sink, and a deep claw-foot tub with a shower above it. He groaned when he realized he was looking at a shower curtain that had a Christmas tree printed on it. He turned around, bewildered. Cowboys didn’t decorate, and they damn sure didn’t use doilies under cute little lamps like the one sitting on the chest of drawers on JJ’s side of the room.
He shook his head, stepped into the bathroom, and closed the door. When he finished getting rid of two cups of coffee and a big bottle of root beer, he washed his hands and opened the door to find a woman standing in front of him with a pistol pointed at his chest.
“Who in the hell are you, and how did you get in here?” Her cornflower-blue eyes didn’t have a bit of fear in them. She had flaming-red hair that hung in curls down to her shoulders, and even though she was short, her stance said that she would be likely to shoot first and ask questions later.
He raised both hands and said, “I didn’t know JJ was bringing a girlfriend, but that explains all the foo-foo crap.”
“Are you drunk or crazy?” the woman asked. “No one calls me JJ except my grandparents, and I damn sure don’t have a girlfriend.”
“You are JJ?” Cameron felt as if his eyeballs were going to flip out of their sockets and roll around on the floor like marbles at the toes of his cowboy boots.
“I am Jorja Jenks,” she said, and her grip on that gun was firm and her hand was steady.
“I’m Cameron Walsh,” he said. “You can put the gun away. Looks like we’re going to be roommates and co-owners of the Honky Tonk.”
“That’s not possible. Cameron is a g-girl,” she stammered.
“And JJ was my favorite cousin, and believe me, he was all cowboy,” Cameron chuckled. “I think our grandparents and Merle Avery have pulled a good one on us. Would you please lower that gun? Talkin’ is a little tough with that thing pointed at my heart, and honey, we definitely have a lot to talk about.”
“I’m callin’ my granny.” She laid the gun on her chest of drawers and picked up her phone.
Cameron crossed the room, sat down on the bare mattress of the other twin bed, and slipped his phone from his back pocket. His grandmother answered with a question, “Are you at the Honky Tonk yet? We just got word that bad weather was coming that way. Y’all may get two or three inches of snow tonight.”
“You’ve got some explainin’ to do,” he said. “JJ is a woman.”<
br />
“Yep, and you’re a cowboy.” He could visualize his grandmother’s brown eyes twinkling. “All of us thought it was best not to tell you until you’d signed the papers.”
“I’m not living in a one-room apartment with a strange, pistol-toting woman. I’m not even unpacking. I can drive from your place in Stephenville every day,” he said.
“Nope, you can’t. We’re in Fort Lauderdale tonight. Tomorrow, we set sail on a long cruise that will last until after New Year’s. I forget what it’s called, but we’ve let out our house on one of those things where folks can come and stay while we’re gone,” Maria Walsh told him sternly.
“Y’all are at the top of my shit list,” he grumbled.
“Call it payback,” Maria giggled. “You were on the top of ours when you went and quit the college education we’d paid for without a degree and went to Florida to manage a bar. You have a brilliant mind, Cameron. You could have been an astronaut or a doctor or a lawyer, or even the governor of the great state of Texas or Florida if you’d set your head to it, but oh, no, you wanted to be a bartender. So, now you are one and we’re even. We’ll see you after New Year’s, and if you don’t like the arrangements there, then why don’t you go back to Florida and give your half of the Honky Tonk to Jorja.”
“Or maybe she’ll go back to wherever she came from and give her half to me,” he said.
“Don’t underestimate that redhead. From what Lila told me, she don’t back down easy,” Maria told him.
“We’ll see about that,” Cameron said. “Have a good cruise, and this isn’t over.”
“Don’t expect it is. Glad you made it to Mingus and that you’ve met Jorja. Y’all play nice now and share your toys.” Maria’s laughter was cut off when she ended the call.
Jorja tossed her phone on the bed and flopped down beside it. “Our grandparents have pulled a sneaky one on us. What would they do if we just walked out of here this evening and didn’t open up for business tomorrow evening?”
“You ever worked in a bar?” Cameron asked.