Sizzle All Day

Sizzle All Day

Bad Luck Abroad

Book Two

by

Geralyn Dawson

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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© 2000, 2011 by Geralyn Dawson Williams

Cover by Kim Killion

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Thank You
.

For my mother

Acknowledgments

I want to offer my sincere thanks to Denise Marcil and Katie Kotchman at Denise Marcil Literary Agency for their assistance in negotiating the reversion-of-rights waters. Thanks, also, to Jody Allen, for so kindly answering my e-mails and recommending my favorite Scots reference book. Y'all are the best.

Chapter 1

Scottish Highlands, 1884

Jake Delaney was a man on the run.

From his mother.

"It's embarrassing," he told the small dog sharing the saddle with him. "I'm thirty-four years old. I'm my own man. I've driven cattle from Austin to Wichita. I've fought a gun battle with bandits in the West Texas badlands and won a knife fight with card cheats in a San Antonio whorehouse. I took my first drink when I was ten, loved my first woman at fourteen, and bought my first property at eighteen. I truly believed I had my share of sand."

The dog snorted.

So did Jake. Sand, hell. He'd taken one look at that matchmaking light in his mother's eyes and had run for the hills. The hills of Scotland, that is.

The dog gazed up at him with liquid brown eyes, her long ears flopping in cadence to the horse's gait. She'd been a good, if unexpected, companion on this trip north. Jake liked females who listened well and didn't wear out a man's ears with talk of hair styles and fabrics and fashion.

That's all he'd been hearing of late. He'd spent the past few months escorting his mother around London. Elizabeth Delaney had returned to England after more than twenty years in Texas, thrown herself into the welcoming arms of a blue-blood society, and decided her son needed to follow suit. Literally.

"A bit of wenching is fine, don't get me wrong," he told the dachshund he'd christened Scooter. "But I'm not about to marry one of those simpering English misses. If I did want a wife—which I don't—I'd want a female with some pepper in her. I like heat in my women."

And in the weather, too, he silently added as the dog whined and burrowed her way inside his coat. Here it was the middle of summer, but the day was cold as a dead snake in an ice house. Think of how miserable he'd feel had he made the trip during the winter months. That's when he'd first learned that the missing copy of the Republic of Texas's Declaration of Independence was likely hidden in a castle in the Scottish Highlands, and he'd been elected to go get it.

Jake believed it to be a worthy quest. When the state capitol burned four years ago, Texas's lone copy of the historically significant document was lost to the fire. Recently, research by the Historical Preservation Society in San Antonio confirmed that in 1836, five copies of the Declaration had been penned and sent by courier across Texas in order to inform citizens of the official creation of a new republic. What, then, had happened to the four unaccounted-for copies? The Society had made it their objective to find out. They would locate the lost Declarations and bring them home to the people of Texas.

Jake became involved because at that time, his mother had been an officer in the organization.

Originally, Cole Morgan—Jake's brother-in-every-way-but-blood—had been charged with the task of retrieving the copy rumor had placed in England. Cole's search proved to be quite an adventure, netting him in the end one wife—Jake's sister Chrissy—but no Declaration, only a lead about where to look for it next. Supposedly, a lost copy of the Republic of Texas's Declaration of Independence could be found in the Scottish Highlands, in a place called Rowanclere Castle.

"So here I am," he murmured. "Cold enough to spit ice."