Love Under Two Benedicts Read Online Free Page B

party someplace more private.” Steven placed another, this time chaste, kiss on her lips, rubbed a possessive hand down her back, and then stepped away.
    Steven walked around to the driver’s side while Matthew opened the passenger door and urged her into the front seat of the Jeep.
    He got in after her, lifted her onto his lap, then wrapped the seat belt around them both.
    “Are you sure this is legal?” she asked.
    Matthew chuckled. “If the deputy sheriff doesn’t complain, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
    “ You’re the deputy sheriff.” Kelsey practically melted against the hard male body under her. The press of his erection beneath her bottom made her juices flow even faster.
    My God if I’m not careful I’m going to leak all over him.
    Just then, Matthew pushed his hips up slightly, and Kelsey thought it a miracle she didn’t come right then and there.
    She needed to distract herself, fast. Using every bit of willpower she could muster, she searched for something safe to talk about. Her thoughts jumped ahead to their destination. Kelsey had never been to the Benedict ranch itself. She understood the operation and scale of the land was massive, even by Texas standards. “The Big House in town here was the original ranch house, wasn’t it?”
    “Yes, until the 1950s when Sarah Benedict and Amanda Jessop-Kendall, along with our grandparents, decided to cede more land to the town. It suited Sarah to live out the rest of her years in the house she’d moved into with her husbands, and it suited our grandparents, who were true ranchers, to build a new house away from the settled area, closer to the land they loved.”
    “Your grandmother knew Sarah?” There had been quite a bit in the museum about Sarah Carmichael Benedict. She’d been so beautiful, and Caleb and Joshua had seemed so handsome, it was no wonder they’d been attracted to each other.
    “She knew Sarah and Amanda,” Matthew said. “The men had already passed on when Grandma Kate met her husbands. She has some very interesting stories to tell about our great-greats.”
    “I met her one of the times I had dinner with your folks,” Kelsey said. “One time, I think Susan said she was in Las Vegas.”
    “Grandma Kate loves to tour with a seniors group out of Waco. You never know where she’ll take off to next,” Steven said.
    Both men’s tones had softened when they’d spoken of their grandmother. Texan men loved their mothers and grandmothers, probably more, Kelsey thought, than the average American male. She couldn’t recall too many male friends in Pennsylvania who’d displayed such sentimentality toward their older female relatives.
    It didn’t take long to leave the few lights of Lusty behind. Minutes later, Steven slowed the Jeep and turned onto a lane.
    No clouds marred the sky, allowing the full moon to bathe the landscape in a silvery luminescence. The lane proved long and gently curving. They drove up a slight rise.
    When they crested the small hill, Sarah gasped. Before her, nestled in a small dale, stood an enormous home, two-story and sprawling, white with a wrap-around porch. Behind the house and to the left, she could see a barn. Corrals formed a patchwork pattern around that building. Even in the moonlight she could see horses grazing.
    “It’s beautiful. And so big!”
    “We tend to have large families,” Steven said. “My grandparents had five children, which made for eight people living in the house at one time. Plus, there had to be a couple of guest rooms ready for whatever family wanted to visit.”
    “And now you live here alone?” Kelsey couldn’t imagine having such a large, magnificent house to herself. Here was a reminder of one very important fact about the brothers Benedict, something she tended to forget. The family was as rich as Midas.
    “It’s just a house, sweetheart,” Matthew said. His words, accompanied by a slight hug, told her he could read her moods, could almost read her thoughts.