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

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567–4410

(630) 961-3900

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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 everything 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