A Cowboy's Temptation. Barbara Dunlop

      “I will have by tomorrow.”

      “I could arrest you, you know. Have the sheriff lock you up. Hold you overnight on suspicion.”

      “Suspicion of what?”

      He could tell she wasn’t taking him seriously.

      “Sedition. Rabble-rousing.”

      She smiled again, shaking her pretty head. “And I could sue you and Lyndon back to the Stone Age.”

      “You probably could.”

      “I absolutely could.” She picked up the last chunk of the funnel cake before looking him in the eyes. “You’re a smart guy, Seth. And you know how to rise to a challenge. You don’t have to cheat to get there.”

      “You’re pandering to my ego?” He couldn’t help but hope she denied it. And that hope made him realize he wanted her to have a decent opinion of him.

      “I’m being honest,” she responded.

      It was ridiculous, but his chest tightened with some kind of silly pride. “I’m not going to cheat.”

      That earned him another smile. “Which means I’m going to win.”

      * * *

      “Five hundred and ninety-seven,” Darby told Marta who was sitting at the computer in the great room at Sierra Hotel. It was eleven-fifty, and they only had ten minutes left to file the petition electronically. “How could we come so close, only to miss?”

      They should have worked a little harder, put up a few more posters, run another radio ad, or somehow made their pitch more compelling.

      Marta swiveled in the desk chair, her gaze calculating. “If it was me,” she began slowly.

      Darby waited.

      “I’d go ahead and add three more signatures.”

      “You mean forge them?”

      “Nobody real, just scrawl something illegible along the line. I’m sure they’d get lost in the crowd.”

      “That’s illegal. Not to mention immoral.”

      Marta gave a little shrug. “Risk-benefit analysis. If they double-check each and every signature, they’ll throw them out. If they don’t, we get a referendum.”

      “I don’t think I could ethically do that.” Darby had experienced too many situations where people claimed the end justified the means. It never did.

      “Okay, how about this. Six hundred is a lot of signatures to manually count. Are you sure we got it right? Could you have been off by one, maybe two?” She glanced at her watch. “We have seven minutes to file the petition. There’s no time for a recount. Are you absolutely, one hundred percent positive on the number?”

      Darby thought about it. Okay, that was plausible. How accurate could the true count be?

      “I’m sure the people at City Hall are going to double-check when they get it,” she cautioned.

      “True,” Marta agreed. “But if we don’t file, it’s a definite no. If we do file—” she hovered a finger over the computer keyboard “—we could get lucky. A long shot is better than no shot at all.”

      “You’ve scanned all the pages?” Darby asked.

      “A few are a bit blurry, making it, you know, maybe a little hard to get an accurate count.” Marta gave her a conspiratorial smile.

      “This’ll never work,” said Darby, even though she was reluctantly smiling back. Could they possibly fudge their way through? Their subterfuge wouldn’t make the final decision. It would only give people a chance to vote.

      “As a fallback, we’ll try for a dozen more signatures tomorrow. I double-checked. The exact wording on the regulation is: ‘A petition filed at least twenty-four hours before permit implementation. The petition must be endorsed by at least six hundred residents of Lyndon City.’ It doesn’t say the six hundred residents must have endorsed it prior to the initial petition filing.”

      “That has to have been the spirit of the rule,” Darby said, coming to her feet to read the screen. Had Marta found a loophole?

      “It’ll take a judge to say for certain,” said Marta. “And, in the meantime, if the railway gets bad press, they might rethink their commitment to the Lyndon Valley route.”

      Darby moved up behind Marta’s chair. “You’re frighteningly devious.”

      “Just thinking things through.”

      “I’m glad you’re on my side.”

      “I’m always on your side. Here goes nothing.” Marta clicked Send on the screen.

      They both watched as the cursor flashed across the screen. At eleven fifty-eight, it flashed “Sent.”

      “Do you suppose he’s still up?” asked Darby, picturing Seth in the mayor’s mansion. In her imagination, he was in blue jeans and a plaid shirt. She liked him better that way, relaxed and laid-back. When he dressed up in his suit, he seemed to get more uptight.

      “I’m sure he’s still up,” said Marta. “I’m guessing he’s swearing a blue streak about now.”

      Darby found she could easily picture that. “Wine?” she asked, breathing a sigh of temporary relief.

      They’d done all they could do for tonight, and she definitely needed to wind down before she tried to sleep.

      “Sounds easier than making margaritas,” Marta agreed, naming their favorite drink. “You want to do a swim first? I’ve been either sitting or standing still most of the day. I need to stretch my muscles.”

      “Sure,” Darby easily agreed. She’d sleep even better if she got some exercise.

      Early in the summer, she’d tethered a floating dock half a mile out in the lake for guests to use. Floodlights from the yard would illuminate their way, and it was a full moon tonight, which would give them even more light.

      “Three miles?” she asked.

      “That’ll do it,” Marta agreed. “Then wine. We get to celebrate this.”

      “Celebrate what? Not quite getting enough signatures?”

      “Celebrate still having a chance, even though we experienced a setback.”

      “You’re a true optimist.”

      “I find it helps.”

      As they’d done several times in the past, they decided to push a small dinghy out to the floater. The dinghy was stocked with towels, the wine, warm-up clothes and life jackets. It was also a means for them to paddle back to shore without getting wet again.

      After swimming several laps, they pulled up onto the floater and changed out of the suits into sweatpants and jackets, rubbing their hair dry before opening the bottle of wine.

      “This is paradise,” Marta observed, settling onto one of the towels.

      The moon was high in the sky, surrounded by pinpricks of stars. A soft breeze wafted the scent of pine from the hillsides, and the lake water lapped softly against the floater, little more than ripples on the calm surface.

      “Can you imagine a freight train chugging past, spewing out diesel smoke and shaking the ground?” Darby pointed to a rise behind the Sierra Hotel building. It would travel the length of the lowest ridge, crossing Wren Road, where it would have to blow its whistle. They’d have to put a bridge across the creek, and the reverberation would carry across the lake for miles.

      “What was it like?” Marta asked as she poured herself a glass of wine. “Being in a war zone?”

      “I was mostly behind the wire,” said Darby, taking the bottle from Marta and