TroubleTXStyle

One small Texas town…
A crooked sheriff…
Corporate corruption…
Mexican cartels…

Four couples whose lives and stories are forever entwined in…

#TroubleTXStyle

Has found them all…

Cassie McBride has lived her whole life on other people’s terms: her father’s, her husband’s, ‘polite’ society. Only once did she ever have the courage to break free, just one night to live out her fantasy of ‘being a good ole’ boy’s girl.’ It is a memory that had seen her through some tough times.

Fifteen years ago, Chad Wilson held a billionaire’s dream – for a night. When morning came, he did the ‘right’ thing and walked away. But Cassandra McBride has always been a lady in his mind. The only one in his heart.

But with her husband’s arrest for money laundering, embezzlement, and more charge than she can count, her world is falling apart. All that ‘Stand by Your Man’ shit won’t save them now. It seems only one person can keep her and her fourteen-year-old daughter safe.

Will her ‘good old boy’ step up? Will their secrets bring them closer or tear them all apart when #TroubleTexasStyle comes calling?

Laura Reynolds has risen far from that falling down old trailer on the wrong side of the tracts in Sebida, Texas. At thirty-eight, she has achieved her career goals as General Counsel for McBride Industries. So, why isn’t it enough? Why this sudden need to follow some biological imperative to reproduce?

Ryan Ranger has overcome those childhood taunts. As a SEAL, he has seen more of this world than most people ever will. And his new job with the agency is fulfilling. Or it was until he watched his cousin with his new mate. But Ryan accepted long ago that kind of love was not for someone like him. Until he opened the pages of her file, the woman he is being sent to replace. This woman sets off something in his ‘golden gut.’

Nine months later, the case against McBride is haunted by deaths of key witnesses and missing evidence. The only chance of salvaging it is new evidence. Is there something they overlooked? Could she be the key? But when Ryan Ranger shows up on her doorstep in, of all places, Sebida, Texas, he is in for the shock of his life. And maybe more #TroubleTexasStyle than he can handle.

Caleb ‘Will’ Williams has spent his whole life waiting for ‘the promised land’ that his grandparents and so many others in the civil rights movement worked to build. His special gift has helped him to rise in first the Houston police department and now the agency. But it is all falling apart, his life and the whole ‘blessed’ world.

Mercy Reynolds’s life might be a bit staid. After all, she is a thirty-two-year-old virgin librarian in small-town Sebida, Texas. But that’s because she’s never met a man who makes her hotter than her ‘book boyfriends.’ Now her big sister is back in town, and trouble has followed her. What’s a virgin librarian to do when she shoots the sheriff?

Will has traded his soul to the devil or Gerald McBride. It’s not like he has anything left to live for anyway. There is just one more thing he needs to do. So, he follows the only clue in the disappearance of his cousin to Sebida, Texas. But what he finds there changes everything. Now #TroubleTexasStyle is gunning for this city boy and his country girl.

Life has never been easy for Stacey Reynolds. For the last forty years, she has lived for one thing – her girls. They were the only thing that got her through ‘that hell.’ Things were looking up. She had a good job. One daughter was happily married, another happy with her new baby, and even her baby was writing those books about the fantasy of romance. But she should have known – nothing good ever happens to her.

Rebel Zappa Moonchild is a drifter. Or maybe he’s just trying to outrun a past that he can never forget? Either way, Reb has made a good life for himself. He has applied all the tech skills he learned as a Ranger to start his own security business. It gives him the freedom he needs to move from place to place in Elvira, his home on wheels.

Until Reb answers a friend’s plea to update his small-town casino’s security system in Sebida, Texas. He finds himself drawn into something he has been avoiding for years. It isn’t his friend’s pleas but the fractured look in his woman’s eyes that haunt his dreams.

Can he find a way this time to change the course of those dreams and give the woman he loves the life she deserves? Or will #TroubleTexasStyle take them both down for the count this time?

Please be aware that these stories struggle with some of the most complex issues of our time:

  • rape trauma
  • human trafficking
  • sexual exploitation even of children
  • gender roles and feminism
  • …and POC – black, Native American, and Latino.

A note on language and stereotypes: where they are used, it is with a purpose. We cannot erase such things or people from our history. A part of moving beyond them is the validation of their existence and accepting that they were of another time. That does not make it right, but for us to learn from our history, we cannot sanitize it.

And so begins #TroubleTexasStyle…

Prologue – Trouble Brewing
Part 1 – Another Sunday In The South
Part 2 – Sunday Night
Part 3 – Monday Morning Blues
Part 4 – Come Monday Night
Part 5 – Sun Comes Up, It’s Tuesday Morning
Part 6 – Crazzy Tuesday World
Part 7 – Wednesday’s Child
Part 8 – Thursday’s Keeper
Part 9 – Finally Friday
Part 10 – Suddenly Monday
Part 11 – Tuesday’s Broken
Part 12 – Wednesday’s Blues
Part 13 – Thursday in the Danger Room
Part 14 – Friday’s Angels
Part 15 – Saturday Morning Confusion
Part 16 – Sunday Will Never Be The Same
Epilogue – Pleasant Valley Sunday