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blue-eyed stare sure to have melted a few males in its time. “Oily.”
    Biting back a smile, he held up a hand. “Enough with the welcome. Can we order now?”
    Grinning like a woman who’d gone ten rounds with the Champ and won, she signaled to a waitress.
    “Flo, we’re ready.”
    “You’ve decided?”
    The women he usually dined with took half an hour to choose a meal though he’d never figured out why it was so difficult to choose salad, their standard fare.
    She shrugged, the simple action drawing his attention to her neck, devoid of jewelry, and lower, to a hint of cleavage that elicited illicit fantasies.
    “What’s to decide? Enchiladas with Essie’s secret Refried beans, spicy guacamole, and a side order of fries. Followed by a Shake, Rattle’n’Roll Float. Food of the gods.”
    He tried not to stare, he really did, but not only did this woman not belong in this town she didn’t belong on this planet. A woman with a healthy appetite? Truly alien.
    She clicked her fingers in front of his face as if trying to snap him out of it. “And a Chubby Checker Spider. Shaken, not stirred.”
    The waitress’s arrival saved him from putting his size thirteen feet in his mouth and asking where she put all that food. Not an extra ounce of weight graced her sexy body and if anyone should know he should, he’d spent enough time checking her out.
    “What’ll it be, folks?”
    “The usual for me, Flo. Marc?”
    Flo, a dead ringer for Phyllis Diller, glared at him like he was a roach scuttling across the diner floor and onto one of her trays. “Marc who?”
    If he expected Sierra to save him from the local equivalent of the Gestapo, he was mistaken. Not only did it look like she’d enjoy his interrogation, she’d probably help Flo line him up in front of the firing squad too.
    He held out his hand and Flo stared at it like dirt on a roach’s feet.
    “Marc Fairley.”
    “No relation to Liv Fairley, I bet.” Flo licked the tip of her pencil and held it poised over her pad as if that were the end of the conversation.
    Liv ? He’d never heard his mom called anything but Olivia and it added to the surrealism pervading everything about his visit here.
    “She’s my mom.”
    Flo’s scraggy eyebrows shot upward to meet her ragged grey-streaked fringe. “Well, I’ll be blowed.”
    She glanced at Sierra, who nodded confirmation, before sticking the pencil behind her ear and extending a man-sized hand towards him.
    “Why didn’t you say so, mate? Any rugrat of Liv’s is welcome here anytime. Pleased to meet ya.”
    By the waitress’s weird accent, he’d place her as Aussie rather than local. This town was just full of anomalies.
    After a suitable hand pumping that rattled his shoulder in its socket, Flo beamed.
    “What’ll it be? Chuck makes a mean burger and Esperanza’s no slouch with the Mexican stuff, being Mexican and all.”
    Flo guffawed and slapped him between the shoulder blades. A lesser man would’ve flown across the room. He absorbed the impact with the finesse of a bullfighter being upended by a bull as Sierra’s grin broadened.
    “I’ll have a Tex Mex burger and a soda please.”
    Flo peered at him like he’d asked for the moon on a plate before grabbing her pencil and scribbling something that looked awfully long for what he’d ordered.
    “Give the man what he wants, Flo,” Sierra said, the twinkle in her eye alerting him that his instinct regarding Flo was right. He’d ordered a burger; she’d probably bring him the cow.
    “He needs fattening up.” Flo aimed a pinch at his ribs but he managed to fake a sneeze and ease away. “And a Bud will put hairs on his chest. None of this soda nonsense,” she said, shuffling toward the kitchen, bellowing orders across the diner filled to capacity in the time he’d been having his bones rattled by the Amazonian Aussie.
    “They serve beer here without a license?”
    “Chuck keeps a stock in the kitchen for those who want it. He can’t