With deliberate movements, Ray extricated her from the wrangler’s grasp and placed himself between her and the pushy cowboy.
“You first,” Ray countered, keeping his voice even and pleasant. Only the look in his eyes, Holly noted, was steely.
For a second, it looked as if a fight would break out. The wrangler was inches away from trading punches with Ray, but then, at the last moment, he bit off a curse and just waved his hands dismissively at the both of them.
“She ain’t worth getting my hair messed up for,” the wrangler declared. “Looks as frosty as a frozen cone. She’s all yours, cowboy.” With that, the offensive wrangler stormed away.
Ray immediately turned his attention to her. There was concern in his eyes when he asked, “That jerk didn’t hurt you, did he?”
Touched, Holly shook her head. “No, I’m fine,” she assured him, and then she couldn’t help asking him, “Where did you come from?”
That grin that always made her heart flip rose to his lips. “Well, initially, according to my mother, I started out as a twinkle in my dad’s eye—”
Holly suppressed a laugh and rolled her eyes. “I meant just now. I just saw you halfway across the room with Emma.”
The second Ray had looked her way and seen what was going on, he’d felt his temper instantly flaring.
But he kept that part to himself, merely telling her, “You looked like you needed saving.” He paused, debating whether or not to say something for her own good. “You know, Doll, you have to be careful about the kind of signals you send out in a place like this,” he warned.
“I wasn’t sending out signals,” Holly protested indignantly. “I was swaying to the music.”
“Palm trees sway,” Ray corrected. “You were moving your hips in a very inviting way. That creep took you up on the invitation.” If he hadn’t been here, who knew how far this could have gone before someone would have put a stop to it? He didn’t even want to think about what might have happened. He knew that Holly liked to think that she could take care of herself, but the fact was, she wasn’t as tough as she liked to think she was. “Next time, be more careful.”
Blowing out an exasperated breath, Ray turned on his heel, ready to go back to what he’d been doing before he saw the wrangler coming on to Holly.
“Right, no swaying,” Holly promised. And then, grabbing his wrist—and his attention for a second—she flashed him a broad, grateful smile. “Thanks for coming to my rescue.”
“Don’t mention it.” Ray shrugged off her gratitude, just happy he’d been in the right place at the right time. And then, because he was feeling pretty good about the whole thing, he decided not to stomp on her ego. “You probably would have decked him if I hadn’t been here, but since I was, I figured I might as well tell that wrangler what he could do with his unsavory advances and his big, grabby hands.”
This was nice, she thought. Whether Ray realized it or not—and he probably didn’t—he’d just been the white knight to her damsel not-so-in-distress. She allowed herself to pretend that it was for the right reasons: because he cared about her, not as a friend but as a girlfriend.
“How do you know they were unsavory?” she asked.
“Easy. A guy like that only has the unsavory kind,” he maintained. And then, looking across the floor, he frowned slightly.
Holly turned around, trying to see what had caught his attention. “What’s the matter?”
The frown faded as he shrugged, assuming a disinterested air. “Looks like Emma decided she wanted to dance more than she wanted to wait for me.”
And then she saw what he was looking at. Emma was in the arms of Dixon Baker, one of the ranchers. She was looking up at him as if he was the smartest, handsomest man in the room—as well as one of the wealthier ones.
Holly looked at the man beside her. “I’m so sorry I messed up your evening,” she apologized, trying very hard not to allow a smile negate what she was saying.
Ray merely shrugged, looking completely unaffected. “No big deal,” he told her. “If not Emma, then someone else will come along. I wasn’t looking for a lifelong partner, just someone to pass the evening with.”
The band was beginning to play another song; this one had a slower tempo than the two numbers that had come just before.
Ray surprised her by turning to face her and saying, “Well, since I seem to temporarily be caught between partners, would you like to dance?”
She would have loved nothing more, but the truth was, dancing was something she had never taken the time to learn—and she didn’t want to embarrass herself or him in public like this.
“I don’t really dance,” she told Ray with a vague, dismissive shrug. She thought that would be the end of it.
But it wasn’t.
“I don’t think your hips read that memo,” Ray told her, his eyes dipping down to look at the area under discussion. “Let’s see what they’ve got,” he coaxed, taking her hand in his and drawing her over toward the newly built dance floor.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Holly protested again, although she really liked him taking her hand like that.
But he was going to regret this, she couldn’t help thinking. Ray was known to be a good dancer and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d moved her feet in anything but a determined, forward pattern, going from one destination to another.
“That’s the problem here,” he told her with a patient, knowing expression on his face. “You’re overthinking this. You’re not supposed to think at all,” he stressed. “What you’re supposed to do is feel the rhythm in your bones,” he told her, once again bending his head and saying the words into her ear to keep from shouting at her to be heard.
Taking her right hand in his left, gently pressing the small of her back, he brought her up closer to him. Just for a heartbeat, his eyes met hers. “Feel it?” he asked.
What she was feeling wasn’t anything she could admit to. It felt like someone had lit a match in her core, and it was spreading out like wildfire to all her extremities at the same time.
Her throat was bone dry as she tried to thrust out a single-word response. There was only one thing she could say in hopes that he couldn’t read between the lines. “No.”
He spread his hand out, his fingers dipping down below her waist as he tried to get her to mimic his own movements, to mimic the way his hips were moving to the beat of the music.
“Now do you feel it?” he asked, then stressed, “Concentrate.”
If possible, her mouth had grown even drier than before. There was no way she could say anything until she managed to get some saliva back. So instead, she just nodded because she did feel his hips swaying and she did try to mimic the movement.
All this while she was desperately trying to tamp down the flames that threatened to consume her.
Holly raised her head to look at him at the exact moment he looked down. For a second time, their eyes met and held, but this time it seemed to be in a timeless region where clocks had no meaning. Every jump of the pulse was never ending.
What the hell was going on here? The question echoed over and over again in his head. Ray struggled to remind himself that this was Holly, his lifelong friend, the pal he’d played ball with, learned how to rope young colts with, shared secrets and ambitions with. She knew him better than he knew himself—which right now wasn’t hard, he thought because at the moment, he felt like a swirling cauldron of confusion. If he didn’t know any better, he would have said that he was reacting to Holly, that he was attracted to her—which, of course, wasn’t possible.
If anything, it was the dress. It made her look like a different person, not good old Doll but some little hottie he hadn’t met yet.
He would have blamed his odd, rather intense reaction on the alcohol he’d consumed. Except he hadn’t co
nsumed any alcohol yet. Not even so much as a glass of beer. He’d ordered it, then left it standing on the bar when he saw Emma and decided to set his sights on her.
But, while he’d been making his play—and doing rather well, if he did say so himself—he happened to glance in Holly’s direction, completely by accident, and saw the uncomfortable and somewhat distressed expression on her face.
He would have hated himself if he’d ignored his best friend’s predicament just to win Emma over for the evening—he doubted if anything that happened between them tonight would have led to something with a longer life expectancy than a bouquet of wildflowers.
The band had just stopped playing when someone accidentally stumbled and bumped into Holly, sending her right into Ray. Their bodies, still close because of the dance, were practically sealed together.
Something hot and formless shot through Ray, jarring him down to his very toes, and he reacted entirely automatically.
There was no other earthly explanation for why his mouth was suddenly pressed against hers.
Chapter Six
This was a dream.
It had to be a dream.
But, oh, what a lovely, lovely dream it was, Holly thought as her heart hammered in her chest. She’d had this dream countless times before. Usually she was in bed, and visions of what it would be like to have Ray kiss her would seep into her semiconscious or unconscious state.
Sometimes she even had this dream when she was awake. Then, of course, it would be a daydream, most often on megasteroids. She was capable of creating phenomenally real scenarios for herself.
But all the dreams that had come before this magical moment, be they daydreams or ones she’d had while fast asleep at night, had never been this vivid, this incredibly breathtaking. Holly felt as if she’d imbibed not one but several very potent drinks rather than actually leaving her first screwdriver untouched.
She felt that light-headed, that inebriated.
This was divinely delicious, and she intended to savor every single second of it.
Rising up on her toes, flying strictly by instinct, Holly leaned into the kiss, weaving her arms around his neck. Any second now, she was certain that she was going to literally fly away.
Especially when she felt his arms closing around her, sealing her away from the rest of the world. He did such a good job that it seemed as if there was no one else inhabiting this microcosm except the two of them.
Damn, what was going on here? Ray’s brain demanded silently.
This was Holly, right?
He wasn’t sure anymore, but even so, he was fairly certain that it really couldn’t be. This woman didn’t dress like Holly, didn’t act like Holly and most of all, she didn’t taste the way he’d always assumed that Holly would if he ever thought to fleetingly sample her lips.
The Holly Johnson he knew would have smelled of soap and tasted like some kind of minty toothpaste. Holly was practical. Holly was grounded. By no stretch of the imagination was she some femme fatale who got his pulse running like the lead car in the Indianapolis 500 and his imagination all fired up—as this woman did.
Trying to anchor himself to reality, Ray reluctantly pulled back, separating their lips.
Oh, no, oh, no, don’t stop. Please don’t stop. I don’t want to wake up, not yet, Holly’s mind cried.
The next moment, the noise around them shattered the fragile world that had just been created, and reality stormed in.
As subtly as he could, Ray pulled air into his lungs, doing his best not to sound as breathless as he felt. “Thanks for the dance,” he murmured.
Holly bobbed her head up and down in response, unable to immediately form any words. Her mouth was far too dry. When she finally could get a few words together and out, she heard herself mumbling the immensely original phrase, “Don’t mention it.”
Ray regarded her with a mixture of unease and wonder. Aside from her lips having a lethal punch, she sounded a little strange, maybe even disoriented.
There was a lot of that going around, he couldn’t help thinking. “You’re okay, right?”
“Yeah, sure,” she answered hastily, then as her brain stopped revolving at speeds that rivaled the speed of light, she said, “Define ‘okay.’”
His eyes never left her face, watching her warily. “I didn’t hurt you or anything, did I?”
Oh, you “or anything-ed” me all right, she thought. She was going to remember that exceedingly intimate, wondrous contact for the rest of her life, even if she lived to be two hundred.
“No, you didn’t hurt me,” she told him with a small, dismissive laugh.
He nodded, taking in her words and trying to find some kind of inner calm for himself. But so far, it just refused to materialize.
What the hell had gotten into him? It wasn’t as if he was some oversexed tomcat ready to leap on anything that wandered across his path. He was a decent, fun-loving person who had always treated the women who passed through his life with the utmost respect—and none more so than Holly.
Hell, he doubted he’d ever even been aware of her being a woman before tonight. She’d been his friend ever since he’d extended his hand to her the first day she’d come into his classroom, looking like some kind of a lost sheep.
Looking as if she didn’t know how to fit in.
He’d felt sorry for her and he hadn’t liked the way Margaret Jennings and her girlfriend were making fun of Holly during recess. He’d walked right into the middle of that and offered her his friendship by way of a buffer that day. He’d done it just to be kind—he hadn’t counted on really liking her as a pal. But how could he not? They had so much in common. They liked the same things, saw the same movies—and, most important of all, Holly got his jokes.
But never once in all these years had he thought of her as being a girl on her way to womanhood.
Now he couldn’t think of anything else.
And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt even remotely tongue-tied. But right now, words didn’t seem to come with any sort of ease.
Instead, they were occurring to him like some randomly shattered mosaic.
“Can I get you anything?” he finally asked, desperate to have something normal to say. “A drink?” he suggested belatedly, latching on to the fact that this was, after all, a saloon.
Holly glanced over toward the table where the grabby wrangler had set her glass down. The screwdriver was still there. She nodded at it now.
“I’ve already got one, but thanks for the offer.”
She took a step toward the table where the drink stood, but Ray shifted so that he was directly in her way.
“I’ll get you a fresh one,” he told her.
A small smile curved her mouth—the same mouth that had just been beneath his, he couldn’t help thinking, staring at her lips.
“It’s not exactly like it spoiled, sitting out on the table like that. It’s not a cut of beef left out in the hot sun.”
Hands on her shoulders, he turned her around to face the bar, then walked toward it himself. “Yeah, but that creep touched it, and who knows where else his hands have been?”
Holly didn’t point out that the wrangler had also touched her when he’d tried to get her to dance with him. Instead, she followed Ray to the bar and said, “Thank you, that’s very thoughtful.”
He laughed, relaxing just a little as they slowly began to slip back into their customary roles. “Well, you know me, Doll, I’m a very thoughtful guy.”
“Yes,” Holly agreed, her eyes skimming over the back of his head as well as his sturdy, athletic frame. “You are.”
She bit her lip, not wanting to drive him away by seeming to be too clingy or anything even remotely like that, but Ray had done what no one else had ever done for her and he’d done it not just onc
e, but twice, if she counted their very first meeting.
He’d come to her rescue, and she would always be grateful to him for that.
“I appreciate your getting that guy to go away,” she told Ray with sincerity. “You didn’t have to.” After all, nowhere was it written that he was obligated to look after her.
“Yeah, I did,” Ray contradicted her, waiting for Brett to work his way back across the bar to their end of it. “That wrangler didn’t look like the type who was going to be satisfied with just one dance.”
She laughed, contradicting him. “He would have been once he found out how bad a dancer I am.”
She wasn’t that naive, was she? Turning from the bar, he held up one finger. “Number one, I don’t think that a dance was really this guy’s end goal, and number two—” he held up a second finger “—you’re not as bad a dancer as you keep saying you are. You’ve got to quit running yourself down all the time like that, Doll.”
“I don’t run myself down,” she said defensively. “I just know my limitations.” She shrugged. “I don’t believe in bragging and sending up a smoke screen when it comes to what I can or can’t do.”
There was such a thing as carrying things too far. “All right, say one positive thing about yourself,” he challenged her. “Just one, I dare you. Go ahead,” he urged.
She wasn’t accustomed to listing her own attributes and it took her a minute before she had something she could offer.
“I’m a very nice person,” she informed him. She prided herself on that, on being someone who would go out of her way to help others or to make them feel better about themselves.
She liked helping people.
“That’s just a given.” As far as he was concerned, that was the very definition of Holly. She was exceptionally nice—to everyone. Even that grabby wrangler, he thought begrudgingly.
“Not really,” she pointed out. “People aren’t just nice by default.” It would be a lovely world if that was true, she couldn’t help thinking.
“Well, you get that from hanging around with me,” he countered with a straight face.
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