“Yeah,” Cal said, sliding his eyes on over to Zoe. She was sitting up straighter now, forgetting to look sexy and just looking prim and proper instead, and damn if that wasn’t even sexier. “I’ve met Dr. Zoe. And you’re right, she’s not too . . . well acquainted with Idaho, I’d say. Here’s a little tip to help you out tonight,” he told her. “Don’t believe him when he tells you he’s a cowboy. Not until you see him ride.”
Deke snorted, but he ignored that.
“Oh. Wow. Is that innuendo?” She opened those big brown eyes wide at him. She was made up tonight, and he liked it. “Nobody told me there would be innuendo.”
He laughed. Damn.
“So I shouldn’t believe you’re a cowboy, that what you’re saying?” she went on, those round eyes nothing but innocent. “Even though you’ve got the boots and the pickup truck and everything? Because I haven’t seen you . . .”
“Oh, I can ride,” he assured her. “I can ride real good. But I’m not a cowboy. I’m a farmer.”
Rochelle snorted. “You could say that.”
He kicked her under the table, and she jumped.
“You owe me a beer for that, bud,” she told him.
“For what?” Zoe asked.
“Never mind,” Cal said. “Rochelle’s just reminding Deke and me of our manners, that’s all. Here you two ladies are, looking just that fine, and nobody’s bought you a drink yet. What can I get you?” he asked Rochelle, finishing off his own beer with one final swallow.
“Oh, the good stuff,” she said. “Corona with a lime.”
“Want a glass?”
“Nah, haven’t got that fancy yet,” she said. “Bottle’s good.”
“How about you, princess?” Cal asked Zoe. “Let me guess. White wine. No. White wine spritzer.”
There were some sparks flying in those dark eyes now, and he had to smile a little, even as he wondered why he was taking chances with the only woman to capture his fancy for months. Because it was so much fun to tease her, that was why.
Sure enough, she rose right up to it like a trout rising to a fly. “You think I’m too good for beer? I’m a geologist.”
“Um . . .” He put a hand to the back of his head, gave it a scratch. “Is that like star signs or something? Astrology?”
She sighed. “I know you know. It’s rocks. I study rocks. Actually, I study water in rocks. I’m a hydrogeologist.”
“I’ll take your word for it, Professor. So . . . wine? Beer? Let me guess. Tequila straight up, bring the bottle, leave the worm.” He gave her a wink, and she laughed.
Oh, yeah. He’d made her laugh.
“Beer,” she said. “But I’ll buy it. First one’s on me,” she told Rochelle. “Do you want another?” she asked Deke.
“Well, sure,” he said. “And next round’s on me.”
“It’s not actually a crime to let the guy buy,” Cal told her. “Just like you can let him give you a tow. At least, I’d think so.”
He saw the light dawning in Rochelle’s eyes. “Ah,” she said. “Hot mystery man to the rescue.”
This time, he was pretty sure it was Zoe giving her the kick, because Rochelle was jumping again, and he was smiling again.
“I’m not going to argue with you,” Zoe said, all business now, standing up and grabbing her little purse from the table. “Because I did appreciate my tow. And actually, that’s why I’m buying my own beer,” she said with what was clearly a flash of inspiration. “All right, you wouldn’t let me pay you for your trouble. But surely I could buy you a beer. What do you want?”
“You’re going to buy Cal a drink,” Rochelle said slowly. “This happen to you a lot, Cal? You like a take-charge lady? That where I’ve gone wrong all these years? Here I thought men liked to do the chasing.”
“Nope,” Cal said, standing up himself. “She’s not.” He decided not to answer the rest of it. No way to come out ahead on that one. “I’m buying my own beer. And I’m going to keep her company, too. My mama always told me, you never let the lady walk up to the bar alone.”
Zoe just looked at him, those dimples trying their best to come out, then turned on her cute little boot heel and sashayed off, and he followed right after her.
“Your mother told you that?” she said when she was leaning against the bar, worn dark and smooth by generations of elbows, waiting for Conrad, the overworked bartender, to make his way down to them. “She gave you etiquette advice for drinking in bars with women?”
“Nah,” he said, the slow grin spreading, because damn, but she made him smile. “I made it up.”
“Hmm. Well, that’s reassuring.”
He laughed. “Hey. We work with what we’ve got.”
Conrad made it over to them at last. “Hey, Cal,” he said. “Another cold one?”
“Yeah,” he said. “And the lady’ll have . . .” He raised an eyebrow at Zoe.
“Three Coronas with lime,” she said. “Please.”
“Glasses?” Conrad cast an experienced eye over the pretty yellow lace, the silver-studded jacket.
“Bottles,” Zoe said firmly, and Cal smiled again.
Conrad brought them over, threaded between the fingers of one beefy hand, set them on the bar, and started popping tops and shoving in the lime wedges. Cal had pulled his wallet from his jeans, but he was too late. She was holding her credit card out, and she hadn’t been kidding, because she was buying his beer.
“Please,” she told Cal. “It makes me feel better about the tow.”
“Lady’s paying,” Cal said in resignation at Conrad’s raised eyebrow.
The bartender turned to the register, was back in a moment, his heavy face apologetic. “Sorry,” he said. “Not taking the card. Got another one you’d like to try?”
Cal shot a look at her, saw the dusky red creeping up her throat, into her cheeks. Before she could answer, he had the wallet out again, was pulling out a twenty and a five, dropping them on the bar.
“Keep the change,” he told Conrad.
“Thanks,” Zoe said after a minute. “It was . . . the repair bill, I guess. I thought there was still enough on it. And we only get paid once a month.” Her mouth snapped shut. “But thanks.”
“No problem. And see, here I am again, getting my way. Kinda makes you think it was meant to be, doesn’t it?”
She laughed at that, and that was better, and they headed back to the table, where Deke had his elbows on the varnished wood, smiling into Rochelle’s animated face and looking like he was set to stay awhile.
“Honest,” Cal said, sitting down with her again. “I’m an all-right guy, even though I stop to help women on lonely highways and buy them drinks and all.”
She looked a little startled at that. So she had been worried about him. Another reason he didn’t live in California anymore. He’d hate to be that suspicious. “Ask Rochelle,” he said, “if you’re worried about it.”
“Ask Rochelle what?” Rochelle asked, because if you said a woman’s name, no matter how loud the music was or what else she was doing, she’d hear it.
“Am I a bad guy?” Cal demanded. “A deviant?”
“Not that I know of,” Rochelle said cordially.
He groaned, laid his head against the table and banged it a couple of times, sat up again, and told Rochelle, “You have known me since the seventh grade.”
“The sixth,” she corrected him. “He doesn’t remember,” she told Deke tragically. “I’m doomed to go to my grave hopelessly devoted to Cal Jackson, with my love unreturned.”
“Never mind,” Deke said. “Give it to me. I’ll return it.”
“And?” Cal demanded, ignoring Deke.
“And what?” Rochelle asked.
He sighed. “Tell Zoe. Bad guy? Or good guy?”
“All right.” She set down her beer. “Other than a lack of t
aste, as witnessed by his never once asking me out, yes. Good guy. Told the guys to knock it off when they snapped my bra strap. That was their big game. God, that was obnoxious.”
“Did you?” Zoe asked. “That’s good.”
“He said,” Rochelle pronounced, “ ‘You guys are assholes. Leave her alone.’ And they did, of course.”
“You have such power over all you survey?” Zoe asked.
“Oh, honey, he was king of the school,” Rochelle said.
“Aw, I’m blushing and everything,” Cal said. “So we sitting around here drinking? Or is anybody planning on dancing tonight? Deke and I hustled on over here to claim the two prettiest girls in the bar. Going to put us out of our misery, take us for a spin?”
“Well, I am,” Rochelle said. “If somebody asks me.”
Deke got right up, put a hand out. “I’m asking.”
She smiled. “See ya, guys.”
“What do you say?” Cal asked Zoe, watching Rochelle sway out there, put her hand in Deke’s, and start right in enjoying herself. “Seeing as I’ve got my Good Guy badge and all, think you could risk dancing with me?”
“I don’t know how,” she admitted. “Whatever it is they’re doing.”
“Ah,” he said with satisfaction. “Nobody’s ever taught a pretty thing like you how to dance country? This is your lucky night, then.” Teach her? Hell, yeah, he’d teach her. “Because here we are. We’ve got the band, and you’ve got the man.”
TEXAS TWO-STEP
Zoe looked at him, raised her eyebrows with a cool she wasn’t feeling one bit, and shrugged out of Rochelle’s jean jacket, reminding herself to move slowly, to pretend that she’d expected this, that she wasn’t surprised he wanted to dance with her. Even though she was. Surprised, that is. All right, shocked. She guessed the clothes worked. Too bad the woman in them had less than a single clue.
Call it practice, she told herself. Flirting practice. And boy, did she need practice.
His complete confidence should be bothering her, just like it should be bothering her that his eyes had dropped to her breasts for a split second while she’d arched her back to shrug the jacket off, then flown hurriedly back to her face again. It hadn’t been for long, but she’d seen it.
Unfortunately, her body didn’t seem to be getting the proper messages, because the only thing that glance did was send a few more sexy tingles down her spine. She turned, draped the jacket over the back of her chair, put her little shoulder bag across her body, looked at him and tossed her hair back, and he watched that, too. She would never doubt Rochelle again.
“All right, cowboy,” she said. “Teach me something new.”
He went still, and the fire burned just a little bit hotter. She was better at this than she’d ever realized. Or maybe it was him.
Flirting had never been fun. It had only been awkward. But it felt fun tonight.
He was up, helping to pull out her chair, taking her hand in his and leading her to a spot not too far from the stage. The music was loud up here, the dancers’ energy infectious. His hand was warm and solid around hers, big and hard and a little bit rough, and she liked that, too.
The song, a quick, swinging number that had turned the crowded floor into a twirling mass of bodies and had her wondering if she’d ever keep up, ended with a crash of drums as she stood there with him, hovering at the edge of the smooth hardwood dance floor.
“Hang on a second,” he told her. She stood and waited as he jumped up onto the low stage, and the lead singer turned to him. The man listened as Cal talked, nodded once, and Cal was jumping down again, coming back to her with his easy, loping grace, and some of her newfound confidence left her.
Shoulders broad as Texas, slim hips, boots and faded Levi’s and a black T-shirt stretching over a chest that kept right up with those shoulders. Square jaw, firm mouth, nose that wasn’t quite smooth or straight—broken, maybe. And those thick-lashed eyes, as blue as a midsummer sky in late afternoon. Not quite handsome, but tough? Oh, yeah. Every woman’s dark, dangerous barroom fantasy.
Could she really dance with somebody like that on the bare courage of one lonely beer? She wasn’t some hot babe, no matter whose borrowed clothes she wore or how much makeup she put on. She was a geologist, a geologist who didn’t know how to dance. She was going to make a fool of herself, and he’d realize his mistake. He’d be too polite to humiliate her, but she’d be humiliated all the same. She’d spend the rest of the night sitting at the table with a smile pasted on her face, watching Rochelle dance and trying to look like she didn’t care, wishing they could go home so she could quit pretending. Exactly like the ninth-grade dance.
The ninth-grade dance. Her first school dance, and her last. She hadn’t even started out sitting at a table for that one. She’d had nobody to sit with, so she’d stood against the scuffed wall of the gym in the dress her mother had said was “so cute,” that made her look “so slim and pretty,” her hair painstakingly curled, her blue-framed glasses sitting squarely on her round face and flashing in the lights, but thankfully disguising her shining eyes. Standing there with that lump rising in her throat until swallowing had been hard, and not crying had been torture.
Her one real friend and her one almost-friend had finally showed up, and she’d sat with them for the rest of the interminable evening. Except for the times when she’d sat there alone, because neither of them had been quite as relentlessly unpopular, quite as decked out with hardware, quite as chubby or as geeky as she was.
She’d actually danced twice, and she remembered both of them, and her gratitude at finally being released from the Table of Shame. Rainer from Math Club, who hadn’t seemed much more at ease than she was, and her friend’s brother, because Sylvia had told him to, although he hadn’t exactly disguised his relief at returning her to her table.
She wondered now why she hadn’t just danced with her girlfriends. Why had it seemed to matter so much that she be chosen by a boy? Why had she been willing to give them that kind of power over her? Over even her innermost thoughts, her most tender feelings? But she had.
Her dad had been waiting outside for her with the car afterward, thank goodness, so she hadn’t had to stand there alone, and she could slide in next to him and escape. He hadn’t said much—he never did, not about things like this, because he didn’t think they mattered, and look how right he had been.
Her mom, though, had said plenty. She’d been waiting up to hear all about it, and Zoe had disappointed her. Of course she had, because she always did, and what was the point in even trying?
“So how did it go, honey?” her mother asked eagerly. “Did you dance with all the cute boys?”
“No,” she muttered. “It was totally lame.”
“Oh, sweetie,” her mother said. “Did you smile and look like you were enjoying yourself, like I told you? Boys like a cheerful girl. If you look all mopey, they’ll move on to somebody else.”
“Maybe they don’t think braces and glasses are a hot look,” Zoe said. Not to mention girls whose extra pounds were in all the wrong places.
“Of course they are,” her mother said. “Maybe not exactly,” she amended as Zoe looked at her incredulously, “but remember what I always say. A smile is the best makeup. You ask them about themselves, act interested, and the boys will come to you, just like they’re the bees and you’re the flower.”
“Except I’m not a flower. And they have to be in the general vicinity first,” Zoe said. “Which they’re not. You don’t get how it is. You don’t have a clue.” A smile is the best makeup? Please. “Besides,” she said, her voice rising along with her frustration, “that’s what you want. I don’t want the same things you do. How hard is that to understand?”
“Well,” her father said, “if you don’t want it, why did you go? No point in getting emotional about it. It matters, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, what do you care
? Save your energy for the important things.”
“But it’s . . .” she tried to explain, and wondered why he couldn’t understand. Why nobody could understand. “I don’t care. Just . . . forget it, okay?”
She’d fled to her room, slammed the door, wrenched the dress over her head, stuffed it savagely into the wicker laundry hamper with its flowered liner, and gotten ready for bed. She’d pulled on her rose-printed pajamas, taken her glasses off and set them on the bedside table next to the canopied bed, switched off the lamp with its frilly shade and, finally, in the forgiving shelter of the dark, had allowed herself to cry.
She’d never done anything wrong. She’d never hurt anybody, not like the Mean Girls who looked and smirked and made comments not quite under their voices, because they wanted you to hear. She was nice. She was smart and funny. She was a good friend.
And none of it mattered, because all boys cared about was whether you were pretty, whether you had the right body—a Southern California body, tall and thin and tanned—and the right clothes to put on it. Whether you knew how to flirt and how to look cool and sound cool. She didn’t have any of that, and she was sick of trying to play a game when she didn’t even understand the rules.
That was the year she’d ripped the stupid girly canopy off her bed. She’d gotten rid of all the flowered stuff, refused to let her mother go shopping with her anymore, and changed her wardrobe to jeans and T-shirts, to her mother’s constant distress.
She wasn’t one of those girls, and she never would be, and if she was going to disappoint her mother, it was going to be by choice, because she wasn’t trying anymore to be something she wasn’t. She was a geek, and she was chubby, and she had glasses and braces, and she was smarter than almost all the boys. They didn’t like her, and that was all right, because she didn’t like them, either. Most of them were jerks, or idiots, so who cared?
She’d made friends, guys as well as girls, guys who laughed at her jokes, but she’d never gone to another school dance. Not even when she’d lost the braces, when the glasses had been replaced by contacts. She’d finally had a boyfriend, but he hadn’t been cool, and he sure hadn’t been hot.
Carry Me Home (Paradise, Idaho) Page 4