“Then get a move on.”
Natalie felt both hot and cold at the same time as they lined up behind the red rope. The two girls in line ahead of them looked all of eighteen. One had vibrantly pink hair. She wore a skimpy little halter top, a sandwich-sized skirt, and an elaborate tattoo of a blue dragon on her lower back. The other girl was total goth, dressed in black from head to toe.
“They’re not getting in,” she leaned over to whisper in Zoey’s ear. “I bet they’re still in high school.”
Dade gave the giggling girls a stern look. “ID.”
They passed him their driver’s licenses.
He shone a penlight over the cards and then narrowed his eyes as he looked into their faces. “You young ladies do not look twenty-one.”
“We are,” said Goth Girl. “It says it right there on our licenses.”
“We have good genetics. When we’re forty, we’ll look thirty,” Pink Hair added.
Dade gave the driver’s licenses another hard look. Reluctantly, he handed the ID back to the girls and unchained the rope to let them inside. “Behave.”
“Does that mean we can’t pinch your butt?” Pink Hair asked.
“You may not,” he growled. “Scat.”
Giggling, they sauntered into the bar, clutching each other’s arms.
He shifted his attention back to the line, looked at Natalie, and did a double take. A slow, indolent grin spread across his face. “Natalie? Is that you?”
“Don’t act so surprised. I clean up well.”
He ran a hot, leisurely gaze down her body.
She shivered involuntarily. It wasn’t the least bit cold.
“ ‘Well’ isn’t the word for it,” he corrected. “You look sensational.”
Do not blush
, she commanded herself, but her cheeks heated anyway. Dammit! Why did she have to embarrass so easily?
“ID please.” He held out a hand.
“Seriously? You’re going to card me?”
“You look under twenty-one to me.”
Natalie rolled her eyes but she couldn’t help grinning. She showed him her identification.
His knuckles brushed against her fingers and her body went up in flames. Immediately, she dropped her hand. Her arm felt too weak to hold up.
“Twenty-nine, huh?” He looked surprised. “I never would have guessed it.”
“Flattery will get you absolutely nowhere.”
“Had to try.” He winked and turned to check Zoey’s ID.
Natalie’s heart was in her throat and her hand still tingled from where Dade had touched her. She was dimly aware of Zoey ushering her into the darkened nightclub.
Wall sconces with red bulbs dimly lighted the way into the main room crowded with people. Couples were on the dance floor. She’d lived in this town all her life and she’d never set foot in Chantilly’s.
“I see a table in the far corner.” Zoey steered her in that direction. Her sister waved at several people as they went by.
The journey to the table felt a million miles long and Natalie couldn’t help feeling that everyone was staring at her. She was so far out of her element. Once she was seated, Zoey said, “I’ll go to the bar and get us drinks. It’ll take the waitress forever to find us in this corner. What do you want?”
“I’ll have a Coke.”
Zoey gave her a look. “Seriously?”
“What?”
“You’ve gotta have a drink-drink.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Tonight you do.”
“I don’t know what to order.”
“Leave it to me.” Zoey took off for the bar and she was quickly gobbled up in the throng.
Natalie took a deep breath and settled back in her chair. Someone had put one of the town’s ubiquitous love songs on the jukebox. Amy Winehouse belting out “Cupid.”
Natalie drummed her fingers on the table. Now what was she supposed to do?
Look around for a hot guy
.
Nervously, she licked her lips and surveyed the bar patrons, zeroing in on men without partners. One dark-haired guy caught her eye, but when their gazes met, she glanced away. She didn’t want him coming over.
He got up, walked toward her.
Panicked, Natalie fished in her purse for her cell phone, pulled it out, switched it on, and started reading a book on the Kindle app. She did not look up. After a few minutes, she dared to glance around. The guy was talking to another woman. She blew out her breath. Ha! Royal ego buster. He hadn’t even been coming for her.
Amy Winehouse bled into 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love.”
There! That was an anthem she could get behind.
“May I sit down?” A low, deep masculine voice oozed over her like heated butter.
Immediately, Natalie’s body responded. See there? Dade Vega wasn’t the only one who could rev her engines. She put on a smile and glanced up.
Only to find Dade grinning down at her.
Fresh tingles started at the top of her head and spread like a rash over her body. Deep in the very center of her, feminine muscles clenched, clamped down. Natalie gulped and gripped the edge of the table with both hands.
Ah, crap.
Without waiting for her reply, Dade pulled out the chair beside her and sat down very close.
Far too close.
Only the thinnest molecules separated them.
The air in her lungs turned to liquid fire and her stomach quivered. She slanted him a sideways glance, too unsettled to squarely meet his gaze.
He didn’t say anything.
Neither did she, but her heart was galloping as if she’d just bicycled the thirty miles from Cupid to Marfa in the sweltering summer heat at high noon.
Zoey bebopped back to the table. “Gotcha an appletini and—” Her sister stopped, took a gander at Dade, and a sultry smile came over her face. Her voice lowered instantly. “Hey there.”
“Hey.” He shifted his weight, turning his shoulder in Natalie’s direction, and his knee—oh, his glorious knee—brushed against hers.
Accidental?
She spared a quick glimpse into his devilish eyes. Nothing about this man was accidental.
Natalie snatched the appletini from her sister’s hand and took a big gulp. Nice. It tasted like green apples, but immediately afterward, she felt a kick of alcohol speed through her system, and in a nanosecond she was light-headed. Giddy.
Or maybe it wasn’t the alcohol at all, but the fact that Dade’s knee was still touching hers. But here was the truly terrible thing, she wasn’t moving her knee away, did not want to move it away. Why wasn’t she moving her knee away?
Zoey glanced from Natalie to Dade and back again. “Um, I see someone I know. Gotta go say hi.”
Just like that, her wingwoman disappeared, leaving her wingless with the man she’d come here to forget.
Dade was watching her intently.
She squirmed, finally moved her knee from his, and took another long sip of appletini. Whee! What devastatingly delicious potion was this?
“This isn’t your kind of scene,” Dade said flatly.
“No,” Natalie agreed, trying to appear calm, cool, and sophisticated. She hiccupped loudly, ruining the suave look, and plastered a palm over her mouth. At least she hadn’t burped.
“You’re not accustomed to drinking.”
“No.” She wasn’t about to tell him it was her first drink ever, other than one time in high school when, in a rare moment of teenage rebellion, she and her cousin Melody had stolen a bottle of Zinfandel from Aunt Carol Ann’s wine fridge, drank the whole thing as fast as they could, and promptly threw it up.
“That control thing,” he said.
“What?”
“You don’t drink because you don’t like giving up control.”
Damn him for being so insightful. Purposefully, she picked up her glass, took a big slug of appletini. The sweet-tart taste of green apples curled around her tongue as the cool liquid sent a fresh blast of heat rolling through her.
Amusement lit up his eyes. “Have you ever been inside Chantilly’s?”
“No.”
“Why are you here now?”
It dawned on her that he thought she’d come here to see him. How freaking arrogant!
“I could ask you the same question,” she retorted. “Why are
you
here?”
“I work here.”
“Not the bar. Cupid.”
He shrugged. “Good a town as any.”
“You tell me why you’re in Cupid and I’ll tell you why I’m in the nightclub.”
10cc gave way to “Into the Wild” by LP. The lead singer suggested that someone had left a gate open. Hey, shut the damn gate. Too late. Everything had gotten out.
Dade took so long to answer that she didn’t think he was going to. Finally, he said, “I’m searching for something.”
“Pardon?”
“I’m looking for what’s missing in my life,” he murmured.
There was so much in that statement that she shied from picking at it. Her head swayed a little, like a willow in the wind. Foggily, she noticed how the black T-shirt emblazoned with the Chantilly’s logo stretched taut against his tanned, muscular biceps. He wore snug-fitting black jeans with a sharp crease running down the front legs, and black cowboy boots. Natalie took another swallow of the appletini, ran the tip of her tongue over her lips. It was almost gone. Boo-hoo.
His gaze latched on to hers, clung tight. “You might want to slow down.” He nodded at her glass. “Those pack quite a punch.”
“You might want to stop telling me what to do.”
His grin widened. “So I told you why I’m in town. Why are you in the bar?”
“You didn’t tell me. Not really. What’s missing in your life?”
His voice lowered along with his eyelids. “Someone special.”
Her heart fluttered. Dear God! She was in serious, serious trouble.
“Your turn.”
“Not so fast,” she said. “You could find someone special in any town in the world. Why Cupid? Why now? What really brought you here?”
Knock it off. Do you really want to know?
“A hunch.” He reached out and encircled her wrist with his hand. His hand was so big and her wrist so small, his thumb overlapped far enough to touch the knuckle of his index finger.
Manacled!
Natalie gulped like a fish flopping on dry land, desperate, frantic for air. His touch hit her like a blow to the solar plexus, powerful and draining. She tried to pull her hand away, but he held on tight.
Holy guacamole!
Her stomach took a running jump and landed
splat
in her throat. Her limbs were loose as jelly. And her tongue? It untied itself, rolled out words slippery and easy. “A hunch, huh? You woke up one day and thought, Gotta go to Cupid, Texas. That’s where I’ll meet my someone special?”
“Something along those lines.” His eyes narrowed to hungry slits, but his gaze belonged to her, one hundred percent.
Her blood bounded in her ears so loudly that she could not hear herself think. “Bullshit.”
“It’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
“Well,” she said. “Thanks for the chat.” She wrenched her hand from his grip, and this time, he let her go so easily that she almost toppled over in her chair.
“You all right?”
“Yes.” She barely managed to shove the word pass her lips. She pushed up from the table, her head spinning like a whirligig. Her right leg had somehow got tangled around the leg of the chair and it jerked her back down. She tottered.
“Whoa, there.” He was out of his seat, his arm going around her waist. “Told you to watch out for that drink. Those appletinis really slip up on you.”
“It wasn’t the drink,” she denied. “It’s my stupid leg.”
He hovered over her. The T-shirt fit him so snugly she could make out the delineation of his abdominal muscles beneath it. She couldn’t say what possessed her, the appletini most likely, tool of the devil that damn drink. She reached out a hand to trace her fingers over his torso.
Steel.
His abdomen felt like pure steel.
He flinched at her touch, hauled in a breath as ragged as her own. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” she confessed.
“You had better be very careful,” he said. “You go around touching a guy like that and he’s going to get the wrong idea.”
“And what is that?” she dared, tipping her chin up to meet his stare.
“That you want to take me home with you.”
“You already live at my home.”
“I do.”
The look that passed between them was so scorching that Natalie blistered, burned, boiled, broiled.
“Why did you come here tonight?” he repeated.
Her lips twitched. She gritted her teeth, tried not to tell him. If she told him why she was here, then he would know the truth.
“Natalie,” he whispered, so softly she wasn’t sure she heard him.
Around them people were laughing and talking and dancing, but she and Dade were encased in their own little cocoon, on another planet that consisted of just the two of them.
“I came here,” she said, “to get you out of my head.”
Damn you! You had to go and say it. You just had to tell him, didn’t you? Stupid woman!
“I’m in your head?”
“Don’t look so smug about it. You’re in there like a commercial jingle you can’t stop humming, but desperately want to.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse.”
“How’s that?”
“This is craziness.”
“I agree.”
“So you go back to bouncing and I’ll go back to my appletini.”
“Is that what you really want?”
Hell, no. She wanted to whisk off his cowboy hat and plow her fingers through his hair, pull his head down to hers, and kiss him until the end of time. She’d never felt this kind of relentless need. The intensity of it had driven her to go out drinking to forget him and, damn, here the devil was. Grinning at her like he knew every thought that passed through her head.
From the jukebox, Enrique Iglesias started singing “Hero.”
Dade manacled her wrist again, led her toward the dance floor.
Natalie balked. She did not dance. Could not dance.
“No.” She hooked her head, but clearly, she did not get a vote.
“Yes,” he murmured. “Yes.”
His arms were wrapped securely around her waist and he was moving her around on the dance floor. Yes, sure, her right leg was dragging a little, but that didn’t slow him down one whit. She felt feather-light in his arms.
They swayed together. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as difficult as she thought, probably because she was a little drunk and he was pressed so tightly against her she couldn’t misstep if she wanted to.