Gambling On a Heart. Sara Walter Ellwood

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      Tracy watched her brother hold his wife so close they seemed like one person as they moved out on the dance floor to Logan Cartwright’s cover of Alabama’s Feels so Right.

      As Logan finished the song, she dreaded the next dance. When she looked over her shoulder, Zack peered at her from behind a group of wedding guests. His dark blond brows lowered over his intense blue eyes. He didn’t look too happy about their turn on the makeshift dance floor.

      She swallowed and waited for him to walk toward her. Zack’s younger brother announced the next dance, and Zack stepped before her. When she placed her hand in his, heat tingled up her arm. She looked at his face, but if he felt anything, he didn’t feel the same thing she did.

      His eyes narrowed into slits. “Let’s get this over with.”

      She swallowed hard and nodded.

      All eyes were on them. In a community as close-knit as Forest County, Texas–where everyone seemed related in some convoluted way–not many people didn’t know Tracy and Zack’s sordid past. A past she had never lived down.

      He didn’t smile. His expression didn’t change from the angry contemplation she’d seen more than once on his face.

      They reached the middle of the dance floor, and he dropped her hand and reached for her waist. Heat from his light grasp immediately flowed through her, and she sucked in a breath. She had to get a grip. He was making it clear he wanted nothing to do with her. Didn’t she want as far away from him as she could get, too?

      She rested her hands on his broad shoulders. His grip tightened slightly over her hips, and their gazes touched only briefly before she looked away.

      Logan sang a cover of John Michael Montgomery’s hit, I Swear. Why did Logan pick this song for their dance? She was trapped like a calf with a pack of coyotes nipping at its flanks. She wanted Zack to pull her closer, but on the next shallow breath, she wanted him to push her away. He moved her over the floor with several inches between them.

      His heat warmed her, and his muscles flexed under her hands where she touched him. He avoided meeting her eyes, but she caught him looking at her as Logan sang about giving everything and hanging some memories on the wall.

      Was Zack thinking about what could have been between them, or was he missing his wife?

      He looked over her head. A muscle twitched in his jaw and his movements seemed hurried, like he wanted to get the dance over with. So different from the first time they’d danced together at a cattle roundup two weeks after their senior year of high school had started. A week later, they’d begun dating.

      His icy, penetrating eyes locked on hers when Logan sang the chorus. Had this cold man given her a compliment earlier? Was he the same man who lovingly cut up his little girl’s barbecued beef and buttered her roll?

      Desperate to break the tension between them, she said, “Logan’s doing well these days, it seems.”

      The muscle in his jaw twitched again as if he had to unclench his teeth to respond. “I guess.”

      That was the extent of their dance floor conversation. The moment the music ended, Zack dropped his hands and stepped out of her grasp. He didn’t say a word, only turned and walked away.

      She watched him make his way toward her parents, his back straight as a branding iron. He was so damned handsome he made her heart flutter.

      Dylan took Tracy into his arms and kissed her cheek. With her heels, she was two inches taller than her brother. “Hey, sis, it’s my turn with the third most beautiful woman in the world.”

      She playfully glared into his gray eyes and forced her trouble with Zack Cartwright to the back of her mind. “Third?”

      Dylan shrugged. “My bride is the most beautiful woman in the world. I know better than not to call my mother the second. So, that leaves third place for my busybody little sister.”

      She laughed and hugged him close. “I love you, you jerk.”

      “Hey, have you and my bride been swapping endearments for me?” He swung her into a two-step to a countrified love song that Zack and Logan’s mother had originally made a hit when she was a rock singer in the ’70s.

      “That and a few stories.” She let him spin her around.

      When she faced him again, he cleared his throat. “I guess I owe you.”

      She leaned back. “Why’s that?”

      Dylan chuckled, but it was like a hawk’s call over the grassland, deep and echoing. “I know you and Cartwright have been working together to get me straightened out. Without you, I wouldn’t have ever found Charli.”

      She followed his stare to the woman dancing with their father. Charli laughed at something he said. Zack swung their mother into view. He smiled with an ease making him a stranger to the man Tracy had danced with.

      “I don’t know where I’d be without her.” When Dylan’s voice grew soft, she focused on her brother again.

      “Have you two figured out a name for the baby yet?” she asked, turning the conversation away from the emotional cliff before she fell into the blubbering abyss below.

      “Yep.”

      “You know the sex?”

      He grinned and swung her into the last strains of the song. “I never could keep a secret from you. But all I’ll admit to is we’ll need both.”

      “You’re having twins?”

      “Shhh.” Dylan glanced around. “We’d like to keep that off the Colton Grapevine. According to the ultrasound, we’re having a boy and a girl.”

      Her eyes burned. She blinked, but a tear slipped by anyway. “Oh, Dylan. So, what are their names?”

      He shook his head and wiped the drop of water off her cheek. “Not telling you. That’s a surprise for the family.”

      As the music ended, Dylan drew her close and spoke huskily near her ear. “Tracy, I want you to be careful, but don’t over-think things where Zack’s concerned. Follow your heart. You may be surprised where it leads you. I know I was.”

      He kissed her on the cheek and left her standing in the middle of the dance floor. When the hell had her big, hard-assed brother started sounding like a Hallmark card? No, actually, he sounded more like a fortune cookie.

      She hated fortune cookies for a reason. In her experience, they never boded well.

       Chapter 2

      God, Tracy was happy to see the evening end. She’d waited for the last of the catering help and Logan’s band to pack up their equipment. The guests had left a half-hour ago after the groom whisked the bride and their soon-to-be-adopted teenage daughter, Annie Larson, off in his new pickup truck, a wedding gift from his bride.

      Tracy parked in the five-car garage beside her parents’ rented car. She and Bobby got out of the old Taurus. Now that she could afford a new car, she should consider СКАЧАТЬ