Good Time Girl. Candace Schuler

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СКАЧАТЬ a cowboy was a cowboy, even if he had freckles and a snub nose. And she could certainly use the practice. She fluttered her eyelashes experimentally.

      “Hey, yourself, sugar,” she drawled. Her accent was a near perfect imitation of the San Antonio barrel racer who had warned her against trusting cowboys. The flirtatious tilt of her head was the result of two weeks’ worth of close observation and diligent practice in front of a mirror. Amazingly, it worked.

      The cowboy swaggered a bit closer and leaned in, putting one big, beefy hand on the open car door. The mingled scents of horses, saddle soap and a musky men’s cologne, liberally applied, engulfed her. “You here alone, baby doll?”

      Roxanne stifled the urge to take a quick step backward, out of range of that too strong cologne and the unfamiliar burden of his undivided attention. It was what she would have done. Before. Now, she shut the car door with a sassy little thrust of her hip, dislodging his hand, and gave him what she hoped was a provocative look from under the fringe of her chunky blond bangs. “I’m meeting someone inside.”

      “Girlfriend?” he said, looking so much like an eager, oversize puppy that Roxanne couldn’t help but smile at him again.

      “Boyfriend.” She touched the manicured tip of her index finger to the center of his massive chest and pushed lightly, backing him up. “And he’s real jealous, sugar, so I’d be careful if I were you.”

      The cowboy’s grin widened. “I’m willing to take a chance if you are, baby doll. We could run away together before he even knows you’re here. My truck’s right over there.”

      Roxanne laughed and shook her head, causing her tousled flyaway cut to shimmer in the pink neon glow of the flock of flamingos gracing the roof of Ed Earl’s. “I wouldn’t want your death on my conscience, sugar. But thanks for the invitation.” She sighed regretfully. “It was a real sweet offer and if I wasn’t otherwise engaged, I’d be tempted.” She batted her eyelashes again for good measure. “I really would.”

      She patted his chest and turned away, tucking the car key into the pocket of her stretch denim skirt as she sauntered across the parking lot—slowly, because of the unaccustomed height of her boot heels and the graveled surface beneath her feet. The careful pace made her hips sway seductively, in a way they never did in her usual flats.

      “Man, oh, man,” she heard him say reverently, and she slowed down even more, exaggerating the fluid movement of her hips, enjoying the moment, reveling in her unexpected success.

      Oh, it had been so easy! Who would have ever believed it would be so easy?

      With a triumphant, self-satisfied smile tugging at the corners of her glossy red lips, Roxanne pulled open the front door of Ed Earl’s Polynesian Dance Palace and sashayed in like she owned the place.

      It was as if she had stepped into another world and—like Dorothy torn from her black-and-white life and thrust over the rainbow into a brilliantly colored Oz—she could only stand there and blink in stupefied amazement. It was loud, smoky, and tacky. Unapologetically, unrepentantly, gloriously tacky.

      Chinese paper lanterns were strung from life-size wooden cutouts shaped like palm trees. Brightly colored plastic fish dangled from the ceiling. Bedraggled fisherman’s netting, studded with glass floats, striped beach balls and pink plastic flamingos of various sizes, was draped across the walls. Gyrating hula dolls—the kind found on the dashboards of cars of people with questionable taste—decorated each table. The wait staff wore gaudy Hawaiian Aloha shirts and paper flower leis with their Wranglers and boots. The four members of the twanging cowboy band stood on a small, raised stage constructed to look like a log raft. The crowded dance floor was huge, kidney-shaped and painted a vivid blue. Roxanne’s cocky smile faltered a bit as she watched the dancers’ whirling, skipping, kicking progress around the scuffed blue floor.

      Dancing had never been her strong suit. Not that she didn’t love to dance. She did. But girls who were five feet nine inches tall by the time they were thirteen, especially girls who were brainy and wore glasses, too, didn’t get much opportunity to learn all the latest dance moves. Her mother had insisted she learn all the standard ballroom dances, of course—and what a wretched embarrassment those lessons had been, being waltzed around the room by an unwilling partner whose head barely reached her chin!—but she’d never danced any of the popular dances all the kids her age were doing back in high school. Not in public, anyway.

      Determined not to be left out this time around, she’d secretly taken a six-week series of dance lessons in preparation for her Wild West adventure, but none of the half a dozen country-western dances she’d so painstakingly learned bore more than a passing resemblance to the bewildering series of steps currently being performed on the floor of Ed Earl’s Polynesian Dance Palace. Obviously, her instructors—a fresh-faced young preppie couple in matching pastel plaid shirts—had never been in a Texas honky-tonk. Or six weeks of lessons hadn’t been nearly enough. Either way, she couldn’t possibly—

      “Dance, ma’am?”

      Roxanne shifted her gaze from the dance floor to find another cowboy smiling at her from beneath the rim of a broad-brimmed, black cowboy hat. This one was lean and rangy, with dark, soulful eyes and an uncanny resemblance to a young John Travolta. Unfortunately, he was also no more than twenty, at most. Still, it was heartening to be hit on as soon as she came in the door, as it were. Another sign, if she needed one, that her transformation from party pooper to party girl had been successful. If she hadn’t been ninety-nine percent sure she’d fall flat on her face, she might have taken him up on his offer, just out of pure gratitude that he’d asked.

      “Thank you, no.” She smiled at him to cushion the blow. “I’m meeting someone.” She gestured across the sea of dancers toward the bar and pool tables on the other side of the blue lagoon. “Over there.”

      “How ’bout I dance you over that way, then? Little bitty slip of a thing like you might get stomped on, you try to make it through this rowdy crowd on your own.”

      Even without the warning from the San Antonio barrel racer about a rodeo cowboy’s proclivity for stretching the truth, Roxanne knew a line when she heard one—and his was long enough to hang clothes on. No one had ever, in all her twenty-nine years, referred to her as a “little bitty slip of a thing.” She’d been called skinny. Scrawny. Bean Pole. String Bean. Arrow Archer. But never a little bitty slip of a thing. And by someone who was smiling at her as if he really, truly meant it. At the moment, anyway. It was irresistible.

      “All right, sugar,” she drawled, suddenly feeling powerfully, erotically female. Little bitty slip of a thing. If she could call forth that kind of shameless flattery from a young, good-looking cowboy by just standing there, she could do anything. Even dance in public without disgracing herself. “For that, you get one dance. The man I’m meeting can wait.”

      He whooped as if he’d just won the lottery and snagged an arm around her waist, whirling her onto the floor before she had a chance to change her mind.

      “One dance,” she reiterated as they joined the enthusiastic throng.

      They danced two dances.

      After all, the first dance hardly counted, as the song was more than half over when they joined in. And the second dance was the Cotton-Eyed Joe. It would be an affront to Texans everywhere to leave the dance floor when the Cotton-Eyed Joe was playing. Roxanne acquiesced to that argument, spurious though it was, but managed to stand firm when he tried to cajole her into a third go-round. Cute as he was—and he was darn cute!—she had other plans for the evening. And it was about time she СКАЧАТЬ