Good Time Girl (12 page)

“You can put your knife away, Slim. I’m not engaged to her.”

“Are you going steady?”

“No, we’re not going steady. Cowboys don’t go steady. We keep company.”

“So, are you keeping company with her?”

“No, I’m not keeping company with her. We’ve never even dated.”

“Well, then…” She looked up at him, a puzzled expression in her whiskey-colored eyes. “I don’t understand. If you’re not involved with her why the guilt trip when Rooster mentioned her name?”

Tom gave it his best shot. “It’s against the cowboy code to talk about one woman when he’s with another, is all. Bad manners. If Rooster hadn’t had a few brews too many he would have been more gentlemanly and not mentioned her.”

Roxanne didn’t believe that for a minute. She’d been around cowboys long enough to know they’d talk about any woman, any time, anywhere. Just like any other man. “What a load of B.S.,” she scoffed.

“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” Tom said, and twirled her in series of quick spin turns in the hopes she’d get dizzy and forget what they’d been talking about.

But Roxanne was made of sterner stuff. “You’ve thought about it, though, haven’t you?” she said, resuming their conversation right where she’d left off when he brought her back in against his chest again. “That’s why you reacted like a kid who’d got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.”

“Thought about what?”

“Marrying little miss Texas A&M with the degree in animal science and her daddy’s spread as a dowry.”

“I wouldn’t marry a woman for money,” he said, insulted.

“What would you marry her for, then?”

“A life partner,” he said instantly, like a man who’d recently given it a lot of thought and didn’t have to pick and choose his words now. “Someone who could understand and share my life. Someone to raise a family with. Build a future with. Grow old with.”

Someone like you,
he thought, surprising himself.

He stumbled and missed a step, causing them to bump shoulders with another pair of dancers. “Beg pardon,” he mumbled, wondering where the hell
that
had come from.

She wasn’t the kind of woman he had in mind to marry. Not by a long shot. The kind of woman he had in mind to marry was, well…he suddenly wasn’t sure exactly what kind of woman he had in mind. He’d thought it had been someone like Jo Beth but, suddenly, someone like Jo Beth seemed kind of tame and uninteresting and dull. Still, a prudent man didn’t marry a woman like Slim. She was a good-time girl, a buckle bunny who picked up cowboys in bars and took them back to her motel room for wild raucous sex. Except that she wasn’t…quite. He was the only cowboy she’d picked up, after all, and she hadn’t so much as smiled at another cowboy with anything like invitation in her eyes, despite that little misunderstanding they’d had about Clay Madison. No, the way she treated the other cowboys—Clay, included—was almost, well, motherly. And she’d become like a big sister to Rooster, chiding him about his diet, fretting over his injuries, reading him bedtime stories, for God’s sake!

Were those the actions of a die-hard buckle bunny?

But, then, hell, he thought, even if they weren’t, what difference did it make, anyway? So what if there was more to her than he’d thought that first night in Lubbock? So what if she was more than sass and sex and sweetness? Forever wasn’t part of their deal. He was just a summer fling, a part of her Wild West adventure, and in six weeks she’d be leaving him to go back to her real life. The thought gave him an odd, uneasy feeling in the center of his chest. He didn’t think he’d be ready to let her go in six weeks. Not in six months. Hell, maybe not ever…

“And Jo Beth is that someone?” she prodded, unable to let it go.

He gave her a blank look. “Someone who what?” he said, still trying to sort it all out in his mind. He had to let her go, of course. He
would
let her go. That was their deal, and it had been his plan from the get-go. Neither of them was looking for anything permanent…

“Someone you might marry,” she said, exasperated.

“Well…ah…” With an effort, he shook off his distraction. “I guess I’ve sort of considered that she could be,” he admitted, wondering how he’d ever thought that possible. He certainly wasn’t considering it now.

“Aha!” Roxanne pounced on that like a barn cat on a mouse. “I
knew
it! You
have
thought about marrying her!”

“I haven’t thought about marrying her, specifically,” he said, backtracking for all he was worth. “I’ve just been thinking about getting married in a general kind of way. And what with her living right next door, so to speak, Jo Beth was just one of the possibilities.”

“Oh, really?” Her eyebrows disappeared into her bangs. Her chin came up in that way that tempted and challenged him. “And just how many other possibilities are there?”

Tom tightened his grip on her right hand and moved in closer, in case she took it into her head to try to sucker punch him again. “For crying out loud, Slim. Do you mean to take everything I say the wrong way?”

“You said Jo Beth was only
one
of the possibilities. How else am I supposed to take it except to mean there are others?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t like being one of a crowd.”

“You’re not one of a crowd, damn it. You’re one of a kind. For which I am profoundly grateful. I don’t think the world could handle more than one of you.” He was on the hairy edge of exasperation, his tone colored with unwilling amusement, hovering somewhere between frustrated and admiring. “I know I sure as hell couldn’t.”

Roxanne ignored the exasperation and focused on the admiration. “You think I’m one of a kind?” She leaned into him, all the fight gone out of her, and smiled up into his face. “Really?”

“Really,” he said, and gathered her in close, dropping her hand to wrap both arms around her.

She sighed and snuggled into him like a kitten in familiar hands, her own arms lifting to circle his waist, her head on his shoulder, her face nestled into the warm curve of his neck.

They danced without speaking for several long minutes, feet shuffling over the wooden dance floor, bodies swaying under the stars, hearts beating in time to the music and the slow, sweet pulse of unhurried passion, content for the moment merely to hold each other and be. And then he lifted his head, and she lifted hers, and they stared at each other, intently, like lovers staring at each other across the width of a pillow.

“I want you,” he said, and wondered if he meant for now, or forever. “So much.”

“I know.” She touched her lips to his. “I want you, too.”

He smiled.

And she smiled.

And without another word they turned and, hand-in-hand, left the dance floor.

They continued to hold hands in the cab of the truck on the way back to the motel. They held hands on the short walk from the truck to their room. They were still holding hands—both hands now when they stood face-to-face beside the bed, palm to palm, fingers intertwined—when he leaned down and kissed her.

It was a soft, sweet kiss, his lips barely brushing across hers…lifting away…coming back for a second taste…a third…the pressure increasing slightly then, but still gently, almost hesitantly, as if it were the first kiss between them, as if he had just discovered the promise of passion in her and was testing its depths. Entranced, Roxanne answered in kind, her kisses as soft, as gentle, as giving as his, until, finally, gentleness wasn’t enough and she opened her mouth to him, inviting a deeper possession, a closer communion, a more complete union.

He wrapped his arms around her, bringing her body flush against his, taking their clasped hands to the small of her back, and slanted his mouth across hers, deepening the kiss. He used his tongue now, but still softly, still sweetly, the subtle seducer rather than the bold invader. Roxanne sighed and let herself be seduced.

His kisses trailed from her lips to her jaw to the soft sensitive place behind her ear, slowly—oh, so slowly—sliding down the long, slender column of her neck to the valley between her breasts. As he had once before, he buried his nose there and simply breathed her in, as if the very smell of her intoxicated him.

And, as she had before, Roxanne shuddered in his arms and fell a little bit in love. Not all the way in love, she cautioned herself. Not all the way, but just a little bit. Just enough to make her breath catch and her heart beat faster. Just enough to make her dizzy with need.

“Tom.” It was the only word she could think of to say. The only word that made any sense at the moment. “Tom.”

He raised his head and stared down into her flushed face. Her lips were slicked and red from his kisses. Her eyes were nearly golden in the dim light, her pupils large and round and focused intently on his face. “You’re so damned beautiful,” he murmured. “And I want you so damned much.”

“Then take me.” Her head fell back in surrender. “I’m yours. Take me.”

His eyes flared wide, passion and heat and something else warring in their hot blue depths. He let go of her hands and stooped, lifting her into his arms so he could lower her to the bed. She expected him to fall upon her, then, to shove the necessary bits and pieces of clothing out of the way and ride her, wildly, as he had so many times before. Instead, he straightened and began undressing himself. He dropped his clothes where he stood; his hat, his boots, his shirt and jeans and underclothes were all discarded, falling like leaves onto the carpeted floor, as she lay there and watched, mesmerized. When he was naked, he began undressing her.

He removed her boots first, dropping them on the floor at the foot of the bed. He unzipped her little denim skirt and tugged it off her hips and down the length of her bare legs. And then he sat down on the edge of the bed, bypassing her panties, and reached for the first button on her white eyelet camisole.

His gaze locked with hers, something more than passion still burning in his eyes as he slowly unbuttoned her blouse and spread it open. Her underwear was new, purchased on her whirlwind shopping trip to Wal-Mart the week before. The fabric was old-fashioned and sweet, white cotton lace with tiny blue forget-me-nots embroidered on it. The cut was scandalous—brief and unabashedly sexy. The whole was as much a dichotomy as the woman who wore it.

“So beautiful,” he said, and bent down, pressing his lips to the plump swell of flesh above the edge of the bra. “I want you.”

There was an edge of desperation in his voice, a need she had never heard before, a something that set her blood to racing through her veins, and her mind to weaving impossible fantasies. She lifted her hands up to his head, threading her fingers through his thick dark hair. “I want you, too,” she whispered, and brought his mouth down to hers for a searing, open-mouthed kiss.

The loving that followed was hot and intense, incredibly wild, impossibly tender. And when he was finally positioned between her silky thighs, on the verge of taking what they both wanted so desperately, their hands were linked, palm to palm, fingers entwined, pressed into the mattress on either side of her head.

“I want you,” he said as he thrust into her.

A
HOT, SWEATY
, tempestuous hour later, they lay, skin to skin, heart to heart, in the middle of the rumpled motel bed.

“I’m sorry about the third degree tonight,” Roxanne murmured into the damp curve of his neck.

“I’m not.” Tom ran his hand down the length of her bare back to the curve of her equally bare bottom, and gave it a little squeeze. “Every time you throw one of your little hissy fits, we have really hot makeup sex.”

Too relaxed to manage a more forceful display of feminine ire for his chauvinistic remark, she bit him lightly on the neck. “No, really, I mean it. I’m sorry.” She kissed the place she’d bitten and raised up, crossing her arms over his chest so she could look down into his face. “I have no right to pry into your personal life. What you did before this summer and what you do after it isn’t any of my business,” she said, as much to remind herself of that fact as to reassure him. “You’re only required to be a one-woman man while we’re together.”

“I reckon I’m pretty much a one-woman man all the time, anyway,” he said, wondering if, from now on, that one woman was going to be her. Wondering, too, what the hell he was going to do about it if that were the case. “One at a time is about all I can handle.” He grinned at her. “Especially when that one is a tall cool glass of water with a hair-trigger temper and a mean right jab.”

“I do not have a hair-trigger temper.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“It’s your own fault, anyway,” she said, and tweaked his chest hairs.

“How do you figure that?”

“You’re the only person I’ve ever hit in my entire life, so it must be your fault.”

“Isn’t that called blaming the victim?”

“Victim, my ass.”

“And it’s such a nice ass, too,” he said, and pinched it.

She squealed and tweaked his chest hairs again, harder this time so that he yelped in response. “See? You
made
me do that. I’m not normally a violent per—” The last word was muffled against his chest as he surged upward and rolled her beneath him.

A brief but vigorous tussle ensued. They wrestled across the bed like rambunctious children, Roxanne squirming and squealing, Tom trying mostly to keep her from pinching anything vital. In his effort to evade her grasping fingers, he rolled too near the edge of the bed and toppled off onto the floor, dragging Roxanne down with him. She snagged a pillow as she went over and was up on her knees in an instant, pummeling him with it before he had to a chance to catch his breath.

“Dang, woman.” He cupped his hands over his privates. “Watch your knee.”

“Say uncle.” She bashed him in the head with the pillow. “Say it.”

“Uncle.”

She checked her next blow, surprised by his easy capitulation. That quick, he snatched the pillow out of her hands, tossed it aside, and reversed their positions. Flat on her back on the floor, her arms held down on either side of her head, her chest heaving with exertion, Roxanne went limp. “What now, sugar?” she said, and batted her eyelashes at him.