Ohmigosh, he said yes. I don’t know what to do.
Yes, you do. Get your act together.
She was going to buy a man a drink. She’d asked, he’d nodded and it was as simple as that. She was no helpless Jane. She was Emily Davis, future rancher—whether her family approved of that goal or not—and current purchaser of a beer for a man whom she wanted to... Well, never mind where her mind went at the sight of him. She just wanted to be around him. So she was going to buy him a drink.
He’d gestured out of the hallway with his nod, so she’d turned and started pushing her way back into the crowd. Guitars and drums obliterated all but the loudest shouts as Emily headed for the far side of the room, where the iron-trimmed wooden bar stretched the length of the wall. The hottest man in her world was currently half behind her, half beside her, matching her every move as she dodged left and right around people who were talking and drinking and standing in one place. The rush was as exciting as that first drop on a roller coaster.
Emily wedged herself in between two other people at the bar. Like all the other girls who wanted the bartender’s attention, Emily put her elbows on the iron-trimmed wood and started to lean forward, prepared to flirt her way into getting some service, but she felt Graham’s presence behind her, and she paused. He was in a different league than her college crowd—the college she was being forced to return to. She didn’t want to act like the other girls.
It wouldn’t work, anyway. Leaning over the bar generally gave the bartender a nice cleavage shot, which would hopefully get his attention, but Emily’s outfit was more subtle than that. Sure, her dress barely reached to mid-thigh and she was wearing her fancy cowboy boots, the ones that were only good for dancing, but her chest was covered with ruffles up to her neck, not exposed by a low neckline. Besides, the bartender tonight was Jason, helping out his family on his own winter break from college. She’d known Jason in high school, when her previous stepfather had lived far outside of Austin and the school bus ride had taken over an hour each way. If the sight of Emily’s cleavage was going to make Jason hustle over to her, it would have done so years ago.
“Yo, Jason!” But her shout had to compete with the band’s cover of a Merle Haggard outlaw country tune. She whistled instead, another masculine move, but the piercing sound worked. Jason pointed at her to let her know he was coming her way next. She turned to ask Tarzan—Graham—what he’d like, but he wasn’t paying attention to her. Instead, with his eyes narrowed and his jaw set, he was scanning the crowd.
Maybe he was looking for whichever friends he’d come in with. She hoped he wasn’t looking for a particular girl, but that was entirely possible. He was undeniably handsome, and the protective streak he seemed to have—and the buff body his shirt clung to—only made him more appealing. Women would fall all over him, as she had.
He was watching someone in particular now, no longer scanning. The thrill she’d felt from having his attention dropped a notch.
“Is beer okay?” she asked over the band.
He didn’t hear her.
She reached out to touch him, her fingertips sliding over his shirtsleeve, the curve of his bicep solid underneath that soft knit.
He looked at her.
“Light beer?” she asked, pointing at the handles of the beer taps in case he couldn’t hear her. “Dark beer?”
He shook his head and made a small gesture with his hand, almost like he was busy and she shouldn’t bother him. Nothing. Not right now.
Disappointment flooded through her, washing the thrill away. A little embarrassment heated her cheeks, because she’d misread him. That nod in the bathroom hallway hadn’t meant Yes, I’d like to spend more time with you, after all. He probably hadn’t even heard her question in the first place. He’d just been on his way to the bar himself. He was waiting for her to get her drink and go back to her friends, so he could order his and go back to whomever he was looking for.
There was nothing more Emily could do. Graham had turned half away from her again. Since he wasn’t even looking at her, she could hardly flirt with him now, even if she had the guts to risk a second rejection.
Emily caught Jason’s eye and held up one finger. One beer, darn it. One lonely beer.
From somewhere beyond the pool table, a male voice shouted in anger. Two voices. More. Suddenly, Graham’s hand was on her waist, his palm immediately warm through the thin blue material of her dress. Emily turned to him in surprise just as a flurry of violence erupted near the pool table.
The crowd lurched away as one, pushing everyone a foot closer to the bar, butting up against Graham. He was braced for it, though, and didn’t move. Emily wasn’t squashed at all, not with him standing like a wall, breaking the tide of people coming at her.
Emily stepped back as much as she could to give him room, but she could only back up a half step until the rounded iron edge of the bar touched her back. He stepped with her, keeping his hand on her waist, then placed his other hand on the bar beside her and braced his arm straight. There was more shouting, another surge as people tried to get out of the way of the fistfight. Emily was sheltered from the second wave, too, safe as she looked up into those green eyes, feeling Graham’s muscles flex as he kept his arm stiff and people collided with his back, and wow, this is much too sexy.
She could love being Jane. It would be too easy to get addicted to having this man protect her from the dangers of the jungle.
But he shouldn’t have to. The crowd pushed against him, and Emily grimaced apologetically. Fistfights around here were usually over as soon as they started, but the distinctive sound of a pool cue cracking cut through the air, as loud as a baseball bat splintering on a fast pitch. Women screamed.
“Let’s go,” Graham said.
He didn’t wait for her to answer. He let go of her waist to put his whole arm around her, holding her so that her back was against his chest. He raised his other arm in front of her and used it to firmly clear the way as he herded her toward the closest door, an emergency door with an alarm on it. She knew it would open onto an outdoor courtyard full of picnic tables that would be empty in January. The door was usually propped wide open with a cinder block on summer nights.
Tonight, in the dark, people were heading for the main exit, so she and Graham were like salmon going against the flow as they headed to the much closer emergency exit. The band stopped playing, one guitar after the other petering out mid-chord. More women started screaming, which only added to the chaos.
Emily ducked instinctively as a bottle flew over their heads. She kept moving, the wall of warm man protecting her, his body all around her. The crowd jostled them—well, it jostled him. She only felt everything secondhand, a vibration at her back as his body absorbed any impact. In an amazingly short time, a matter of seconds, Emily and her bodyguard pushed open the silver bar of the emergency exit and burst into the crisp, cold air of the empty courtyard.
“Go on.” He let go of her so suddenly that she took a couple more steps before it registered that he’d changed directions and gone back to catch the door before it shut. No alarm was sounding; it had probably never been armed after the summer. Graham reached in, leaning in with his shoulder, and handed out another woman. Another. Then a steady stream of men and women started pouring out of the open door, dozens of people filling up the patio, bringing their loud and excited chatter out into the cold January night.
She lost sight of him.
Her ex, Foster Bentson, hustled out the door instead. Foster looked around the growing crowd, but there was no sharpness in his gaze, no efficient scan of the situation. Instead, Foster looked nervous, peeking back over his shoulder as he put distance between himself and the fight inside. Emily watched him for a moment. That wasn’t nervousness; it was guilt. He looked like a child afraid someone had seen him filch an extra dessert.
“Em! Hey, Em!” One of Foster’s friends, Doug, called to her from the rapidly growing outdoor crowd. “Have you seen Foster and Mike?”
She pointed briefly. “Foster’s over there.”
Tarzan had disappeared back into the jungle silently. Emily couldn’t do anything about it except wait and hope she’d see him again. Being Jane had its sucky side.
Emily crossed her arms to keep herself warm. It wasn’t freezing, but it was still in the forties, typical January weather around here. It was cold enough that she hoped the crowd would be able to go back inside shortly. She’d dressed for her night out in something fun and feminine, not warm. Her legs were bare from mid-thigh to the tops of her cowboy boots. She was going to get real cold, real quick.
Instead of walking over to Foster, Doug hollered at his friend to come over to them. The guys greeted each other like they hadn’t seen each other in months instead of minutes, performing some kind of an arm wrestler’s grip of a handshake and a bump of shoulders.
Oh, yeah. You’re a couple of he-men, the pair of you.
Emily looked around the growing crowd, but Graham was gone. It had been nice of him to get her out of the bar, but considering the way he’d helped the next few women as well, he’d just been a gentleman. He hadn’t wanted to have a drink with her, and he didn’t want to stick around and talk to her now. She wasn’t his Jane.
“Mike’s still inside,” Foster said. “I don’t know what happened. Some guy just pushed him, and next thing I knew, pool cues were flying.”
And then you ran outside to be safe and left Mike to fend for himself in there?
No wonder Foster had come out looking so guilty. He and Doug stared at one another in silence for a moment.
“But Mike can hold his own,” Doug offered.
“Oh, yeah. Mike can handle it.” Foster sounded eager to believe it.
“Yeah. Mike’s fine.”
Emily rolled her eyes even as she kept her arms crossed against the cold. “Whether Mike can handle himself or not, I’m sure he’d appreciate some backup.” She was half-tempted to go back inside, just to demonstrate how a loyal friend should act. But Mike was Foster’s friend, not hers.
Foster looked irritated. “Mike’s fine.”
“And you’re a wimp.” Then she smiled at him, very sweetly, just as he’d been begging her to do all night.
Foster opened his mouth, looking offended as all get-out, ready to tell her off.
Bring it, wimp. She was so in a mood for a fight. Nothing was going her way tonight. She’d come here to blow off some steam with girlfriends, because her family had spent the entire Christmas break trying to talk her out of the one career—the one life—she wanted. Talk had turned to ultimatums she couldn’t disobey. But her friends hadn’t shown up. Her ex had. Then a stranger named Graham had rocked her world just by standing still, but the man couldn’t be less interested in her. Frustration of every kind was boiling over.
Foster abruptly shut his mouth and settled for a sneer before he shuffled away a couple of feet.
Awareness prickled down her spine, and she turned around to find Graham back in his silent bodyguard mode, standing just behind her. He was scanning the crowd again, but he spared her a glance as she looked at him. He nodded.
Great. Apparently he communicated in nods, which she’d already misinterpreted once. She kept her arms crossed and crossed her ankles, too, squeezing her thighs together to keep warm, and tried communicating with words. “That was my ex and his friend.”
“I figured that out.”
Ah, he speaks. Emily waited, but that was apparently all Graham was inclined to say.
She tried again. “He’s harmless, but it was nice of you to step in earlier by the bathrooms. You don’t have to keep being my bodyguard, though. I can handle him.”
“There’s no gate in this fence,” he said. “We’re penned in if the fight spills outdoors.”
Okay, then. He was still in bodyguard mode. She might not need a bodyguard, but he’d be a heck of a good one, always on duty, always making people think twice with that air of danger about him.
She rubbed her arms. “The only way in and out is the front door where they check the IDs. We won’t be leaving for a while.”
“If the fight comes out here, we’ll have to go over the fence. I’ll give you a hand.” He glanced at her, and she knew, without a doubt, he was judging how much she weighed and how easy or difficult it would be to toss her over. It was a purely practical evaluation. There was nothing sexual in that look.
He nodded toward one section of the fence. “We’ll go there. I can see between the planks that there are no shrubs on the other side to get tangled in.”
It wasn’t that he was dangerous, she realized. It was that he was prepared to handle danger. “Do you always have an exit plan?”
“Always.”
She’d benefited from his last exit plan when they’d been inside, but it was kind of sad that he’d had one when he could have been smiling at her and enjoying a beer instead. Expecting the worst at all times must wear a person out.
“This bar usually isn’t this bad. Just a fistfight that’s over before it’s started, maybe one a week. This one’s probably over already. You won’t have to throw me over any fences.” She patted his arm without thinking, a couple of firm slaps. It was the same way she’d pat her horse’s neck after they’d worked the cattle.
Atta boy. We’re done now; you don’t have to keep watching the herd.
But this was no beast under her hand. This was a man, with hard muscles and an even harder expression on his face.
She pulled her hand back, embarrassed at her impulse, and tucked her hands back under her arms. She uncrossed her ankles, then crossed them the other way, trying to stay warm. There was just enough of a breeze to make the ruffles on her dress lift and ripple.
Graham didn’t look cold. In fact, he looked pretty comfortable outside. It was as if now that he’d assessed the situation and located his alternate exit, he was content to wait it out.
Emily wished everyone were that way. The drama gearing up around them was ridiculous. While the men all puffed out their chests and claimed they could have done something if they’d needed to, a group of girls hung all over each other, sobbing, not two feet away. Emily found their drama even worse than the men’s bragging. She just couldn’t summon up any sympathy for perfectly healthy, perfectly capable women who acted like they were dying.
“Did you see how close they got to me? I swear to God, I thought I was going to die.”
Emily glanced at Graham. He’d crossed his arms against the cold, too, but he was watching her instead of the crowd, for once. Great. She’d probably been rolling her eyes or wrinkling her nose in disapproval. Her family teased her about the faces she made all the time, so it was entirely possible that she hadn’t been keeping her thoughts to herself.
She could pretend she wasn’t embarrassed, but it was harder to pretend she wasn’t cold. The breeze was pretty brisk, but surely the police were on their way. It took a little while for them to get this far out of town, but they’d be here soon to sort out the action inside. Maybe the patio crowd would be stuck out here for another half an hour, tops. She’d survive.
The cluster of girls weren’t cold. They had each other to hug and weep upon, of course, but some had a different strategy. One woman chose a man from the crowd and zeroed in on him, tiptoeing over to him in little baby steps. She clasped her hands and blew on them like they were already frozen solid. “I’m so sorry to bother you, but could I borrow just the edge of your coat? Just to tuck my hands under the hem for a minute? It’s so freezing out here.” Within a matter of seconds, she had the man eating out of her cold hands, taking off his coat and laying it over her shoulders while she thanked him as if he’d done something extraordinary—as if she hadn’t maneuvered him into doing just that.
Emily knew how to play that game, just as she knew how to flash some cleavage to catch a bartender’s attention. She simply didn’t want to. It took too much energy to keep up the golly-gee-whiz facade. It felt a little demeaning to her, to have to act like an innocent child in order to be thought of as cute. She hadn’t been able to sustain it very long with Foster, and Foster hadn’t liked her much when she’d acted more like herself and less like a helpless doll.
Still, the girl in the borrowed coat was undoubtedly warmer than Emily at the moment. Girls who acted cute got all the attention.
Not from Graham.
Emily had given him a hearty handshake instead of a cute tilt of her head, and yet, for whatever reason, Graham had gotten her to safety first before helping anyone else.
No wonder Graham was so darned appealing. She hadn’t asked him to step in when Foster was harassing her; he just had. She hadn’t felt helpless when the fight had broken out, but he’d protected her, anyway. He had to be interested in her, didn’t he?
Graham walked a few steps to stand on the other side of her, just close enough to be in her personal space.
“Here, try turning this way,” he said. With one hand on her arm, he angled her so that she was once more standing with her back to his chest, but they weren’t touching this time. The ruffles of her dress fell still.
“What—what are you doing?” she asked.
“It feels less cold if the wind’s at your back.”
But of course, he’d blocked the wind for her with his larger body without her having to pout or flirt or even flatly ask him to.
If the man was trying to seduce her without touching her, he was succeeding. Now that Emily thought about it, the literary Jane wasn’t a cute or adorable character. She never manipulated anyone. She’d just been herself, lost in a jungle, and a man had swooped in to save her because he’d wanted to, not because she’d flirted with him first.
She looked at Graham over her shoulder. “Now the wind’s not at my back. It’s at yours.”
“That was the idea.” The ghost of a smile touched his lips. He looked so unconcerned, standing behind her, but he had to be cold. It was forty-something degrees out, and he was human.
“You’ll freeze to death,” she said.
“That’s doubtful.”
She did roll her eyes then.
He shrugged, a small movement of his shoulder. “It’s not that windy. More of a brisk breeze.”
“It’s still cold, no matter how much wind there is or isn’t.” She hesitated, all her thoughts about not being fake or manipulative swirling in her head. She hoped she wouldn’t come across that way. “I know we don’t know each other, but if you put your arm around me again, it would keep us both warmer.”
He didn’t move for the longest moment.
She hadn’t played the game right. She should’ve smiled when she’d said that and tilted her head just so, maybe run a finger over his arm. Or she could’ve just said she needed to warm up and then leaned into him with a giggle and puppy dog eyes.
Too late now. She’d been straightforward, and it would be too psycho if she suddenly switched gears. So she shrugged her own shrug, as casual as his had been. “I’d feel a little less guilty if I was helping to keep you warm, too. That’s all.” Pretending her pride wasn’t stung, she crossed her ankles the other way and studied the pattern of swirls that had been tooled into the pointed toes of her leather boots.
His arms came around her so gently, the only thing startling was how very warm he felt. He stepped closer, so his chest touched her back. His square-toed boots mingled with her fancy ones.
“Nothing to feel guilty about,” he said. “There was no sense in both of us getting windblown, so I thought I’d stand on this side.”
“But this is even warmer, for both of us.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
His voice was close to her ear. No, not his voice—his lips. His mouth. She hadn’t meant to use near-freezing temperatures to indulge in a little fantasy with this man, but being wrapped in his arms was delicious.
“For the record, I wouldn’t normally put my hands on a woman in the first half hour that I’ve met her,” he said. “My mother would call it ‘getting handsy.’”
He had a deep voice. She shivered, and pretended it was from the cold. “It’s forty degrees out. Believe me, all I’m thinking is that you’re warm, not handsy.”
He chuckled, which surprised her, because his expression hadn’t been anything but grave from the hallway to the bar to the patio. “My mother drilled it into my head that girls don’t like guys who get handsy. I should have dated more in the winter.”
“Look how we’re standing. We look like a prom photo. You’re not being any more handsy than a boy who gets to put his arms around his prom date for the camera while his teachers are chaperoning. Pretty innocent stuff.”
“I don’t know about innocent intentions at prom,” he murmured from his prom position behind her. “I think I was a pretty handsy date. Yours wasn’t?”
“I’d had my hair done at a salon. I didn’t want him to mess it up.” She loved this, being able to just turn her head a little to the side to have a private conversation with Graham, cheek to cheek. “I think I scared him off early in the evening when he went in for a kiss. I said, ‘Don’t touch my hair.’ Maybe it was more like a shriek. Don’t touch my hair. He barely touched any part of me after that, not even for the slow dances.”
She felt Graham’s smile even before she peeked at him out of the corner of her eye. He held her just right, his arms loosely crossed over hers, hands resting at her waist, no awkwardness in trying to avoid touching certain parts of her, no accidentally-on-purpose brush against her breasts, either. It was heaven to be with a man who knew what he was doing.
“Whoever your date was, he’s kicking himself every time he remembers his prom,” Graham said. “An opportunity to hold a pretty girl doesn’t come along every day. Fortune favors the brave.”
“And you are the brave?”
He paused a fraction of a second. “Back then.”
“What about now?”
“I got older. I’m a very, very good boy now.” He murmured those words close to her ear, this man who knew what he was doing. Her breath left her in a rush of want, her body reacting instantly with a heavy ache deep inside. A very, very good boy...
She turned her head to see more of his profile. He had hard features, nothing of the prettiness of the theater majors at her college, none of the country club grooming of the aspiring business majors. Graham was still keeping an eye on the crowd around them, the way he narrowed his eyes causing little lines to fan at their corners. She felt that same thrill of being protected; she felt that same tug of sympathy for a man who never dropped his guard.
“At least now you won’t freeze to death for my sake,” she said. “You already took a few punches for me tonight. I’m sorry about that.”
“I did?”
“On the way out of the bar.”
“Nothing to be sorry for. That was just some pushing and shoving. No one landed a decent hit.”
And it wouldn’t have fazed you if they had.
He was older, stronger, tougher than the other guys. Stronger than she was, although she thought of herself as both strong and strong-willed—stubborn, her mother called it—and she needed to continue being both if she ever hoped to live the life she wanted. But always being strong could wear a person out.
So tonight...
Why couldn’t she be Jane for just one night? Not the strongest, not in charge, not the decision maker. What could be the harm in spending a little time with a man who knew what he was doing?