Chapter Twelve

Wade was impressed with how well the street party organizers had transformed the main street. He’d been tucked away writing all afternoon and had joined the festivities a short time ago. CC had been in the thick of it, which was annoying because he missed having her in the same room to bounce things off on a whim. But she’d been swept up in one of his mother’s mad missions, and no one got in the way of Veronica Carter on a mission.

A section of the street had been closed off using bales of hay as dividers. They also doubled for seating. Party lights had been strung from one side of the street to the other, criss-crossing to form a colorful canopy currently filtering the gilded pink clouds and purple haze of dusk.

Trestle tables were set up within the perimeter, laden with food and depressingly non-alcoholic drinks. One of the county’s finest country bands was set up in a corner, punching out tunes to which a mass of people were all dancing.

It seemed like just about everyone in the town had turned up in their finery to meet and greet and dance to the lively fiddle beat.

The party, as they say, was going off.

“Now, you boys all have something to drink, right?”

Drew, Arlo, and Tucker, seated on hay bales, nodded dutifully, raised their red Solo cups of lemonade, and said, “Yes, Mrs. Carter.”

Wade smiled. No matter how many times she insisted they call her Ronnie these days, the three of them resisted.

“I hope you’re dancing, there are a lot of women here tonight wantin’ to dance with our hottie Credence bachelors.”

Hottie? Wade winced a little at the word coming from his mother’s mouth.

But she needn’t have worried. The guys had rarely been on their asses. Except for Wade. As far as Wade was concerned, he was here to show his mother support and that was it. An hour tops. He was wearing his old Stetson pulled low on his forehead and putting out stay the hell away vibes. His plan this weekend was to lay low—the last thing he wanted was to be recognized.

Before they could confirm or deny, Wade’s mother had switched track. “Wade, don’t forget to ask Cecilia to dance, will you?”

Her request startled Wade. He and CC didn’t dance. “Why?”

His mother looked scandalized at the question. “Wade William Rhett Carter, that girl has worked her patootie off these past two weeks, the least you can do is show off some of those good Southern manners I know I taught you and not leave her sittin’ around like a wallflower.”

Wade blinked. A wallflower? If CC danced any more, she’d wear out the heels on those very distracting red cowgirl boots she was sporting. Every damn time he’d looked up, she’d been jigging away with some guy or other. It was making him pretty fucking tense, actually.

But he knew better than to get into it with his mother when Southern manners were at stake. He just nodded and said, “Yes ma’am.”

“Thank you, darlin’,” Ronnie said, smiling indulgently before fluttering away to the next thing. She hadn’t sat still all night, between all the schmoozing and introducing and generally doing her thing. She’d even managed a dance or two with her husband.

“There is something mighty rewarding about seeing a rich-ass, six-foot-two quarterback being put in his place by a little old five-two Texan lady,” Tucker said.

Arlo started to laugh, Drew did too, and Tucker followed. Wade shook his head at them. “I’m going to tell my mother you called her little and old.”

Tucker’s laughter cut off as if he’d been garroted, and Wade grinned with a certain satisfaction.

“I can’t believe your momma just called us hotties,” Drew said, which caused more laughter.

“Yes, thank you. I’m trying not to think about that.” Wade downed his current drink, wishing it was whiskey. “Christ, can’t you go and grab us a bottle of something a little stronger from that bar of yours?” he griped. “I think I’m turning into a goddamn lemon.”

“Public drinking is against the law,” Arlo said mildly, his gaze glued to the dance floor. “I’d have to arrest you.”

Wade snorted. He could try.

“Hey, is that—” Arlo leaned forward at the hips. “Is that Wyatt?”

Another snort from Wade. “Wyatt doesn’t dance.” But they all looked in the direction of Arlo’s finger, the crowd parting enough at the right time to identify Wade’s brother.

“Well,” Drew said. “I’d call that more ass-grabbing and feet shuffling but yeah, I think you’re right.”

“Since when does Wyatt dance?” Tucker asked.

“Since when does Wyatt ever get that close to a woman he doesn’t know without breaking out in hives?” Drew clarified.

They were close. Wade could just make out a sliver of light between the two bodies.

“They seem kinda into each other,” Tucker said.

Wade nodded. “They do, don’t they?”

Good for Wyatt. If anyone deserved a bit of recreation in his life, it was his brother. He just hoped he didn’t get his heart broken come Sunday.

The crowd moved then, obscuring Wyatt and his dance partner from view but revealing someone Wade wished wasn’t getting quite as much recreation.

CC.

She was currently dancing with Don Randall, whose fashion choice of mayoral chains was as idiotic as usual, but Wade barely noticed, distracted as he was by her fringed skirt playing around her knees and those red cowgirl boots. Honest-to-God boots that came to mid-calf and looked, even at a distance, the real, hand-tooled, deal. She had on a blouse that sat wide on her neckline, almost falling off her shoulders, and she had some kind of flower in her hair.

No jeans. No baseball cap. No stripy shirt. It was about as far from Where’s Waldo as was possible.

Also hot as fuck. Christ…he’d never had indecent thoughts about his PA, but hell if he wasn’t tonight.

“CC looks good in a skirt,” Arlo mused.

CC looked incredible in a skirt. It was something else Wade was trying not to think about. A little bit of hard liquor would really go down well about now.

“She’ll want to watch Don,” Tucker said. “He’s been known to get grabby.”

Wade snorted. “Don’t worry about CC. She can hold her own.”

“Yeah.” Drew nodded. “Guess a girl with five brothers knows how to look after herself.”

Wade raised an eyebrow at Drew. “How in hell do you know that?”

Drew shrugged. “She told me.”

“See, this is your problem, Drew,” Tucker said, clapping him on the back. “Chicks see you as a big brother and tell you their life story.”

Drew sighed as he watched the movement on the dance floor. “This is true.”

Arlo nodded. “You’re a good-looking guy, but women bench you because they can’t see past the whole dead-people thing.”

“I prefer the term mortally challenged.”

Arlo and Tucker laughed. Wade rolled his eyes. “When did she tell you?” He clung precariously to his patience as he tried to bring the subject back to CC. And her skirt.

Actually no, fuck, not her skirt. Her brothers.

“At Annie’s last week.”

Wade shook his head. “She’d been working for me for months before she said anything about her brothers.”

Drew shot him a pitying look. “It’s called conversation, dude, you should try it sometime.”

The criticism stung even though Wade knew Drew was just yanking his chain. CC had wanted things kept strictly business, and that was the way he’d kept them. Until recently, anyway.

“I wasn’t aware she was hanging out at Annie’s conversating.” Wade was pretty sure that wasn’t a word, but it worked for him at the moment.

“You think she stays in that ridiculous meringue of a house you live in all morning while you’re at the farm? She gets around. You don’t keep her under lock and key.”

No. But he was beginning to think he should, with this many hottie bachelors around.

“Speaking of which.” Arlo rose and tossed his cup in a nearby trash can. “I promised her a dance.”

Oh no. No, no, hell no. “Don’t even think about it.” Wade stood, scowling at his friend. Watching Don dance with CC had put his guts in a tangle. Watching Arlo limp around heroically was about more than he could stand now.

“Yeah, Arlo,” Drew said. “Wade’s gotta dance with her. His momma told him to.”

Wade flipped Drew the bird. “Bite me.”

The guys laughed some more. Their amusement at his expense tonight was becoming irritating.

Peachy. Fucking peachy.

“Thought you were keeping a low profile,” Arlo said, taking his seat again, not remotely concerned by being usurped.

Most of the media had snapped their pictures and taken off for the night, but there were a couple still hanging around. Wade pulled his Stetson lower on his forehead.

“Oh yeah,” Tucker said drily, “now you look completely different.”

Wade ignored them, a strange itch in his blood obliterating his normal sense of caution as the fringe of CC’s skirt flared and showed off her knees. Christ, since when were knees sexy? Was this how dudes back in the dark ages had felt? When a glimpse of ankle was enough to give them a hard-on?

“Good luck, honey,” Arlo called after him as he strode away. “Remember, no spaghetti arms.”

And one of his jackass, so-called friends whistled the Love Boat theme song.

The itch in Wade’s blood intensified as his legs shortened the distance between them. It wasn’t a feeling he was used to, this feeling of…uncertainty. Normally, he approached women with absolute certainty of the outcome. He knew how this went down. He was practiced and pretty damn perfect at it, even if he did say so himself.

But then, CC wasn’t a woman. She was his PA. And they didn’t dance.

The fiddles were belting out a jaunty polka-style dance as Wade took the last couple of steps. CC spotted him honing in over Don’s shoulder and frowned.

Wade stopped and tapped Don on the shoulder. “Can I cut in?”

CC blinked, her mouth parting slightly in surprise. Well, she could take a number. She wasn’t the only one surprised here tonight. He had no idea why he was doing this other than his mother’s insistence. And cock-blocking Arlo.

Nothing to do with that fucking skirt and those cowgirl boots. Nothing at all.

Don puffed himself up and patted Wade on the back enthusiastically. “Of course you can, son. Pretty little thing like this doesn’t want to be dancing with an old fogey like me.”

He chuckled in a fake kind of self-deprecation and, when neither of them jumped into refute his description, he coughed and muttered something about mayoral duties and departed.

Wade was excruciatingly aware of their stillness as couples all around them jigged along to the upbeat tempo of the music. He held out his hand. “Shall we?”

She eyed him suspiciously. “You dance?”

“I can dance.”

“This kind of dancing?”

Wade grinned, the itch dissipating at her incredulous expression. “Yes, this kind of dancing. I grew up here, remember? With a Texan mother whose sworn duty it was to raise sons who could do-si-do. I can even line dance, but I will deny that under pain of death if you tell anyone.” He reached for her hand again, but she leaned away slightly.

“Why?”

“Why not?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, and Wade could see she had some kind of dark liner where her eyelashes met her eyelids. She wasn’t the first woman to kohl up her eyes, but he was pretty sure it was the first time she had. That he’d noticed, anyway.

“We don’t dance, you and I.”

Yeah. No shit. “Well I guess there’s a first time for everything.” He waggled his hand at her. “Cut me some slack. My mother seems to think it’s an affront to Texas if I don’t ask you, so…here I am, asking you to dance.”

“Fine.” She sighed, but a small smile twitched at the corners of her mouth as she took his hand. “I wouldn’t want to insult Texas.”

Wade’s hand buzzed as CC’s slid into his. He ignored it by holding her at a decent distance and quickly picking up the steps, going through the familiar motions, looking anywhere but down.

Too soon, though, the song came to an end, and the band struck up a slower, more intimate ballad, and they were left standing awkwardly in the middle of the dance floor as couples melted into each other.

The guests and the locals seemed to be getting on very well indeed!

Wade wasn’t sure if this weekend would be a success in regards to the long-term prospects of Credence, but in the short term, he wouldn’t mind betting on a population explosion in nine months’ time.

He felt a tug on his hand as CC tried to pull away, but for some reason he resisted. “Where are you going?”

Her gaze didn’t quite meet his eyes. “Song’s over.”

Her cheeks were flushed, he noted. Maybe it was just from the exertion of the polka and the previous dancing she’d done, but her face looked pretty, all warm and pink, and got him to thinking about other ways he could put color in her cheeks, which led to a startling stirring behind the zipper of his jeans.

That alone should have warned him to unhand her, but the devil was riding him tonight.

“One more. For my mother’s sake?” He tipped his chin, and she followed the direction of his gaze. His mother—God bless her—beamed and waved at both of them, and he could have kissed her for her timing because for some reason he couldn’t explain, Wade wanted to pull CC closer, not let her go.

Something had a hold of him tonight. Maybe it was the music, maybe it was the stars, maybe it was nostalgia for Credence, which filled him everywhere he looked.

Whatever it was, he was finding it impossible to resist. Finding her impossible to resist.

“Okay, fine,” she murmured. “One more.”

Wade grinned and stepped in closer, sliding a hand around CC’s waist, careful to still keep a little distance between them. Her body was warm and pliant beneath his palm, but she shivered. “Cold?” he murmured, his voice suddenly raspy.

She shook her head, but unconsciously he stepped a little closer, adding some of his body warmth to the heated space between them. All around them people swayed to the music, and they followed suit, not talking for a beat or two, not even looking at each other.

A strange kind of silence settled over them. The music, the chatter of the crowd around the edges, the movement of the other couples around them faded to black until it felt as if they were dancing alone on the street.

“So…” She cleared her throat and glanced at him, her chin stuck out in that determined way he knew so well. “Line dancing, huh?”

His breath caught at the dance of red and yellow and blue in her eyes from the colored lights overhead and the way they bathed the exposed skin of her neck and chest in a muted rainbow of soft light.

“Yup. I even won a trophy for best junior line dancing boy at the county fair one year.”

She laughed. “So you’ve always been competitive, then?”

Wade laughed, too. “That and naturally light on my feet.”

Someone bumped them from behind, pushing CC against him, and Wade’s hands tightened around her waist to steady her before returning her to her previous position. Or maybe a touch closer. She shivered again, and he realized his fingers were absently stroking her waist, and he swore he heard the rough intake of her breath.

Or maybe it was his. Did her lungs feel as ineffectual as his all of a sudden?

It’d been three years since Wade had been so attuned to the internal workings of his body. As an athlete it’d been his job to listen to internal feedback. In retirement that skill had gone by the wayside. But he was listening now. Listening as it hummed with an awareness that was terribly familiar yet utterly foreign.

Different to the sharpened focus demanded by football. Different, too, to the familiar stir of sexual interest.

This was much more intense. This was an awareness of his pulse bounding at his wrists, his temple, his abdomen, and his groin. And it wasn’t fast and hectic like it was when he was chasing a touchdown, but slow and thick. Wade was aware of the scorch of air, hot and ragged, in his lungs, the electric tingle in the pads of his fingers where they touched her body, the vibrations along nerve endings that cranked taut every muscle he owned.

Aware, too, on some level, that she was feeling the same.

He glanced at the top of her head. The flower in her hair was fake, he realized, glued to a clip, but it was quirky and playful. So not the efficient PA he’d known for five and a half years. But a woman. A sexy, vibrant, flesh-and-blood woman.

“You’re looking very nice tonight.”

Wade wasn’t entirely sure where the words had come from. They’d just slipped out of his mouth unfiltered and unchecked.

She glanced up at him, startled, her lips parted, that slight v between her brows. “Oh…thank you.”

“I didn’t know you owned a skirt.”

Wade blinked as more stupid fell from his mouth. Why in hell would he say that? Why? If anything, her v deepened and her mouth closed, her lips pressing together. “Guess there’s a lot of things you don’t know about me, Wade Carter.”

She dropped her gaze, and Wade frowned at the top of her head. What the hell did that mean? Was she trying to distance herself from their conversation in front of the television last week? Yeah, they hadn’t talked much prior to Credence, but he still knew her, and he’d bet his last cent she didn’t have some closet somewhere full of girly shit. He opened his mouth to say as much, but she got in before him.

“So today’s been a roaring success.”

Her voice was tinged with triumph, but Wade let it slide, concentrating instead on the warm fan of her breath where his open neckline met the first button of his shirt. It was as distracting as her fucking knees, making the air in his lungs hotter.

“Yes.”

She gave a half laugh that huffed more air across his skin, drifting to his throat and caressing him there. Sensations prickled at his scalp and his groin, and his hand tightened a little more at her waist.

“And you thought the sky was going to fall in.”

Wade gave a soft snort. The way his body was reacting to the tickle of her breath felt pretty fucking apocalyptic. “The weekend’s not over yet.”

“You haven’t been recognized, have you?”

“No.”

She glanced around. “Everybody seems to be enjoying themselves.”

“Yeah.” Wade’s body, for example, was enjoying itself way too much. He forced himself to look around too, take his mind off every sway of her hips. “It’s nice, actually. Seeing Credence like this.” And it was; it’d been a long time since he’d felt part of the town. “It takes me back to the fourth of July parties when I was a kid. Mom and Dad would bring us into the parade, and then they closed off the street like this, and we’d eat hot dogs and cotton candy and drink soda until we puked.”

She laughed, and goose bumps feathered up his throat. “That sounds nice.”

He glanced down at the wistful note in her voice, understanding the origin much better now, but found himself staring at the top of her head again. “Yeah, it was.” He gazed at the criss-cross of lights above him. “You’ve all done a great job with the decorations. The street looks real pretty.”

She glanced up at him the same time he looked down at her, and their gazes meshed. “Yeah?”

Her voice was husky and hopeful and burrowed under his ribs quicker than if she’d taken his compliment as a matter of course or shrugged it off. Wade nodded and smiled as his gaze drifted briefly to her mouth before returning. “Yeah.”

Just like you.

Why hadn’t he noticed how damn feminine she was before tonight? That under those jeans and ball caps, she was delicate, her features almost feline.

They were still staring at each other, barely even swaying, when somebody cleared their throat behind him a beat or two later and Wade felt a quick tap on his shoulder.

Arlo. Wade didn’t even have to turn to know that.

“Okay, okay, hotshot, unhand that woman. You get to see her every day, and she promised me a dance.”

Wade didn’t want Arlo to dance with CC, but his brain, suddenly back in control, was telling him to step away. They may be getting friendlier, but CC was still his PA, his employee, and the things he was thinking and feeling were putting him in dangerous territory.

Arlo taking over was probably for the best.

“It’s true,” she said, her gaze still holding his. “I did promise him.”

And then she stepped back, breaking their eye contact, their physical contact. Wade’s hands slipped from her waist, his palms still hot and buzzing from their contact. Arlo nudged him aside, taking his place, and Wade was almost overwhelmed with the urge to tear him away, the pulses at his temples throbbing with a surge of primal testosterone.

What the fuck was wrong with him tonight?