Hot Cowboy Nights (Lucky Penny Ranch #2)(51)

Her chest tightened. “You’ve been doing a pretty good job of practicin’.”

Was he about to tell her that he’d found a woman he wanted to see and that this artificial thing between them was over? Bad timing was a bigger bitch than karma.

“Ah, that was nothing but showin’ off. It’s real dating that scares the bejesus right out of me. Never was any good at it,” he admitted.

“Bullshit!” Lizzy said. “You are a player. You know all the moves.”

“Yes, I am. Yes, I do. But that’s the game of take a woman home, take her to bed, feed her breakfast, kiss her good-bye, and start a new game the next week. Dating and getting to really know a woman is a different game. Kind of like the difference in Monopoly and Texas Hold ’Em.”

“You mean one is exciting and the other is boring. I wouldn’t want to be the Monopoly lady then,” she said.

“Nothing boring about you, Lizzy Logan,” he said, and chuckled. “Will you go on a date with me Friday night? A real date, not a pretend one? I’ll probably be so clumsy that you won’t go out with me a second time, but please say yes.”

“Where are we going? Bar? Ice cream?”

“Is that a yes?” He slipped his hand under the barbed wire and laced his fingers with hers.

“It’s a yes, but I don’t know if I’m ready to tell our relatives that this has turned from fake to real,” she said.

He squeezed her hand gently. “I agree and don’t expect too much from me here at first. I’m new at this.”

“This new Lizzy Logan is pretty new at it, too. The old one was busy trying to be something she wasn’t. This new one is going to be herself, so you might not want to ask her out on a second real date,” she said. “Just one thing before we get out the chisel and set this in that rock you are sitting on right now and be honest with me. Is this one of your pickup lines?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. I have not asked a woman on a date since my senior year in high school. I asked Betsy Dulaney to the prom and the night was a disaster. From then on I honed my player skills and to hell with dating.”

“What changed your mind?” she asked.

“Promise you won’t laugh,” he whispered.

A warm breeze kicked up under her hair and kissed that soft spot on her neck right below her ear. It wasn’t hard to imagine that it was his whisper that caused it or to embrace the feeling that it evoked.

“I promise,” she said softly.

He removed his cowboy hat and laid it in his lap. “I do not believe in voodoo or spirits or any of that hocus-pocus crap. But I got a feeling this evening as Blue and I were sitting out behind my trailer that something is missing in me.”

“I know the feeling.”

His face was half in shadows and half dimly lit by the moon, creating an air of mystery about him. There was a dark side that had honed the craft of a player, but there was a light side that wanted so badly to open up his heart. One side would win and like the story Granny told about the wolf and the baby rabbit. The side that got fed would emerge the winner. The one that he starved would eventually fade away into the dust of the history books.

“What time should I be ready and what should I wear?” she asked.

“Something very comfortable. Jeans will be fine.”

“Really? Then I take it we are not going to one of those fancy restaurants where it takes all evening to eat a meal?”

“No, ma’am,” he answered.

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise but we might be late getting back home.”

She drew her knees up to her chin, pulled her hand free, and wrapped her arms around her legs. “Mama is leaving Friday and won’t be home until Sunday. I don’t have to worry about anyone comin’ to look for us. Sure you don’t want to tell me what this date involves?”

“No, I want it to be perfect enough that you’ll say you want to go out with me again,” he answered. “And to do that it has to be a surprise. I will pick you up at seven.”

“Okay.” She tried to ignore the jitters, but it wasn’t possible. She had just agreed to go on a real date with Toby that did not involve sex or a breakfast afterward. Her heart rate jacked up a notch or two at the idea, and she couldn’t help but smile.

He bounced up on his feet, grabbed his hat before it hit the ground, put a hand on a fence post, and cleared the barbed wire like an expert high jumper. “I’ll walk you back to your house. Wouldn’t look too good if that imaginary man with the binoculars in the tree saw us going our own way. By morning it would be all over Dry Creek that we’d had a fight and broken up and we couldn’t go on our real date without everyone knowing.”

With his hat settled on his head, he threw an arm around her shoulders and kept pace with her all the way to the yard fence, where he opened the gate for her. “I swear I caught a faint glimpse of a flash over there to the east.”

“It was probably a fallen star,” she said.

He started humming the old song by that name, coming in with parts of lines as he remembered them. When the lyrics said that she was a fallen star, he drew her close and danced with her on the green lawn. He sang a line when it said that she must have strayed from the Milky Way and went back to humming as he waltzed her around the yard under the stars and moon.