Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(85)

She looked at both of them like they were piles of dog shit and began to sweep by. Her attitude pissed Dallie off. Just because Ritchie and Hank got into a little trouble now and then and weren't in college prep didn't mean she had to treat them like maggots or something, especially since she was wearing dime-store tights and a ratty old navy skirt he'd seen her wear a couple hundred times before. With the Marlboro dangling from the corner of his mouth, Dallie swaggered forward, shoulders hunched into the collar of his denim jacket, eyes squinted against the smoke, a mean, tough look on his face. Even without the two-inch heels on his scuffed cowboy boots, he was the one boy in the senior class tall enough to make Holly Grace Cohagan look up.

He stepped directly into her path and curled his top lip in a trace of a sneer so she'd know exactly what kind of bad-ass she was dealing with. “My buddies offered you a smoke,” he said, real soft and low.

She curled her lip right back at him. “I turned them down.”

He squinted a little more against the smoke and looked even meaner, it was about time she remembered that she was back behind the school with a real man, and that none of those squeaky-clean college-prep boys who were always drooling over her were around to come to her rescue. “I didn't hear you say ‘no, thank you,’” he drawled.

She stuck up her chin and looked him straight in the eye. “I heard you're queer, Dallie. Is that true? Somebody said you're so pretty they're going to nominate you for homecoming queen.”

Hank and Ritchie snickered. Neither of them had the nerve to tease Dallie about his looks since he'd beaten them up when they first tried it, but that didn't mean they couldn't enjoy watching someone else go after him. Dallie clenched his teeth. He hated his face, and he'd done his best to ruin it with a sullen expression. So far, only Miss Sybil Chandler had seen through him. He intended to keep it that way.

“You shouldn't listen to gossip,” he sneered. “I know I didn't listen when I heard that you'd been putting out for every rich boy in the senior class.” It was a lie. Part of Holly Grace's appeal lay in the fact that nobody had managed to get any further with her than a few incomplete gropes and some tongue-kissing.

Her knuckles gradually turned white as she clutched her chemistry book, but other than that she didn't betray a flicker of emotion at what he'd said. “Too bad you won't ever be one of them,” she jeered.

Her attitude infuriated him. She made him feel small and unimportant, less than a man. No woman would have ever talked like that to his old man, Jaycee Beaudine, and no woman was going to talk like that to him. He moved his body closer so he could hover over her and she would feel the threat of six feet of solid male steel getting ready to run her down. She took a quick step to one side, but he was too fast. Pitching his cigarette down on the blacktop, he sidestepped with her and then moved closer, so that she either had to retreat or bump against him. Gradually, he backed her up against the brick wall.

Behind him, Hank and Ritchie made smacking noises with their mouths and let out catcalls, but Dallie didn't pay any attention. Holly Grace still held up her chemistry book gripped in her hands so that instead of feeling her breasts against his chest, he felt only the hard corners of the book and the contours of her knuckles. He braced his hands against the wall on either side of her head and leaned into her, pinning her hips to the wall with his own and trying not to pay any attention to the sweet scent of her long blond hair, which reminded him of flowers and fresh spring air. “You wouldn't know what to do with a real man,” he sneered, moving his hips against her. “And you're too busy wrestling the pants off those rich boys to find out.”

He waited for her to back down, to lower those clear blue eyes and look upset so he could let her go.

“You're a pig!” she spat out, glaring at him defiantly. “And you're too ignorant to know how pitiful you really are.”

Ritchie and Hank began to hoot. Dallie wanted to punch them... punch her.... He would make her deal with him! “Is that so?” he scoffed. Abruptly, he slid his hand down along her side to the hem of her navy skirt, keeping her body pinned against the wall so she couldn't get away. She blinked. Her eyelids opened and closed once, twice. She didn't say anything, didn't struggle. He pushed his hand up beneath her dress and touched her leg through the diamond-patterned white tights, not letting himself think about how much he'd been wanting to touch her legs, how much time he'd spent dreaming about those legs.

She set her jaw and gritted her teeth and didn't say a word. She was as tough as nails, ready to take on any man who looked at her. Dallie thought he could probably take her right then, right against the wall. She wasn't even fighting him. She probably wanted it. That's what Jaycee had told him—that women liked a man who took what he wanted. Skeet said it wasn't true, that women wanted a man who respected them, but maybe Skeet was just too soft.

Holly Grace glared at him, and something pounded hard in his chest. He curled his hand closer to the inside of her thigh. She didn't move. Her face was a picture of defiance. Everything about her told him how tough she was—her eyes, the flare of her nostrils, the set of her jaw. Everything except the small, helpless quiver that had begun to destroy the corner of her mouth.

He backed away abruptly, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans and hunching his shoulders. Ritchie and Hank snickered. Too late, he realized that he should have moved more slowly. Now it looked as if she'd gotten the best of him, as if he'd been the one to retreat. She glared at him like he was a bug she'd just squashed under her foot, and then she walked away.