The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge (Gold Valley #14)(93)

And now that he was thirty-two, he found he still wanted to do it.

She was prissy, stuck-up, thought she was better than him... But she had been the teacher’s daughter. And now she was the librarian of the largest town adjacent to Four Corners, which was not large at all.

At least, he’d heard tell she was the librarian. He’d never been in the library to see it with his own eyes. Tag wasn’t a sit-still-be-quiet kind of guy. Tag was a get-shit-done kind of guy.

He had said that to Nelly, the adult equivalent of pigtail pulling, quite honestly, on another birthday of hers, nine years ago.

Her twenty-first birthday, to be exact, when the Sullivan sisters had dragged her down to the saloon to get drunk.

After twenty minutes of being there, all she’d succeeded in doing was sticking the tip of her tongue into the shot glass and screwing up her face into a horrified, disgusted expression. Which had made him laugh so hard he had damn near fallen out of his chair.

“Is something amusing to you, Taggart?” She had said his name like he might be in trouble. He had never understood how or why she could do that so effortlessly. She was younger than him. She had no call getting on his case about anything.

“You,” he said, from his place in the corner. His brothers hadn’t laughed, as he’d assumed they would, and his buddy Landry King had simply given him a sideways glance and said: You have a death wish?

A death wish.

He wasn’t afraid of Nelly Foster.

“That’s not how you do it,” he said, standing up from the table and making his way over to the bar. Then he picked up the shot glass and downed it in one, setting it in front of her, making sure to maintain eye contact. A strange current of electricity shot between them. Like it always did. But it made no earthly sense.

Tag liked to have a good time. Nelly was so buttoned-up it would take a half hour to get to the potential good time, and even then, she would probably call it an early night because she had to get up in the morning to feed her cats. Or something.

“I’ll take another shot.” The color mounted in her cheeks, and that surprised him more than anything. But one thing he did know about Nelly was that when she was challenged, she dug in. She was as mulish as she was repressed.

Which was a lot.

The other whiskey shot appeared, and she looked at her friends, then back at him, before taking it to her lips and knocking it back. She swayed in her stool, then slammed it down on the scarred, wooden countertop. “More?”

He sat across from her, taking his jacket off and pushing up his shirtsleeves. “Sure.”

It wasn’t fair. He was going to drink the little mite under the table.

Two shots later and she was bright-eyed, but determined.

“I’m cutting you off,” he said.

“No,” she said. “You don’t get to win. You always think you win.” She was slurring slightly. “You don’t know everything. You don’t know everything about me.”

“Oh, I don’t know everything about you. I’ve known you since you were five years old.”

“That means I’ve known you since you were seven,” she said. “And that does not make you better than me or more mature than me.” She stuck her tongue out at him. She was drunk. Nelly Foster was drunk. And his initial reaction to that was to be afraid, because her mother had been his teacher, and he could imagine Mrs. Foster coming for him with a switch. And the fact of the matter was, his dad wouldn’t have lifted a finger to stop her. No. Seamus McCloud would’ve said that Tag was reaping what he sowed.

“I’ve never claimed to be more mature than you. But then, you were born a sixty-year-old spinster. I wouldn’t be surprised if you came out holding a box of kittens.”

In his drunken haze, that seemed like a real zinger. The problem was, he had started drinking a while ago, so these were not his first three shots of whiskey. He was ahead of her, which was fair, because she was probably an alcohol virgin.

That word stuck in his head. Stuck there hard.

A virgin.

“Is that the best you’ve got,” she said, tipping her glass back and letting the last drop fall into her mouth. “You must’ve come out holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a note that says I give up. Because you’ve been nothing but a screwup since day one. And we all know it.”

“There’s a few things I’m good at,” he said, something burning in his chest.

“Name one.”

A smile tugged at his lips, and he knew that his mama would slap him upside the face for saying what he was about to say to Nelly Foster. But he was going to say it anyway.

“Fucking, Nelly. I’m damn good at fucking.”

Her face turned bright red, and she slumped slightly in her chair. “Some people don’t care about that,” she said.

“Only because some people don’t know what they’re missing. Am I right?”

He forgot that his brothers were there. That they were watching. He forgot that her friends were sitting next to her, until they moved slightly, clearly ready to slap him or something if need be. But Nelly waved them off. “I don’t need to know what I’m missing to know that I don’t want it.”

“Suit yourself. But I’ll tell you what. My birthday gift to you. If you’re curious. Cash in your chips.”