"Focus," I told him, but I was one to talk. Callie laughed at something Savannah said with her head tipped back and her throat exposed and the string lights catching the line of her jaw. Holy shit. I missed my next throw by a foot because I was watching her instead of the board.
"Oh, that was tragic," Callie said, hand on her hip, shaking her head at me with mock sympathy. "The PBR World Champion, taken down by a bag of corn."
"I'm going easy on you."
"Sure you are, cowboy." She sank another shot — dead center, nothing but hole. Savannah whooped. Callie dusted her hands off and gave me a look so smug it should've been illegal. "Remind me what the score is?"
She bumped my shoulder with hers as she passed to retrieve the bags, and the contact lasted maybe half a second, and I felt it for ten minutes. She smelled like something clean and warm — vanilla, maybe, or just soap, something simple that hit harder than any perfume.
"You're staring," she said on the next pass.
There was something in her eyes that told me she didn’t mind all that much, so I went with honesty. “Can’t help it."
"Try harder. It's affecting your game." She nodded at the board. "Which was already pretty sad."
Weston threw his hands up when the final score came in. "Rematch. Immediate rematch."
"You want to get your asses kicked twice in one night?" Savannah asked sweetly.
"There's no coming back from this," I told him. "Accept it with dignity."
Callie shook Weston's hand with mock formality. "Good game. Really. You both triedrealhard."
Then she turned to me, flushed and grinning, and for a second she was just a woman at a party having fun, and I forgot to be charming and just stood there like an idiot.
She caught it. Her grin softened into something knowing. "Easy, cowboy."
So I pushed my luck. It was basically my job description. "Have dinner with me."
The grin didn't die. It shifted into something warm and sure. "Clay." She said my name the way you'd set something fragile on a table. "You seem like a genuinely good guy. And Maisie clearly thinks you hung the moon. So I'm going to be straight with you."
"Uh oh."
She gestured at the party — at the cluster of women near the drink table who'd been watching me all night, at the blonde who'd twice found a reason to walk past us, at the general gravitational pull I pretended not to notice. "You see that? Every single one of them would love to have dinner with the PBR's most eligible bachelor. I'm sure you're wonderful company." She turned back to me. "But here’s the thing. My shop is closed. Permanently. Locked up, lights off, key thrown in the creek." She said it lightly, almost cheerfully. "It's Maisie and me. Our new home. My new job. That's the whole list. There's no room on it for a cowboy, however devastating the smile."
"You think I have a devastating smile?"
She tilted her head, a gentle smile playing at her lips. "I think you know exactly what your smile does, which is part of the problem."
I deserved that. I respected it, too. She wasn't shutting me down — she was drawing a line with a steady hand and a sense of humor about it.
"Fair enough," I said. And meant it.
"Go enjoy your party, Clay." She nodded toward the crowd. "You just won a world championship. There are about fifteen women over there who'd like to help you celebrate. I'll be right here, content with not being one of them."
She clinked her beer against mine — the one she still wasn't drinking — and gave me a smile so genuinely kind it almost hurt worse than a flat rejection.
Weston found me at the drink table five minutes later. “That was hard to watch," he said.
I laughed once, but there was no humor in it. “Try experiencing it.” I squeezed the bottle cap in my hand. “She turned me down.”
"Good." He leveled a look at me — the look of a man who'd been exactly where I was standing and came out the other side married. "She's Savannah's friend. She's got a kid and she's coming off a bad divorce. She's rebuilding from the ground up. She's not a buckle bunny at a hotel bar, Clay. She's the real thing. And the real thing takes time."
"I asked her to dinner, not to elope."
"Same thing, coming from you." He clapped my shoulder — the bad one, the bastard. "Just be her friend. That's what she needs. Show up as the guy, not the show."
I watched Callie across the yard. She'd found the fence line at the edge of the party, her eyes tracking Maisie through the pack of kids. She looked easy out there. Content. A mother watching her daughter play in a safe place and letting herself breathe.
