"Important distinction."
"Most distinctions are."
His hand shifts slightly at my waist, pulling me a fraction closer. I let it because we are past the point of pretending fractions matter.
The bar moves around us, warm, loud at the edges, the band doing something that makes the whole room feel like it's breathing together.
"I meant what I said at the arena today," he says quietly. Against my hair almost.
"Which part?"
"All of it." A pause. "But specifically the part where I kissed you in front of the whole town."
I look up at him. "You have no regrets about that."
"Zero," he says. "Absolutely zero."
June is watching from the table with her chin in her hand and the satisfied expression of a woman whose evening has gone exactly as she hoped.
I look back at Beckett.
He looks back at me.
The steel guitar does something that ought to be regulated.
"Good," I say quietly. "Me neither."
We stay on the dance floor longer than one song.
Nobody at the table makes anything of it when we come back, which is either genuine discretion or a very coordinated performance of discretion. Remy has returned from wherever he disappeared to with the satisfied energy of a man whose evening also went well. He says nothing about the dancing.
This is so uncharacteristic that I check his forehead for fever.
He moves my hand away and grins. "I'm fine."
"You didn't say anything."
"I'm practicing restraint."
"Since when."
"Since Silas bet me twenty dollars I couldn't go one evening without commenting on you and Beckett." He picks up his drink. "I intend to collect."
Silas looks at the ceiling.
The night moves the way good nights at Whiskey River do, unhurried and warm, one thing flowing naturally into the next. The band takes a break.
The room shifts into a lower gear, conversations getting easier, the particularly comfortable hour of a Friday night when everyone has decided to stay a little longer than they planned.
Beckett and I end up at the quieter end of the table.
Not deliberately. Just the way the seating shifts as people move around. Remy and Silas get pulled into a conversation with a couple of other ranch hands from a neighboring property. June moves up the table to talk to someone she knows. Wyatt is back behind the bar.
It's just us.
The noise of the bar wraps around the quiet between us like something protective.
He's turned slightly toward me, elbow on the table, relaxed in the way he gets at the end of a day when the composure he carries has fully loosened, leaving just him underneath it. Unguarded. Real. The version I've come to know best in early mornings on the porch and late nights in the barn.
