Page 45 of Drifter’s Heart

We just need two girls to accompany us… if I can convince them to come.

If they’re home.

I knock again, her name easy on my lips, when the door opens. And then I’m staring at more Winnie flesh than I expect to see before nine in the morning on a Tuesday.

The rest of her is covered in enough glitter and neon that she glows even without a black light handy.

My mouth dries. “How was your date?” I ask, prepared to trash the wildflowers that are really just nationally accredited weeds I could have picked in any out of town park and wrapped up myself.

Winnie tosses her head. That familiar glint of defiance sparkles in her eyes for a single second, but then exhaustion dulls her elfin features. “Sober. Come in.”

I shake my head. “I have a passenger in the truck. He’s… not half as patient as he thinks he is.” I pass the bouquet across the threshold to her.

Winnie takes my offering, her expression curious. “What are you doing here, West?”

Tension snaps across my shoulders. I resist rolling them—just. “I want to apologize. See if you have time to head up to the Invitational. I⁠—”

“Didn’t call.” Her lips part. “You know I have work.”

“I know.”

“You don’t seem like the world’s most impulsive man.”

“I’m not.”

Her hip pops. She places weight on her knee, clutching the bunch of flowers that crush in her hands a little. “So you detoured here?”

Breath blows between my lips in a long exhale. “This is my apology for not staying when I should have.”

Winnie says nothing for a long moment. Long enough that I think I’m going to have to turn away and explain my multitude of shortcomings in excess to Dustan. My pet rodeo trainee is likely to chatter my ear off with relationship advice that I neither want nor need for the next 180 miles.

“You listened to me,” she says. “Even when you probably shouldn’t have.”

I peer at her, ignoring the backhanded compliment that she just passed to me while managing to insult herself at the same time. “Is that your version of an apology?”

She shrugs. “Maybe? I don’t even know.” She plops herself onto the doorstep at my feet, the flowers flouncing across her lap. Glitter drifts across their stems in a constant cascade.

I crouch on the lower step and brush my thumb across her cheek, gathering extra glitter that trickles over both of us. Dustan will be thrilled. “Your date didn’t go as planned?” It’s a loaded question, one I don’t expect her to answer. Hell, I half expect her to slap me.

The petals from one of the flowers are pulled apart one at a time. I watch her, mesmerized at how efficiently she dismembered the entire thing.

“Tom… he asked me to dance. Not with him, for him. I sassed him. Told him if I wasn’t on the stage, I wouldn’t go. That I refused to be his backup dancer.”

Something akin to pride warms my chest. “There’s my girl.”

Winnie’s head jerks, but she refuses to look up at me. “Don’t get cute, cowboy. Listen to the story first.”

“All right. I’m listening.”

I circle my fingers around her ankle, letting the pad of my thumb rest over her Achilles’ tendon, and stroke gently. Her sharp inhale tells me I’ve discovered another sensitive spot on her body. Maybe I should be possessive or jealous that she spent the night out with another man last night, but… I’m not.

Tom isn’t a threat to me, and if we’re over and that’s who she’s seeing, then we really are done.

But I don’t think that’s what I’m seeing from her.

Winnie moves on to killing another flower, though she peeks at me from beneath purple-painted eyelashes. “You don’t care that I danced with a guy all night?”

It’s nine in the morning. I don’t care if she parties with every person in the club. She’s still up. She didn’t drink. And something’s bothering her. The date didn’t go anything like she either hoped or expected.