Smooth-Talking Cowboy

“Do you not drink at all?”

“No, I do. I mean, I have. I just don’t usually.”

“Any particular reason?” he asked.

“I like control,” she said simply.

“Well,” he said, lifting the shot glass to his lips and knocking it back. He grimaced. “That’s a shame. Because so do I.”

She looked at him and blinked slowly, her expression comically bland. “Good thing this isn’t a real date, then.”

“Good thing.” He stood up. “Because then you would be obligated to let me win at darts.”

She huffed out a laugh. “I would do no such thing.”

“Really?”

“Really,” she returned. “Any man who needs to beat a woman at darts to feel good about himself is no kind of man in my book. I would rather see how my date fared in the face of defeat.”

“So confident.”

“With good reason.”

“Okay,” he said, “show me how it’s done.”

* * *

OLIVIA FELT LIKE she’d had alcohol, and she absolutely had not. But she felt bubbly, fizzy, and her blood felt slightly overheated. It was a strange turnaround from a few moments before when she had been certain that she was going to pass out. It was just that when Luke had held her hand like that...

She’d held hands with two men in her life. Which was lame and silly, and probably completely ridiculous to get worked up over, but her level of experience was what it was.

She had very briefly dated one guy before Bennett, and it could hardly even be called dating. They had gone out a couple of times. They hadn’t even kissed.

But she had held his hand. And then she had held Bennett’s. Often, obviously, as they had dated for more than a year.

Holding hands with Luke... It had been unexpected. It had been one thing for him to help her out of the car, although, even that small bit of skin on skin had felt significant. But once he had woven his fingers through hers her entire body had gone tight, like fencing wire, and she had found it almost impossible to breathe.

And it wasn’t like when he shocked her, when he said things that made her blush. No, this was different. It had made her hot, then cold; it had set off a chain reaction that she could hardly figure out even now. It was just... Such intimate contact to make with a man she had known for so long, but never like that.

She had known Luke since she was a kid. Since he had been a kid, too, honestly. Even though he had always seemed like a grown man to her, because that was a child’s perspective on teenage boys. And that had always put him in this other realm, as this other thing, separate to her. But she wasn’t a child anymore; she was a woman. And he was a man. And that was very... Alarming to fully realize. That there was no longer this invisible wall between them, something that kept them on separate sides of that divide. It made this game they were playing feel far too stark. Far too dangerous and real.

It felt like something different all of a sudden than what it had felt like when they had conceived it a bit earlier. Far different than that vague itch that usually rested beneath her skin when she dealt with Luke.

But now they were in the bar trading barbs, and getting ready to play darts, and that felt familiar somehow. And she was ready to jump into it with both feet. To do something to get herself back on balance, because she could not go back to that place she’d been in when his hand had touched hers. No, that, she did not want to contend with. Not at all.

So darts and good-natured banter it would be.

She was far better at darts than she was at banter, but you couldn’t have it all, she supposed.

“Are you really that good, Liv?” he asked, his voice huskier than normal, and strange, the roughness abrading places inside of her she would rather it didn’t.

She was back to feeling slightly dry of throat and out of her comfort zone.

“I’m better,” she said. “Haven’t you seen me play before?”

“Sure,” he said, “but I’ve never played you. For all I know Bennett let you win. Usually, you just play Bennett.”

“Bennett never let me win,” she said. “He didn’t have to.”

“I wonder what he’ll think of another man getting to play with you,” he said.

Okay, this Luke she could deal with. Cocky and arrogant, throwing out innuendo expecting that it would make her blush. And yes, it often did. But at least that was a comfortable pattern. “That’s what we’re here to find out,” she said.

She went over to the dartboard and collected the darts from where they were stuck into the cork, and then she carried them back to the line, steeling herself for her first shot.

“You’re really not a bar girl,” Luke said. “So how is it exactly that you are the most notorious dart player in Gold Valley?”

“I like to have a bit of mystery about me, Luke.”

“Fine. You have to get a bull’s-eye on this next shot, or you have to tell me how you learned to play darts.”

She laughed, then she straightened her posture, cocked her arm back and let the first dart fly, effortlessly sticking it in the center of the bull’s-eye.

“No shit,” he said, slightly annoyed, slightly in awe.

“I told you I was that good,” she said.

She liked darts. She had ever since she’d outgrown the little wooden dollhouse she’d played with when she was young. If there was one thing Olivia had done a lot of, it was playing by herself. Because Vanessa always wanted to push the boundaries, and Olivia never had. So she’d played with dolls. And then when she was a teenager, it had been darts.

She had spent hours fiddling with them down in her dad’s man cave in their house. Countless times when Vanessa had decided that she was too cool for Olivia and all of her rule following, when she had gone out with her other friends. When she had decided that drinking and sex were far more important than having a bond with her sister.

When Olivia had ended up grounded because she’d come home a few minutes too late, or her grades had slipped and it had caused her parents to tighten their restrictions on her, while Vanessa ran absolutely wild, uncaring if she was grounded or not.

Olivia had thrown any kind of silent frustration she had felt into sticking that sharp pin into the corkboard. Into watching that dart fly straight and true and land exactly where she wanted it. Control. Even in all those muddled, mixed-up feelings, she had found control. Had found a way to channel them. And God knew that had to be better. Better than simply exploding and getting messy emotion all over the people that you were supposed to love and care about. Better than going off and doing whatever you wanted.

Her parents had been hard on her. Harder, in the end, than they were on Vanessa. But hadn’t she turned out better for it?

Olivia hadn’t disregarded their parents’ warnings.

Olivia had played darts.

“Okay,” he said. “Now you have to tell me where you learned.”

She tossed her hair, shooting him a smile. “I don’t have to tell you anything, cowboy. Because I hit the bull’s-eye. And I’m going to keep hitting the bull’s-eye. All night long.”

A strange crackle of tension arced between them and she felt as though she was electrocuted by her next breath.

She looked away from him, and her eyes automatically went to Bennett’s table. He was looking at them. He really was. He was looking at her and Luke and he was not happy.