Lost in Tennessee (35 page)

Butch tipped his beer down his throat. “Not in the mood.” It irritated him that Tom tried to throw Trudy under the bus and pissed him off that Jeb listened, but what really had him in a foul mood was the fact that he now questioned his friend’s motives.

Kate stood and smoothed the dress he had bought her. “Please.”

Butch shook his head, trying to remember why he wanted to go out. He wasn’t fit for company and he knew it.

“All right.” Kate turned to walk away.

“Where are you going?” Butch captured her hand.

“Dancing.”

“I said I don’t want to dance.”

Kate patted his arm and pulled her hand free from his. “I heard you. I’m going to dance with Tom and Jeb.” Kate joined them in the center of the dance floor. She put her hands in the air and copied the women dancing. In a place like the Sly Dog, a pretty woman in a short dress never danced alone for long. In minutes, Kate had two partners. She danced and spun on flat shoes that showed off every sassy feature. The tall man with a neat beard spun her until she fell laughing against a broad shouldered blond.

He wasn’t chasing after her. She knew where he was. She could come to him. Butch cursed under his breath and drained his beer. “Does anyone want anything from the bar?”

“Oh,” Trudy cooed, patting his arm. “Another margarita. They make the best margaritas here.”

“No, they don’t,” Butch groused as he extracted his arm from her hold. “Anyone else? No?”

Butch fought his way up to the bar with the order for another round. So Trudy touched his arm. A touch on the hand here, a touch on the shoulder there. She was an affectionate person. Hell, he thought, it wasn’t like she crawled in his lap. He looked over his shoulder, and she winked at him. “Christ.”

While the bartender filled the order, the band had the crowd rocking. Butch couldn’t see Kate in the throng of bodies, but he saw Tom and Jeb. They wouldn’t let her go far. He made it back to the table and sat back down when Trudy automatically linked her arm in Butch’s. Butch drew his arm out, shaking her off.

“What’s the matter, honey? You’re in a mood this evening.”

“I’m fine.” He took a long swallow.

Trudy moved behind him and began massaging his shoulders. She leaned down and kissed his cheek, making him jump. “Where’s Kate?”

“Dancing,” Butch snapped.

“No, she’s not. Looks like you’re on your own tonight.”

Butch’s head snapped up. The band took a break, and the dancers left the floor when the music from the CDs filled the joint. Butch found Jeb and Tom settling at a table in a corner with their partners, but there was no sign of Kate.

“Looks like she found some entertainment of her own,” Trudy said. She bent to whisper against his ear. “I guess you’re stuck with me.”

Butch looked at Trudy, looked into her eyes to see what she kept in there. “We’re friends, Trudy. Right?”

Trudy smiled, wide and warm. “The best kind of friends.”

Butch looked hard and long into her face. All he saw was the girl next door who deserved better than the cards life dealt her. Tom was wrong. He unlocked her hands and stood, forcing Trudy a few steps back. “You should find someone to dance with, Trudy. You look too pretty to sit back here. I’m going to see where Kate ran off to.” With his eyes scanning the crowd, Butch walked over to Tom and Jeb.

“Butch!” Tom greeted him. “Have you met Allison and Amazing, I mean Amanda?” The brunette in his lap giggled and slapped playfully at Tom’s chest.

“It’s a pleasure, ladies. Did you see where Kate went?”

Jeb had an arm around the blonde, Allison, looking relaxed, happy. “Nope. Don’t worry, though. She can take care of herself.”

Butch moved through the room with a new kind of urgency. No one found trouble like Kate. And in a room full of drunk and hot cowboys, he didn’t want to think about the kind of trouble she could get into in that little, blue dress. What had he been thinking, buying her that dress? He found her in the game room, stretched out over a pool table with the three ball lined up for the corner pocket. She lifted her shapely left leg and with it the heads of every man in the room. Her dance partners stood behind her, admiring her…style.

With a quick, light stroke that bespoke of hours of time on a pool table, Kate sunk the three ball and left the four lined up with the side pocket. She went around the table and leaned over, giving the men a great view straight down her dress.

“What the hell are you doing?” Butch snapped at Kate.

His bark didn’t faze her. “Working. I already took a hundred off of them.”

“Best money I’ve spent in a long time.” One flashed a grin.

Kate kept her eye on the ball. “Now I’m running the table on them. They just don’t know it yet.” Kate sank the four ball but left the five in a difficult position with the seven between it and the corner pocket. The short skirt crept up her legs as she moved, hinting at the heaven beneath.

“Lord have mercy,” the second one muttered.

“That’s it.” Butch heard the lust in the voice and snapped. He took Kate by the waist and dragged her from the table. The five ball shot to the left, banked off the bumper, and rolled to a slow and pathetic stop in the middle of the table.

Kate threw the stick down at the missed shot and planted her hands on Butch’s chest. “What the hell? You ruined my shot.”

Butch wrapped his hand around her upper arm and pulled her so she had to walk on her toes. “You’re done. Let’s go.”

“I’m not done. I’m in the middle of a game.”

Her two opponents stepped in front of Butch. “You heard her. She’s in the middle of a game.”

Butch brushed Kate behind him and planted his feet. “Game’s over. You got a problem with that?”

The broad-shouldered one swung at Butch, but Butch caught the punch in one hand and returned it with the other. Butch hit the man high on the jaw and dropped him to the ground. His tall friend stepped back, hands up in surrender. “We didn’t come out to fight.”

Kate looked between Butch and the man on the floor. “What the hell was that?”

“The end of the evening. We’re going home.” Butch wrapped his hand around her wrist and left the bar, giving her no option whether to stay or go.

“Will you slow down and talk to me? What is the problem?”

“You were all over them. Did you think I didn’t see you?”

“I wasn’t all over them. I never touched either of them. I just danced.” She dug in at his truck, forcing him to face her.

“Then you should have been dancing with me.” He spit out each word, hating the idea that she was with another man.

Kate threw it right back in his face. “That’s what I said, but you didn’t want to.”

“Well, I want to dance now.” Butch pinned her arms over her head and crushed his mouth to hers, intending to take away her choice. To his surprise, she went willingly into his arms, embracing the monster that raged within him, and by doing so, taming it.

She bit his lip, taking the kiss deeper, claiming it and him as her own. Neither spoke, locked together with a heat that steamed the night. Out of breath, they stood with their foreheads touching, panting for air.

“Until tonight, you’re the only man I’ve ever danced with. Did you know that? I didn’t even know how to dance before I met you.” She whispered it on the night.

Butch looked into her blue eyes, shining in the light from the parking lot, made brighter by the dark fringe of mascara. Silky strands of hair escaped their pins and curled around her face. He brushed them back, her satiny skin smooth beneath his calloused fingers. “I really didn’t like you dancing or shooting pool with anyone else.”

She smiled as though it pleased her that he’d gone insane. “You’re my first choice, every time for everything, Butch. But you have to know, I’m not going to sit on my hands when you say no. That just isn’t me. I can’t sit there, watching life go by because you’re busy with something else. I don’t expect you to put your life on hold for me. And if it looks like I’m moving on, well, you have to know that all I’m doing is passing time until you come back to me. I love you. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I know.” And he did. He felt the love she had for him every time she looked at him. “I love you, too. I lost it for a minute, but I’m here. I’m back.”

“I think that qualifies as a fight, don’t you?” She smiled wickedly.

Butch could feel the trap but didn’t know where it lay. “I don’t know if I’d call it a fight. Maybe a tussle.”

Kate laughed. “You have too many muscles to use the word tussle. And you knocked a guy on his ass. It was a fight.”

He rolled his eyes. “What’s your point?”

Her gaze focused on his mouth. “Makeup sex.”

Butch came out of his corner like a boxer at the bell. He wasted no time circling but moved straight in, opening an all-out assault on her senses. He’d learned the places that excited her, the ones that made her weak. He exploited as best he could through the cotton that separated them. Her knees buckled. Butch caught her, carrying her to his truck. There would be no driving home. His hands were everywhere. He pulled the dress down, her bare, firm breasts peaked in the night air. He suckled as his hands found the damp heat beneath her panties. His hands rode over her hips, down her butt, savoring the smooth expanse of skin while stripping the panties from her legs.

She parted her legs, inviting him to settle against her core. She pulled his shirt from his jeans, her fingers digging into his back. In the narrow space, she wrapped her legs around his back. She held his head to her breast, pushing into the heat of his mouth.

Butch used his teeth, nipping the sensitive bud. Kate thrashed her head from side-to-side, cursing him in one breath and moaning deep, throaty in the next. “I need you. Now.”

“Yes, you do.” He shoved his jeans until his cock sprang free then slid into her overheated body. Hot and wet for him. Only him. His strokes were short and fast, matching his mood. The passion and raw emotion beat off of him, beat into her. Kate wrapped her arms around his neck and held on, meeting him stroke for stroke. His pace quickened and his teeth sank into her shoulder. She cried out as her body locked down on his with wave after wave of tremors.

She squeezed him, torturing him with hot friction until he followed her into the oblivion. His dead weight collapsed on her. Nearly fully clothed, buried deeply in her naked body, too exhausted to go anywhere, Butch rested his head on her chest. He caught his breath, watching her breast rise and fall, his tongue within easy reach of her tempting nipple.

Kate ran her fingers through his hair, arching as he pulled her breast into the heat of his mouth.

Butch took his time savoring her body. He pressed a kiss over her heart before pulling her dress into place, covering what he wanted no other man to see. “I hope I don’t have to make it a habit of fighting other men off of you.”

“You’re so silly.” She traced his lower lip with her finger. “Those guys weren’t interested in me.”

“Baby, every man in that bar was interested in you.”

Pure mischief showed in her crooked smile. “Well, if they were interested, it ended after I won the first fifty. Let’s get a midnight breakfast. On them.”

Butch hitched his pants and climbed into the driver’s seat. “Lord, give me strength.”

“You’re going to need it.”

S
unday morning started late and slow. Butch kept Kate in bed hours past her normal rise time. To his mind, she had started coming around to his side of life. Hot nights, simmering mornings. Butch left Katie soaking in a hot tub to start the coffee. He’d just poured a cup when Jeb and Tom stumbled in through the door.

“Well, don’t you boys look like you were rode hard and put away wet?”

“Clyde,” Jeb said with a big toothy grin as he looked his brother up and down. “That is the pot calling the kettle black.”

Butch raised his eyebrows at Jeb. It had been a long time, a really long time, since he saw that goofy grin. He belted out a big belly laugh, thinking all Jeb had needed was a good roll in the hay. “Clyde, you have no idea.”

“Clyde and Clyde, we need a party.” Tom patted them both on the backs.

Tom invited Waters, who invited the crew.

Jeb invited the girls who invited the Sly Dog.

Butch left the party planning to the boys and walked across the field to the Big House. He had his own planning to do. While he was there, he invited his parents to the party. They invited the church.

Butch walked back across the field an hour later with a whistle on his lips and a spring in his step. Trudy sat on the small pier fishing in the McCormicks’ pond. “Catching anything?”

“Just sunshine.” Trudy climbed to her feet and ran her hand up and down Butch’s arm. “You disappeared awfully quick last night. Did you find Kate?”

“I did. You in the mood for a party, Trudy?”

Trudy flashed him a smile as bright as the sun. “You know I’m always in the mood for a party, Butchy.”

“We’re having one at the old house. Starting now.”

In a matter of hours, a good old-fashioned barbecue had sprung up at the old house. For all of the pain and loss of Angie and Fawn’s death, they had a lot to celebrate. The project was back up and running, keeping men at jobs that paid a hell of a lot better than unemployment and felt better, too. Butch was no longer a person of interest in Angie’s murder, with no motive and no evidence suggesting he wasn’t sleeping away the morning when Angie died. Kate had been cleared of involvement with Fawn’s death, thanks to Jeb’s tenacity and Tom’s attention to detail. Hyde was in a coma, but he was alive. And where there was life, there was hope. That was worth celebrating.

The potluck-style feast had enough to feed the whole town. Jeb roasted chops and burgers on Tom’s homemade grill. Emily made more fried chicken and Tom bought out all the beer and soda pop from the nearest store. Watermelon was cut, potato salad was scooped, and laughter was shared. Butch ate twice as much as he should have and sat down at the piano to keep from having another piece of chicken. Friends and family moved his few pieces of furniture out of the way and danced into the evening.

T
he sun edged toward evening when Kate slipped away to celebrate in the quiet of the barn. She took apart the riding mower to give it a tune-up, needing time to herself. So many people to meet and greet, so much food to eat, Kate needed a bit of quiet. When she found it, her mind filled with Butch. He had fast worked his way into being a big part of her life. Over the past few days, her feelings had only grown stronger as he stood by her when she couldn’t stand for herself. She had told Butch she loved him. And she did, but was it enough? Her mother had loved her father at the beginning. But it didn’t last, love hadn’t been enough. Kate had no experience with long-term relationships. The few boyfriends she’d had had whined that she didn’t spend enough time with them, that she had too many projects. How did people balance real life with a love life? Kate had no role models. How did you know when the feelings were enough to build a life on?