“Melt your face off,” Bodine told her. “Sounds good. We ought to get some for the table.”
“I don’t see any salads.”
For a second or two Bodine just blinked, then she threw back her head and howled. “Jessie, you come here for the red meat, the hot sauce, the beer, and the music. Rabbit might find its way onto the menu, but rabbit food won’t.”
She grinned as Rory and Chelsea came back with the drinks. “Have a drink, or two. It’ll all go down easier.” So saying, Bodine hailed Darlie and ordered a large platter of Screaming Nachos.
By the time Chase got there, the nachos were a memory—one Jessica feared would live in her stomach lining for years—and dinner was ordered.
“Sorry, had a couple things.”
“You missed the nachos—and they’re just as potent as I remember.” Callen lifted the beer he continued to nurse. “Dinner’s coming.”
“I’m ready for it. Place is filling up.”
Most stools at the bar had already been claimed. A few tables remained open, but at others people ate, drank, and talked so the noise pushed against the bartender’s playlist.
The band wouldn’t take the stage for nearly an hour, but dancers already circled the dance floor. The big square of plywood held stains from countless spilled beers, and infamously, nearly dead center, a faded bloodstain from a fight—over a woman, so the story went—nearly a decade before.
Dancers twirled under three enormous wagon wheel lights. When the band came on, the head bartender—the captain of the ship—would dim those lights from their current high-noon glare.
Callen might have imagined the evening differently, but he couldn’t find a single flaw sitting around a crowded table, elbow-to-elbow with friends—close enough to Bodine to smell her hair every time she turned her head.
He’d frequented places not dissimilar to the Roundup in his years away, drinking with friends, flirting with women with sweet-smelling hair.
But he knew without a doubt, for him, there was nothing like home.
It didn’t matter what they talked about, and with Rory at the table you’d never have a conversational lag, but eventually it turned toward Callen and his Hollywood experience.
“It had its moments,” he said when Chelsea, a little wide-eyed, asked if it had been exciting, glamorous.
“Mostly it was horses, but it had its moments.”
“Not too many,” Bodine put in, “as he never met Brad Pitt.”
“Never did.”
Rory pointed a finger at him. “Best female meet—movie-star division.”
“Well, that’s not even close. Charlize Theron.”
Now Rory went wide-eyed. “Kiss my ass. You met Charlize Theron?”
“I did. A Million Ways to Die in the West. Seth MacFarlane movie. Funny guy.”
“Screw MacFarlane. You met Charlize Theron. What’s she like? Did you get close enough to touch?”
“She’s beautiful, smart, interesting. I might’ve touched her in the general course of things. Mostly we talked horses. She’s good with them.”
“Before Rory lapses into a coma.” Bodine swallowed the last of her burger. “Best male meet, same division.”
“Pretty much as easy. Sam Elliott. I’m not going to say beautiful, but smart and interesting. And I never knew an actor to sit a horse better.”
“‘I still got one good arm to hold you with.’”
Jessica turned toward Chase, and the iconic gravelly voice. “That sounded just like him. What’s that from?”
“Tombstone. Virgil Earp.”
“He’s got a million of him,” Rory claimed. “Do Val Kilmer, Chase. Do Doc Holliday.”
Half smiling, Chase shrugged. “‘I’m your huckleberry,’” he said in a lazy Southern drawl.
“What does that mean?”
Chase looked at her. “It means, mostly, I’m your man.”
He looked away again, picked up his beer.
“So it’s a romantic idiom.”
Even as Rory snorted, Chase turned back to her. “Ah, I don’t expect Doc had romantic feelings for Wyatt Earp. You never saw Tombstone?”
“No.” Now Jessica’s gaze circled the table and the looks of amusement or shock. “Uh-oh, am I about to be tossed out of here?”
“Ought to see the movie” was all Chase could say.
When the table as a whole began to grill her on what Westerns she had seen, or hadn’t, she was treated to Chase’s mimic quotes from John Wayne through to Alan Rickman.
As entertaining as it was, she was relieved when the band took the stage—to cheers and applause—ending the inquisition.
They busted right out with a song she didn’t recognize any more than she had the quotes from Quigley Down Under.
“We’re up.” Rory grabbed Chelsea’s hand, spun her out onto the dance floor.
“Said I’d take you dancing.” Callen stood, held out a hand for Bodine’s.
“We’ll see how good you are at it.”
He was pretty damn good. He had a way of holding her right in, moving with her and against her in a prelude to what they both knew was coming. She laughed, twirling easily when he spun her out, then gave him a taste of her own by shifting on the way in so her back pressed to him. Undulating.
“You learned some new moves,” he said in her ear.
She tipped her head back so their lips almost touched. “I’ve got more.”
She twirled again, let him draw her in, and hooked an arm around his neck as she matched her steps to his.
“You sure as hell do. What have you been up to while I’ve been away, Bodine?”
“Practicing.”
At the table, Jessica watched the dancers. A lot of stomping, spinning, and what she thought of as scooting. While Bodine and Callen did all of that, they coated it with a layer of sex.
She’d never thought of country-western dancing as sexy.
When the second number picked right up after the first, Chase cleared his throat. “I’m not much of a dancer.”
She angled toward him. “That would make us about even here, as I’ve never done this kind of dancing in my life. Why don’t you teach me a little?”
“Ah … I can try.” Rising, he took her hand. “You’re probably going to need another drink after we’re done.”
“I’ll risk it.” After she reached the plywood, she turned, put a hand on his shoulder. “Right?”
“Yeah, and…” He put an arm around her waist. “We’ll just sort of … Can you walk backward in those shoes?”
“I can run backward in them. And—” She took it on herself, raised their joined hands, executed a twirl out, then back to him. “No worries.”
“You’re already better than I am.”
She smiled. They seemed to be moving around the floor just fine. “I can teach you if I have to.”
*
About the time the women took to the floor to “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” and Jessica learned—or tried to learn—her first line dance, Jolene and Vance Lubbock headed home.