Page 3 of Full Coverage (Boys of Fall)

Finally he saw her. She was several yards from the barn door, perched on the top of the wooden railing that separated the barnyard from the field to the west.

She was looking out over the darkness, twinkling with lightning bugs, and lifting a beer bottle to her lips.

“Randi?”

He said it softly, trying not to startle her. But it didn’t work. She gasped and started to turn, and the combination of the scare, the narrow piece of wood she was sitting on and the tequila apparently all hit at once. He reached her just as she started to pitch forward. He grabbed her by her belt and hauled her back up onto the fence.

For a second she just breathed. Then she twisted her head to look at him. “Holy shit, that was impressive.”

He gave her a grin. “Thank God for cowgirls who wear big-ass belts.”

She laughed. “Didn’t even spill a drop of beer.”

“Amazing,” he said dryly.

“Nolan Winters, what are you doin’ out here?” she asked, squinting at him in the dark.

“Checking on you.”

“On me?” She wrinkled her nose. “Why?”

“Well, I can’t dance with you out here. I went to look for you inside but you’d disappeared.”

No sense in letting her know that he knew every move she’d made since she’d walked into the party. That sounded creepy.

“You wanted to dance with me?”

“Of course.” Who the fuckwouldn’twant to dance with her?

“You and Lacey were dancing.”

Was there a twinge of jealousy in her voice? No. Nolan immediately shook his head. There was no way Randi was jealous of another girl dancing with him. There had never been anything between him and Randi, ever, but friendship. If she’d wanted him, she could have had him. For anything. Boyfriend, booty call, slave, minion.

“Lacey and I are just friends,” he told her. “She’s with Carter.”

“Oh, good,” Randi said—then her eyes widened as if she hadn’t meant to say that.

Nolan wasn’t sure he’d ever heard anything better from her.

He was a little embarrassednowabout how infatuated he’d been with her, and he no longer felt willing to give her a kidney just for a smile, but he was still…enamored. Possibly more so now than ever, in some ways. Because now he knew what he’d been missing as a nerd who liked books better than people.

He still, generally, liked books better than people. But he didnotlike books better than sex.

Definitely not.

And if he had a fantasy girl, it was the one sitting drunkenly on a fence on the outskirts of Quinn, Texas.

For fuck’s sake.

Nolan shook his head. You could take the boy out of the small hick Texas town, but you couldn’t take his love for cowgirls out of the boy. Apparently.

It was something he’d been trying to kick for years.

But sophisticated, polished city chicks just didn’t do it for him.

Girls who wore jeans and used fuck as a noun, verb, adjective and adverb, who liked to get dirty—whether it was good old dirt and naughty in a backseat, or with wrenches and grease—who ate red meat and loved being outside, rain or shine, did it for him. No matter what he did to try to kick the addiction.

He made a good show of liking things more cultured. He’d developed a taste for wine and he actually liked Broadway. Most of it. He could name all the courses of a seven-course meal and he really did like tailored suits. He’d always been an avid reader and a connoisseur of current events and politics, so he could hold his own in conversations with the people he met at New York publishing parties, but he had actually found himself missing talk about the weather and football—two of the main topics of almost any conversation in Texas.

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