Page 8 of Full Coverage (Boys of Fall)

Dammit.

“I’m not really looking for adancetonight,” she said.

“What’re you lookin’ for?”

And there was a little hint of his Texas drawl. That had been distinctly missing from his words since he’d moved to San Antonio. Which was crazy. San Antonio was very much Texas. But Nolan had never had the hard accent a lot of the guys did in Quinn, and he’d “cleaned up” since he’d gone to the city. He rarely wore jeans or boots—Coach’s party had definitely been an exception. He seemed to prefer dress slacks and button-down shirts, sometimes with a jacket, and he hadn’t put a cowboy hat on his head in years.

According to all the gossip she heard, anyway. Though she had noticed his speech and dress on his visits to Quinn too. And mourned the absence of denim. Blue jeans werealwaysher preference, even over a tuxedo. Though the last time she’d seen one of those on a guy around here was prom, and it wasn’t like those were the best look. The guys looked nervous and uncomfortable in the ill-fitted, hot, cumbersome things.

Annabelle kicked her under the table. Randi started and realized she’d been staring at Nolan as her thoughts turned. He was simply watching her, that grin in place, letting his question about what she was looking for hang in the air between them.

What was she looking for? A Quinn boy. Who could make her heart hammer and her stomach flip. A Quinn boy she wanted to dance with. Tequila or not.

“More tequila,” she told him instead.

Becausehewas a Quinn boy who made her heart hammer and her stomach flip. And she wanted to dance with him. But he wasn’t really aQuinnboy. Not anymore. He’d grown up here…but he’d grown beyond Quinn. He wasn’t a small-town kid anymore.

She was.

She always would be.

But for a moment she recognized the emotion in her throat. Wistfulness.

She loved Quinn, and after twenty nine years here, there wasn’t much for surprises anymore.

That had to explain her strange and sudden reaction to Nolan. He was a surprise. Or the way he made her feel hot and tingly when she looked at his lips and remembered their kiss was a surprise, anyway.

“I need to ask you a question,” he said. “Maybe I can buy you the next round, then and we can talk.”

Talk? Hell no. That was the last thing she wanted to do with Nolan Winters. It was the only time she felt like a dumbass. Other than the one time she’d tried to dry hump him in Coach’s backyard.

The music on the jukebox changed to a Thomas Rhett song she loved and she slid off the high chair. “On second thought, dancing sounds great.”

Because what she couldn’t add to a conversation about current events or politics, she could more than make up for on a country bar dance floor. Typically the guys she hung out with wanted to talk about the same things she did—sports, cars, the locals—and when they ran out of words, they danced and drank. She could do all of those things ’til early in the morning.

Nolan didn’t talk about sports or cars, and he didn’t strike her as the gossipy type, so they were going to have to go straight to the dancing and drinking after all.

Good thing that, no matter how smart they were and how they dressed, all guys could be distracted by two things—boobs and compliments.

* * *

Randi was dressedup again tonight. It was February, so she was in jeans instead of a short summer dress, but she still wore her boots. And when she shrugged out of the jacket she was wearing, her fitted red top still clung to the most gorgeous pair of breasts he knew.

She grabbed his hand and tugged him toward the dance floor. Nolan was a smart guy—he followed without complaint.

This was swaying music, so he took her in his arms. He needed to gauge if she was right about the too-much-tequila tonight. He had a proposition and he wanted her honest answer. And he wouldn’t mind picking up where they’d left off at Coach’s, if she seemed so inclined.

He’d been thinking about her nonstop for the past four months. No, more than thinking about her. He’d been worked up about her. Previously, he’d always been able to put her out of his mind when he was away from Quinn. Once in awhile he’d find himself comparing the city girls to her. It would start off as a compare and contrast between city girls and country girls in general, but when he was comparing caviar to buffalo wings, champagne to tequila and orchestra music to country twang, it didn’t take long for his mind to go to Randi. But it wasn’t like he obsessed about her all the time. He didn’t even think about her every day.

But since Coach’s party, he had been. And frankly, he was on edge tonight. He was trying not to show it, but the second he’d set foot in Quinn this trip, he’d decided he was going to see what it was like to kiss a completely sober Randi.

She and that kiss were the whole reason for this trip.

The book was a great front. He could always talk to somebody here about football or Coach. And he did have a few chapters to go. He also needed to figure out photos. He had a photographer lined up for whenever he was ready , but he needed to figure out what he wanted in the book, and to best capture Coach and Quinn and the love for the game that permeated the fabric of this town. But the book was just his cover for coming back to see Randi after finally getting his lips and hands on her.

He’d intended to get back here before this. If he hadn’t had to wait four months, he might not be on the verge of throwing her over his shoulder and heading to her house right this minute. But he hadn’t had a chance to get back. He’d been to New York twice and had been working on his book, as well as still doing all his writing for theSan Antonio Express-News. There hadn’t been any damned time. And now that he’d seen her, he was fighting to not pull her close, slide his hands under the back of her shirt onto hot, bare skin and lay a kiss on her unlike any she’d ever had.

But he wouldn’t do it in public.

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