Page 31 of The Bodyguard
He smirked. “Okay, there was a little sexual innuendo in that statement, but I promise you it was unintentional.”
I opened my mouth and he popped the chip in and it was everything that I remembered. Crispy, starchy, and creamy, all at once. Suddenly I realized I’d kept holding on to his hands long after I had chewed and swallowed it so I let him go.
When I opened my eyes he was staring at my mouth.
“You’ve got a little…cream at the corner there,” he said roughly, pointing at my mouth.
I found a cocktail napkin on the bar and wiped the dip away.
“Better?” I asked.
“Depends on your definition.” Again his voice was rougher than normal.
We both turned back to the face the bar rather than each other. I lifted my glass of wine and started drinking it in deep gulps. I noticed he was going after his beer pretty hard, as well. And his foot was bobbing up and down on the lower rung of his stool.
Oh, wait. Mine was, too. I finished my wine first and snapped the glass a little too hard onto the bar.
“Well, I’ve got to go. Been good seeing you, Garrett.” I put another twenty down and thought how Jack was doing all right by me with tips.
“See you around, Brin.”
He faced the bar and didn’t look at me as I left. I only turned around once to look at him before I made it to the exit.
* * *
SABRINA
The King’s Land—A Week Later
“I think I want to throw an engagement party for you and Clayton.” I was sitting on my couch, phone to my ear, in my big, lonely ranch house and I realized I needed to do…something. Calling Ronnie seemed like a good idea.
Being back in Dusty Creek was both a blessing a curse.
A blessing that not a single weird thing had happened since I’d been back. No emails, no dead animals. Since I was completely off social media there were no messages to deal with there. I felt like I had finally given whoever had been chasing me the slip.
A curse though, too, because there wasn’t a whole lot to do in Dusty Creek. There was one main street. One diner. One bar. One grocery store. Which meant any time I was out and about I was likely to run into the town’s one sheriff.
Seeing Garrett wasn’t good for my mental health. Seeing Garrett when he was being nice to me…which was, like, ALL THE TIMEnow…was definitely messing with my head.
That night in the bar last week, well, I didn’t even want to think about how I had practically sprinted to get away from him. Before I did something ridiculous like climb into his lap.
“No,” Ronnie said instantly.
“No, this could be good. Get rid of all the old bad memories and replace them with good ones.”
“No. It’s enough that I’ve agreed to this massive wedding.”
I snorted. “Hardly massive. You talked me out of what I wanted to do. Well, I should say, you got Clayton to lower the boom on me. A hundred and seventy-five people here at the ranch? That’s like child’s play. The food is done, the flowers are done, the invitations are out. The entertainment is pending, but that’s just because I’m waiting for a contract. Did I mention the ice sculptures?”
“Ice sculptures? In June in Texas? For an outside wedding?”
I smiled. Now probably wasn’t the time to tell her about the fireworks.
She sighed. “Sabrina, Clayton and I don’t need any more exposure to the world. Besides, you know we’re already married. An engagement party seems silly.”
I suppose it did. Ronnie had dropped that bomb on me a few days ago. Apparently they were so in love they had both decided they didn’t want to wait for the deadline to get married. When I asked Clayton why he’d done it, he just said he’d been waiting for five years and didn’t want to wait any longer. The moment Ronnie told him she loved him, he’d taken them to a courthouse in Dallas to make it legal. He still wanted the big to-do, though. For Ronnie—and maybe himself, too.
“Fine. Maybe I’ll just call it a party and be done with it. I’m me. People expect me to have fun parties all the time. This would be just one more.”
