Page 88 of The Holiday Heartbreaker

Lachlan arched a brow. “Really.”

“Benny is gone. For Christmas break. So it was a good time for her to go out and see the nightlife.”

“Which I’m told is bustling,” she said.

The bar was packed full of people. You couldn’t say it wasn’t bustling.

It was the damn season, after all, and people had to have their ways of coping.

There were a lot of women there, as usual. Girls dressed up in dresses with shockingly short hems and long sleeves. He liked that look. He always had. But still, no one appealed in the same way that Elizabeth did. Nobody could.

“What would you like to drink?”

“You don’t have to buy me a drink.”

“I would like to,” he said.

“I don’t think you should buy me a drink. I think you should buy a drink for one of those women over there. Because they’re who you came for. Right?”

He was tempted to say yes. Because after all, that was who he had come for. At least, in theory. Or historically. But truth be told, hooking up tonight had never seemed feasible. And he had brought her for a reason.

“No. They’re not why I’m here. Actually, I wasn’t really all that into coming out tonight until I thought of inviting you. So. I would like to buy you a drink.”

“But why? Because we just talked about the fact that it had to be...” She looked quickly at Lachlan, who was occupied talking to a woman who had just approached him.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know what I said. Does that mean that I can’t want to be here with you?”

“I suppose not,” she said.

“What’ll you have?”

“I guess... I don’t know. I don’t really drink beer. Can you recommend something?”

“Sure. I’ll get you one on tap.”

“Let me rephrase. I don’t know beer at all, so that doesn’t even mean anything to me.”

“All right. I’ll just get you what I’m having.” But of course, he revised what he was going to get, making sure to choose something a little bit milder so that it wouldn’t be too intense of a taste for her. He brought them back and set them on Lachlan’s table. He pulled up an extra chair, and gestured for Elizabeth to have a seat.

At least ten women came over to chat Lachlan up, and he and Elizabeth didn’t really make much conversation. Rather, she just looked at everything happening around them. There was one near brawl, quite a bit of bad line dancing, a lot of people hooking up. Some people taking off their wedding rings.

“People come from other towns,” he said, “for that reason.”

“That’s... Distasteful,” she said.

“People are distasteful,” he said. “But the fact of the matter is, there’s a lot of small towns around here, and if you want a little infidelity, you’ve got to go a few towns over. Otherwise somebody’s going to be on the phone to your wife in five minutes. I mean, you run the risk of that, even coming here. Because you might be over here at the same time one of your wife’s friends is over here trying to get lucky.”

“This seems complicated.”

“It is. I’ve always kept it easy by not ever being married.”

“Yes. Well. That is a lot easier.”

“You want to dance?” He didn’t know where that had come from. He didn’t typically dance. He would, because sometimes a man had to do what a man had to do to get a girl interested in going home with him. Some of them needed the full deal. A hamburger, dance, and then sex.

But he just wanted to dance with her again, like they’d done at the Town Hall. Because he knew now it had been six years since she’d been with another man, so he wondered now if, until their dance, it had been six years since anyone had danced with her. He wondered if that ass Carter had ever taken her to dance at all. If he’d really appreciated what he had with her.

Somebody strong and beautiful and soft all at once.

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