Page 53 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"Because the twins have a bet going and I need to know which one I'm paying."

Tater comes up behind her with a paper tray of fried peach pies, hands me one without asking. "He can lean. I've seen him lean on a truck for two hours straight. Man's a professional."

"I'm not dancing."

"Swaying," Debbie says. "Keep up."

Nellie takes the other pie off Tater's tray and doesn't say a word, and the two of them share a look over it that I'm not supposed to see. I see it.

The band swings into something slow. Debbie starts herding people onto the grass like a border collie in a sundress. Couples pair off. Somewhere near the pie table I catch a flash of red hair. Rue Hawthorne, standing very still, watching the dance floor the way I watch a building before I go in.

Nellie licks peach filling off her thumb. "You want to sit down?"

"No."

"Your leg."

"My leg is fine."

"You keep saying that like it's got a hearing coming up."

"Dance with me."

She stops with the pie halfway to her mouth. "You can't dance."

"I can stand. You do the rest."

"That's not how dancing works."

"Nellie." I hold out my hand. Palm up. Same as she did at the Wagon Wheel, that night at the table, when neither of us said anything about it. "Six days you drove me to therapy. You can stand on my foot for one song."

"Stand on your—"

"Good foot. Like a wedding. Like a kid at a wedding."

She looks at my hand. She looks at my face. Whatever war she's running in there, she loses it right in front of me.

"If you fall," she says, stepping out of her sandals right there in the grass, "I'm charting it as noncompliance."

"Chart away."

She steps up onto my left boot. The real one. Her arms come up around my neck and mine close around her waist and the whole world narrows to thirty inches of Texas summer.

She fits against me like the answer to a question I quit asking. All of her. There is not one inch of this woman I would send back.

We sway. Barely. The band plays and the lights burn and her forehead is level with my chin and she smells like peaches and antiseptic soap and I could stand here until the boot rusts.

"People are watching," she says into my collar.

"People have been watching since the fishhook."

"Since the auction."

"Since the fishhook. Dwayne talks."

She laughs. I feel it in my chest before I hear it, this small shaking thing she gives me, and I stop swaying.

And standing still with her weight on my boot, it lands on me that I'm happy. Plain as a bell. The old voice starts up right on schedule. You don't get this. You know what it costs.