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“I remember you used to play when you were a kid. Played real good and sang. You should pair up with Tammy some time over at Dirty Coyote. She’s always looking for a new, young singer.”
“I play for myself and my daughter. Nobody else,” I told him, knowing damn well Tammy wouldn’t want the likes of me up on her stage when she could get some of country music’s finest.
“Shame, ‘cause I remember you sounding real sweet. How old’s your baby girl?” he asked all friendly, grinning at me like we’d been fast friends. We knew each other, that was for certain, but our friendship had always been from afar, until tonight. Suddenly, I felt as if we’d been buddies ever since the summer when I turned fourteen. And how he knew I played guitar back then, I had no idea, but it was a small town… which explained a lot of things.
“Eleven months,” I told him, grinning right back, proud of my little girl.
“She looks just like you with that head of red hair, all pretty and happy.”
“Thanks. She’s a sweet baby. Easy, except when she can’t sleep. Then she fusses, but it’s not long lived. I guess I’m lucky.”
He nodded. “Are you here for a vacation or are you staying longer?”
“Not on vacation. Who did Daryl fight with tonight? Was it you?”
“What makes you think there was a fight?” He answered so quickly, I knew he was trying his best to cover up the truth of the matter.
“His knuckles are bruised and red.”
“That could’ve happened from almost anything.”
I leaned away from him and looked him right in those amazing eyes of his.
“If you’re going to come up on this porch to lie to me, Colt Johnson, you can turn yourself right around and drive on out of here.”
I could be downright blunt when I wanted to be. I hated lies, and I could usually spot them as the words spilled from the liar’s mouth.
“I would never lie to you, CindyLou. Never.”
And there it was, that Colt Johnson grin that warmed my body like a hot cup of cocoa on a cold day.
Colt could charm the panties off any girl he wanted, except this girl. Now that I had a baby on my own, my panties were made of steel, and it took a lot more than a killer smile, deep blue eyes, and false sincerity to get this cotton armor to slide off my bottom.
At least that had been my thought process ever since I took my first pregnancy test.
But sitting next to this beautiful man, on a warm summer’s night, surrounded by his intoxicating musky, vanilla scent, listening to the crickets’ serenade us, caused me to rethink my steel panties. Perhaps they weren’t quite as impenetrable as I’d like them to be.
“Okay, then let me put it another way. Who was at the receiving end of my uncle’s punch tonight?”
He gazed down at the floor for a moment, reset his hat on his head, looked back up at me and said, “That would be Mickey Finn, but in all fairness to your uncle, Mickey threw the first punch.”
“Is he crazy?” The words shot out of me so fast, I didn’t think my brain had time to catch up.
He tossed me a look like I should know better than to ask. “We’re talking about Mickey here. Sanity never quite took up full residency in his brain.”
He had a point, and I wished I would’ve thought of that when I first read his damn napkin note he’d left for me in the bar that night. Thing was, I’d been so lonely, that when I read it, I wanted to believe him. I’d only been living in Cheyanne for a couple months when my boyfriend left me for a blond-haired, big-breasted trick rider before Frontier Days ever got going. And when the rodeo left at the end of the month, Clark Williams, my two-timing boyfriend who convinced me to move to Cheyanne in the first place, left with the rodeo and his blond-haired trickster. I didn’t know what to do, or where to go, so I stayed. At first, I thought the baby belonged to Clark, but when the doctor told me how far along I really was, which didn’t add up for Clark, I knew the baby daddy had to be my one-night stand with Mickey Finn.
And besides, Clark always used a condom.
Mickey? Well, Mickey didn’t have a condom that night, and I thought I’d be safe because of the time of the month.
Never a good idea to try to calculate your cycle when you’re in the heat of the moment.
“But to start a fight with my uncle when he knows those fists are deadly. And what about Jimmy Jennings? I heard he doesn’t take too kindly to fights in his dance hall.”
According to my aunt, Jimmy had zero tolerance for fights of any kind, nor did he like anything that disrupted his idea of how people should act and react.
She said that Jimmy and my Uncle Daryl lived by the same roadmap.
