Page 46 of Lawbreaker

Later, there was dancing. There was Big Ben on the dance platform they’d put up, holding pretty little Mercedes and doing a pretty good box step. Odalie danced with two of the visiting ranchers who were here for Cole’s purebred heifers, but didn’t enjoy it. Her feet were hurting in the pretty new shoes she’d worn for the barbeque, and both ranchers were heavy on their feet and pretty uncoordinated.

She ended up back at the drink table reaching for ginger ale.

“You look washed-out,” John noted as he and Tony got refills of coffee.

“You try dancing with cattlemen who spend their lives with bulls,” she muttered. “My feet are killing me!”

She kicked off her shoes and sighed. “Oh, that feels good!”

“You’ll get cuts,” John said.

She made a face at him as she put ice in a glass. “You wear those shoes for a few minutes and tell me that.”

“Not me. I look awful in high heels.”

“You look awful when you’re not in high heels,” she retorted.

“Worms!” he said. She smacked him in the stomach playfully. It was like hitting a wall.

“Can’t dent me,” he teased. “I’m made of good Everett steel.”

“Is she always that mean to you?” Tony asked John.

“Only when she’s here,” he agreed. “We never fight when she’s in New York.” He grinned.

Odalie started to hit him again when one of Cole’s cowboys, a new one with red hair and a big smile, caught Odalie’s hand and tugged her toward the dance floor.

“No, Ray,” she pleaded. “Look, my poor feet have blisters. I can’t dance!”

“It was a fair bet,” he reminded her. “And I won.”

She made a face at him and sighed. “Okay. But if I collapse on the dance floor, it’s going to be your fault, and I’ll tell Maude!”

“Oh, God forbid!” he groaned as he led her toward the dance floor.

“Who’s Maude?” Tony asked John, not pleased to find Odalie in some other man’s arms.

John noted the older man’s expression and hid a smile. “Ray’s wife,” he said, and watched Tony visibly relax.

“Oh.”

“Ray bet her that she couldn’t throw a calf. So she tried and got knocked over. Ray threw the calf and won the bet. Hence—” he nodded toward the dance floor “—that.”

Tony watched her with a rapt expression, unguarded for those few seconds. “She can sing, she can dance and she looks like a fairy,” he murmured. “But no boyfriend.”

“Singing has been her life from the time she was in grammar school,” John told him. “I tried a lot of things before I realized that Dad had to leave Big Spur to somebody and it was probably going to be me.” He shrugged his broad shoulders and smiled. “It’s not a bad life. I love animals, and I know everybody in a ten-mile radius. I could have landed worse.”

Tony sipped coffee. “I hated it when my grandfather died and the farm got sold. My grandmother never got over it. She died a couple of years after he did. I guess I was too much of a city boy to settle in the sticks, but I loved summers on the farm.”

“Dad said every shot you put in that rattler hit dead center in its head, and from a distance,” John remarked.

“In my line of work—my former line of work,” he amended, “a gun was a necessity. I learned to shoot straight when I was a kid. It’s saved my life a few times.” He glanced at John. “They made all these movies about the old-timey gunfighters being so fast. Fast is nothing unless you can hit what you aim at. The shooter who takes his time and aims well doesn’t die.”

John sighed. “I’m no good with guns. Dad despairs of me. Tanner can shoot anything. So can my sister. I’m the odd one out,” he chuckled.

He noticed that John, like himself, was drinking coffee. “No beer?” Tony mused, nodding at John’s coffee cup.

“I don’t have a head for alcohol,” John confessed. “It’s better not to drink if you can’t handle it. I mean, one little glass of wine and I’m wasted.”