“Ladies, remember where you are,” Jill said.

Betsy leaned forward until she was inches from Kinsey’s face. “I see a few wrinkles around your eyes. Won’t be long until you’ll have to lower your prices or pay the customer.”

Then she flipped two dollar bills on the bar in front of the stunned Kinsey and said, “I wouldn’t want you to starve to death since your chicken and dumplin’s dried up. That should buy you a latte tomorrow morning.”

She lined the burger baskets up on her arm like a professional waitress and sashayed her way through the line dancers back to her table. Kinsey swiped all the color from her lips with a paper coaster and smiled at Sawyer.

“I’m experienced, not old,” she said.

“I’m not sayin’ a word,” Sawyer said bluntly.

“I’ll take the beer back and return for the burgers,” Kinsey said.

The baling on the hip pockets of jeans glimmered as she carefully made her way past the folks two-stepping to Blake Shelton’s newest song. Then suddenly she stumbled and fell right into the Gallagher table, dumping one pitcher of beer on the floor and the other on Betsy.

Jill grabbed a mop and headed that way, with Sawyer right behind her. Betsy jumped to her feet, slinging her hands and throwing drops of beer on everyone around her.

Kinsey’s eyes went wide in mock shock. “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry,” she said coldly. Then she moved closer to Betsy, grabbed her by the shoulders, and licked the beer from her face from jawbone to forehead. The song ended, and the bar went quiet. It was worse than sitting in the eye of a tornado, and more eerie than the music in a horror movie.

“What the hell are you doing?” Betsy quivered like she’d stepped on a mouse in her bare feet.

“A Brennan doesn’t waste good beer.” Kinsey smiled. “If all you can do is whine and bark, then you don’t have a place with the big dogs.”

Betsy’s hands knotted into fists. “I’ll show you a fight, if that’s what you want.”

“Not in here, you won’t. You’ve both had your fun, now settle down,” Jill said.

Sawyer quickly plugged two coins into the jukebox, and loud noise filled the building again. Jill didn’t know if he simply punched in numbers or if he’d chosen the songs, but she couldn’t keep from smiling when Gretchen Wilson’s voice filled the room with “Redneck Woman.”

Jill swabbed up the beer on the floor and put the mop back in the closet. “It says that she’s a product of her raisin’. I believe that Kinsey and Betsy should sing along with her,” she grumbled when she was back behind the bar.

“What was that? I was afraid the crowd might goad them into a brawl, so I started poking numbers into the jukebox. I’m not sure what I played,” Sawyer said. “I was ready to step in if fists started flying, because I was afraid you’d get hurt.”

“Hey, I had a mop. I’d have decked them both with the handle.” She started to laugh when the song ended and “Romeo,” an old one from Dolly Parton and Billy Ray Cyrus, started playing. “Are you sure you didn’t handpick these?”

“Hell, no! I’m not interested in being anyone’s Romeo, if that’s what you are thinking,” he answered.

She laughed even harder when the lyrics said that she might not be in love but that she was definitely in heat. “Sounds to me like Dolly Parton knows Kinsey and Betsy both pretty damn good. They’re not in love, darlin’, they are in heat, like she says in the song.”

“It’s not funny,” Sawyer said.

But it was, because Jill had the same problem. Love and heat were two different things, and she could easily see where Sawyer, with his tall, dark, handsome looks could put any woman in heat. The words said she didn’t get as far as his eyes when she was lookin’ him over, and Jill could relate very well. She had trouble listening to that damn song and not letting her eyes stray to the silver belt buckle above Sawyer’s zipper.

Good God, when did this happen? A couple of kisses, and I’m wanting to jump his bones? What’s the matter with me?

It was a few minutes past eleven when Sawyer finally unplugged the jukebox and announced that the place was now officially closed. The Brennans and Gallaghers had left, and a couple of old worn-out cowboys who’d come close to dancing the leather off their boots shuffled out the door.

Sawyer locked it and picked up the broom. Jill started wiping down tables and chairs. She’d barely gotten past the first table when she heard money clinking down the chute in the jukebox and turned to see Sawyer coming toward her with that grin on his face.

“Will you be my Juliet?” He growled exactly like Billy Ray in the “Romeo” song.

“I’m too damn tired to dance,” she said.

He grabbed her hand. “Don’t make me waste my money.”

He tucked his hands in his belt loops, and good Lord, those jeans did things that gave her hot flashes. It was either dance with him or stand there slack-jawed like a Saturday-night drunk. She tossed the cleaner and the rag on the table, tucked her thumbs in her jean loops, and matched him step for step in the line dance.

When it ended, she was panting so badly that she couldn’t even talk. “That sucked every bit of energy out of me.”

“You ain’t that old yet,” he said as Mary Chapin Carpenter started singing “Down at the Twist and Shout.” He swung her out to the Cajun-flavored music and brought her back to his chest for three minutes of swing dancing.

“Please, tell me the third song isn’t that fast,” she said when it ended.

The whine of the fiddle in an old song softened the lights and the whole atmosphere in the bar. Sawyer pulled her close to his chest, picked up her hands, and put them around his neck. Then he dropped both his hands to rest at the small of her back, and he moved slowly around the floor as George Jones sang “Don’t Be Angry.”

He softly sang the words in her ear as they danced. He sang about remembering the first time he flirted with her, and asked her not be angry with him when he failed to understand all her little whims and wishes all the time.

When the song ended, he tipped her chin up and kissed her. She heard the whine of the fiddles and a harmonica somewhere in the distance, even though the music had stopped. There wasn’t an angry bone left in her body when she rolled up on her toes for the second kiss.

“That, darlin’, was the payment on the bet,” she said.

He picked up the broom and started sweeping.

“So?” she asked.

“So what?”

“So is my bet debt paid in full?”

“Honey, after that kiss, I will need at least two cold showers to cool my blood so I can sleep.”

Chapter 13

Clouds shifted back and forth over the moon, and only an occasional star could be found in the sky when Jill and Sawyer locked up for the evening.

Jill inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with clean, cool air. “Thank goodness the bunkhouse and the store are smoke-free, or we’d both drop graveyard dead with lung cancer from secondhand smoke.”

“At least the exhaust fan takes most of it out of the bar area, so we don’t get what the folks do that are out there around the tables.” Sawyer’s hand went to the small of her back as he guided her to the truck.

They were inside with seat belts buckled, and he had put the truck in reverse, when both doors opened, startling Jill so badly that she squealed.

“What the hell?” Sawyer said.

Tall men with ski masks, bibbed overalls, and work boots pointed sawed-off shotguns at them. Sawyer’s pulse quickened, and adrenaline rushed through his body, but there wasn’t a thing he could do. Three guns in his truck, and he couldn’t reach a damn one of them.

“Out of the truck right now. You make a move, and I’ll shoot this little lady right here in the parking lot. She’d bleed out before you could get an ambulance all the way up here,” the one with a gun on Jill said gruffly.