It was as if she had stepped into another world and—like Dorothy torn from her black-and-white life and thrust over the rainbow into a brilliantly colored Oz—she could only stand there and blink in stupefied amazement. It was loud, smoky, and tacky. Unapologetically, unrepentantly, gloriously tacky.
Chinese paper lanterns were strung from life-size wooden cutouts shaped like palm trees. Brightly colored plastic fish dangled from the ceiling. Bedraggled fisherman’s netting, studded with glass floats, striped beach balls and pink plastic flamingos of various sizes, was draped across the walls. Gyrating hula dolls—the kind found on the dashboards of cars of people with questionable taste—decorated each table. The wait staff wore gaudy Hawaiian Aloha shirts and paper flower leis with their Wranglers and boots. The four members of the twanging cowboy band stood on a small, raised stage constructed to look like a log raft. The crowded dance floor was huge, kidney-shaped and painted a vivid blue. Roxanne’s cocky smile faltered a bit as she watched the dancers’ whirling, skipping, kicking progress around the scuffed blue floor.
Dancing had never been her strong suit. Not that she didn’t love to dance. She did. But girls who were five feet nine inches tall by the time they were thirteen, especially girls who were brainy and wore glasses, too, didn’t get much opportunity to learn all the latest dance moves. Her mother had insisted she learn all the standard ballroom dances, of course—and what a wretched embarrassment those lessons had been, being waltzed around the room by an unwilling partner whose head barely reached her chin!—but she’d never danced any of the popular dances all the kids her age were doing back in high school. Not in public, anyway.
Determined not to be left out this time around, she’d secretly taken a six-week series of dance lessons in preparation for her Wild West adventure, but none of the half a dozen country-western dances she’d so painstakingly learned bore more than a passing resemblance to the bewildering series of steps currently being performed on the floor of Ed Earl’s Polynesian Dance Palace. Obviously, her instructors—a fresh-faced young preppie couple in matching pastel plaid shirts—had never been in a Texas honky-tonk. Or six weeks of lessons hadn’t been nearly enough. Either way, she couldn’t possibly—
“Dance, ma’am?”
Roxanne shifted her gaze from the dance floor to find another cowboy smiling at her from beneath the rim of a broad-brimmed, black cowboy hat. This one was lean and rangy, with dark, soulful eyes and an uncanny resemblance to a young John Travolta. Unfortunately, he was also no more than twenty, at most. Still, it was heartening to be hit on as soon as she came in the door, as it were. Another sign, if she needed one, that her transformation from party pooper to party girl had been successful. If she hadn’t been ninety-nine percent sure she’d fall flat on her face, she might have taken him up on his offer, just out of pure gratitude that he’d asked.
“Thank you, no.” She smiled at him to cushion the blow. “I’m meeting someone.” She gestured across the sea of dancers toward the bar and pool tables on the other side of the blue lagoon. “Over there.”
“How ’bout I dance you over that way, then? Little bitty slip of a thing like you might get stomped on, you try to make it through this rowdy crowd on your own.”
Even without the warning from the San Antonio barrel racer about a rodeo cowboy’s proclivity for stretching the truth, Roxanne knew a line when she heard one—and his was long enough to hang clothes on. No one had ever, in all her twenty-nine years, referred to her as a “little bitty slip of a thing.” She’d been called skinny. Scrawny. Bean Pole. String Bean. Arrow Archer. But never a little bitty slip of a thing. And by someone who was smiling at her as if he really, truly meant it. At the moment, anyway. It was irresistible.
“All right, sugar,” she drawled, suddenly feeling powerfully, erotically female. Little bitty slip of a thing. If she could call forth that kind of shameless flattery from a young, good-looking cowboy by just standing there, she could do anything. Even dance in public without disgracing herself. “For that, you get one dance. The man I’m meeting can wait.”
He whooped as if he’d just won the lottery and snagged an arm around her waist, whirling her onto the floor before she had a chance to change her mind.
“One dance,” she reiterated as they joined the enthusiastic throng.
They danced two dances.
After all, the first dance hardly counted, as the song was more than half over when they joined in. And the second dance was the Cotton-Eyed Joe. It would be an affront to Texans everywhere to leave the dance floor when the Cotton-Eyed Joe was playing. Roxanne acquiesced to that argument, spurious though it was, but managed to stand firm when he tried to cajole her into a third go-round. Cute as he was—and he was darn cute!—she had other plans for the evening. And it was about time she quit stalling and put them into action.
“I’m meeting someone,” she stated firmly, resisting when her dance partner tried to twirl her into the two-step that was just beginning. “And you said you’d dance me over there—” she gestured with her free hand “—after one dance, now didn’t you, sugar?”
The cowboy gave an exaggerated shrug, pantomiming both compliance and disappointment, and obligingly two-stepped her backward through the crowd. As they approached the edge of the dance floor, he spun her in a series of quick, showy turns that ended with her pressed up against his lean, rock-hard young body, their joined hands clasped against the small of her back. Breathless, laughing, Roxanne clutched at his shoulder with her free hand for balance and found herself looking into his face from only inches away. The expression in his soulful brown eyes had her reconsidering her definition of dangerous.
“Oh, my.” She slid her hand from his shoulder to his chest in an effort to give herself a little more breathing room. Unlike the cowboy who’d accosted her in the parking lot, he didn’t budge. “Well…um, that was certainly invigorating,” she said brightly, forgetting to drawl. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” he purred, and dipped his head with unmistakable intent.
Roxanne drew back sharply, as far as the arm encircling her waist would permit.
“Is that a no?” he murmured.
“No. I mean, yes. That’s a no,” she stammered, fighting a curious combination of schoolgirl panic and equally schoolgirlish triumph.
He wanted to kiss her!
It was out of the question, of course. He was just a kid. Younger than her youngest brother, Edward, who was a junior at Brown. But still…this young John Travolta lookalike wanted to kiss her! It was a heady thought and if he were a few years older or she were a few years younger, she might be tempted to let him. Maybe.
“Sure I can’t change your mind? I know lots of other—” his arm tightened fractionally, pressing her closer to his overheated body; his voice dropped an octave, becoming intimate and suggestive “—invigoratin’ things we can do together.”
“Yes, I’m quite sure you do,” she said primly, wondering how she’d gotten herself into this. And how she was going to get out of it. “But I’m meet—” She sucked in her breath, startled into silence when he reached up and brushed her cheek with the back of one finger.
“You sure have soft skin,” he murmured, his finger wandering down her cheek to the side of her neck. His dark eyes sizzled with potent male heat. “You this soft all over?”
Roxanne reached up and grabbed his hand, stopping its unerring descent toward the scooped neckline of her lace-edged camisole blouse. “No,” she said firmly, with no equivocation in her voice this time, and no indecision in her expression that might lead him to think she could be convinced to change her mind.
The young cowboy sighed and let her go. “I enjoyed the dance. Dances,” he said with a smile, as earnest and polite as if he hadn’t just tried to cop a feel. “And if you change