“Fine. I don’t want alcohol, anyway,” Clara muttered.
When Clara’s drink arrived, it was fizzy and pink from the juice of the cherries, and she didn’t look the least bit sad. Violet herself felt a bit uncertain about the whiskey. She had very little experience drinking on this level. But it felt like a night to be bold.
She brought the shot glass to her lips and basically just touched the amber liquid to them. She licked them, and gasped. “Oh. This is...” She coughed.
“You don’t sip it,” Clara said. “Or so I have observed.”
“I can’t take a shot of it. I will die. It will set my esophagus on fire. I can’t pick a guy up if I have a burned out esophagus.”
“Might help with your gag reflex.”
“Why would that...” Suddenly, she got an image. Of herself, on her knees in front of Wolf. “Oh.”
“Yes,” Clara said. “Indeed.”
“Well, that’s...disgusting in the context of this conversation.”
“It’s not disgusting. In any context.”
“Well.Well.” She looked around the bar. There was an array of cowboys. There always was. People drinking hard to prepare for the endless work that was ahead. There were no weekends when you were a rancher. There was always something to do. She’d known that all of her life. Because her dad had done it. He loved the life. Took it very seriously. As far as she could tell, it was a life you pretty much had to take seriously. Which was probably why it attracted this sort of work hard-play hard philosophy.
She was familiar with it, and yet she still felt like she was on the outside looking in. Unable to take that shot of whiskey. Unable to drain it.
Then she saw a figure, in the shadows. He moved. And she felt something shift inside her. The man had a cowboy hat drawn low over his face, and when he emerged from the darkness, her heart caught in her throat. It was Wolf. Looking every inch the predator that his name implied he was. And he was stalking toward her.
Her heart fluttered, and all she could do was stand there. A sheep waiting to be eaten. By the big bad Wolf.
“And what the hell are you doing here?” he asked.
“I might ask you the same question.”
“Well, do you want an honest answer?”
She looked over her shoulder and saw that Clara had lifted her glass up, and was sipping it through a straw, her blue eyes wide and pinned to both her and Wolf. She turned back to Wolf. “Well... I came here to...”
Clara swirled her straw around in her glass and made a loud clanking sound. Then she tipped the glass to her lips and captured some ice between her teeth, crunching noisily. “She’s here to find a man,” Clara said, setting her glass down on the bar. “Since the one that she found ended up being a disappointment.”
“Clara,” Violet muttered.
“I’m helping,” Clara said in an obvious stage whisper that Wolf could clearly hear.
“You are not.” She turned back to Wolf. “But yes. I am here to find a man.”
“Are you?”
He did not sound at all interested. In fact, he sounded irritated.
“Well.Well. Like Clara said, it’s only that I thought that I had found one, and then you didn’t show up. You didn’t come back to the bed-and-breakfast, so I figured... If I was in the mood to have a little fun, I might go out and find some by myself.”
“Is that what you thought? You. The woman who did not come to my room last night after she kissed me like she was thirsty and I was water?”
She looked back over at Clara, who was watching this with far too much interest. “Can we go over here?”
She stepped away from Clara, whom she could still feel watching. “Why didn’t you come back tonight?”
“Because I was trying to do the right thing,” he said. “Look, you’re a nice girl.”
“And you seem like a nice man. So I don’t see the problem?”