Free One True Love (Cupid, Texas 0.5) by Lori Wilde Page B

over to say hello.
    “You look like warmed-over death,” she declared cheerfully.
    “Consider yourself very lucky you sprained your ankle,” John said.
    “On the upside, you still look better than the rest of the contestants.”
    Buddy and Rosalie were still bickering. I eavesdropped a bit as I swallowed down a big gulp of hot coffee. It sounded like she was trying to get him to commit to their relationship.
    Penelope’s eyebrows went up. “My friend Wallis says a dance marathon will either make or break a couple. The sheer endurance and teamwork that it takes to win either makes your bond stronger or shows all the cracks in a relationship. Those two”—she waved at Buddy and Rosalie—“aren’t going to make it, and Wallis knows a thing or two about that. She and her husband have separated more times than I can count.”
    I glanced at John. The marathon had made us closer than ever. Which was precisely the problem; if we hadn’t been so close together for so long, these feeling would never have been stirred to this extent.
    “Wallis will divorce her husband eventually,” Beau predicted. “And she’ll be off to make some other poor sap miserable.”
    “Don’t be mean,” Penelope said, and tweaked his ear.
    He laughed and kissed her affectionately. “I’m just glad you were not a suffragette.”
    “Wallis wasn’t either. She simply has strong ideas about what she wants from life and she’s determined to get it. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
    The horn sounded.
    “It’s back to the dance floor for us,” John said, holding me a little less closely now that his family was in the building again.
    A few minutes later, another couple dropped out when the male partner keeled over. Medical personnel rushed in with a stretcher and carted him off.
    That left three of us. Me and John, Buddy Grass and Rosalie, and a married couple who had traveled all the way from El Paso to be in the competition. They’d told us during one of the breaks that they were interested in joining the professional dance circuit, and winning the trophy would help get them there. I had no idea there was such a thing as a professional dance circuit.
    Time ticked steadily toward noon. Now I knew how Cinderella felt. Soon, the clock would strike twelve. The Nash roadster would turn into a pumpkin. The flapper dress to rags. The sideline spotters and the promoter would turn into mice and scurry off to a field. The glass slipper was already nothing but a bloody bandage.
    At fifteen minutes to twelve, the couple from El Paso were disqualified when they stopped moving. It was just us against Buddy and Rosalie, who were still bickering.
    “We’re going to take this thing,” John said.
    “I don’t know about that. They’re feeling frisky enough to fight.”
    “That might be their ploy to keep going. Stay too mad to fall asleep.”
    “It’s a dangerous strategy.”
    I gave a halfhearted smile. At this point, I was ready for it all to be over—fall into bed, cry my eyes out, start getting over John. Except I knew there would never be any getting over him. How did you ever get over your one true love?
    Twelve noon came and went.
    The gymnasium was packed again, people egging us on. It took everything we had in us to keep moving. Every step was painful. Muscles twitched and burned. Gravity pulled on us. Exhaustion sat on our shoulders, whispered lullabies in our ears.
    At seven minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon, twenty-six hours after we’d first started dancing, Buddy Grass called Rosalie a rude name.
    She slapped his face hard. The loud smack reverberated throughout the entire gym.
    The crowd clapped, thrilled by the drama.
    Rosalie sank her hands on her hips and proceeded to tell him exactly what she thought of him and his bootlegging ways.
    A spotter on the sidelines blew the whistle. “Broken contact. You’re out of the competition.”
    My mind was so foggy, my heart so heavy that it took me a minute to realize