Free Undeniable by Alison Kent Page A

seated until the dancing was done.
    Off to her side, a man took the stool at the end of the bar. “Be right with you,” she said, tossing the words over her shoulder as she unlocked the corner closet housing the light and sound system controls. Scanning the labels—“Cotton-Eyed Joe”? ZZ Top? Asleep at the Wheel?—she decided tonight she was in the moodfor Charlie Daniels. She queued up the song and the laser show, then locked and shut the door.
    As the first fiddled notes of “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” hit the speakers, the Kittens dropped what they were doing and, in a flurry of shrieks and ponytails, hopped onto the bar. Their boots on the polished wood rattled like castanets and pounded like deep bass drums. Red, green, and blue lights swept the room, lighting rapt faces.
    Watching the Kittens’ feet shuffle and fly, Arwen got back to her customer. “What can I get you?”
    “I’ll have what they’re having.”
    She grabbed a forgotten longneck before it rolled to the floor, found both her mental and physical footing before glancing Dax’s way. Then she berated herself for letting him knock her off balance in the first place. But really, with the way he looked and the intimate things she knew, who could blame her?
    His skin showed a long day spent in the sun, and his eyes appeared all the brighter because of it. He was clean—she smelled his soap when she breathed in—and his hair beneath his hat was still damp. The collar of his khaki shirt showed years of washing and fit like he couldn’t imagine ever giving it up.
    He wasn’t the Dax from high school. He was a dangerous man, arrogant and hard and with needs of his own, and that got in the way of her plans. She dug an icy bottle from the stainless steel chest behind her. “You’re a sneaky bastard, you know that?”
    Dax grinned, an ear-to-ear showing of big bad wolf teeth and black-sheep-don’t-give-a-damn. Both courtesy of the family issues she’d brought into the tub.
    “Learned to be one early on,” he said, taking the beer she handed him. “Only way to avoid running into fathers. Strange, but they forget the fun of being teen boys the minute their daughters turn into teen girls.”
    She thought of her own father keeping her close. Thought of the times he’d forgotten she was there. “And that surprises you?”
    He swallowed, lowered the bottle. “I’m not a father. I can’t say.”
    “Is this the same reason you learned to kiss and run?” she asked, pushing aside the picture of a pink-faced bundle of joy cradled in a cowboy’s arms. Pushing aside, too, the tickle in her tummy the picture wrought.
    “No,” he said, shaking his head. “That was about giving up hanky-panky on company time.”
    Her fault for thinking she could get him to change his mind. That she’d be worth it. And where in the hell was that coming from? Their relationship—and calling it that was already a stretch—wasn’t about his worth or hers. It was about sex. Plain and simple.
    “Has that been bothering you?” he asked, his eyes reflecting the colored light show. “Me cutting out?”
    Nope. Hadn’t bothered her at all. Except for the part where she was at a loss to understand the way it had played out. “Why would it? You had things to do at the ranch. Fences to ride. Shit to shovel. Whatever.”
    He waited, nursed his beer, his gaze sharp and never leaving hers. Not even when one of the Kittens danced close, her long bare legs and denim shorts begging for notice. Not even when Arwen, perspiration tickling a path between her breasts, reached beneath the bar for the bottle of water she kept close.
    “I had to see Darcy,” he said as she drank, dropping his gaze and flicking his thumb at his longneck’s rim. “But I did you wrong, and it’s been bothering me a lot, and I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
    She was pretty sure he hadn’t been seeing Darcy at five a.m. which was about the time he’d left, but he’d apologized all the