Free Lauri Robinson by DanceWith the Rancher Page A

awfully steep.”
    “The high ante means only serious bidders will play,” Ray Ray said. “Of course, if no one wins, everyone will get their money back, minus my holding fee.”
    “Holding fee?” Garret asked, more to himself in simple disbelief. It never failed to amaze him how some men made money.
    “Fifteen percent,” Ray Ray said. “Someone needs to assure the hundred and fifty dollars remains safe.”
    “A hundred and fifty dollars?” Garret asked. No doubt there were a few men in town who’d ante up ten bucks to be the one to lead Rory Boyle across the dance floor. DeLong had been right calling her the prettiest thing in the county. There might not be another woman in the state as cute as her, especially when her dimples showed. He’d admit that. It was her demeanor that got to him. “You already have fifteen men striving to get Rory on the dance floor?”
    “You’d be the fifteenth one,” DeLong said. “But the Rose brothers haven’t arrived yet.”
    “We believe the kitty will be two hundred,” Ray Ray said.
    “Two hundred bucks and all I have to do is make Rory Boyle dance with me?” Garret asked for clarification.
    “Yeah,” DeLong answered.
    “Well, you can’t hold a gun to her head or anything like that, Garret,” Ray Ray added seriously.
    Garret slapped his money on the table, but as Ray Ray reached for it, he flatted his hand over the bills. “You’ll be here after the dance, to pay me.”
    “Right here.” The man patted the red-checked tablecloth. “I don’t plan on leaving all evening.”
    “And I don’t plan on it taking me long,” Garret said. Dang if life didn’t seem a whole lot brighter than it had just moments ago. This was going to be the easiest 200 bucks he ever made. Well, 170 once Ray Ray took out his 15 percent.
    * * *
    Any words she might have hoped to say dried up in Rory Boyle’s throat as a sudden burst of perspiration left her skin clammy. Drawing a breath through her nose, she finished filling the cup in her hand with fruit punch and then set it on the table with several others.
    It would help if Garret McCoy didn’t look as if he could charm a baby bird out of its nest, standing there in his bleached white shirt and shiny black string tie, grinning. Too good-looking for his own good, that was what he was and that, too, frazzled her in ways she’d never been frazzled before.
    Rory took another breath, held it deep in her lungs in order to say as evenly as possible, “Hello, Mr. McCoy. Would you care for some punch?”
    “Nope.”
    That didn’t surprise her. Garret was not a punch-drinking kind of man. Taking swigs off the bottles being passed behind Grady Campbell’s barn was more his style.
    Through gritted teeth—trying to uphold her preacher’s daughter’s persona—Rory suggested, “Perhaps you’d care for some pie, then.” She waved to the table next to the punch one she was in charge of. “There are several flavors.”
    “Nope,” he said again.
    His green eyes held a touch of silver, like the undersides of oak leaves when they curl up to signal a rainstorm, and his dark hair always made her think of fresh-ground coffee beans with all its different shades of brown. Snapping her chin up, Rory told herself he was simply a man. Yet she couldn’t help but admit he was the man that made what happened with Jim Houston all the more infuriating. Your past never goes away , and always impacts the future. That was what her mother had said. Until some months ago, Rory had hoped that wouldn’t be true for her. She knew better now.
    The smile she forced to remain on her lips hurt. “Well, then, would you mind moving? There are people behind you who would like punch and pie.”
    He took a single step, taking himself out of the line, but how he leaned with one hand on the edge of her table showed he had no intent of leaving. The chill those green eyes cast over her skin also told her he was still furious with her. Which wasn’t new. Garret McCoy