Free Do Me Right by Cindi Myers Page B

come into the shop, she'd thought she had him all figured out. He was a sexy cowboy out for a good time. Someone who, in return, would show her a good time in the process. But then he kept revealing new sides of his personality, aspects that didn't fit the image she'd put together in her mind.
    Cowboys were supposed to be taciturn chauvinists or opinionated rednecks. Sexy, sure. Maybe a little wild and fun to be with. But not smooth and sophisticated, smart and considerate.
    With a lurch, the boat pulled away from the dock. Soft music swelled over the throb of the engines, and a waiter brought a bottle of wine to the table and poured them each a glass. She sipped, hardly tasting the beverage.
    He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. "Come on, relax. We're supposed to be having fun here, remember?"
    She nodded and smoothed her fingers along the edge of the linen-draped table. "I guess I'm just not used to this kind of treatment."
    "What kind of treatment is that?"
    "You know. All...this." She gestured toward the plush interior of the boat, with its candlelit tables filled with well-dressed couples.
    He frowned. "The men you usually date don't take you to nice places?"
    She moved her fork a half inch to the left. "The men I usually go out with are more the beer-and-burgers type." She straightened and met his gaze. "I guess I'm a beer-and-burgers type of woman, too."
    He shook his head. "No. I think you might have grown used to beer and burgers, but that doesn't mean you don't think about better things sometimes." He squeezed her hand. "It doesn't mean you don't deserve to be treated like a queen."
    His voice was low, soft as a caress, the words seeping into her like warm water flooding through cracks in a wall. If she listened to him long enough, she'd forget what they were really up to here.
    The waiter arrived to take their order, breaking the spell, and she pulled her hand away and fussed with her napkin in her lap. By the time they'd made their choices and were alone again, she'd composed herself enough to strike a casual pose and smile seductively across the table. "I'm glad you've figured out that I deserve to be treated like royalty. I find I get along so much better with a man once he's learned that."
    He laughed and raised his wineglass. "To the queen. And her loyal subject."
    They touched glasses and drank and she began to feel a little better. What had she been worried about, anyway? It wasn't as if Kyle had some ulterior motive. He'd made it clear from the start what he was after; he just had a different idea of foreplay than most of the men she'd met.
    "Hey, your cast is different." She nodded to the plastic contraption around his arm that had replaced the gauze-wrapped fiberglass.
    "It's an air cast." He winked at her, a slow, sexy lowering of his eyelid that made her catch her breath. "It comes off when I want to take a shower--or other things."
    She took another drink of wine, trying to calm the flutter in her stomach as she thought of those "other things."
    "Ladies and gentlemen, if I could direct your attention to the Congress Avenue Bridge just ahead, we've come to one of the highlights of the evening." The voice over the PA interrupted her reverie. "The largest urban colony of Mexican free-tailed bats is about to set out for its nightly foraging. As many as seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand bats live in the expansion joints of the bridge. Nightly the colony consumes ten-thousand to thirty-thousand pounds of insects."
    "Only a Texan would make a tourist attraction out of a flying rodent," Kyle observed as he scooted his chair closer to Theresa.
    "Hush. It's interesting." As the announcer reeled off a few more facts about the bats, small, dark figures began to flit from beneath the bridge. Within another minute, a black cloud of bats rose up, the sound of their wings merging into a throbbing like a thousand heartbeats. The cloud spread out over the water, passing over the boat and dispersing.
    "I