would you like?” Nathan asked without acknowledging the waitress.
Sheila was one of Carrie’s favorite people in the whole world. The bubble-gum-blowing, forty-something waitress was blousy and blatantly sexual in her too-tight uniform and bold makeup. She was also forthright and funny and her cat-and-mouse come-ons to Manny, who flirted and teased with everyone but who, Carrie suspected, secretly had it bad for Sheila, cracked her up.
“Have you met Sheila?” Carrie interjected, deciding Nathan hadn’t actually meant to be impolite, but instead was simply feeling the weight of “new person in town” syndrome and still felt a little uncomfortable with the locals. “She’s an institution at the Royal Diner.”
“Sweetie, I’m an institution in Texas,” Sheila informed her with her best Mae West moue. “How you doin’, Doc?” she added as Nathan slowly lifted his gaze from the menu.
“A…pleasure, I’m sure,” he managed, looking uncomfortable even as he forced a smile that Carrie strongly suspected was for her benefit.
Determined to be generous and assume his actions were shy, not snobbish, Carrie folded her menu and smiled up at Sheila. “I’ll have the soup. And a small salad.”
“Ranch on the side, right?”
“You got it.”
“And for you, Doc?” Sheila asked.
His shoulders stiffened slightly then relaxed. As Carrie watched, wondering if perhaps he was a little snobbish after all, he folded his menu, looked at Sheila and manufactured a smile. “I’ll try the sirloin. Medium rare.”
“Comes with a baked spud and a side of ’slaw.”
“Fine,” he said and, dismissing her, redirected his gaze at Carrie.
She’d just decided she’d imagined Nathan’s discomfort when the last voice in the entire free world that she wanted to hear boomed into the confined space she’d carved out for her and Nathan.
“Fine with me, too, sweet cheeks. I’ll have what he’s having.”
Carrie froze at the sound of Ryan Evan’s voice.
With a barely suppressed groan, she looked up to see him standing there—all-American good looks, all-Texas brass, all rough-hewn charisma geared up to charm the socks off the world in general and Sheila in particular.
His cheeks were ruddy from the chill of the wind and the cool February night. His shearling coat was open at his throat, his hat tugged low over his brow, beneath which his brown eyes danced with intelligence and a blatantly flirtatious sparkle. Every woman with a beating heart had to have felt it stall, then catch at the mouthwatering picture he made standing there…pure animal magnetism, rough-and-tumble cowboy grace.
“Hello, you handsome devil,” Sheila cooed.
“You made up your mind to marry me yet?” Ry teased with a grin as he dropped a kiss on Sheila’s cheek.
“Darlin’,” Sheila drawled, “if I thought you could keep up with me, we’d negotiate, but I’m a realist, not a dreamer…unlike you, who can only dream of what you’re missing out on.”
“What a woman.” Ry chuckled as Sheila walked away with their orders and, despite Carrie’s death grip on the tabletop and her obvious intention to stay firmly put on the outside edge of the booth seat, he nudged her aside and squeezed onto the bench beside her.
He smelled of the chilly evening and of leather and everything familiar yet illusive, and she hated him in that moment almost as much as she’d always loved him for his unconscious ability to send her into awareness overload.
He turned his gaze first to Nathan, who, Carrie noticed from the corner of her eye, appeared to be sliding toward a slow boil over Ry’s unwelcome intrusion.
“Well, now,” Ryan said, all aw-shucks grin and innocent eyes as he turned to her, “isn’t this nice? Never dreamed I’d find some dinner company tonight. Y’all don’t mind do you?” he barreled on as if Carrie wasn’t giving him the evil eye and singeing him with silent messages to “git while the gittin’ was still good.”
“Great,” he said before she could open her mouth, and turned that good-ol’-boy grin on Nathan. “Evans. Ryan Evans.” He extended his hand across the booth top. “Nelson Beldon, right?”
“Nathan. Dr. Nathan Beldon,” Nathan corrected him stiffly, and because he’d been left with no choice, he met Ry’s hand across the gray Formica.
“Doc,” Ry said with a nodding smile while he exerted, in Carrie’s opinion, just a little too much enthusiasm in an extended handshake that finally ended with a small grimace of pain on Nathan’s face.
God, she thought on a long sigh. Did that really just happen? Did Ry just try to outmuscle Nathan? If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was pulling a junkyard-dog stunt and marking his territory. Which, of course, was as ridiculous a notion as the one she’d bought into for the past fourteen years.
“What are you doing here, Ryan?” she asked through a clenched jaw and totally false smile as she fought with everything in her to ignore the way his muscled thigh felt pressed against hers. It was solid and hard and hot.
“Same thing you are, Carrie-bear. Refueling. So—” he turned his attention away from her and back to Nathan as she quietly slid out of physical contact range “—how are you finding Royal, Nolan?”
“Nathan,” Carrie corrected him with a hard stare. “His name is Nathan.”
Another country boy grin. “Nolan. Nathan. Sorry, pal. So…you’re a vet, right?”
Carrie closed her eyes and counted to ten as fire flooded her cheeks. She was about to clarify, yet again, when Nathan handled it.
“Physician. OB/GYN, actually. And you? It would appear by your outfit that you’d be a cowboy, correct?”
Her eyes flew open. She grinned. Whoa. Score one for the doc.
Okay. Maybe score half a point, she decided, when she saw a vein bulge out on Nathan’s forehead.
Beside her, though, Ry’s grin just got broader, making it apparent who was still getting the best of whom.
The evening quickly went downhill from there.
“Just what, in the name of everything sane, did you think you were doing?” Carrie demanded as she watched Nathan walk out of the diner, his shoulders stiff.
Beside her, polishing off the last of his dinner, Ryan paused with his fork midair. “What are you talking about, darlin’?”
It was the last straw. She slugged him.
“Ouch.” He rubbed his biceps, grimaced. “That hurt.”
“It couldn’t possibly have hurt enough,” she groused and, crossing her arms over her breasts, slumped back in the booth seat.
He pretended to study her with a concerned frown. “Oh. Oh,” he repeated, as if the bricks she’d have
