“Gods no. No offense.”
She winked and took a swig of the whiskey. “How about I stop guessing? What caught your eye?”
Now I was feeling self-conscious. “This was a…bad idea.”
“Delaney Reed.” Her voice filled up the room with wind and laughter and the sweet call of a bird that didn’t exist on this continent, nor on several others. “You will not step one foot out of this shop until you point at the thing that brought you in here in the first place.”
She took another sip of whiskey and walked past me to the door. She flipped the sign to the “closed” side, slid the lock, then killed the front lights in the window.
“There. Now it’s just us girls. So what did you see? I have private changing rooms down this little hall, and if you don’t want to come out of there to look at whatever it is in a larger mirror, you don’t have to.”
“You’re making a big thing out of nothing. You can…” I waved at the lock, at the door, at the lights.
“Nope. This is my store. I set the hours. Oh, plus I’m drunk. Oh, hold on.” She held up a finger and took a huge gulp out of the cup. “There we go. I can’t serve customers until I sober up, can I?”
I shook my head, embarrassed, but grateful that she’d closed the door and made this a safe place. For some reason, dresses always threw me. They made me feel vulnerable. It’s why I only owned two.
“The dress.”
She leaned forward. “The what?”
“The…uh…dress. In the window.”
She pivoted on the balls of her feet and did a slow scan of her front window. There were half a dozen dresses there and one smart suit with a skirt.
I didn’t have to say anything else. She set her cup on the counter and walked straight over to the dress I had seen.
Clouds and blue, with just a little yellow. Now that I looked at it closer I realized it was water and sunlight and time.
It was Patience.
And that was all a part of life, wasn’t it?
“Let me put this in the changing room for you. While I do that, I want you to…” She nodded at the whiskey. “One sip. When one is out of practice wearing a dress, a little liquid courage will do one good.”
I glanced at the bottle, but didn’t pour myself a drink. I didn’t drink on duty.
“I’m going to give you two choices, all right?” she said from down the hall. “But I don’t want you to come back here yet. Two choices.”
I moved away from the bottle, glanced at her cross-stitch—a sweet, grandmotherly, flower-filled frame with the words, “We had sex in this room,” in neat little block letters—then moved on to the rack of jackets.
The jackets were practical. Some had a little style, and I thought maybe I should just get one of those and call off the whole dress thing.
But she was back before I could decide between the Army green corduroy and the Army green denim.
Her gaze ticked to the jackets. I dropped my hand back to my side.
“Those are men’s jackets, Delaney.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m not going to let you buy one of those.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Not even for Ryder, who is a fine-looking man, but even he couldn’t make those look good.”
“Maybe I’ll just—”
