It coated his tongue with smoke and oak.His cheeks pinched tight from the kick.Marisol howled and dragged Kyla into the jeer.
“He sips like somebody’s abuela.”
Before Titus could answer, Ruthann’s voice carried clear as a town crier and pointed as barbed wire.
“Y’all hush and mind your manners now.Time for the groom to get sentimental.”
No,he screamed mentally.
This was a town tradition, but he thought he’d hid anything that could be used against him in a moment like this.
The postmistress, half lost in her shawl and with hair teased wild by the wind, climbed onto an old tree stump near the pit.
She waved a stack of envelopes over her head.It took Titus a breath to recognize the battered paper.Corners thumbed.His handwriting cramped in blue ink.
Old notes.
Months of them.
“Ruthann—”
His warning died.
She grinned too wide.
“Ladies and gentlemen, witness for the court,” her voice rose.She thumbed through his words then began in a stage whisper that cut straight through the smoke.“To the woman who made me forget my own name in the space of one dinner.”
The crowd yelped.
Laughter broke out.
“Give us the dirty part!”Emmitt shouted.
Ruthann needed no invitation.She straightened and deepened her voice in mock gravity.“I want to taste the sweat on your collarbone.I want you pressed belly-down on my table, legs splayed, begging for my hands.”
A roar went up.Boots stamped the flagstones.Marisol shrieked with delighted horror.Bourbon jar jammed between his knuckles, Titus stood frozen.Torn between bolting for the exit or yanking Ruthann from her perch.
Kyla covered her face, but the tears slipping between her fingers came from laughter, not shame.She shook with it.Shoulders bouncing.Hair falling loose.When she managed to breathe, she let her hands drop.Her eyes found Titus.
Ruthann kept going, savoring every syllable.“I want you so full of me you forget your name.Well.”Ruthann fanned herself to raucous applause and arched her brows at Titus.“Boy’s got poetry after midnight, I will give him that.”
His neck flushed.Rage and pride shared the same short fuse.They were not secret anymore.He glanced at Kyla.She watched him with her head tipped back.Gaze open and sharp.
Through it all, Kyla never looked away.Never shrank.Her lips parted, ready to bare her teeth or her heart.He had never been sure which.
He raised his jar in salute and answered Ruthann’s next bawdy accusation with a lopsided smirk.
“Damn straight,” he growled, voice low.“I meant every word.”
The words were for Kyla.
For everyone else, he did not much care.
Kyla shoved away from Marisol.She swung herself onto the iron lip of the old tractor rim.Every face turned.Her hem bunched high.Fabric clung to the muscle at her thigh.She set her feet wide and raised the whiskey jar high.Arm steady.Queen and outlaw both.
“Let me say it plain since y’all have so much damn interest.”Kyla grinned wider.Savage and sweet.“I promise,” she said, raising the glass like a challenge, “to keep this man guessing every single day.You think you are ready for me tomorrow?You will not be.”
A strangled silence settled over the pit.
