Page 22 of Past Tents

She’d been studying the screen above the bar where a Nashville Predators hockey game had the attention of half the folks in the place. As soon as she heard my words, her eyes snapped to mine. Sweeping her dark hair over one shoulder, she scooted her chair closer in order to hear me over the voices.

“Ooh, sounds juicy. I’m here to help, you know that.” I did know. It was the best part of our friendship.

I debated how much to tell her. Word traveled faster than a boll weevil in a cotton field around here and I didn’t want anythinggetting back to Clay. I bit my lip and reconsidered saying anything at all.

Lucy swatted my shoulder. “Oh, spill it. I can already tell it’s about a man, so why don’t I just keep guessing and you can nod or blush or whatever until I get it right.”

“Fine, if you put it that way, I’ll just tell you.” I inhaled a cleansing breath, checked the score of the game—three to one, Predators—and took a long swig of my beer. “I have to spend not one but two weekends camping with Clay Meadows.”

She whistled. “Not exactly shooting fish in a barrel, that one. Good luck.”

“I’m not trying to shoot him. Or kiss him, to be clear.”

“Okay, good. Because I was about to talk you down.”

“I’m already down, thanks.”

I felt my face fall at her low opinion of my odds, and she immediately corrected. “Oh, honey, it’s not you. You’re the biggest catch around. Any guy in this place...” She spread her arms wide and looked around. “And I don’t mean Genie’s, I mean Green Valley. Any of these guys would be blessed by the angels to have you. But Clay? You know he’s notorious for short, meaningless relationships.”

Other than a very dedicated hermit, everyone knew.

My dating record didn’t look much better.

Just to prove my lack of prospects, I looked around Genie’s. At one table, a group of guys barely old enough to drink knocked back beers and played a drinking game with dice. One of them caught me looking his way and tipped his cowboy hat at me witha wink. His auburn beard had that patchy look of a guy just this side of puberty. I couldn’t see myself as a cougar at thirty-four.

The several other tables that were filled with couples made me sigh. I’d always imagined myself as part of a couple. Heck, I’d been part of a couple for five years. Five years ago.

I didn’t need to look at the date to know it had been nearly five years to the day that Johnny Culpepper and I parted ways. Dating Johnny had felt like a good solid plan when we met right out of college. And I was a planner.

I was also a reader of every Regency romance novel from Jane Austen right on through Tessa Dare’s latest. More than once Lucy had accused me of being lost in an earlier era, and maybe she was right.

Thanks to the dukes and the viscounts who could woo better than anyone, I had myself a model for how my love life would be—it would be swoony and romantic. Full stop.

My plan was I’d date a series of roguish bachelors in my early twenties, settle for one at twenty-five, marry at twenty-seven, have three moppets by my mid-thirties. Teaching would be the perfect job that would give me school breaks off to coincide with my kids’ schedules.

So I graduated from college and dated the roguish bachelors, most of them variations on Clay Meadows—tall, rakish, muscular men with chiseled good looks. The best of the bunch was Johnny Culpepper, the son of a Nashville seafood importer who dazzled me with his ready smile and his ability to lead on the dance floor. We met at a wedding, began dating a week later, and by the time I was twenty-four I was ready to put my plan in place.

Johnny Culpepper seemed on board with the plan. We’d talked about my romantic aspirations and my love for formal wooing. A man who liked a challenge, he jumped at the chance to woo like the best of ’em.

He brought flowers to me after my last class when I was getting my teaching credential. He held doors open for me when we entered a restaurant and remembered my mother’s birthday. He serenaded me with classical music from his phone when he told me he loved me under a moonlit sky.

So I didn’t see it coming when night turned to day and the magic wore off.

Johnny explained it in such simple terms I kicked myself for not recognizing the charade. “I got caught up in the wooing. I liked doing all the stuff. It was romantic, and I loved the chase. But I never wanted a forever relationship. I just wanted the chase.”

How had I not seen this coming?

It was a blow to the ego and an anvil on my tender heart.

He’d mastered all the trappings of courtship so well that I didn’t really notice that Johnny Culpepper was really just a greyhound. In other words, he ran as fast as he could when the starting gun went off, pulled out all his best wooing moves when the object of his affections had yet to commit. Then, once I signed on for good, he lost his motivation.

Once a greyhound wins the race, it doesn’t keep running. It stops and basks in the win.

Then it waits for the next opportunity to chase something new.

Johnny Culpepper was the first man I ever dated who was only in it for the chase, but he wasn’t the last.

I kept doing it, kept falling for guys who wooed my pants off, only to put theirs right back on after they got what they wanted. Sometimes it was after one week. Sometimes after three months.

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