Page 6 of Merry with a Ranger

Well, him.

I swallowed hard, certain the bartender heard, but Nash’s voice stayed low enough for only me to hear, apparently. I flashed him a grateful, if strained smile, and said the first thing that tumbled from my lips. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Professional surfer.” His mouth tightened a fraction, enough for me to read the lie in him without checking him for tan lines…and I already did that back on the beach in a half second glance.

The only tan line Nash Mercer sported was one involving a shirt and tie outlined over his lying heart.

Don’t know him anymore, my butt.

At least our deceptions matched.

“Surfer. Right.” My words had a flatness I couldn’t erase.

“Yeah.” He swallowed, taking the whiskey the bartender poured for him, a double shot, and downed it in one. We had the same goal tonight, apparently. “You?”

“Elementary school teacher.”

I took perverse pleasure in watching him choke on the overpriced alcohol and smiled innocuously as my own blue drink arrived, topped with an excess of cream, cherries, something that looked like sand from the beach, and a lackluster umbrella that refused to stay up.

From the look on his face, Nash knew just how that felt.

“Yeah?” He thumped his chest in an effort to breathe, his touch at my back wavering for just a second before he was back. His eyes zeroed in on me. “Happy with that career choice, Bonnie?”

The bartender made an excellent decision in heading up the other end of the bar to clean sparkling glasses.

I nodded and sipped my drink, failing in my attempt not to screw up my face with the excess of sugar. “Holy fuck,” I whispered, loud enough for the bartender to snort up the other end of the bar, polishing away with an ardency I was sure the hotel manager would have adored.

Nash leaned in. “Bullshit tastes fine in that filthy mouth, huh, Teach?” His fingers trailed along my side as he sighed. “You know, I promised myself I was gonna try to take it slow with you, not get involved, all the right things, but…” He swiveled me around to face him in full, and there was no disguising the unslaked need in his eyes that reflected Christmas lights in all the wrong ways I suddenly craved. “You’re making that damn hard.”

I licked the obscenely sweet liquor off my lips. “My tongue is numb,” I muttered.

He huffed, wrapping an arm around my waist and pulling me in close. “Got dinner plans, love?”

“My f– folks.” My tongue played hardball, but I got the F word out, eventually.

Nash’s face closed. “Your daddy’s here? I wouldn’t mind having a word with him.”

My hair whipped my face, horror settling as I realized what he meant, but his attention already shifted. “No, that’s a really bad idea–” Suddenly I was a seventeen year old girl with her life back in tatters, her arms around her legs trapped in a tatty t-shirt and a pair of ripped jeans that felt too tight and too big all at once while the rest of her class was dressed to the nines and her date grew angrier, like he did right now. “Nash, no–”

He turned on the spot, right as the door to the dining room opened, and my mother walked in, dressed in the same pants suit she’d worn to dinner every night this week. Her hair was done in the same way it had been when I was a girl. Nothing changed about her but for the vague expression on her face when she looked past me like I wasn’t even there.

By now I was used to it. Nash, on the other hand, hadn’t experienced my mother’s mood swings where I spent the past decade growing used to them,after. They were my fault, after all.

My father, however—his sharp gaze lit on Nash and locked there.

“Good to see you again, son.” His tone implied anything but as he glanced at me for confirmation that he hadn’t started his own bout of hallucinations.

I nodded, detaching myself gently but there was no need. Nash’s hand lay limp at his side.

“Daddy. You remember Nash?”

The two men stared at each other, both as stiff as dead men reawakening after an eternity beneath unturned Texas soil.

“Of course.” My mother, so used to springing into action when needed though the brain cells long ceased to actually function, did so on demand as an automaton.

The shock of her Stepford wife-ish Mom-bot on his arm, her cheek upturned for her kiss, her blank expression, jolted Nash out of his stupor. A glance at me, and he leaned down to kiss her, murmuring soft, kind words to her ear though his flapping hand behind him gave away his freaked out reaction to the surreality of the situation.

I was the girl he should have taken to prom.

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