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agreed, clearly
reluctant. “I wouldn’t do that to either one of them. Or you.
You’re looking forward to it, aren’t you?”
    “Yes, I am,” Christi admitted. “I would love
to get out and d—” Damn, she’d almost said she wanted to dance.
Hopefully Tommy hadn’t caught that. “Have a little fun. So, why
don’t we make an evening of it and have dinner in the café? Gus
still makes the best pork chops.”
    Tommy smiled faintly. “Sure, Christi. We’ll
do dinner and the engagement party. No big deal.”
    Yes, it is, Christi
thought. It was in fact a very big deal.
    * * *
    At the end of the table, Tommy sipped the
beer he was nursing and looked around the rowdy old bar where he’d
enjoyed plenty of misspent evenings in a much happier past. If it
were up to him he would finish the beer, wish Rory and Lisa well
and head out the door, but Christi was having a good time for the
first moment since he’d come home to her, and he would be damned if
he’d cut short this night on the town.
    Dinner at the café had not been the ordeal
he’d expected. The pork chops were cooked to Gus’s usual
perfection, and everyone seemed to take his wheelchair in stride,
perhaps because Tommy wasn’t the only wounded warrior in Verde;
they were surely used to seeing Holly and Cathy around town. But
this bar was another matter. More than once he’d seen Christi sneak
a longing glance at the packed dance floor, and the topic of the
night appeared to be the hot and heavy sex life of every other
couple around them, Rory and Lisa included.
    “Yeah, Rory’s just as randy as that little
bull of Tommy’s,” Lisa teased. Rory smiled sheepishly and turned a
little red. “Mind you, I’m not complaining any.”
    “I bet you’re not,” Roxanne Pruett said with
a smile. “Kind of reminds me of that hound dog out of Mason I dated
for a few months before I found out the SOB was married. Reminded
me of a bull in more ways than one. Best three months of my
life.”
    “Is that the one your brother ran off the
front porch with the shotgun?” Christi laughed. “Good thing Hutch
is a deputy or he would have been in trouble for that.”
    “One and the same,” said Hutch, a county
deputy like Rory. “Bastard had the balls to tell Roxanne and me
both he didn’t see the problem. He could keep up with both ladies
just fine, couldn’t he? I, for one, took exception to that.”
    “Wasn’t that a little hypocritical, Hutch? I
heard you were hot and heavy with some rich trophy wife in
Horseshoe Bay,” Lisa said.
    “Oh, no. My mama didn’t raise no fools. I
made sure that trophy was collecting dust on the shelf before I
partook,” Hutch laughed. “They were separated. I don’t poach on
another man’s lady, trophy or no. And from what I hear, the one who
puts us all to shame is Russ Riley, Judge Riley’s nephew. You know,
Holly Riley’s brother. His reputation precedes him all the way from
Fort Hood.”
    The table erupted in laughter and Rory
reached out and pulled his red-headed fiancée close. “Well, folks,
unlike Riley and the rest of the hound dogs out there, I can’t help
being a horny bastard. Just look what I get to go home to.” He
planted a warm kiss on Lisa’s lips. “An angel. A sexy angel, and
she’s all mine. Any man with an angel like this would feel like I
do.”
    Wanna bet? Tommy
thought bitterly. He had a warm, sexy angel in his bed too, but fat
lot of good it was doing him. It was killing him, in fact, hearing
all the jokes and innuendos. He didn’t even know if he could make
love to Christi. Did his equipment still work? If it didn’t, what
on earth kind of future did he have any right to expect with
her?
    The jokes continued to fly, and Tommy felt
his spirits sinking even further.
    He was just about to ask Christi if they
could make their excuses and leave when a shadow fell across the
table and he looked up into the face of his old nemesis, Doug
Westerman. For reasons that probably made no sense to