“Yeah, the impenetrable, cool ones don’t seem a natural fit with you.”
Vance thought of Layla. Clutching at him when she had her bout of Ferris-fear. Slow-dancing, her warm body moving against his. Her simple enjoyment in the mani-pedi, pointing her toes for him to admire. She was a natural.
“You’re right,” he told his cousin, staggered for a moment by a truth he’d never allowed himself to see. “Blythe wasn’t a good fit for me at all.”
“So why’d you go for her then?”
“Fuck, I don’t know,” Vance admitted, still nonplussed. “We’d been dating awhile, though we never actually slept together.” His motivations had not been driven by sex, and Blythe, in her still-waters way, had seemed fine with that.
“Oh.” Baxter’s eyes were wide.
“Yeah. Never went to bed with her.” The confession made him feel uncomfortable and maybe even idiotic. He started to say something else, then stopped.
“Spit it out, V.T.” Baxter nudged his leg with the edge of his rubber thong. “Because none of this sounds like you.”
On another sigh, Vance tried again. “We were going along, dating slow and steady, and then I was called back up. I thought, ‘Hey, why not?’ I knew Mom and Dad would love her. They’d consider her a steadying influence—”
“Screw that,” Bax said, straightening in his seat. “You had your wild times, but where you’ve been and what you’ve done since you enlisted...”
“The fact is, she was Fitz’s type,” Vance said, “so I think I saw her as my way back into the family fold.” He hadn’t been able to articulate that to himself at the time, but now, from a distance, he saw that it was true. Jesus. “Lousy reason to get engaged, huh?”
What had motivated Blythe to go along? She wasn’t the only woman who acted on the impulse, though. He’d had army buddies who’d made the same impetuous offer and received the same impetuous agreement from ladies they’d not known half as long. Hell, more than one couple of his acquaintance had entered into a quickie, day-before-deployment marriage.
Thank God it hadn’t gone that far for him and Blythe. And before long she’d realized Vance didn’t have his older brother’s chops and rejected him.
Baxter drained his beer and signaled the peace sign at their waitress to order two more. “If I wasn’t so miserable myself, I’d try to broker a settlement on your side of the family. Get some of you to wake up and others of you to start talking.”
Vance laughed as the waitress put new beers in front of them. “God, you can be officious and arrogant.”
“Prissy and pasty, too,” Baxter muttered. “However, I have developed a bit of kink in my sex life.”
“Whoa. Way better than talk of porn stars. Though I’m not sure I believe it.”
“Believe it,” Baxter said, then glanced over his shoulder toward Addy again.
Well, well, well, Vance thought. This should be interesting.
But his cousin’s eyes had gone to slits. “Who the hell is that?”
Vance looked around. Addy was on the dance floor, laughing up at some dark-haired guy who had his hands on her hips and was trying to encourage them to move. “I don’t know.”
“I do. That’s a firefighter. A dirty, no-good, fucking first responder. Teague something.”
“They’re just dancing, Bax,” Vance said, and remembered with guilt how he’d pulled Layla away from another man on the Fourth of July at this very spot.
“A fucking first responder. Everybody knows that gives a guy an advantage.”
Baxter had to be really upset, Vance thought, because he normally avoided cursing. Such verbal activity had never made it onto the BSLS. “Look, it’s no big deal.”
“Oh, yeah? Now he’s got Layla out there.”
Vance swiveled in his chair. His “natural” was certainly out on that dance floor, with her glowing, facial-ized face, her buffed fingernails and her moon-and-star toes. She’d changed into a rib-sticking tank top and a tight pair of jeans. The firefighter touched her like he’d been touching Addy, his palms on either side of Layla’s sweet hips, encouraging them to swivel.
“Fucking first responder.” Vance started to rise.
Then fell back onto his stool. She doesn’t need me supervising her night out. He repeated it twice more for good measure.
The words, though, didn’t do much good reining in his reckless instincts. They still urged him to peel that other guy’s hands off the girl, then sling her over his shoulder and take her home to his bed.
“We should go to their table,” Baxter suggested. “Give that guy the eye. Let him know they don’t need