But she was.
Charlie started after him, quickly finding that balancing in heels while carrying a goat was a little bit more complicated than walking in heels without carrying a goat. She also was fascinated to find that the other goats started to follow her as she headed in the general direction of the barn. Or at least what she assumed was the general direction of the barn since she had yet to see the structure.
Sure enough, as she rounded the corner of the bar, crossed the street, and followed the sidewalk leading away from the boat docks, she found herself approaching a wooden structure that could only be described as a small barn. It was tucked back under a cluster of trees and was inside a very typical wooden fence with a dirt yard in front. The space had two large boulders, two plastic barrels, and three feeding troughs. There was also a large basin of water.
The man set the goat he was carrying down and then turned to take her goat from her. His attention went to something behind her—she assumed the rest of the goats following her—and he smiled.
Charlie just stared.
She knew she was staring. She knew that was a crazy reaction. She knew that he was going to notice that she was staring and that it was a crazy reaction. But she couldn’t stop.
Without the smile, he was sexy, hot, and rugged. She’d found him incredibly attractive inside the wedding reception and had actually been very disappointed that he’d turned down her invitation to dance.
However, him smiling did things to her stomach that no man had done in a very long time. Possibly ever. And it was that thought that gave her the greatest hesitation. It was one thing to flirt. It was one thing to charm. It was one thing to poke at a guy who was a little gruff and didn’t think he wanted to have conversations with her. It was one thing to tease the guy who turned her down for a dance.
It was quite another to have a man smile and make crazy, warm, curly, tingly, twisty things happen to her insides that she’d never experienced before.
Whew.
It was a really good thing that she was only in town for this wedding. She was getting on an airplane in two days to go to Paris. She wasn’t hanging out on the bayou for any period of time. She wasn’t spending the summer here as she had for so many years. She was out of here tomorrow night.
And suddenly that seemed not only practical but like a really good idea.
It wasn’t that she was scared of the guy. Quite the contrary—she found herself wanting to spend a lot more time with him. She had no desire to return to the wedding reception. She was even considering what it would take to scatter the goats so that they would have to stay out here and round them up again.
This guy rattled her. And all he had done was smile.
“You okay?”
Just as she’d expected, he was watching her with a puzzled look, as if he couldn’t figure out why she was standing there, not moving or saying anything.
Charlie pulled herself together. Kind of. “Now what?”
And she wasn’t talking about the goats.
He took the goat from her, their hands brushing, and dammit, she felt some tingles. That was crazy. She loved tingles. Tingles were awesome. In fact, if a guy didn’t give her tingles after three dates or so, she usually ended it. Tingles were required.
For dating. For guys she wanted to have hot, fun sex with. For guys she would consider potentially getting serious with. For that last group, tingles were absolutely essential.
Tingles, however, had no place in a petting zoo barn with a guy whose name she still didn’t know and who had turned her down for even a simple dance. Especially a guy who lived in a tiny town in Louisiana when she was on her way to Paris in forty-eight hours.
3
Griffin had never seen a woman in a cocktail dress holding a goat.
He supposed it was likely that most men could say that. But it turned out that he’d been missing out on one of his major fantasies.
This woman was stunning. She would have been stunning in a potato sack. He knew better than to actually believe that the eight-hundred-dollar—holy shit—cocktail dress had anything to do with how beautiful she looked.
He’d been incredibly attracted to her from the minute he’d seen her across Ellie’s bar. Which was why he had turned down her offer to dance. He knew better than to get attached in this little town.
Frankly, he was already struggling with that.
Autre, Louisiana, had a way of getting under a person’s skin. Even his. He’d learned the hard way not to settle down anywhere, not to get attached to a place or to the people there. But Autre had proven, in the six months that he’d been here, to be dangerous to even the best-laid plans of a guy who had a pretty high, firm wall around his heart.
It did, however, seem typical of the way his luck worked that when he’d successfully resisted temptation at the wedding dance and escaped outside for some air, that the same gorgeous blond who had been tempting him with nothing more than, “Do you want to dance?” and then a genuinely surprised look on her face when he declined, would be the person to find him talking to goats.
It was no surprise that this woman didn’t hear no from men very often. In fact, even Griffin, who had no trouble saying no to just about anyone, had almost immediately regretted his answer. Not enough to change his mind and go after her, of course. Until she’d walked up and asked him about the metaphoric carrot in his pocket.
Of course, she had to be funny, clever, bright, friendly, and charming on top of looking like sex on a stick in the cocktail dress and heels she was wearing.
Even when he’d lived in D.C., he hadn’t gone for the hours-in-the-salon-chair type. This woman screamed high maintenance. She wore heels that were not only completely impractical for walking around the bayou town but were the type of shoes that fought for attention with the form-fitted cocktail dress that hugged her breasts and hips. It was clear that she also spent a lot of time on her nails, and no one’s lips were the color of hers naturally.
Still, he had been inordinately pleased to see her once he’d gotten over his surprise, and nothing about their conversation had done anything to dim his interest.
Which in and of itself was a shock. She was a talker.
Griffin was not.
But then she’d held a goat. In a cocktail dress and high heels.
And he suddenly had a new fetish.
She hadn’t fought it. She’d barely glared at him. In fact, she’d used the goat, and the potential goat smell on her dress, as a bargaining chip. For some reason, this woman wanted to keep talking to him and spending time with him. That, again, made her unusual.
There’d been a time when plenty of women had wanted to spend time with him. But that had been before he’d become a surly, unpleasant pessimist. Even women less friendly than this one found him to be a bit of a downer. Or an asshole.
But he hadn’t really been much of an asshole with this one so far. He’d tried. Half-heartedly. He’d been a little gruff, and he definitely made it clear that conversation was his least favorite pastime, but he’d told her the animals’ names. The ridiculous animal names. He’d also teased her about the talking. And he’d commented on how she looked in her dress.
He shouldn’t have done that. Not only because it definitely could’ve come off as creepy, but because he shouldn’t have been noticing how she looked in the dress in the first place.