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lie about all the big fish that got away.”
    She sent a thin blue stream of smoke into the air and arched a brow. “Sounds like a racket.”
    “Yeah. It’s called free enterprise. Have dinner with me tomorrow night.”
    “I beg your pardon?” Alaina sat back in her chair, completely caught off balance by his request. What a devious tactic, changing subjects that way. She couldn’t help but admire his strategy. He was handsome
and
clever. That was a rare and dangerously appealing combination.
    “Dinner,” he said affably. “You know, it’s that meal at the end of the day.”
    She shot him a look. “I know what dinner is.”
    “Good, then we’re over that hurdle.” He leaned forward on his chair, warming to the idea of a date almost as much as he was warming up from leering at the lawyer’s lovely legs. “I know a great little place up near Russian Gulch, very quiet, out of the way, great dance band. So, it’s a date?”
    “It’s not a date!” Alaina declared, scooting over on her chair as if she were afraid to have him breathe on her. In fact, she was trying to escape the lure of his body heat and the shiver of delicious anticipation his suggestion had set loose inside her. She would not succumb to her hormones, shestated inwardly, though less emphatically than before. Her shoulders squared defensively, thrusting her full breasts out in a way that made Dylan groan low in his throat. “I won’t go out with you. I hardly know you. Why, not an hour ago I thought you were a social deviant.”
    He looked wounded, dramatically clutching his hands to his heart as if her words had been a dagger plunged into his chest. “How can you say you hardly know me? How can you say that after all we’ve shared? We’ve been arrested together!” Leaning so close to Alaina, just a deep breath away from kissing her, he lowered his voice to a devastatingly sexy pitch. “We’ve shared handcuffs. I usually save that for the third or fourth date.”
    Ignoring the warm tingles his nearness—not to mention his audacious admission—brought on, Alaina gave him an incredulous look and shoved him back into his own space. “You’re completely irreverent!”
    “That’s true. I don’t have a reverent bone in my body. It made headlines in the
Enquirer
when I was born:‘Mystery Baby Born Without Reverent Bones—Space Alien or Love Child of Elvis’ Ghost?’ ”
    “See there?” Alaina said, waving an elegant hand in a dismissive gesture as she bit back her laughter. Her cool blue eyes sparkled like ice on a sunny winter day. “I don’t date men who read the
Enquirer
, let alone men who make the front page.”
    “Snob,” he accused good-naturedly.
    She smiled and tapped her ash into the cheap tin Reno, Nevada, souvenir ashtray she’d taken off Deputy Skreawupp’s desk. “Yes, I am.”
    “And darn proud of it,” Dylan declared emphatically, slapping his thigh.
    “Naturally.”
    Dylan grinned. The impact of that dazzling smile nearly knocked Alaina off her chair. Lord, he was handsome, bar and bait shop or not. And he was really quite charming in a tacky sort of way.
    “If you’re going to do something, do it well, I say. Or, as my father likes to put it, if you go hunting for bear, don’t come home with a greasy dead possum.”
    Alaina grimaced. “What a disgusting backwoods maxim.”
    “I come from disgusting backwoods stock,” Dylan admitted with a smile. “Hayseeds and bumpkins abound on my family tree. We even have a mountain man or two.”
    “Better than I had imagined,” Alaina quipped. “Still, it’s another perfectly legitimate reason why I can’t go out with you; you’re ill-bred.”
    She was cut from the same cloth as Veronica Howard, all right, Dylan thought. But there was one big difference between Alaina Montgomery and his ex-wife. Alaina’s sardonic tone was laced with martini-dry good humor. When Veronica had derided his background, she’d meant every word. Alaina seemed to enjoy playing