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bartender said with a wave.
    I was just working through my options in the reply department—I was coming up on empty—when every nerve shot to attention. I’d been growing accustomed to that sensation, and it could only mean one thing.
    Rowen was close by.
    “You okay on your own for a while?” I asked Alex, who was ordering her drink.
    She narrowed her eyes like my question was insulting. “Yeah, I think I can hold my own against Dorothy here.” The bartender who shot me another wink when I glanced at him.
    I certainly didn’t need to worry about him taking advantage of Alex if I left the two of them alone. Me, on the other hand . . . Backing into the crowd, I waved at both of them. Their parting words?
    “Hurry back.”
    “Away with you.”
    Spinning around, I wove through the mass of bodies, getting closer to Rowen with every step. I couldn’t see her, but I didn’t need to. The feeling inside of me told me all I needed to know. It wasn’t like an invisible rope where when she pulled, I came, or when I pulled, she came. It was more like . . . a magnetism. The closer we were, the stronger the attraction became.
    I followed that attraction to the other side of the club where a smaller room was separated from the rest of the place by a pair of sheer red curtains. That room was far better lit than the main room and nowhere near as packed. A few dozen people wandered around, inspecting some familiar and some not-so-familiar paintings and drawings.
    That was when I saw her. She was standing in front of one of the paintings I hadn’t seen yet talking to a middle-aged couple who was inspecting the piece like they were envisioning it above their fireplace. Rowen looked . . . well, she still made my heart hammer like she did when I first starting falling hard for her last summer. Falling like I couldn’t even stop it if I wanted to.
    She was in a black and silver beaded dress, the one she’d found at an antique store on Queen Mary Hill last month when I’d been over. She’d glommed onto that dress like it was a homing beacon. After admiring it for a while, she announced she was confident she must have owned the dress in a former life—apparently she’d been a flapper in the ‘20s—and that she had to buy it. Then she checked the price tag, frowned, and put it back. We walked out of the antique store without the dress, and Rowen headed for the nearest cafe to drown her sorrows in a cappuccino and a croissant. I’d excused myself to go to the restroom, returned ten minutes later to find her picking at a second croissant, and set the dress in her lap.
    The look on her face that rainy afternoon? Yeah, it was one I’d never forget.
    Other than the night I’d purchased it, I hadn’t seen her in it. Even that night, the dress didn’t exactly stay in place for long. Tonight, though, seeing her in that dress, smiling, talking, and showing off her artwork, so obviously in her element . . . She stole whatever fraction of a piece of my heart I might have still possessed. Rowen Sterling had every last piece of me, and I didn’t want any of them back.
    That magnetism jolted back to life in a staggering way. I couldn’t not go to her. I’d gone two steps in the hundred left to go when my journey came to an abrupt end.
    A man who made the guy guarding the front door seem like a kitten stepped in front of me. “This room’s for V.I.P.s only.”
    I might not pour milk over my steak for breakfast in the morning, but I wasn’t a weakling. When Big Boy rammed his chest into mine to stop me, I kid you not, I bounced back a good five feet. Okay, so manhandling hay bales, feed bags, and hundred-pound calves doesn’t hold a candle to benching small SUVs. Noted.
    The dude might have been Goliath’s offspring, but Rowen was a mere dozen yards away. I wasn’t going down with one warning. I advanced again, trying to step around him. That time, he grabbed my shoulders and shoved me back.
    “V.I.P.s” he said slowly, half