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memory of the sound. “Come on, Vic,” she started, then paused to knock back her drink before speaking again. “You have to admit, you worked fast.”
    Automatically, he refilled her glass. No, he’d mourned her, first, but Sheila was there and had worn him down eventually. “You ran away.”
    “Yeah, after…after I was…”
    He watched her struggle to say whatever was on her mind. “After you were what?”
    She leveled her gaze at him. “After you stood me up—”
    “If you’d stuck around, I would have told you what happened.”
    She lifted her whiskey, tilted her head back, drained the glass, and then slammed it down on the bar.
    “You should slow down,” he murmured when she knocked the empty glass against the wood.
    “Fill it up.”
    He shook his head, never taking his eyes from her. He filled a tumbler with ice water and placed it in front of her. “I went to your parents’ house the next morning. To tell you I didn’t want to elope—”
    “Right,” she snapped, fire behind her eyes. “Because you were with Sheila.”
    He slammed his palm against the bar. “I was not with Sheila.”
    “Oh, really? Then who’s Zach’s mother?”
    “That was after you took off, Delaney.”
    “I left town because you were with her that morning.” She drank down half of her water, then grabbed her whiskey glass and held it up, signaling she was ready for yet another. “I saw you two, all nice and cozy.”
    He took the glass from her, putting it in the sink. He remembered coming out of his house that morning, freshly showered and shaved and dressed in his Sunday best, only to find a jealous Sheila on his porch. He’d had to pry her arms off of him, wanting desperately to go formally ask Red West for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Sheila had blubbered mascara all over his pressed white shirt, and by the time he’d changed and finally made it to the West ranch, Delaney had taken off. Gone for good, it turned out. “Nothing happened.”
    “Sure.” She ran her fingers through her hair, then pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Three forty-five. That ring a bell?”
    The time they were supposed to have met at the Chain Tree, in the dark hours before dawn. He nodded. “I remember.”
    “You didn’t show up.”
    “And you pitted everyone against me with that story you concocted. Pressuring you.” He scoffed, batting down the bitterness tingeing his thoughts. He let his attraction for her rise to the surface instead. The attraction they’d never consummated. It was now or never. Get her out of his head once and for all. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
    She glanced around, looked at Jasper and Alan, then back at him like she was suddenly aware that they were hashing this out in public.
    He seized the moment, moving to the other side of the bar in a flash. He wrapped his hand around her wrist. “Come on.”
    She balked. “Come where?”
    “With me.”
    “No. I’m meeting Carmen—”
    So she was still friends with Carmen Rios. Good for Delaney that she could pick up right where she’d left off when she’d bailed on him and San Julio. But they had one piece of unfinished business themselves. “Mary Jane!” he bellowed. “When Carmen Rios shows up, tell her Delaney will be back in a minute.”
    Mary Jane nodded and he dragged Delaney off the barstool, through the crowd in the dining room, and to the wide staircase that led to his office and the card room where a few regulars played their weekly poker game at the round table, comfortable in their Naugahyde club chairs. There was no game tonight, so the lights were dim and the room would be chilly, but he didn’t need light or warmth to proposition Delaney.
    “Vic,” she began, but her feet tangled under her.
    He tightened his grip to keep her upright until they were down the stairs and he had her leaning up against the brick interior wall.
    “Delaney,” he said, turning her around before letting go. “It’s time we