Marry A Man Who Will Dance

“You really think you’re somebody, don’t you? A real princesa?”

Up close his eyes were so fierce, she felt consumed by their unholy fire. “I’m not scared of you, Roque Blackstone!”

Liar.

“So, you know who I am?”

She almost stopped breathing when he smiled. Jet would have smiled back and said something clever.

“You’re a Blackstone—the worst of a bad bunch. You flunked…”

His face twisted. “If you don’t like us, what the hell are you doing on Blackstone land, Meeez Know-it-all Keller? Where’s your pretty friend?”

“Jet?”

“Are you like her? Did you come to watch a meens swim naked and steal heez clothes?”

“Man?” she corrected, tilting her nose in the air.

He flushed.

Sassily she put her hands on her hips. “You’re no man.”

“Like you’re some expert—”

“You’re just a stupid, mean boy nobody likes. Not even your father!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Last year he sent you home…to Mexico ’cause… ’cause…”

Roque swore violently under his breath, first in Spanish and then in English. “’Cause a bad girl told my father she liked me…too much—Four Eyes.”

“Well, I don’t like you.” Ritz stuck out her tongue.

He laughed. “Most girls do. That gets boring after a while.”

“You are too conceited to believe.”

Another quick burst of his male laughter made her heart skitter.

“I’m not boy-crazy…not like Jet.”

“Jet.” He purred. “So, that’s her name. She is pretty, your boy-crazy friend. Older. She follows me.”

The red sky burned green.

“She’s only a year and a half older!”

“More than that,” he said, peeling clothes from her skinny frame with his indecently bright, emerald eyes. “You’re a baby. She’s a woman. Last night she…”

“Are you going to give me my horse or not?”

He shook his head. “She’s mine now.”

He pranced back and forth. “And you’re on Blackstone land.”

A red sun slanted a kaleidoscope of rays behind him, giving him the devil’s own halo while keeping that pretty face of his in the dark. She had to squint to make out his well-shaped, glossy, black head and that hair that was so long it whipped against his hard, dark jawline and tangled with the ends of the scarlet bandanna he wore at his neck.

With the sun at his back, he was mostly a black figure. Still, she got an eyeful of sleek, brown torso under that wet shirt that seemed made of nothing but ripply muscle. Indeed, even up close, every part of him seemed made of muscle, too—his squared-off shoulders…his arms…his lean waist and…his legs. He looked better by sunlight than by firelight.

Black jeans clung to those powerful legs. Jet said boys who wore jeans that tight were too nasty for nice girls to talk to. And here she was—Ritz Keller, fourteen years old, talking to just such a boy.

She’d watched him dance, seen his thingy. Catching a scared, little breath, she remembered he wasn’t nearly as big as Cameron. And he wasn’t as mean, either, no matter what people said about him.

“Like what you see, squirt?” he whispered.

“You’re a nasty boy.”

“I just like girls. And girls like your friend, Jet, like me back.”

If you only knew.

Buttercup snorted and blew, moving skittishly to one side, thereby changing the angle of the sun, so that Ritz could finally see the conceited brute’s face, or at least three-quarters of it.

Up close he looked bad and wild like the rock stars on Jet’s posters that hung all over her bedroom walls. But he was way more handsome. His blatantly masculine face seemed hacked from hot, sun-baked stone. A sheen of perspiration set him aglow and made him seem like a god come to life. He had a high brow, an aquiline nose, and a wide, sexy mouth. Thick, spiky black lashes shaded green eyes so bright and feral, they literally knocked the breath out of her.

For a long moment, she couldn’t move or breathe a word.

He went equally still.

Nervously she pushed her glasses up. For a long second their gazes remained fixed.

“You’re bad,” she said.

“Stupid, too?” he mocked, using those eyes of his to twist her around his little finger.

Ritz stiffened.

“What are you doing here?” he repeated.

She didn’t dare look at him again. “I-I’m here…to get…to get…t-that horse, my horse, Buttercup!”

“My Buttercup now.” His voice deepened and roughened, bringing those little shivers again.

“You have to give her back!”

“Make me, squirt.”