Educational Experience

Part II--Chapter 17

Colt loves his children, as we all know. This night is a test of that love and his new love. And Wyatt rises to the occasion gracefully--and finally gets the greenlight from the woman she has been most afraid of since she and Colton first met...

So I get back to Tuff’s Pavilion and Joie grabs hold of my arm and goes, “Just the man I’ve been lookin’ for! Boot Scoot with me, Daddy!”

Now, this Boot Scoot thing was popular before I was even born, I think. And I look up and Wyatt’s killin’ it out there doing a club girl version that has more hops and bops and wiggles in it than the country folk know. And there are some dudes dancing right behind her just to watch how all that works on a fine be-hind like hers.

Until Joie drags me out there and they get all red in the face and start giving me the, “Hey, listen, chief--we didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” thing. I was pretty gracious about it, mostly because she was so totally into the dance that she didn’t even notice there were a bunch of rude bastards with their eyes glued on her glutes.

But I took Joie right over next to her, to run interference. And then I see Hugh is only a few dancers down from her, shaking his groove thang like he grew up scooting boots.

No, seriously. He knew this dance. Do not ask me how. We already knew he had a lot of rhythm for an aristocrat. But Aisha and the girls were getting such a laugh out of him being so good at this thing that they kept missing the turns and bumping into people. Or rather, into all the  guys who had strategically positioned themselves to get a look at their be-hinds, too.

Hey, they were country, these guys, but they weren’t dumb.

I picked up on the basics fast enough to stay with the ups and backs and turns. Joie helped. They’d been in on the line dance craze at her club, of course, so she could do damned near all of them in her sleep, and put her own spin on this one like Wyatt, too.

So we scooted to the very end, and then Joie strutted up, gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, “Thank you kindly, cowboy!”

“Aw, twernt nothin’, Miss Di Vivre,” I said, lunging to grab hold of Hugh’s belt as he passed by—Wyatt found her way over, too. And I hooked arms with her to make sure none of the men who’d been checking her out got any ideas about the slow jam they were playing to calm things down a little.

Hugh gave me a tipsy smile and said, “My liege! Ihear you’ve had a visitor!”

“Yeah, well, he’s gone now.”

Hugh wagged a finger at me and then got caught up in the motion of that finger for a moment. Like, an acid blank out, you know? We all got a kick out of that.

But then he focused and said, “The press is on to us, by the way. Someone has been keeping track of tail numbers. Private jets landing in Vegas—TMZ is tracking Celie, too. She’s trending. You see? I’m learning!”

“Hide the women and children,” I said.

And he put an arm around me and said, “The only thing to fear is—“

“You learning how to tweet,” I said. He hated Twitter and everything like it.

“That and your judge,” he said. “Who is probably watching this with deep interest. And malice aforethought.”

“Oh, to hell with him--has your lady friend ever seen you scoot like that?” I asked, to keep from killing my buzz altogether with the judge talk.

“What lady friend?” Joie cried, just as the girls came shoving over looking all flushed and a little bit drunk, too.

“Over all that noise she hears this,” I said. And then I frowned and said, “I didn’t even think to ask you her name, before.”