They had sacrificed their own fun to give Cassie what she wanted, even knowing the total lack of fun the other girl would have.
Looking up, she watched as Cassie Sinclair stalked back to the table, lifted a glass of amber liquid and tossed it back furiously before giving in to a rough, shocked bout of coughing.
“There, there,” Ashley murmured as she smacked the other girl on the back a few times. “That’s it. Fine whiskey just makes everything better. Would you like another shot, dear?”
That gleam in Emma’s eyes was positively devilish as she indicated to the waitress that she wanted another.
It wasn’t going to make it better, Gypsy thought as she watched Cassie sit back in her chair, her gaze slashing mutinously to the dozen Breeds who moved to the table.
“They even have two female enforcers to go into the bathroom with her.” Ashley leaned across the table as she indicated that Gypsy should move closer. “Or we would have just slipped her out the bathroom window.”
She glanced at Cassie, seeing the damp gleam in her eyes as the other girl quickly ducked her head to hide the tears she had to blink back.
Damn, to let her go, then to send a dozen bodyguards to make certain she was miserable, was just cruel.
“Why not just slip her out of the hotel?” Gypsy asked, her gaze flicking to the furious Cassie. “They can’t follow if they don’t know she’s leaving.”
“It’s hard to slip away from six Breeds parked on your ass every minute of the day,” Ashley answered with a twinge of sympathy. “Besides, there’s not a bar in a hundred-mile radius that doesn’t have at least one Breed who would report where she was.”
Oh, they so didn’t know the area, or the bars, as well as they thought they did.
“What about the underground bars?” Surely Ashley and Emma had been to a few of them. “The Breeds there would die and go to hell before they’d tell on her. If she was caught there, so would they be. If there were even any there, which is damned rare. They might watch out for her, but they’ll damned sure not ride her ass like a herd of ponies after a prized female.”
Ashley’s eyes narrowed as the others, even Sharone, laughed in surprise at the description. “You’re kidding me. They have those here?”
Gypsy had to laugh now. “At least a dozen that I know of. Come on, bars are still strictly banned except along the reservation’s borders. Even then, they’re not allowed within the city limits. Do you really think we always want to make that drive? Especially those who live much farther from here?”
She could see Ashley’s mind working now, the gears beginning to move, at first with a hesitancy that indicated she might still be recovering, then with enough strength to put that gleam she had lost back into her eyes.
Ashley hadn’t changed, perhaps, Gypsy thought. She was getting bored. And that was something Gypsy well understood, the boredom. But she had also managed to snag the attention of the other women as well.
“I want to go.” Cassie breathed out in sudden excitement. “Just one night, I want to be someone other than the crazy Breed Cassandra Sinclair.”
Cassie wanted to be anonymous. That was something else Gypsy could understand. But a discussion on how to accomplish it wasn’t going to happen here.
Suddenly, Cassie’s gaze jumped to hers, narrowed and appeared brighter, a sky blue, lighter than Rule’s, but so deep and pure it was almost mesmerizing before her gaze slid to Gypsy’s side.
Cassie frowned, grimaced, then shook her head.
Gypsy glanced beside her, saw nothing but Emma, who had lowered her head as though intensely interested in the top of the table.
“Is there a problem?” Gypsy asked as she turned back to Cassie, letting the other woman read her lips rather than hear her words over the loud pulse of the music.
“Probably.” The other girl could barely be heard. “But not yet.”
Oooh-kay.
Yeah, she’d heard the stories about Cassie, and whatever it was the other girl saw or heard, Gypsy simply didn’t want to know.
“Well, girls.” Lifting her beer, she finished the cold liquid quickly before placing the bottle on the table and giving them all an amused look. “My bodyguards aren’t here, if I even had any. And Daddy hasn’t worried about my dancing since I was fourteen because he was never aware of it to begin with.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about the bodyguards.” She read Cassie’s lips, as she seemed to have muttered the words to herself.
Whatever.
She hadn’t had a protector since Mark . . .
Rising to her feet, she tipped her fingers to the other girls, ignoring their glares, and moved to the dance floor.
She was there to dance, and in her teasing, playful movements and flirtations with several of the males on the dance floor, she gained bits and pieces of the information she would later give to her contact. The pass of information would be deliberate tonight, though.
Gypsy had let them know several nights before that she needed specific information concerning any odd questions any of the Breeds were asking lately. She’d allowed them to believe she was asking because of Rule’s interest in her when one of them had asked worriedly if she was being targeted, possibly, because of her brother’s death and information it was rumored he might have had at the time.
This game could become dangerous fast, though. Breeds had exceptional hearing, and she wasn’t the only one who was well aware of that. But she knew at least one of them had learned something. SLAP HAPPY’S. BEFORE MIDNIGHT. XOXO. The message she’d found tucked beneath the wiper blades of her Jeep that evening held the distinctive XOXO that she’d asked them to use.
Tonight, something was definitely going on. Even amid the loose-knit crowd where there were few real couples on the floor, getting a chance to get close enough to any of the four men became impossible.
A subtle wink by one of the older cowboys her brother had once been friends with identified the messenger, but getting close enough to get the information became hazardous. Each time they danced close to each other, one of the Breed Enforcers on the dance floor became noticeably nosy.
What the hell was going on?
Moving into step with the contact, James Herndon, she let his arm wrap around her waist. He pulled her to him, swaying, twirling her once, twice. She landed against his chest laughing as his lips moved directly to her ear. “Later.”
The word, a distinct warning that would have had her tensing if he hadn’t swung her around again, laughed at her as she caught herself against his chest, then glanced over her shoulder.
His expression stilled. All laughter, all humor wiping away.
Releasing her, he stepped back quickly.
Another arm came around her, twirled her around until she was staring into Rule’s brooding, narrowed gaze.
He didn’t look happy, and he didn’t look in the mood to be teased.
In that instant the music moved from the hard, pulsing throb she was used to, to a slow, sensuous ballad that crooned the singer’s hunger, her aching loss and need.
“You don’t want to do that,” he growled when she moved to push away from him. “Not here. Not now.”
The warning in his voice was firm, dominant, and pushed some feminine button she hadn’t known she possessed that urged her to just relent. To obey him, just this once, just in case he had a way of enforcing it in some erotic manner she couldn’t fight.
“I don’t slow dance,” she bit out from between her teeth, her body longing to relax and melt against him even as she fought to remain stiff and unyielding. “Slow dancing with you will imply a relationship that doesn’t exist.”