✨EXCERPT: BEES, BLOGS, AND BLUSHES by Sawyer Bennett releasing November 3!
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“I was hoping,” she drawls with an actual bat of her eyelashes, “that the local beekeeper might give me a dance. Or buy me a drink. Or both, if he’s feeling generous, though I hear he’s mostly too busy and set in his ways.”
The band, which has the worst and best timing in the state of North Carolina, slides right out of the fast tune into the fiddle slowing and going sweet and low.
“No.” It comes out easier than I expect. I’ve got a table to break down and a cash box to count and a hard-won talent for staying out of exactly this kind of trouble. “I don’t dance.”
Reese’s completely nonplussed. “Everybody dances. It’s a slow one. You just have to stand there and sway and look handsome, and you’ve clearly got two of the three handled.”
“Still a no.”
“It’s a maybe.” She steps in an inch, but it’s a deliberate inch, and her chin tips. I see the dare sitting right there on her mouth. “Come on, Eli. One dance. I’ll even let you lead, which, for the record, I don’t offer to just anybody. I’m a notorious back-seat dancer.”
“I believe that.”
“I’ll be good. I’ll follow. I’ll be a perfect little—”
“Reese.”
“—biddable Southern dance partner, demure as anything.” She’s grinning now, full and wicked, because she can see it’s working, can see me starting to lose the battle. “You can tell all your bees about it Monday. Eli danced. Eli had a feeling. The hive will be utterly scandalized.”
And God help me, I feel it. The wall going soft, the word yes climbing up the back of my throat. My hand lifts off the table to take hers because she’s funny, sexy, and she smells like sugar, and I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours thinking about the way she looked at me from the bottom of that oak tree.
