“Jamie, everybody knows Tegan can’t stand you… Why the hell would she marry you?” He was saying this to help Chet, but he was on the wrong track, there.ĭean Davis laughed. “Now it’s my turn.” He didn’t mean that at all. “You had your chance, buddy, and you ditched her at the altar,” Jamie told him. “Everybody means everything when they’re drunk,” Chet said. Maybe she should have stopped at one beer. She felt irritated with herself, and with Jamie, for the fact that she so often noticed these things about him.

Unbuttoned neck of the shirt gaping so that Tegan could see inside, down to the start of the sprinkled dark hair on his chest. He shifted again, sitting up and leaning forward, and this time it was his upper body that was on show, hard brown forearms below the half-rolled sleeves of his shirt.

Jamie didn’t deny his friend’s accusation. He was staring at Jamie out of those baleful, red-veined, bull-like eyes with an intensity of focus that suggested he needed to fix his gaze on a solid object in order to stop himself from falling over or throwing up. Tegan knew it was Chet himself who deserved that accusation. “You’re drunk, Jamie,” Chet pointed out to him, gathering himself to speak at last. It wasn’t the old Mae West scenario - Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

In his new position, legs extended and crossed, elbow on the hard armrest of the plastic chair, she could see the bulge of a nice-looking, denim-clad package at his crotch. Still, it suddenly seemed to her, looking back, that maybe he quite often pretended to have drunk more than he really had, when he and Chet were together. Pretending to be slurred from beer? Tegan tried to think how many he’d actually had, but couldn’t.

Marry Me, Cowboy by Lilian Darcy