I’ll keep Shep fully responsive to each beat, with long paragraphs, more dialogue, no repetition or paraphrasing of Winnie’s dialogue, and let the dance become the natural next step rather than turning it into a whole new scene.

Shep had expected the possibility of his family embarrassing him to amuse Winnie. What he had not expected was the warmth that settled beneath her amusement when she admitted how much she liked the idea of eventually being there for it. He felt the distinction immediately. She was not fantasizing about some formal milestone or arranging a future introduction in her head. She simply liked knowing there were rooms in his life she might someday enter, people who could tell her versions of him he would never think to offer voluntarily. That landed somewhere tender enough that his first instinct was not to tease her at all. He looked down at her instead, taking in the open brightness of her expression and the ease with which she had begun allowing harmless possibilities to exist without immediately dismantling them. “You’d be dangerous in that room,” he said at last, the low amusement returning gradually. “My mother would know within thirty seconds that you actually listen when people talk, and then I’d be finished.” His thumb moved once along her upper arm. “You think three minutes is generous now. Wait until my brothers realize you’re interested. They’ll coordinate.”

He could picture the betrayal with almost insulting clarity. His oldest brother interrupting halfway through one story to correct a detail in a way that somehow made the story worse. His youngest producing photographic evidence from an ancient family group chat. Their mother remembering something Shep had successfully forgotten for twenty years and announcing it with the delighted certainty of a woman who believed embarrassing her sons remained one of the legitimate rewards of motherhood. And Winnie, rather than helping, would be sitting somewhere inside the middle of it with exactly the expression she wore now—bright-eyed, attentive, trying only minimally to disguise how much she enjoyed watching his control over the narrative disappear. “And no,” he added, giving her a pointed look when the question of confiscating evidence remained alive between them, “removing incriminating material is not obstruction when the entire court is corrupt.” The corner of his mouth lifted. “It’s self-defense.”

The image of Winnie eventually following him into the kitchen after granting him some token amount of recovery time reached him more quietly than the rest. He did not say that part aloud. He simply felt the warmth of it settle, because of all the things she might have imagined, that small continuation mattered most. She would let him escape. She would laugh at him. She would collect whatever story had driven him from the room. But then she would come find him. There was something in that Shep liked too much to turn into a joke.

Her own childhood immediately provided safer material, especially once she began defending conduct that was clearly indefensible. Shep listened to her explanations with growing disbelief, his eyebrows lifting a little farther with each attempt to classify reckless climbing as ordinary exploration and unauthorized wildlife as temporary educational programming. “You have been doing this your entire life,” he realized, the observation pulling a laugh from him. “You don’t change the behavior. You change the terminology until the behavior sounds reasonable.” His gaze moved over her face with affectionate accusation. “That snake escaped in a house, Winnie. I don’t care how hostile the environment became afterward. You introduced the snake to the environment.”

The raccoon was even worse, because the conviction in her defense made it obvious that childhood Winnie had not merely wanted the animal. She had developed a case. She had seen repeat visits as meaningful behavioral evidence and probably regarded every adult concern about disease or property damage as the unimaginative resistance of people unwilling to embrace opportunity. Shep laughed hard enough that his arm shifted around her shoulders, though he kept the movement easy rather than tightening it. “Absolutely not. You don’t get to tell me that animal kept coming back and expect me not to hear exactly how this happened.” His eyes narrowed with delighted certainty. “You fed it, didn’t you?” He did not actually need the answer. The accusation had already settled into his head as canon. “And if there’s footage of you arguing that it liked you, I’m watching that more than once. I’m warning you now.”

Her defense of childhood fashion nearly made him laugh again, but the sudden possibility of rain boots on a future date caught him somewhere between amusement and genuine interest. He looked deliberately down the length of the sage silk before returning his attention to her face. “I wouldn’t object.” The answer came too quickly to be dismissed as teasing. “Actually, I think you could probably get away with it.” His mouth curved. “You’d look at me like I was the problem if I questioned it, and twenty minutes later I’d somehow be defending the boots to somebody else.” That sounded exactly like what would happen. Winnie had already demonstrated a remarkable ability to make her questionable decisions feel internally consistent if a person stayed near her long enough.

Birdie’s growing boldness changed the warmth in him again. Shep had noticed it too, perhaps precisely because the earlier version of Birdie had been so careful. The small signs mattered: the theatrical indignation she had begun borrowing from Rhett, the way she moved farther from Winnie at the Callahans’ house without repeatedly checking that her mother remained where she left her, the increasing willingness to invent games instead of merely joining them once someone else proved they were safe. That mischief meant security. Shep knew enough about children and enough about fear to understand that. “Safe crime is good,” he agreed, his voice gentling beneath the humor. “Safe crime means she expects there to be a tomorrow where somebody tells the story and laughs.” He paused, then added, “But the stairs are absolutely going to become a problem. Rhett has the confidence of a man with no understanding of gravity, and Birdie is starting to believe him.”

The thought made him grin. He could already imagine Jack discovering some elaborate construction at the top of the staircase and standing there with the expression of a police lieutenant trying to understand why none of his professional skills had prepared him for preschool engineering. “Jack won’t prevent it,” Shep added. “He’ll arrive five minutes too late and then somehow get blamed by all four of you.” That outcome seemed inevitable enough that he was almost looking forward to it.

Her warning about the archives of her own childhood did not frighten him remotely. If anything, it sharpened his curiosity. He wanted the raccoon negotiations. The impossible outfits. The roof climbing. The tiny blonde menace who apparently moved through childhood with no measurable concern for embarrassment or injury. More than that, he wanted to see the continuity. The pieces of the woman beside him that had survived untouched beneath years of responsibility, motherhood, and the caution she had learned later. “You’re not helping your case,” he told her, smiling. “Every story makes me want the videos more.” His thumb brushed slowly along her arm. “And I already know enough to recognize you. That’s the problem. I’m going to watch seven-year-old you argue with an adult about a raccoon and know exactly where this version came from.”

The empty cup reclaimed the conversation before he could enjoy that thought too long, and Shep felt the satisfaction in her attention like warmth against his skin. Her disbelief that he had actually finished what remained made him glance down at the cup as though he might discover some alternative explanation inside it. There was none. He had eaten it. All of it. After dinner, shared dessert, and his own ice cream. “You keep looking at it like I falsified the result,” he said. “It was not a magic trick. You watched the entire thing happen.” His mouth twitched. “And yes, I was full. I still am. I don’t understand why you keep treating fullness like an emergency shutdown.”

Then her gratitude changed the air between them.

Shep’s expression softened immediately, the teasing easing without disappearing completely. He understood what she meant about keeping small things small. There were preferences that carried history without needing the history excavated every time they appeared. He could understand why handing over the rest mattered without forcing Winnie to explain every emotional thread attached to the gesture. He could simply take the plate. Finish the fries. Eat the remaining half of something and leave the transaction exactly as ordinary as the one she had remembered from childhood. His hand moved once along her upper arm, slow and warm. “You don’t have to justify it to me,” he said quietly. “If something matters to you, it matters. Doesn’t mean we have to turn it into a six-hour discussion every time.” He glanced toward the empty cups before looking back at her. “Sometimes I can just eat the rest.”

The simplicity of that made him smile.

He liked that role more than he should have.

Her reframing of the secret test as something less prosecutorial earned her a long look. “That’s somehow worse,” he decided. “At least a test implies standards.” He shook his head as if genuinely troubled by the process. “Apparently you’re just conducting surprise consultations now.” The accusation remained playful, but his expression warmed when she admitted nothing important had been at stake. “Fine. Keep your unannounced research.” A beat passed. “But if I find a clipboard in your kitchen someday, I’m leaving.”

He did not miss the someday hidden inside his own sentence.

Neither did he remove it.

The hypothetical budget had already taken them far enough into domestic absurdity that there was no reason to become nervous about a clipboard.

Winnie’s reaction to his bureaucratic treatment of that earlier financial slip pleased him far too much, and he made no attempt to hide it. The theoretical merger had clearly become objectionable the second he named it, which only guaranteed the term would remain available for future misuse. “You brought up collective grocery concerns. I’m trying to be responsible.” His face remained composed even as amusement lived plainly in his eyes. “There should be projections.” He considered the berry issue with exaggerated seriousness. “Although I agree Birdie is the primary threat. I’ve seen what happens when raspberries enter the house. There is no inventory control.”

The thought of Winnie attempting to review his mother’s historical grocery spending pushed the image into complete absurdity. “And you’re absolutely getting the records before any binding agreements,” he added. “I’m not entering a hypothetical household economy under allegations of financially destabilizing appetite without representation.” His thumb moved over her arm once more. “Jack can witness. Lenora is disqualified immediately. She’d manipulate the numbers because she’d think it was funny.”

He liked that Winnie could laugh now when the future slipped out accidentally. No panic followed the implication. No immediate correction requiring both of them to pretend the thought had never existed. They could let the possibility sit for a moment, poke at it, turn it into bureaucracy, then move on. That felt healthier than treating every ordinary imagined future as a dangerous promise.

Her shoes had finally surrendered by then, and Shep watched the relief move through her with enough obvious force that whatever defense remained collapsed instantly. The first little sound she made after freeing one foot nearly destroyed him. He looked down at the heel in her hand, then back at her face with the grave expression of a man observing the aftermath of a preventable incident. “That sound is damaging to your case.” He waited until the second shoe came off and saw the tension leave her legs before adding, “I’m glad you finally stopped negotiating with them.”

When she floated the possibility of deliberately choosing terrible shoes in the future because the resulting service might prove worthwhile, Shep turned his head slowly toward her. The mischief in her face made the threat credible enough to deserve concern. “Absolutely not.” His refusal carried immediate certainty. “We are not creating a reward structure for bad footwear.” His mouth shifted. “If I suspect premeditation, carrying privileges are revoked.”

The statement was nonsense and they both knew it.

Shep would carry her anyway.

The admission that she had once gone barefoot everywhere explained more than it should have. He could picture that version of her instantly—feet dirty, shoes abandoned somewhere they were not supposed to be, moving across grass or gravel with the same stubborn conviction she brought to everything else. He looked toward the dark path beyond the gazebo and understood the adult objection as well. “The ground out there is disgusting,” he agreed. “I’m not going to pretend it isn’t just because carrying you sounds convenient.” His eyes returned to hers. “You assess. If you don’t like it, I’ve got you.”

The ease with which she accepted that possibility affected him far more than the actual image of carrying her.

Although that image was doing perfectly fine on its own.

He could already feel where his arms would go: one beneath her knees, the other across her back, her body lifting easily enough against his chest that the six-inch difference between them would become irrelevant. The sage dress would gather against his forearm. Her bare feet would be off the ground. She would probably start by insisting the entire arrangement remained temporary and then settle against him once she realized he had no intention of making it awkward.

Shep looked out toward the stars before his imagination became unnecessarily detailed.

Her attempt to reserve plausible deniability for the idea made his mouth curve. “Fine,” he said. “It’ll be entirely my fault.” He was willing to grant that fiction. “You’ll be an innocent victim of circumstances and hostile pavement.”

The compliment he had offered landed more deeply than he expected. Winnie’s expression changed, quieting under the amusement, and Shep felt his own chest tighten when she admitted that being seen comfortable mattered more than being seen perfectly assembled. He understood why. The woman who opened the door tonight had been beautiful, undeniably so. He had spent several minutes reminding himself not to stare. But the woman beside him now had stopped monitoring the effect she created. Her shoes were abandoned. Her hair had softened out of whatever careful arrangement she’d given it. Her lipstick was gone. She was warm, barefoot, laughing, full, and leaned against him as though none of those things reduced the femininity he had noticed from the second he arrived.

If anything, they intensified it.

Shep looked down at her for a long moment, his expression losing most of its humor. “You were beautiful when you opened the door.” He let that truth stand before adding the rest. “You’re beautiful now.” His hand moved slowly over her upper arm beneath the cardigan. “I just like that you’re not thinking about whether you are.”

That was the difference.

He could see her resting instead of presenting.

He liked being allowed to witness it.

The quiet settled around them again after that, deeper now, and Shep let her remain tucked against him without turning the tenderness into another conversation. Her bare feet were folded comfortably beneath her. The heels sat safely beside his thigh. Their empty cups waited to be thrown away, and the stars remained bright through the dark opening of the gazebo while the next song began.

Shep recognized the track almost immediately.

He also felt Winnie change beside him.

Not dramatically. Just enough.

Her attention moved from the night to the music, then toward the open space in the center of the gazebo. The small shift in her body told him where her mind had gone before she looked at him. He remembered the conversation at dinner. Ballroom lessons. Her tendency to anticipate the lead. The challenge she had issued about whether he could actually dance. The fact that she had agreed to let him prove it someday.

Apparently someday had become inconveniently close.

Shep remained still while she considered it.

He did not help.

Did not make the suggestion first.

If Winnie wanted this, he wanted the asking to belong entirely to her.

He could feel anticipation building in himself anyway. The idea of dancing with her had been abstract at dinner, safely contained inside teasing and future possibility. Now there was music, a smooth wooden floor, bare feet, summer darkness, and Winnie sitting beside him with her face tilted toward his.

He knew exactly how he would hold her.

That thought arrived immediately.

His right hand at the middle of her back, high enough to remain respectful and low enough to guide. Her hand in his. The difference in their height requiring him to shorten his natural stride, which would come automatically after years of dancing with women smaller than him. He would give her enough structure to follow without ever dragging her through the movement.

Shep felt his pulse change.

He wanted this.

More than he expected.

When she finally sat more upright, his arm loosened immediately rather than trying to keep her where she had been. Her warmth left his side in small increments, and the loss registered at once. Then she looked toward the open floor again, and the smile she gave him made something inside Shep sharpen pleasantly.

The challenge in her face was different from every earlier one.

Not defensive.

Not testing.

Excited.

A little nervous.

Wanting.

He knew the difference now.

His eyes dropped briefly toward her bare feet and then returned to her face. The absence of heels did make things easier. Safer too. No opportunity to crush the shoes she had already sacrificed to the evening, though he doubted he would have stepped on them anyway. His mother would consider that a disgrace after all the lessons she had forced into him.

Winnie’s hand lifted between them.

Open.

Shep looked at it.

For one heartbeat, he did nothing.

Not because he hesitated.

Because the sight of her offering it affected him enough that he wanted to feel the moment before moving through it.

Months ago, Birdie had taken two of his fingers and Winnie had watched as though the entire bakery had changed around the contact.

Now Winnie was doing the asking herself.

Shep’s expression softened.

Then he placed his hand into hers.

“Come here.”

The words were low, warm, and entirely without teasing.

He stood first, keeping hold of her hand as he rose from the bench. His other hand immediately reached for the abandoned heels—not because they were going anywhere, but because leaving them directly beside the place where they were about to move seemed like an excellent way to turn a romantic moment into an orthopedic injury. He set them farther beneath the bench, out of the open floor and safely away from both of them, then returned his attention fully to Winnie.

His gaze moved over her once.

Bare feet.

Sage silk.

Cream cardigan.

Blonde hair loosened by the night.

A woman who had spent the afternoon deciding whether she looked as though she were trying too hard and had somehow ended the date barefoot beneath a gazebo asking him to dance.

Shep felt his smile appear.

“Much better footwear.”

The teasing returned just enough to ease whatever nervousness he saw flicker through her.

He stepped backward toward the open center of the gazebo, keeping her hand in his and allowing her to follow at her own pace. He did not tug. Did not pull her into position before she reached it herself. When she stopped in front of him, the height difference became more pronounced without the table or bench disguising it. Shep looked down at her, suddenly aware of just how close dancing would place them compared with everything else tonight.

His free hand lifted slowly.

He gave her enough time to see exactly where it was going.

Then his palm settled against the middle of her back through the cardigan, broad and warm, fingers relaxed rather than spread possessively around her waist.

“Your hand can go here.”

He tilted his shoulder slightly toward her rather than physically placing her.

“And stop thinking.”

His mouth curved at the immediate look that produced.

He knew.

Impossible request.

Especially for Winnie.

Shep’s eyes warmed.

“I know.”

His thumb shifted once against her hand.

“I’m asking for ten seconds.”

The music continued around them, the rhythm easy enough that he did not need to count aloud. He could feel it naturally, the old lessons stored somewhere deeper than conscious memory. His mother had made all three boys practice until basic timing became instinctive, largely because she refused to attend weddings where her sons spent every dance pretending to be deeply interested in the wall.

Shep waited until Winnie settled her hand and found her stance.

Then he moved.

Small first step.

Nothing showy.

Nothing designed to prove competence.

Just enough pressure through the hand at her back and the one holding hers to tell her where they were going before his feet carried them there.

He felt the immediate temptation in her body to anticipate.

Of course he did.

His smile deepened.

“Don’t.”

The word came softly, almost against the music.

His hand steadied at her back.

“I’ve got the next step.”

He guided her through another easy movement, shortening everything for the available floor and for bare feet on old wood. There was no reason to perform formal ballroom technique here. No judges. No mirrored wall. No nineteen-year-old Winnie trying to prove she had learned more from television than the instructor expected.

Just the two of them.

He shifted their joined hands slightly and changed direction.

“Wait for me.”

Not command.

Instruction.

Invitation.

Shep watched her face as he felt her begin to surrender that fraction of advance planning. It was subtle. Her shoulders softened first. Then the movement in her feet changed, less prepared, more responsive. The difference affected him immediately.

“There.”

His voice lowered.

“That’s it.”

Something warm tightened beneath his ribs.

This was far more intimate than he had anticipated.

Not because of the physical closeness alone, though there was plenty of that. Winnie stood inside the space of his body now, her smaller frame close enough that he could feel the movement of her breathing when the distance narrowed. Her hand rested where she had chosen to place it against him. His palm remained warm at her back. Every shift he made reached her through touch before motion.

But the real intimacy was trust.

She let him tell her where the next step was.

Only the next one.

Nothing beyond that.

Shep understood exactly why that mattered.

He did not say it.

He simply led.

Slowly.

Carefully.

The gazebo did not give them enough room for anything elaborate, so he kept the movement contained. A gentle turn. Two steps back. A change of direction that brought them briefly nearer before opening the space again. His mother would have criticized his form under different circumstances. Shep did not care.

Winnie’s bare feet moved quietly over the boards.

He watched her once, then immediately lifted his eyes to her face again.

“See?”

A faint smile.

“No casualties.”

The callback to the shoes earned him whatever reaction it earned him, and Shep let the amusement live for only a second before the music pulled them onward.

His hand remained steady at her back.

The night seemed different standing.

Stars visible beyond the gazebo railing moved through the background whenever they turned. The low light shifted across Winnie’s face. The music sounded fuller despite coming from the same small phone because now his body had something to do with the rhythm.

He had forgotten this.

Not the steps.

The feeling of dancing with someone he wanted close.

There had been weddings. Events. Women he knew. Social dances where competence existed entirely to make the evening easier.

This was different.

Every step carried awareness.

Every shift of Winnie’s hand against him registered.

The soft movement of the sage dress against her legs registered.

The occasional brush of her body when the available space brought them nearer registered far too clearly.

Shep kept all of it contained inside the same careful frame.

Then he guided her through another small turn and felt a laugh threaten when she instinctively tried to decide the ending before he gave it to her.

His brows lifted.

“There you are.”

He knew exactly what she had done.

“Still trying to improve the choreography.”

His smile turned warmer.

“Trust me for one song.”

That was all.

Not forever.

Not even the entire evening.

One song.

He could feel the significance of phrasing it that way, and he suspected Winnie could too.

His hand softened against her back.

“I promise I won’t lead you into anything you can’t see coming.”

The words were about dancing.

Mostly.

Shep let them remain that way.

Then he guided her closer for the next movement, not enough to turn the dance into an embrace but enough that the space between them narrowed noticeably. His gaze stayed on hers.

He could feel the warmth of her through the cardigan now.

His voice dropped.

“And if you decide I’m terrible at this after all…”

A pause.

“You’re allowed to tell me.”

The corner of his mouth lifted.

“Quietly.”

Shep felt the instant her body began to give him the next step instead of trying to take it from him, and the change settled something warm and quietly satisfied beneath his ribs. He kept the rhythm deliberately simple, allowing the song to do more work than either of them needed to. His hand stayed steady against the middle of her back while their joined hands remained comfortably between them, and for several measures he did nothing more ambitious than guide her through the small pattern they had already established. Winnie was beginning to follow without that fraction of anticipation he had felt at first, her bare feet moving more easily over the smooth wood as she stopped preparing for a direction before he offered it. Shep watched her face rather than her feet, partly because he trusted her balance and partly because looking anywhere else had become increasingly difficult. “There you go,” he murmured, approval warming the low words. “You remember more than you think you do.”

He did not use that growing ease as permission to suddenly become clever.

The thought of turning her had entered his mind almost immediately after they stepped onto the open floor, but Shep knew exactly how quickly a spin could become unpleasant if the person following did not know it was coming. Winnie had trusted him with the next step, not with surprises, and he had no intention of confusing the two simply because he knew how to make the movement look smooth. So when the rhythm opened enough to offer the opportunity, his hand at her back changed first—not pushing, merely easing away until the contact became lighter and gave her room to move.

His eyes stayed on hers.

“I’m going to turn you.”

He said it before he altered their joined hands, giving the warning enough space to actually be useful rather than announcing what he had already begun doing. His thumb brushed once over her fingers, and his expression softened with the faintest hint of amusement. “Slowly. I’m not testing your reflexes.”

Only when he saw that she understood did he lift their joined hands.

There was no abrupt sweep above her head, no sharp change of direction. Shep raised her hand gradually until the angle made his intention obvious, then stepped slightly to the side so he would not crowd the space she needed. His other hand left her back completely rather than trying to steer her from two places at once. For a brief moment the only point of connection between them was their joined hands, his grip warm but loose enough that she could stop the movement simply by not continuing.

“Just follow your hand.”

His voice remained quiet beneath the song.

Shep guided the first quarter of the turn at a pace almost comically patient for anyone who might have been watching, but he did not care how it looked. He cared that Winnie never had to wonder where her balance was going next. Her bare feet shifted against the boards one step at a time, the sage skirt moving softly around her calves as she began rotating beneath the loose arch of his arm.

“Good.”

He adjusted his own position with her, walking the outside of the turn instead of standing fixed and forcing her to navigate around him.

“Keep going.”

There was a smile in the instruction now.

“Nothing dramatic.”

The turn unfolded rather than snapped.

Halfway around, Shep caught the movement of her hair as it slipped across her shoulders, blonde waves loosening farther with the motion. The dress followed a heartbeat later, the silk shifting outward slightly before settling back against her legs. It was not remotely the kind of theatrical spin ballroom dancing could become in a larger space. It was smaller than that, softer, built around the dimensions of the gazebo and the woman trusting him enough to let him guide her through it.

Shep found it considerably more affecting.

His eyes followed her the entire time.

Not her body.

Her.

The little concentration that appeared while she registered the movement. The anticipation beginning to give way to enjoyment once she realized he was not going to increase the speed halfway through. The way her expression changed when the turn passed the point where it could still feel unfamiliar and became something her body remembered how to complete.

“There.”

His voice dropped softer.

“You’ve got it.”

He let her finish the rotation herself rather than pulling her out of it.

The distinction mattered.

Shep simply kept his hand where she expected it to be, offering the final point of reference until she faced him again. Then he lowered their joined hands gradually, never releasing her fingers, while his other hand returned to the middle of her back only after she had fully settled her footing.

The entire turn had lasted several seconds.

Long enough that nothing about it could have surprised her.

Still, when she came back toward him, Shep felt an unexpected little rush of satisfaction that had absolutely nothing to do with demonstrating that his mother’s lessons had stuck.

Winnie had trusted him through it.

He liked that.

Far too much.

His palm settled against her back again, warmer now after the brief absence, and he guided them into the same easy rhythm as before rather than immediately attempting another turn. “See?” The smile was audible in his voice. “Nobody died. No trees went down. No speakers stopped working.”

He could not resist that one.

His gaze warmed when it found hers.

“And I gave you advance notice, so I believe my safety record is currently better than yours.”

The tease softened whatever significance had gathered around the movement, but Shep still paid attention to her balance for the next few steps. There was no wobble, no delayed dizziness, nothing suggesting he had moved her faster than she wanted. Only when he was satisfied did his attention return completely to the dance.

He shortened the next step, bringing them a little closer again.

Not enough to trap her inside the frame.

Enough that the hand at her back became more useful than decorative.

“You want another one later, tell me.”

He let the offer remain practical.

“No surprise spins.”

His thumb moved once against the hand he held.

“I know some people like that.”

A faint pause.

“I don’t.”

Not with her.

The admission carried more than dancing if anyone chose to examine it, and Shep suspected Winnie would notice that without him explaining.

He guided her back a step, then forward again, keeping the rhythm steady while the song continued around them. The stars shifted through the open sides of the gazebo with each slight change in their angle, and the abandoned heels beneath the bench briefly entered his peripheral vision before disappearing again.

Barefoot suited her better for this anyway.

Shep looked down at her and felt the quiet smile return.

“You know what the problem is now?”

His tone had acquired that familiar dry amusement.

“You’re going to get confident.”

He guided another step.

“And then I’m going to spend the rest of the song trying to stop you from leading.”

The accusation was affectionate rather than corrective. He already knew she would test the edges once comfort arrived. That seemed to be Winnie’s pattern in nearly everything: caution first, then curiosity, then the gradual discovery that rules might be negotiable.

Shep had no objection to that.

Not as long as she kept letting him know when she wanted something different.

His hand rested steadily against her back while he let the music carry them through another slow measure.

Then his expression softened.

“You did good.”

No joke beneath it this time.

He held her gaze.

“And I mean the dancing.”

A beat passed, his mouth beginning to curve again.

“Your footwear decisions remain under review.”

Winnie rose with him on instinct, her hand remaining in his while the warmth of the bench disappeared beneath her and the wooden floor came cool and smooth beneath her bare feet. Standing changed the scale of him immediately; the height difference that had softened while they sat together returned all at once, and she had to tilt her chin farther than expected to meet his eyes. The small joke at the expense of her discarded heels eased the nervous flutter beginning low in her stomach, and she glanced toward where they had been banished beneath the bench with a look of exaggerated betrayal. “I’ve already admitted defeat,” she reminded him, though the smile pulling at her mouth made it impossible to sound aggrieved. “Continuing to insult the fallen is poor sportsmanship.”

Following him toward the open center of the gazebo felt strangely more exposing than asking him to dance had. Winnie had spent years watching ballroom dancers cross polished floors with the impossible ease of people whose bodies seemed to understand music as a language, and one short stretch of beginner lessons in her youth had taught her something television never could: appreciating good dancing and being responsible for half of it were entirely different skills. She knew enough to recognize shape, timing, posture, the difference between someone moving beautifully and someone merely remembering where to put their feet. Knowing all of that was, unfortunately, not the same as possessing the ability herself. Her body had rhythm, but it also had opinions, and one of those opinions had always been that waiting for another person to determine where she went next was an inefficient system.

The warmth at the middle of her back brought every theoretical thought abruptly into the physical world. Winnie placed her free hand where he had indicated, fingertips settling against his shoulder with more awareness than the contact deserved, and discovered that dancing with Shep was considerably more distracting than watching strangers do it on television. His body was close without crowding hers, broad enough that the hand she rested against him seemed almost absurdly small, and the quiet certainty in the way he positioned himself made her pulse kick once beneath her ribs. The instruction to stop thinking earned him exactly the look it deserved. “Ten seconds is an unreasonable opening bid,” she murmured, but she drew a slow breath anyway and made a sincere attempt to give him that much.

The first movement immediately revealed the flaw in her strategy. Winnie knew a step was coming, so naturally she attempted to help by preparing for it, which apparently defeated the entire point of having agreed to let him lead. Her mouth tightened with guilty amusement when he caught her doing it almost instantly, and she forced herself to abandon the movement she had already begun inventing. Waiting felt far stranger than it should have, especially when every instinct told her that competence meant knowing what happened next before it arrived. “I was being proactive,” she protested softly, though even she could hear how weak the defense was. Then his hand steadied against her back, and she let herself follow the direction carried through that small pressure rather than trying to predict the next one.

It was startling how much information could pass through touch when she stopped getting ahead of it. A slight change at her back told her where her weight needed to move before the step itself became obvious, while the hand holding hers shifted just enough to provide shape without dragging her anywhere. Winnie still thought too much at first—left foot, right foot, weight, don’t step on him, for God’s sake don’t step on him—but gradually those instructions became less verbal inside her head. Her shoulders loosened, and the tight concentration around her mouth gave way to an involuntary smile as she realized she had made several steps without mentally narrating any of them. “This is annoyingly effective,” she admitted, looking up at him. “I dislike when instructions I object to turn out to be useful.”

The request that she trust him for one song landed beneath the playfulness with a softness she felt all the way down to her bare feet. One song was small enough to accept without transforming the gesture into something larger than it needed to be, and perhaps that was why it affected her so much. He was not asking her to become the kind of woman who stopped anticipating, stopped planning, stopped knowing where the exits were; he was asking her to let him know where the next step was for the length of a song. Winnie understood the distinction, and something warm opened in her chest because she suspected he understood it too. “One song,” she agreed quietly, her gaze holding his. “But if you steer me into a post, I’m revising your entire résumé.”

The promise hidden inside the next reassurance made her smile soften, and she allowed another measure to pass without trying to steal the lead from him. When the space between them narrowed, attraction moved through her with enough force to make concentration briefly more difficult. She became conscious of the hand at her back, the heat of his body through the thin layers between them, the faint scent of his shirt and skin when she turned slightly nearer, and the way looking up at him from this close made the rest of the gazebo seem to fall away at the edges. His invitation to criticize his dancing if necessary made a laugh catch lightly in her throat. “Quietly?” she asked, brows lifting. “That seems like an unfair restriction after the amount of commentary my shoes have endured.”

The longer they moved, the more Winnie understood why watching ballroom had fascinated her for so long. From the outside, the most graceful dancers had always seemed almost psychic, two people changing direction as though the decision occurred simultaneously inside both bodies. Standing here, she could finally feel the mechanism underneath that illusion: the almost imperceptible preparation, the shift of pressure, the way the lead existed before the visible movement. She was nowhere near as good at receiving those cues as she had once been at identifying them from a couch, but she found herself improving simply because Shep refused to hurry her into looking competent. When approval reached her after a particularly smooth stretch, satisfaction warmed her face despite herself. “I remember enough to know when I’m doing it wrong,” she said, laughing softly, “which is arguably worse.”

The warning before the turn made Winnie’s attention sharpen immediately. She appreciated it more than she could comfortably explain, not because a slow spin beneath gazebo lights was remotely threatening, but because he gave her time to understand what was coming before her body was already committed to it. She watched their joined hands rise and felt the point at her back disappear, leaving her connected to him only through their fingers. For a heartbeat, the open space around her seemed much larger than it had a moment earlier, and the watcher in her recognized the shape of the movement before the dancer in her trusted herself to perform it. Then she followed the lifted hand as instructed, bare feet stepping carefully over the wood while the sage skirt whispered around her calves.

The turn was so much less dramatic than the ones she had watched for years, and she liked it better for that. There was no momentum forcing her to catch up, no flourish designed for an audience, only enough guidance to let her understand the curve of the movement while still completing it with her own body. By halfway around, concentration gave way to pleasure, and a laugh escaped her as her hair shifted across her shoulders and the gazebo lights changed position in her peripheral vision. When she came around to face him again, she felt absurdly pleased with herself, as though one carefully managed rotation had settled an argument no one else knew existed. “Okay,” she conceded, her smile bright and a little breathless. “That was fun.”

The immediate attack on her skating history made Winnie’s eyes narrow, although she could not sustain outrage while still smiling from the turn. “The tree was an entirely different operational environment,” she informed him, reclaiming the easy rhythm between them as his hand returned to her back. “There were blades involved. And seasonal décor. Your comparison is scientifically irresponsible.” Unfortunately, she had no credible argument against his current safety record, which only irritated her more. She sighed with theatrical resignation and added, “Fine. Your record is presently excellent. Don’t become smug about it.”

The offer of another turn later pleased her enough that she tried not to answer too quickly. More than the spin itself, she liked the promise that nothing unexpected would be imposed on her simply because someone else considered surprises romantic or exciting. The statement about not liking surprise spins was clearly about dancing, and Winnie was perfectly capable of leaving it there, but she still felt the larger consistency underneath it. He kept telling her, in a dozen small languages, that her knowing what was coming mattered to him. Her fingers tightened gently around his for a moment before relaxing again, and she gave him a softer smile than the subject probably warranted. “Later,” she said. “I think I want another one later.”

Confidence did, predictably, become a problem almost immediately. Once Winnie stopped worrying about stepping incorrectly, the part of her that had always wanted to improve the choreography woke back up and began making suggestions without consulting her. She felt herself starting a change fractionally before it had been offered, caught the affectionate accusation in his expression, and laughed as she corrected herself. “I can’t help it,” she said, though she very obviously could and simply disliked doing so. “You give me three successful minutes and suddenly I have creative differences.”

Still, she tried again, because the reward for resisting herself was unexpectedly lovely. There was a peculiar intimacy in allowing her body to remain receptive instead of predictive, particularly with someone she trusted not to exploit the surrender of that tiny piece of control. Winnie began paying less attention to where her feet went and more to the experience surrounding them: the warm bulbs overhead, dark pines sliding through her view whenever they changed direction, music wrapping softly around the gazebo, and Shep’s steady nearness anchoring all of it. Her hand rested more naturally against his shoulder now instead of hovering with beginner stiffness, and every so often the distance between them narrowed enough that her dress brushed him. Each contact sent a small, pleasant awareness through her that made the dance feel less like an exercise and more like something unmistakably theirs.

The simple praise near the end of another measure affected Winnie more than she expected. She had been ready for teasing, prepared to defend whatever mistake he had noticed, and instead the uncomplicated approval made warmth bloom beneath her sternum. Her expression softened as she looked up at him, no longer trying to disguise how pleased she was to have impressed him even slightly. “Thank you,” she said, and then because she could not leave sincerity entirely undefended, she added, “I’m choosing to believe that assessment was made by a qualified professional and not a man currently compromised by attraction.”

The renewed attack on her footwear brought her right back into laughter, and Winnie glanced toward the abandoned heels beneath the bench before returning her gaze to him. They could remain under review indefinitely as far as she was concerned; her feet were comfortable, the night was warm enough, and she had just discovered that dancing barefoot with Shep was considerably more appealing than standing several inches taller in beautiful shoes. “Those shoes got me through the important part,” she reminded him, her smile turning sly. “They delivered me to dinner looking excellent and then had the decency to fail somewhere you could carry me home if necessary. That is not poor planning. That is delegation.”

The song kept moving beneath them, and Winnie made no attempt to check how much of it remained. She was aware that their evening still had another destination eventually, aware of the invitation waiting at her house and the truck somewhere beyond the trees, but none of it pulled at her strongly enough to make this feel transitional. For now there was only his hand at her back, her bare feet on smooth wood, and the deeply satisfying discovery that she could be better at watching ballroom dancing than performing it and still enjoy being held through every imperfect step. Her feelings for him had been growing all evening in precisely this irritating fashion—not through declarations large enough to brace against, but through one sweet, careful thing after another until affection kept deepening before she had time to decide what to call it. Winnie looked up at him, bright happiness mingling with something warmer and more vulnerable, and let herself follow the next step without asking where the one after it would go.

Shep had expected the turn to make her smile. He had not expected the sound of her laugh halfway through it to land quite as hard as it did. By the time Winnie came back around to face him, bright-eyed and a little breathless from something he had deliberately made as slow and uncomplicated as possible, the satisfaction he felt had very little to do with dancing. His hand returned naturally to the middle of her back, settling there once her balance was fully beneath her again, and he let their rhythm resume without immediately asking anything more from her. The admission that she had enjoyed herself pulled a wider smile from him, the expression changing his face before he could bother containing it. “Yeah? Good. Because you looked like you were having fun about halfway through, and I was trying very hard not to point it out and ruin it for you.” His thumb moved lightly against the hand he held, the teasing gentle enough to leave the pleasure of the moment untouched.

He gave her precisely one measure before her defense of the skating incident began, and his expression steadily deteriorated into disbelief while she attempted to distinguish ice, blades, seasonal decorations, and apparently the fundamental principles of scientific comparison. He listened until she finally conceded that his safety record remained intact, then nodded with exaggerated gravity as though accepting an official ruling. “Presently excellent. I’ll take it.” The corner of his mouth pulled upward as he guided her backward through another easy step. “And I’m not smug. I’m just appreciating how quickly we went from you threatening my résumé to formally acknowledging my competence. That’s professional growth, Winnie.”

Her agreement to another turn later quieted some of the teasing in him. She had not merely tolerated the first one. She wanted him to do it again. She had trusted the warning, trusted his hand, trusted that he would not suddenly speed up because he thought surprising her might be charming. She had come back around laughing, and now she was asking for another without needing him to convince her. Shep’s gaze stayed on hers as her fingers tightened briefly around his, and he answered with the smallest pressure of his own. “Later,” he agreed, the word carrying no pressure beyond the promise that he had heard her. “And I’ll tell you before that one too.”

He did not explain the promise further. He did not need to. The entire evening had been teaching him that Winnie noticed the things people did around the edges of words. She noticed when choices remained hers. She noticed when someone gave her information before asking for trust. If those things made it easier for her to relax with him, then he could give them without ever requiring her to explain why they mattered.

The creative differences arrived almost immediately afterward. Shep felt the premature shift before Winnie had completed it, and amusement warmed his expression as he corrected the direction without stopping them. He did not fight her for control or make the mistake into anything worth embarrassment. He simply held the intended pattern steady until she found it again. “Three minutes. That’s all it took,” he murmured, brows rising as though the speed of her rebellion genuinely impressed him. “I knew this was going to happen. You started out negotiating ten seconds, and now you’re trying to revise the choreography.”

Another few steps carried them slowly across the gazebo, his hand shifting subtly against her back as he guided her through the next change. “You’re ambitious. I respect it.” His mouth twitched when he felt the next faint suggestion of her trying to anticipate him. “Still not letting you lead.”

The refusal itself had become part of the game, and Shep liked the way she tested him once she became comfortable. He had seen glimpses of it before tonight, but dinner had brought it out more openly: the appetite investigation, the playlist arguments, the increasingly elaborate legal defense of catastrophic footwear, every little challenge offered simply because she trusted him to challenge her back without turning it into something ugly. Dancing gave that part of her another language.

He could feel the exact moment she stopped trying so hard. Her hand against his shoulder changed first. The careful placement disappeared, fingers resting more naturally against him instead of behaving as though someone might grade her frame. Her body followed. The stiffness left her shoulders. Her steps stopped arriving with that tiny hesitation that told him she was still checking them against whatever she remembered from lessons years ago. She simply moved when he moved her, and Shep’s expression softened as he felt the difference. “That’s it. Don’t worry about whether you remember it right.”

He guided them through another slow change in direction, his hand broad and steady against the middle of her back while he kept his voice low enough to belong only to the small space between them. “You don’t have to know what comes next.” The sentence left him before he considered the larger meaning it might carry, and he heard it afterward. Judging by the way Winnie had been hearing him all night, he suspected she would too. He did not retreat from it. “For this,” he added quietly, giving the statement its proper boundary rather than taking it back, “you just stay with me.”

The song continued around them, soft enough that the creek remained audible beneath it. Warm bulbs hung overhead, their light catching intermittently through Winnie’s loosened hair whenever they changed direction. The abandoned heels beneath the bench had become part of the scenery, and Shep found himself increasingly grateful for their failure. Barefoot, relaxed, laughing at herself and at him, she seemed farther removed from the woman who had opened her door earlier looking beautiful and visibly determined to survive the evening correctly.

She was still beautiful. That had never been in question. But this version of her affected him differently. He liked the loosened hair. He liked that whatever lipstick she had worn had long since faded. He liked her bare feet and the occasional flash of concentration followed by annoyance whenever she caught herself thinking too much again. He liked the warmth in her face when she forgot to manage her expression. Mostly, he liked that she seemed happy.

When his praise made that happiness deepen instead of immediately being hidden behind another joke, Shep felt something tighten pleasantly beneath his ribs. Her thanks came first, simple enough that he might have let it stand if she had not immediately accused his professional assessment of being compromised by attraction. His eyebrows lifted, and there was no hesitation in his answer. “Oh, it’s compromised. I’m extremely attracted to you.”

The admission came so plainly that it barely qualified as flirting. His gaze moved over her face, unhurried but unmistakably warm, before returning directly to her eyes. “That doesn’t mean I’ve lost the ability to assess basic motor function. You’re doing well.” He guided her through another step, bringing her back toward him as the pattern narrowed naturally, and the corner of his mouth lifted. “And you’re distracting. Both things can be true.”

There was no reason to pretend otherwise. They had kissed before tonight. They had spent dinner flirting across a table, walked through Evergreen with their hands joined, sat beneath the stars pressed comfortably together, and now Winnie was barefoot in his arms looking up at him from close enough that attraction was hardly a secret requiring careful protection. Shep did not turn it into more than that. He simply let her know.

The defense of the heels gave him somewhere easier to place the smile that followed. He glanced briefly toward the abandoned offenders beneath the bench before looking back at her, disbelief immediately settling across his features. “Absolutely not. That is the most creative reconstruction of events you’ve attempted all night.” He continued guiding them without difficulty while dismantling her argument. “They did not strategically complete their assignment and retire with honors. They injured their operator and were removed from service.”

His expression became solemn as though the matter deserved a formal incident report. “And somehow I’ve been assigned transportation duties as a result of equipment failure I specifically predicted.” The idea of carrying her had stopped feeling hypothetical sometime during the last half hour. She had already told him she might let him if the ground offended her sufficiently, and Shep had no intention of pretending he would object. The thought of slipping one arm behind her knees and lifting her against him produced an awareness he kept carefully separate from the practical offer itself.

Still, her claim that this constituted delegation earned a quiet laugh from him. “Delegation usually involves informing the person being delegated to. What you’re describing is outsourcing consequences.” His hand moved slightly higher along her back as their direction changed, then settled again as his teasing eased into something simpler. “But yes. If your feet hurt when we leave, I’ll carry you.”

He said it without challenge or expectation that she accept merely because he had offered. If she wanted to walk, she would walk. If she wanted her shoes carried, he would carry them. If she looked at the pavement, decided she wanted nothing to do with it, and lifted her arms toward him, he would pick her up. Shep suspected he would enjoy the third option considerably more than was useful to disclose.

The song had moved toward its final stretch by then, though neither of them acknowledged it. Shep could hear the progression well enough to know they did not have much longer, but counting the remaining measures felt contrary to everything the night had become. So he stopped thinking about the end and let the next step come, then another, Winnie following both without trying to predict him.

Shep looked down at her and felt the full weight of that small act of trust. Her face was tilted toward his, happiness remaining there while something else moved beneath it now, quieter and warmer. The teasing had not disappeared; he doubted it ever entirely would. But the moment between jokes had stretched longer this time, and his hand at her back gradually slowed their movement until they were barely traveling across the floor anymore.

His eyes moved over her face. He knew what kissing her felt like already. That was precisely why the thought arrived with such immediate clarity. He knew the softness of her mouth, knew the small shift in her breathing when the space between them disappeared, knew how easily one kiss could become another when neither of them was trying particularly hard to stop it. But he did not bend toward her yet. Instead, his thumb moved slowly across the hand he held as the faintest smile returned to his mouth. “You know, for somebody with creative differences, you follow pretty well when you decide to.”

He expected retaliation for that, and he almost wanted it. His hand remained steady against her back as he waited, the music carrying them through another slow step beneath the gazebo lights.

Shep saw the retaliation gathering before Winnie had the chance to deliver it. It was there in the brightness of her eyes and the slight change at the corner of her mouth, that familiar expression he had learned over the course of the evening meant she was already assembling an argument and would almost certainly present it as though he were the unreasonable one. He could have waited for it. Under almost any other circumstances, he would have. But the song had softened around them, their movement had slowed until dancing had become little more than swaying beneath the gazebo lights, and having her this close made teasing her suddenly less interesting than simply touching her.

His hand remained steady at the middle of her back as he leaned down, giving her enough time to see him coming before his lips pressed softly against her temple. The kiss lingered for a quiet second, warm and affectionate rather than hurried, and when he lifted his head again he did not move far. “You’re thinking too hard again,” he murmured, amusement threading gently through his voice as he looked down at her. “I can see it happening.”

Instead of giving her enough distance to begin whatever defense she undoubtedly had prepared, Shep shifted his head slightly and pressed another kiss to the very tip of her nose. That one was deliberately lighter, almost playful, and his mouth curved immediately afterward because he knew perfectly well it was an unfair interruption. “There,” he said softly, his thumb brushing once against her back while he kept her comfortably within the circle of his arm. “That ought to buy me at least five seconds before the argument starts.”

Five seconds turned out to be more than he needed. His gaze dropped naturally to her mouth before returning to her eyes, and the teasing in his expression softened into something warmer. He did not rush the remaining distance or turn the moment into a surprise simply because they had already kissed before. His hand stayed secure against her back, their joined hands resting comfortably between them as he bent toward her again, slowly enough that she could meet him in the final inch.

His lips settled against hers in a soft, unhurried kiss.

There was none of the playful precision of the kiss to her nose now. Shep let this one linger, his mouth moving gently against hers while the song continued around them and their dancing stopped altogether. His hand at her back held her close without drawing her any tighter than she had already chosen to stand, and for those few seconds the gazebo, the creek, the abandoned shoes beneath the bench and every unfinished joke between them seemed perfectly capable of waiting.

When he finally broke the kiss, he stayed close enough that the separation amounted to only a few inches. His eyes opened fully on hers, and an affectionate smile spread slowly across his face, softer than the grin she usually managed to provoke from him. He gave her hand a small squeeze, clearly pleased with himself but not smug enough to ruin what had settled between them.

“I like dancing with you,” he said quietly, his smile deepening as his gaze remained on her face. “Even with the creative differences.”

The plainness of the admission hit Winnie harder than a more polished compliment would have. There was no coyness in it, no attempt to make her guess whether the warmth in his eyes meant what she thought it meant, and the certainty sent a flush blooming beneath her cardigan before she could do anything useful about it. She had known he wanted her; they had already kissed, and she had spent most of dinner catching him looking at her with enough appreciation to keep her pleasantly aware of the silk against her skin. Knowing something and hearing it stated without qualification were apparently two completely different experiences, because her stomach dipped and her fingers flexed lightly where they rested against him. “Extremely?” she asked once he had finished, unable to keep the pleased little curve from her mouth. “That seems medically significant.”

Her attempt at humor did very little to diminish the effect of the way he looked at her, especially when he paired attraction with the irritatingly reasonable insistence that it had not rendered him incapable of evaluating anything else. Winnie’s smile changed, becoming softer despite her best effort to keep it teasing, and she let the next few steps happen without trying to reclaim the conversational advantage immediately. Being called distracting should not have felt as intimate as it did, but she was standing close enough to feel the heat of his body through the narrow space between them, with his hand steady at her back and his attention fixed on her as though there were nowhere else he particularly needed to look. “I’m willing to accept that both conclusions may be sound,” she said, lifting her brows with mock generosity. “I’m very reasonable when the findings are favorable.”

The renewed criticism of her shoes earned him a look of profound injustice. Winnie let him complete his reconstruction of events before she shook her head, already amused enough that any serious defense was impossible. “You’re leaving out a crucial detail,” she told him, her hand settling more naturally against his shoulder as they continued moving. “Those shoes might have betrayed me, but I would have kept wearing them out of sheer principle if you hadn’t been the one to introduce the possibility of carrying me.” Her eyes brightened as she remembered exactly how he had done it, and the corners of her mouth pulled upward. “And you brought Chandler carrying Monica into the discussion. At that point, whatever happens next is simply me taking advantage of a benefit you advertised.”

She was enjoying his practicality around the idea far more than she intended to admit. The offer had never carried the faintest suggestion that she ought to be helpless enough to require it; he had simply made another option available, one that happened to involve being picked up by a man she was becoming increasingly attracted to while wearing a dress that would gather against his arms in ways she had already imagined more than once. Winnie kept that particular observation to herself and concentrated instead on the absurdity of blaming her for accepting excellent customer service. “You cannot offer premium transportation and then complain that I may use it,” she added, her tone rich with satisfaction. “That’s not how incentives work.”

The song moving toward its end changed something in her awareness even though she deliberately refused to count the remaining measures. She had stopped thinking about her feet almost entirely, which felt like its own victory, and the movements between them had become easy enough that her attention kept wandering toward less practical things: the warmth of his palm, the way his expression shifted when he watched her, the small changes in distance that brought her closer before opening the space again. The slower they became, the more dancing began to feel like an excuse for continuing to hold one another. Winnie did not object to that development in the slightest.

His observation about her ability to follow when she chose to made retaliation rise immediately to her tongue. She could feel the answer assembling itself—the unfairness of blaming her for creative initiative, the obvious argument that a good collaborator should welcome improvement, perhaps another remark about his unreasonable attachment to control—and she was already fighting a smile at the thought of delivering it. She did not get the chance, and the interruption turned out to be considerably more effective than anything he could have said.

The first kiss landed at her temple with such uncomplicated tenderness that every clever response disappeared. Winnie’s eyes closed before she consciously decided to let them, and the warmth of his mouth against her skin sent something softer than attraction moving through her chest. There was something almost unbearably sweet about being kissed there while she stood barefoot beneath warm lights with his hand holding her securely against him, and for once she did not try to protect herself from the tenderness by immediately making it funny. She simply let the moment reach her.

The second kiss, lighter and deliberately playful, pulled a helpless smile across her face without giving her enough distance to recover her argument. Winnie opened her eyes again and found him close, the laughter she might have released caught somewhere behind the warmth gathering beneath her ribs. She could feel how pleased he was with himself, and under ordinary circumstances that alone would have demanded retaliation. Instead, the nearness of his face and the subtle shift in his attention made her pulse sharpen, and whatever argument had existed a few seconds earlier ceased to matter.

His gaze lowered, and Winnie understood what was coming before the space actually disappeared. This time she met him rather than simply receiving the kiss, closing the last fraction willingly as her hand shifted higher against his shoulder. The softness of it affected her more than urgency might have; they had nowhere to prove anything, and the fact that neither of them seemed interested in rushing made every small movement of his mouth against hers easier to feel. Winnie leaned into the contact, letting the hand at her back support the subtle change in her balance while her fingers curled gently into the fabric beneath them.

The kiss ended before she wanted it to, though not so soon that she felt deprived. Winnie remained close, her breathing a little less even than it had been before, and the affectionate expression she found waiting for her made the warmth in her chest deepen in a way that had begun happening with alarming frequency tonight. He kept doing things she could have categorized as small—offering choices, noticing the meaning beneath a trivial story, warning her before a turn, letting tenderness remain tender—and each one seemed to add itself quietly to all the others. Attraction was easy to understand. What was growing around it was becoming much harder to dismiss as something temporary.

His admission that he liked dancing with her drew a smile that Winnie did not bother containing. “I like dancing with you too,” she answered, and for once she let the uncomplicated truth survive for several seconds before adding anything clever. Her eyes warmed as she considered him, still close enough that the words did not need much volume. “Even with your deeply inflexible stance on artistic collaboration.” The teasing was gentle now, affection threaded so thoroughly through it that she doubted either of them could mistake what sat underneath.

Then the playlist betrayed the mood with spectacular timing.

The next track arrived with a beat that bore absolutely no relationship to the soft rhythm they had been moving through, the shift abrupt enough that Winnie froze for half a second before recognition lit her face. After an evening of defending her complete lack of genre loyalty, her own music had apparently decided to present Exhibit A at the most romantically inconvenient possible moment. A laugh broke out of her before she could contain it, and she tipped her forehead briefly toward his chest as the new song filled the gazebo with something far more suited to a car stereo than a slow dance. “Do not say anything,” she warned, though she was already laughing too hard for the command to carry much authority. “The transition makes emotional sense.”

She stayed close despite the death of their ballroom rhythm, unwilling to treat the change in music as a requirement that they immediately separate. There was no obvious step pattern to retreat into now, so Winnie simply let her arms settle more comfortably around him for a moment, the position somewhere between the end of a dance and the beginning of an embrace. The contrast delighted her: sage silk, bare feet, warm lights, an increasingly inappropriate beat, and Shep standing there after kissing her as though her chaotic playlist had been lying in wait to puncture anything in danger of becoming too polished. “This,” she said once her laughter eased enough for speech, “is why you have to trust the process.”

The harder rhythm made traditional dancing ridiculous, but Winnie had never believed music needed permission from technique. She shifted experimentally with the beat, less a dance step than a small movement of her shoulders and hips that made her smile widen because there was no possible way to perform it seriously while still standing this close to him. The intimate mood did not disappear; it changed texture, tenderness picking up something looser and happier around the edges. She had spent enough years believing romantic moments could be ruined by imperfection that the discovery of the opposite felt almost exhilarating. A song could crash into another genre, she could laugh in the middle of wanting him, and none of it made the wanting less real.

Winnie looked up at him, happiness bright in her face now, and gave the hand nearest hers a small tug toward the open space as though daring him to adapt. “You were very confident when the music was cooperating with you,” she said, her tone carrying the sweet satisfaction of someone who had just discovered a new experiment. “Let’s see what those maternal dance lessons do with this.” She was not expecting elegance, nor did she particularly want it. The idea of seeing whether the same large, controlled man who had guided her so patiently through a turn could loosen up enough to survive her playlist was suddenly irresistible.

Even as she teased him, Winnie remained conscious of the kiss lingering on her mouth and the tenderness of the ones before it. The combination made her feel lighter rather than confused, as though attraction and affection had finally stopped competing for which one was allowed to define the evening. She wanted to laugh with him, kiss him again, make him prove he could dance to something entirely unsuitable, and eventually go home with him still beside her. None of those desires canceled the others. They simply belonged to the same man.

Her eyes flicked once toward the bench where their things waited, but the glance carried no intention of ending anything. Her shoes could stay abandoned, the empty cups could remain where they were for another song, and the rest of the evening did not need to advance simply because one romantic track had already finished. Winnie turned her attention back to Shep and let the beat pull another small, deliberately unserious movement from her. “Come on,” she said, smiling up at him with open challenge and unmistakable affection. “You told me you could dance. I never agreed to make it easy.”

Shep had exactly enough time to appreciate the uncomplicated way she returned the admission before the playlist destroyed whatever dignity the moment had accumulated.

The first beat of the next song cut through the gazebo with such complete disregard for what had been happening beneath its roof that his eyebrows rose. One second Winnie had been standing barefoot in his arms, mouth still soft from kissing him, gently accusing him of artistic inflexibility while the last notes of something slow disappeared around them. The next, her playlist had apparently decided tenderness had received sufficient airtime. Shep looked toward the phone on the bench and then back down at her just in time to catch the warning.

That made it worse.

His mouth pressed into a line while he attempted to honor the instruction. He lasted perhaps two seconds before a quiet laugh escaped him, his chest moving beneath the forehead she had briefly tipped against it. “I didn’t say anything.” His hands remained comfortably at her waist when the structure of their slow dance became impossible to maintain, and amusement deepened across his face as the new rhythm established itself. “I want that entered into the record before my expression gets prosecuted next.”

Her insistence that the transition possessed emotional logic earned the slightest narrowing of his eyes. Shep listened for several seconds as though approaching the claim in good faith, then gave a slow nod that communicated absolutely none. “Of course it does.” His voice carried the careful neutrality of a man choosing survival over honesty. “I’m sure there’s a sophisticated internal architecture here that I’m not musically advanced enough to understand yet.”

He liked that she did not immediately step away when the song changed. If anything, the absence of formal steps seemed to erase the last small piece of structure between them. Her arms settled more naturally around him, and his hands adjusted without thought, one remaining at her waist while the other rested lightly along her back. The position was closer to holding her than dancing now, and Shep found he preferred it. Her laughter was still fading when he looked down at her, and the happiness in her face affected him almost as much as the kiss had.

“Trust the process,” he repeated, his mouth twitching. “That phrase is doing a tremendous amount of work for you tonight.”

Then she moved.

Not much. Just enough of her shoulders and hips to acknowledge the new beat and make it perfectly clear she expected him to adapt rather than wait patiently for another song better suited to his skill set. Shep watched her for a second, amusement giving way to suspicion when he recognized the experiment forming behind her eyes. He had become familiar with that look. It was the same one she had worn while monitoring his food, defending her playlist and attempting to determine whether his appetite possessed measurable limits.

Apparently he was the study now.

When she tugged at his hand and challenged the usefulness of his mother's lessons under less cooperative musical conditions, Shep gave her a long look. “You understand my mother taught me ballroom dancing because she believed three sons should know how to behave at weddings.” His hand closed securely around Winnie's as he allowed her to draw him farther into the open space. “She did not prepare me for whatever disciplinary hearing this has become.”

He went willingly anyway.

The difference became apparent immediately. There was no frame to establish, no careful pattern for Winnie to anticipate and then attempt to overthrow. Shep simply caught the rhythm, his shoulders loosening as he moved with it, far less polished than he had been several minutes earlier but nowhere near uncomfortable enough to give her the victory she was clearly hoping to obtain. Years of athletic training had given him coordination; decades of existing at weddings, bars, parties, family gatherings and every other place where refusing to move eventually attracted more attention than moving had taken care of the rest.

His eyes stayed on hers as he matched her deliberately unserious energy, a small grin pulling at his mouth. “This what you wanted?” he asked, shifting closer when the beat brought them naturally back together. “Because I feel like you were expecting a much more catastrophic failure.”

The accusation carried no real complaint. He was enjoying himself too much for that. The carefulness of the earlier dance had been right for that song and for the trust Winnie had offered him when she placed her hand in his and asked him to lead. This required nothing except rhythm and a willingness to look slightly ridiculous if necessary. Shep had never been particularly afraid of the second condition.

He caught her hand when their movements separated them by another half step and drew her easily back toward him, stopping her close without colliding with her. “And for the record, this is not ballroom.” His brows lifted with mock severity. “So any evidence collected here is inadmissible when you eventually review my dancing credentials.”

The increasingly chaotic music gave Winnie precisely the advantage she wanted, however, because there was nothing for him to teach her now. No lead for her to resist. No turn requiring warning. No correct way for either of them to occupy the beat. Shep watched some of the concentration that had accompanied the earlier dance disappear completely from her face, replaced by the loose happiness she had been settling into all night.

That alone made him stop caring whether he looked particularly good doing any of it.

He let her pull him into whatever movement occurred to her next, adapting when she changed it and refusing to give her the satisfaction of looking alarmed when the rhythm demanded something substantially less dignified than the slow dance had. “I’m beginning to understand the strategy,” he told her after another few seconds, his voice raised only enough to carry over the music. “You couldn’t take over the first dance, so you arranged for conditions where leadership became impossible.”

His expression turned approving despite himself. “Effective.”

Shep shifted around her rather than directing her, letting the song decide most of what happened between them. At one point he caught both her hands briefly in his, moving them between their bodies as he stepped backward and drew her with him before releasing one again. Nothing about it resembled the ballroom technique she had challenged earlier. It was simply two adults under gazebo lights, barefoot in her case and increasingly unconcerned with appearances in his, letting an absurdly timed song keep them moving because stopping would have been less fun.

The contrast with the woman who had opened her front door earlier did not escape him. He remembered the careful dress, the heels she had apparently been prepared to suffer for indefinitely, the momentary self-consciousness beneath her smile. That Winnie had been real too. He would never reduce her to someone who had merely needed to loosen up.

But he liked this version of the evening.

He liked her shoes abandoned beneath a bench. He liked her hair no longer arranged exactly as it had been when he picked her up. He liked that she laughed without immediately checking the volume of it. He liked that she had invited him into her house later because she wanted more time and then willingly delayed that invitation because she wanted this time too.

Most of all, he liked that she kept asking for things.

Another hour. Another song. A dance. Him.

Not because she needed any of them.

Because she wanted them.

Her latest challenge drew Shep nearer again, and this time his hands returned easily to her waist as he looked down at her. “I did tell you I could dance,” he conceded. His thumbs shifted lightly against the fabric at her sides while the harder rhythm continued around them. “I don't remember promising I could satisfy whatever impossible standards you're inventing in real time.”

His smile widened as he caught the open affection in her face. “But you’re going to have to work harder than this if the goal is embarrassing me.”

He let the challenge remain between them for only another beat before dipping his head toward her, not for another kiss this time but close enough that his next words belonged more to her than to the gazebo. “And I know what you’re doing.”

There was no accusation in it. Only amusement and a warmth he no longer had much interest in concealing.

“You wanted to see if I’d loosen up.”

Shep straightened enough to meet her eyes properly, his expression affectionate and quietly triumphant. “There. I loosened up.”

He moved with her through another measure, considerably less formal now, then lifted their joined hands just slightly—not enough to initiate the turn he had promised would always come with warning. His eyebrows rose instead, silently reminding her of that promise before he spoke.

“Want your second spin?”

He waited for her answer rather than assuming it, even now, even when she was laughing and comfortable and already moving with him. The song might have changed every other rule they had established about dancing, but that one remained exactly where he had left it.

Winnie’s laughter only deepened when his expression betrayed him before he managed to say anything useful. The drastic change in music had already done exactly what she loved about her playlists: it had refused to respect the emotional category of the moment simply because the previous song had established one. She was still warm from kissing him, still standing close enough that the hand at her waist registered through silk and the thinner knit of her cardigan, but now there was a harder beat beneath all of it and absolutely no dignified way to preserve the slow-dance atmosphere. The careful neutrality he attempted only made her grin wider. “You’re being very brave about this,” she told him, eyes bright with laughter. “I appreciate your willingness to admit there are musical concepts beyond your current education.”

She had no intention of moving away merely because the choreography had become useless. If anything, Winnie found it easier once there were no steps to remember and no invisible structure asking her body to wait for instructions. Freestyle had always made more sense to her precisely because there was nothing to get right; she could move because the song made her want to, change her mind halfway through, exaggerate something until it became ridiculous, then settle back into the rhythm without having technically failed anything. Her shoulders loosened first, rolling easily with the beat while her hips followed in a smaller sway that was less deliberate than instinctive. She tipped her head toward him with an expression that said she expected him to survive whatever came next. “See?” she said, the word half laugh. “Much less bureaucracy.”

The warning about what his mother had and had not taught him made Winnie’s smile soften around the edges. She had never actually expected him to fall apart when the music stopped cooperating; by now she trusted his physical ease too much for that, and there was no hidden evaluation behind the way she drew him farther into the open space. She simply wanted to see this version of him too—the one with no inherited manners to perform and no formal pattern protecting either of them from looking slightly foolish. When his body loosened with the rhythm instead of resisting it, Winnie felt a ridiculous little surge of delight. “Yes,” she answered when he wondered what she had wanted, letting her eyes move over him with undisguised appreciation. “Actually, this is pretty much it.”

There was something unfairly attractive about watching a man his size move without needing to advertise that he could. The earlier dance had shown control; this showed comfort, and Winnie found herself enjoying the distinction more than she had expected. She shifted back half a step, letting one hand slip free long enough to turn herself sideways to the beat, then returned with a playful little shoulder roll that was probably more suited to a kitchen than any public dance floor. When the rhythm invited something sillier, she gave it exactly that—an exaggerated two-step, a deliberately overdramatic dip of one shoulder, a brief expression of intense concentration that made the entire movement look more serious than it deserved. She laughed at herself immediately afterward, because that was the point. Nothing here needed to look impressive to feel good.

When he drew her smoothly back toward him, Winnie came willingly, the nearness changing her dancing without requiring any conscious decision. The sillier movement softened into something slower through her hips, her body matching the beat in a way that was still casual but carried more awareness now that his hands were close enough to feel. She let her fingertips skim his shoulder before settling there again, and her smile turned faintly wicked when he attempted to establish distinctions between this and his earlier credentials. “I’m not reviewing anything,” she told him, genuinely amused by the assumption. “I’m having fun with you. Try to keep up.”

That was the truth of it. She was not studying him anymore, not measuring whether he could satisfy some private standard or collecting proof to decide whether trust had been well placed. There were still parts of Winnie that would probably always observe, always notice, always keep one quiet corner of her mind awake because that was simply how she moved through the world. But tonight that instinct had receded far enough into the background that it no longer organized the experience. She knew he could dance. She knew he would tell her before he spun her. She knew that if she wanted to stop, stop would be enough. With those things settled, she could simply let herself enjoy the ridiculous pleasure of moving badly or beautifully depending on whatever the next few seconds happened to invite.

His accusation about her arranging conditions where leadership became impossible made Winnie laugh so hard that her next movement collapsed into something completely unplanned. She caught herself against him for half a second, then recovered with a grin that made no attempt to look apologetic. “That gives me far too much credit,” she said. “My playlist has been like this since before you were under investigation by it.” The word investigation slipped out mostly from habit, and she immediately softened it with a playful shake of her head. “No, scratch that. You’re off duty. This is recreational.”

The moment both her hands were briefly caught between his made her happiness spike in a way that had almost nothing to do with the movement itself. Winnie followed the backward step easily, then let one hand go when he did and used the freedom to turn her own movement loose again. She gave the beat a ridiculous little bounce that would have mortified her if she had been trying to impress anyone, followed it with a calmer sway, then let the next change pull something more sensual through her hips simply because she felt like it. There was no calculation in the contrast. One second she was deliberately goofy enough to make herself laugh, the next she was moving close to him with the kind of confidence that came from knowing exactly whose attention she had. “Don’t look so surprised,” she murmured, smiling up at him. “I contain multitudes.”

The more the song continued, the less Winnie cared what she looked like from anywhere outside the gazebo. Her hair shifted around her shoulders whenever she moved quickly enough, the cream cardigan slipping slightly against the sage silk before she pushed it back into place without stopping. Her bare feet made everything easier, toes flexing against the wooden floor as she changed direction or stepped closer, and the lack of shoes somehow made the whole thing feel more private despite being outdoors. She danced the way she might have alone in her kitchen if a favorite song caught her at the right moment, except now there was a broad, warm body moving with hers and a pair of eyes she liked far too much following every ridiculous choice.

The way he looked at her made some of the silliness turn flirtier without extinguishing it. Winnie let her hands settle briefly against his chest when they came close, then moved them upward toward his shoulders as her hips found the beat between them. She was not trying to seduce him so much as refusing to pretend attraction needed its own separate category from fun. She could make an exaggerated face at one lyric, laugh into the next measure, then look up at him with enough heat in her expression to make the laughter soften. That seemed to be the shape of wanting him now—nothing carefully curated, no choice between tenderness and desire. Both could exist while she danced badly on purpose.

His insistence that she would need to work harder if embarrassment were her goal only made Winnie shake her head. “You’re still assuming there’s an objective,” she said, breath a little warmer from moving. “I promise this is much less sinister. I just wanted to dance.” She liked being able to tell him that and mean it without any hidden second layer she needed him to decode. Wanting something for no reason beyond pleasure had begun to feel like its own small form of freedom tonight.

When he moved close enough to speak more privately, Winnie’s pulse gave a pleasant jump despite herself. She could feel the warmth of him before she consciously registered the words, and the claim that he understood what she had been doing made amusement return to her face. The triumphant declaration of having loosened up earned him a long, appreciative look as she let her gaze travel from his face to the relaxed line of his shoulders and back again. “You did,” she conceded, deliberately generous. “And look at you. Still alive.”

The subtle lift of their joined hands changed her attention immediately, because she recognized the reminder even before the offer came. Winnie liked that he still asked. The fact that she had already trusted him once did not get converted into permanent permission; even in the middle of laughter and movement, he left the next choice where it belonged. Her smile softened in a way that was probably more revealing than she intended. “Yes,” she said, and then her eyes brightened again because pure sincerity apparently still required seasoning. “But if I become wildly overconfident afterward, that’s on you.”

She let him guide the second turn when it came, trusting the warning enough that anticipation felt exciting rather than defensive. This one found her more relaxed, and Winnie allowed the momentum to carry farther through her shoulders and skirt, laughing when her hair swung across her cheek before settling behind her again. When she faced him, she did not stop herself at a polite distance; she came back close, one hand returning against him as the beat continued. The pleasure of the movement stayed in her smile, and for several seconds she simply let them move together without needing to say anything about it.

The song shifted into its final stretch gradually enough that Winnie noticed the approaching end without feeling disappointed by it. She had stopped trying to preserve moments against change sometime during the evening, perhaps because every ending had so far managed to become another beginning: dinner into ice cream, ice cream into the gazebo, a slow dance into this ridiculous one. Now she was warm from moving, pleasantly tired, her bare feet comfortable, and very aware that the next part of the night still included him. She drifted closer again as the beat eased, her hands settling around his shoulders while her body slowed naturally against his.

Winnie looked up at him for a moment before acting, the attraction that had threaded through the dancing gathering into something quieter and more direct. She rose slightly onto the balls of her bare feet and kissed him, not waiting for another cue this time. The kiss began playful because she was still smiling when their mouths met, but it deepened just enough to carry everything warmer underneath—the affection, the growing pull toward him, the strange happiness of having spent hours discovering more reasons to stay. Her fingers curled lightly at the back of his shoulders while she lingered there, and when she finally eased away, she remained close enough that her nose nearly brushed his.

The last of the song was fading when Winnie glanced toward the bench and the abandoned heels beneath it. She had absolutely no interest in putting them back on, and the earlier promise waiting between them now felt less like emergency assistance and more like a privilege she was perfectly prepared to collect. Her mouth curved as she looked back at him. “All right,” she said, happiness and flirtation mingling easily in her voice. “I’m ready for my premium transportation to the truck.”

She did not step away immediately, because announcing readiness to leave the gazebo and actually ending the moment were apparently separate things. Winnie let one hand slide down his arm before finally turning toward the bench, gathering her cardigan more securely around herself while leaving the heels exactly where they were for him to deal with, since he had already claimed responsibility for them. The empty cups and phone were easier; she collected those, tucking the phone into her bag and stacking the cups together before glancing at the nearest trash receptacle. “I can carry the lightweight cargo,” she said, looking at him with a pleased little smile. “I assume your assignment is obvious.”

Once the small bits of the evening had been gathered, Winnie stood barefoot beside him and looked toward the path back with absolutely no serious consideration of walking it. She could have. Her feet no longer hurt now that the heels were off, and she was perfectly capable of making it to the truck. But capability had stopped being the point hours ago, and there was something deliciously liberating about accepting an offered kindness simply because she wanted to experience it. She turned back toward Shep and lifted her brows. “And before you accuse me of manipulating circumstances, I’d like to remind you that you volunteered for this several songs ago.”

The prospect made her grin before he had even moved. She slipped the strap of her bag over one shoulder, then opened her arms toward him with none of the hesitation she might once have attached to asking someone else to take her weight. “Come on, Chandler,” she said, laughing softly. “Let’s see whether the service lives up to the advertising.” The joke kept the moment light, but the trust beneath it was real, and Winnie did not feel any need to hide that from herself anymore.

When the evening finally shifted away from the gazebo, she carried no sense that they were closing something behind them. The truck waited somewhere beyond the warm pools of town light, and after that her house waited with its quiet rooms, the flowers he had brought her, and the invitation she had already managed not to retract. Winnie felt pleasantly aware of all of it without needing to decide how the rest should unfold. She only knew that she was happy, that her mouth still remembered his kiss, and that being carried to the truck by a man she was falling increasingly hard for sounded like an excellent way to continue the night.

Shep had known the music change would amuse her. He had not anticipated quite how much satisfaction she would take from watching him adjust to it, though by the time she praised his bravery and offered condolences for the apparent gaps in his musical education, the answer was written plainly across his face. He gave her a long look that carried no real offense, one hand remaining comfortably at her waist while the beat made anything resembling their previous dance impossible. “I’d like it entered into the record that I never said I didn’t understand it,” he said, his mouth pulling at one corner. “I said it was a violent transition. Those are different charges.” Her description of freestyle as less bureaucratic earned a quiet laugh from him, and he let his shoulders loosen further as he followed her into the change rather than trying to impose structure where she clearly wanted none. “There. No forms. No permits. Complete regulatory freedom. Happy?”

Apparently she was, and Shep discovered very quickly that watching Winnie dance when she was not concentrating on dancing was an entirely different experience. The careful attention she had given him through the slower song disappeared, replaced by something instinctive and wonderfully inconsistent. One moment she moved with an ease that made his attention settle more firmly on her; the next she deliberately exaggerated something until she made herself laugh. He liked both versions equally, particularly because neither seemed intended for him in the performative sense. She was not putting on a show. She was enjoying herself and allowing him to be there for it, which felt considerably more intimate than anything rehearsed could have.

Her approval when he finally abandoned whatever remained of his formal dancing earned her a small inclination of his head, as though he had just passed an evaluation despite her insistence that no such evaluation existed. “Pretty much it,” he repeated, amusement warming his voice. “Good. Because this is approximately the full extent of my advanced training.” When she shifted away and returned with that ridiculous shoulder movement, Shep laughed outright, catching her hand when she came within reach again. “Although apparently I’m working with someone who has invented an entirely separate curriculum.”

He had no difficulty keeping up with her. That became obvious enough that he did not bother defending himself when she challenged him to try. Shep simply moved with her, letting the rhythm determine more than technique did and allowing the distance between them to change whenever Winnie changed it. When she came closer, his hand settled more securely at her waist. When she moved away, he let her go without chasing the space. The pattern belonged entirely to the two of them now, less dancing together in any recognizable sense than sharing the same music and repeatedly choosing to find one another inside it. “I am keeping up,” he corrected mildly when she accused him otherwise. “You’re just changing the rules every twelve seconds.”

Her laughter when she lost the rhythm entirely against him made his arm move automatically around her for the brief second she needed it, though there was no urgency in the gesture. She had barely stumbled before she was already recovering, grinning as though the mistake had improved things. Shep looked down at her with unmistakable amusement when she declared his investigation officially suspended. “Recreational,” he repeated. “That sounds suspiciously like something someone says when they realize the investigation is producing evidence they don’t like.” He released her again when she moved away, his grin remaining. “But fine. I’m off duty.”

Then Winnie reminded him precisely why being off duty might be dangerous.

The ridiculous little bounce nearly made him laugh again. The slower sway that followed caught his attention differently, and the transition into something more sensual was smooth enough that Shep’s expression changed before he could pretend otherwise. His eyes stayed on her, following the easy movement of her body as she came nearer again, and when she warned him not to look surprised because she contained multitudes, a low laugh left him. “I’m learning that,” he said, one hand returning to her waist when she came within reach. His thumb moved once against the silk there, the touch easy but distinctly affectionate. “Apparently several of them dance.”

He did not mistake the flirtation for a demand that the moment become anything else. That was part of what he had enjoyed about the entire night. Winnie could look at him in a way that made attraction unmistakable and then make herself laugh two seconds later without either thing canceling the other. She could rest her hands against his chest, move close enough that he became acutely aware of her body against his, and then pull some absurd expression at the music. Shep liked that more than he could have explained neatly. There was nothing fragile about the mood between them. It did not need protecting from laughter.

So when she reminded him that she simply wanted to dance, he believed her exactly as she said it. “Then dance,” he answered, simple and warm, giving her waist a light squeeze before letting the beat pull them apart another fraction. “You don’t need an objective.” His eyes stayed on hers for another moment. “You’re allowed to just have fun, Winnie.”

The words were not meant to carry more weight than she wanted them to, and Shep did not linger over them. He let the music take over again, moving with her until the accusation that he had successfully loosened up earned him a deliberately serious glance down at himself, as though checking for damage. “Remarkable,” he murmured after confirming his continued survival. “I’ll inform my mother that her training was not permanently compromised.”

The next turn belonged to Winnie before it belonged to him. Shep gave her the warning through the slight lift of their joined hands first, waiting until her answer came before he changed anything else. The instant she agreed, his smile softened, and he deliberately kept the motion smooth rather than faster simply because she had handled the first one easily. “Overconfidence is your responsibility,” he informed her as he raised their hands. “I’m only providing opportunities.”

He guided her through the turn slowly enough that she could feel where it was going but with more freedom than the first time, no longer needing to monitor every inch of the movement. Winnie moved beneath his hand with considerably more confidence now, the sage skirt shifting around her bare legs as she turned and her hair swinging across her cheek. Shep watched her come around with an expression that was openly pleased, and when she returned directly toward him instead of maintaining the space, his hand found her waist again as naturally as though it had been waiting there.

“That,” he said near her ear once she was settled close again, “was considerably less rebellious.”

He could already imagine the objection.

“And considerably better.”

That one was mostly there to ensure he received it.

The remainder of the song passed without Shep trying to manufacture another trick from it. He was content simply moving with her, especially once Winnie drifted closer and her arms settled more fully around his shoulders. His own hands rested comfortably at her waist, his attention moving between her face and the warmth of her body against him as the harder rhythm began easing toward its end. There was something quietly satisfying about the fact that their first dance had turned into this instead of remaining perfectly romantic. The evening had repeatedly refused to behave according to any recognizable script, and Shep had stopped expecting it to.

He noticed the change in Winnie before she kissed him.

Her face lifted. Her attention settled differently. Then she rose onto the balls of her bare feet, closing the height between them herself.

Shep met her immediately.

His hands tightened just enough at her waist to steady her while her arms remained around his shoulders, and he kissed her back with the same warmth she brought to him. The smile still lingering against her mouth made the beginning light, but when she stayed there, he did too. He let the kiss deepen naturally without rushing it, one hand sliding from her waist to the middle of her back as she leaned closer. The affection in it mattered every bit as much as the attraction did. He had spent the entire evening discovering that kissing Winnie could contain laughter and tenderness and want without requiring any of them to win.

When she finally eased away, Shep did not immediately create distance between them. His forehead nearly touched hers for a second while he looked down at her, and the smile that appeared was quiet and unmistakably affectionate.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “I like recreational dancing.”

The request for premium transportation arrived shortly afterward, and Shep’s eyebrows rose as though he had been waiting for exactly this moment since making the offer. His eyes moved deliberately toward the abandoned heels and then returned to Winnie. “Ah.” The single sound carried entirely too much satisfaction. “So we’ve reached the claims portion of the evening.”

He watched her begin gathering their things, making no attempt to interfere while she handled the cups and her phone. When she declared herself responsible for lightweight cargo and implied his assignment ought to be obvious, Shep bent to retrieve the heels from beneath the bench, hooking the straps over two fingers before straightening again. “Very obvious,” he agreed. “Apparently my duties include footwear recovery, passenger transport, and tolerating continued Chandler references without additional compensation.”

The empty cups did not survive long enough to become part of the journey. Shep took them from her long enough to dispose of them in the nearby trash, then returned while Winnie adjusted her bag. His phone disappeared back into his pocket after he stopped the music, leaving the creek and the quieter sounds of Evergreen to replace it. The gazebo looked different without the songs filling it, though not emptier. The night had already given the place enough memory to make Shep suspect he would never pass it again without thinking about sage silk, bare feet and Winnie informing him that dancing required less bureaucracy.

Her preemptive defense against accusations of manipulation made him stop directly in front of her.

“I volunteered,” he confirmed.

His gaze dropped pointedly toward her bare feet.

“You subsequently removed your shoes.”

Back to her face.

“Refused to put them back on.”

A pause.

“And are now invoking a verbal agreement made before I understood the full scope of the operation.”

The seriousness held for another second before his mouth betrayed him.

“But yes. I volunteered.”

Then she opened her arms toward him.

Whatever joke Shep might have made next disappeared beneath something considerably softer.

There was trust in the gesture that he did not intend to make Winnie regret. She was perfectly capable of walking. They both knew it. That was exactly why the request mattered differently. She was not surrendering responsibility for herself because she needed him to take it. She was letting him carry her because she wanted him to.

Shep stepped into the space she offered.

“Come here.”

One arm slid securely around her back while the other moved beneath her knees. He gave her enough time to understand exactly where his hands were going before he lifted, refusing to turn even this into an unnecessary surprise. Then he straightened smoothly, bringing Winnie completely off the gazebo floor and against his chest in one controlled motion.

Her size made the lift almost absurdly easy for him, but Shep did not treat her as though she weighed nothing. He adjusted her carefully until her body rested securely across his arms, one forearm supporting beneath her knees while the other held her firmly along her back. The skirt of her sage dress gathered softly over his arm, her bare feet suspended well above the wooden boards, and the cardigan shifted slightly where her shoulder settled against his chest.

He looked down at her.

“Premium enough?”

His expression was far too pleased.

Shep retrieved her heels with the hand supporting beneath her knees, catching the straps securely between his fingers without compromising his hold on her. Then he started toward the gazebo steps at an easy pace, glancing down before each change in level despite the fact that Winnie’s feet were nowhere near the ground.

“And for the record,” he added as he carried her out beneath the darker summer sky, “Chandler complained considerably more than I am.”

The path toward the truck stretched ahead beneath scattered pools of warm light. Shep took it without hurry. There was no reason to rush now any more than there had been at dinner. Winnie was warm against his chest, her bag resting against her side, her shoes dangling from his hand, and her earlier invitation still existed at the other end of the drive without needing either of them to race toward it.

After several steps, Shep glanced down at her again, the teasing in his expression softening into something quieter.

“You comfortable?”

The question was practical, but his hold on her shifted subtly at the same time, bringing her a little more securely against him. Once satisfied, he continued down the path, his stride steady enough that there was almost no movement required from her at all.

Then the corner of his mouth lifted.

“Because this is your opportunity to file a complaint with premium transportation.”

His gaze moved briefly ahead before returning to her.

“After we reach the truck, all sales are final.”

The joke sat easily between them, but Shep was already thinking about the absurdity of putting her down merely so they could drive a few minutes to a house where she had asked him to stay. He liked that there was still more evening ahead. He liked even more that neither of them seemed interested in deciding what that meant before they arrived there.

For now, carrying Winnie through Evergreen was enough.

And judging by the way his smile remained every time he looked down at her, Shep was beginning to suspect she had discovered a service he would have very little interest in discontinuing.

The instant Winnie’s feet left the gazebo floor, every clever thing she had been prepared to say vanished beneath a startled little laugh. She had expected the lift to feel more dramatic than it actually did, perhaps awkward for the first few seconds while she figured out where to put her arms or became overly conscious of the fact that another person had her entire weight. Instead, there was one smooth change in perspective, the wooden boards dropping away beneath her bare feet while Shep’s chest became solid and warm against her side, and then she was simply there—secure across his arms as though this particular arrangement required considerably less effort from him than it did from her pulse. Her arm went around his shoulders almost immediately, partly for balance and partly because once she had permission to hold on, she discovered she very much wanted to.

The first few seconds were enough to reveal that Winnie had badly underestimated the appeal. She had imagined being carried as funny, maybe flattering, probably a little embarrassing once the novelty wore off; she had not anticipated how nice it would feel to be tucked securely against him with absolutely nothing required of her except letting it happen. His arm beneath her knees was steady, the other firm along her back, and every easy adjustment made her more conscious of the difference in their size without making that difference feel intimidating. She looked down at her bare feet suspended several inches above the floor, then back at him with an expression that gradually shifted from delighted surprise into something much more suspicious. “Oh, this is a problem,” she said, laughter warming her voice. “I was prepared for this to be amusing. I was not prepared to like it this much.”

The question of whether the service met expectations made her settle a little more comfortably against him purely to gather sufficient evidence. She let her hand rest at the back of his shoulder, thumb grazing absently near his collar while she considered the matter with exaggerated seriousness. “You may have undersold the package,” she admitted, unable to keep the pleasure from her face. The truth was considerably worse than that: she could already imagine requesting this again under circumstances that had absolutely nothing to do with painful shoes. A long day, cold feet, wanting to be difficult, wanting to be close, deciding that crossing a room on her own seemed unnecessarily inefficient when Shep Lawson had demonstrated a perfectly viable alternative—all of those now felt like defensible reasons.

The Chandler comparison only strengthened her case. Winnie laughed and tipped her head toward him, her hair brushing his shoulder as she remembered the scene he had invoked so confidently earlier. “Actually, this is substantially better than Chandler’s version,” she said, eyes bright with the satisfaction of having found a flaw in his own reference. “Monica had to endure complaining the entire time, and she only got a piggyback ride. This has dramatically better customer service.” Her gaze flicked over the arm supporting her, then up toward his face again, and the grin that followed was openly affectionate. “You made it sound like I was going to receive some kind of reluctant sitcom rescue. This is closer to first class.”

The heels dangling safely away from her feet made the whole thing more ridiculous in exactly the right way. Winnie watched the path shift below them as he moved, surprised by how little she bounced in his arms and how quickly her body stopped bracing for movement that never came. She had been carried before, obviously, but she could not remember ever experiencing it as an adult without some practical reason attached—injury, drunken foolishness in someone else’s distant past, some situation where getting from one place to another mattered more than the sensation itself. This was different because she did not need it. She had asked because she wanted it, and the distinction made every steady step feel unexpectedly indulgent.

The practical check on her comfort softened her expression before she could hide it. Winnie adjusted one arm more securely around his shoulders and allowed herself to settle closer, her cheek nearly brushing his shirt as she found the easiest position. “Very,” she assured him, and then the temptation to tease returned before sincerity could become too exposed. “Disturbingly comfortable, actually. I may need you to forget how easily you did this before I develop expectations.” She knew even as she said it that forgetting was unlikely, mostly because she had no intention of forgetting either.

The joke about complaints earned him a thoughtful little hum as though Winnie were genuinely reviewing the experience. She glanced down the front of herself, checked that the sage skirt had not twisted into anything disastrous, and then looked back up at him. “My only complaint is that this should probably have been offered earlier,” she decided. “Dinner could have included transportation between the table and the parking lot. Very poor planning on your part.” Her smile softened after the tease, and before she could overthink the impulse, Winnie leaned in and pressed a warm kiss to his cheek, lingering just long enough for the affection behind it to become unmistakable. When she drew back, she stayed close rather than pretending the kiss had been casual. “That’s your tip,” she murmured, pleased with herself.

The closer they got to the truck, the more Winnie realized she was not in any particular hurry to be put down. That was perhaps the most dangerous discovery of the entire experiment. She had expected to enjoy the novelty and then become self-conscious enough to reclaim her own feet once they reached the parking area, but instead she found herself watching the truck approach with the faint disappointment of someone who knew the ride had an expiration point. Her fingers curled a little more securely near his shoulder as she looked at him. “For future reference,” she said, deliberately casual, “the shoes may have established precedent, but I don’t think footwear is going to remain the only qualifying circumstance.”

The truck was already unlocked, which presented Winnie with an immediate logistical problem she found far more entertaining than necessary. She had no interest in being set down merely so a door could be opened, especially after discovering that remaining exactly where she was had become one of her favorite parts of the evening. As they reached the passenger side, she twisted carefully in his arms and stretched one hand toward the handle, laughing when the angle required a little more reach than expected. “Absolutely not,” she said when she finally got her fingers around it, though the objection was directed more toward the possibility of surrendering her position than anything he had said. “We are not interrupting premium service for something I can reach.”

She pulled the handle and pushed the passenger door outward, then caught the edge long enough to swing it wider without forcing him to maneuver around it. The small teamwork of it delighted her: Shep carrying her and her opening her own door from his arms like this was somehow the obvious solution rather than something two adults had invented because neither wanted to end the joke. Winnie looked back at him, satisfaction written plainly across her face. “See? Efficient,” she said. “I contribute.”

Being lowered into the passenger seat felt strangely more intimate than the lift had. Winnie kept one arm loosely around his shoulders until the last practical second, her body still warm from being held against him, and once she settled against the seat she became acutely aware of the absence of his chest beneath her side. Her bare feet stayed safely inside the truck, and she gathered the skirt of her dress neatly over her knees before taking her heels from wherever he had managed to keep them during the entire operation. She set them on the floor with the kind of indifference reserved for objects that had lost all negotiating power and looked up at him. “I’m not putting those back on tonight,” she said with complete calm. “They’ve had their opportunity.”

The passenger seat felt familiar after the drive earlier, but Winnie did not. Something in her had shifted over the course of dinner, ice cream, the gazebo, dancing, kissing, and apparently discovering that being carried by Shep was dangerously enjoyable. She tucked a strand of loosened blonde hair behind her ear and glanced toward the phone and speaker situation, remembering just how much of the evening had already been dictated by her musical chaos. Her smile turned almost benevolent. “I think I’ve subjected you to enough genre violence for one night,” she told him. “You can choose what we listen to on the way home.”

The offer was more meaningful than she made it sound, if only because Winnie had defended her playlist like sovereign territory less than an hour ago. She settled back against the seat, cardigan soft around her arms, and studied him with the pleased relaxation she no longer seemed able to hide tonight. “Anything you want,” she added, lifting one finger before generosity could be mistaken for complete surrender. “But understand that if Bread comes on after everything you said about my transitions, I reserve the right to have feelings about it.” The warning was undercut by the warmth in her eyes; she was secretly hoping he chose something unmistakably his, one of those songs that belonged in his truck when no one else was there to influence the selection.

Winnie let the quiet stretch comfortably while the truck remained parked, making no move toward her seat belt yet and showing no impatience for the engine to start. She was still carrying the sensation of his arms around her, and the memory made her glance toward him again with a thoughtful little smile. “I really did think carrying me would be mostly funny,” she admitted, softer now. “That was a serious miscalculation.” Her brows rose as the humor returned. “So you should probably establish boundaries now, because otherwise I’m going to discover increasingly flimsy reasons why walking is suddenly beyond me.”

She laughed at herself and drew one bare foot up slightly onto the edge of the seat, comfortable enough to make the truck feel less like transportation and more like another place the date had temporarily settled. There was still home ahead of them, still the invitation she had made before dinner ended, but Winnie no longer felt any need to pull the evening toward it faster. For another minute she was content simply sitting there with him, barefoot and kissed and considerably happier than she had expected to be when Friday began. Her gaze lingered on his face before slipping briefly toward the stereo, and her smile turned gently challenging. “All right,” she said. “Show me what Shepherd Lawson chooses when nobody else gets a vote.”

Shep had expected some degree of triumph once Winnie was actually in his arms. He had, after all, spent a respectable portion of the evening listening to her defend those shoes long after the evidence had turned decisively against them, and there was satisfaction to be found in the fact that the evening had ended with the heels dangling uselessly from his fingers while their owner remained several feet above the ground. What he had not expected was the startled laugh she gave the instant he lifted her, or the way her arm came around his shoulders almost immediately afterward. That changed the joke before he had much chance to enjoy winning it.

Her admission that she liked being carried more than expected brought his gaze down to her as he stepped away from the gazebo. The pleasure in her expression was impossible to miss, and Shep’s mouth curved slowly in response. “That sounds less like a problem and more like an unfortunate discovery,” he said, adjusting the arm beneath her knees as he started down the path. There was no strain in the movement, only the practical shift required to settle her more securely against him. “For you, specifically. I’m doing fine.”

He was doing considerably better than fine. Winnie fit comfortably against him, one arm around his shoulders and the sage silk of her dress gathered lightly over his forearm. Every few steps her hair brushed his shirt or the side of his neck, and the easy way she had settled into being held made Shep more conscious of her trust than of her weight. He had spent months making certain she never felt cornered by his presence, never had to calculate whether accepting one kindness obligated her to another. Now she was voluntarily relaxing against his chest while informing him that he had undersold the experience, and the significance of that was not lost on him.

Her criticism of the Chandler comparison earned a quiet laugh. “First class,” he repeated, giving the claim appropriate consideration. “That’s going to make the pricing difficult.” His eyes moved briefly toward her before returning to the path. “You were originally quoted complimentary emergency transport due to catastrophic footwear failure. First class sounds like an upgrade.” The grin that followed ruined any suggestion that he intended to charge her anything other than continued harassment about the shoes.

The kiss to his cheek interrupted whatever else he might have said.

Shep’s stride did not stop, but his expression changed immediately. The teasing eased from his face as he looked down at her, catching the warmth still lingering in her expression when she announced that the kiss constituted his tip. He let a few steps pass before answering, mostly because there was something about the casual affection of it that he wanted to enjoy without immediately turning it into another joke.

“That’s a generous tipping policy.”

His voice had gone quieter.

Then his mouth curved again.

“I may reconsider the pricing.”

The warning that footwear would not remain the only qualifying circumstance made him laugh under his breath. He had suspected as much from the moment she admitted enjoying herself. “There it is,” he said. “Expansion of services before the first trip is even complete.” He adjusted her fractionally higher against him as they approached the truck, his expression carrying the resignation of a man watching an entirely predictable problem develop. “I knew the shoes were precedent-setting. I just didn’t expect you to establish case law this quickly.”

He made no attempt to discourage her.

That was probably the real mistake.

By the time they reached the passenger side, Shep had already begun shifting his grip in preparation to free one hand for the door when Winnie twisted carefully in his arms and reached for it herself. He stopped immediately rather than fighting her for the privilege, eyebrows lifting as she stretched toward the handle with absolute determination. Her refusal to interrupt premium service made him look at her for a long second.

“You know I can put you down for approximately four seconds.”

Apparently that was unacceptable.

She caught the handle anyway, and Shep watched her swing the door open from his arms with an expression caught somewhere between affection and disbelief. Her triumphant declaration that she contributed finally pulled a laugh from him. “Excellent teamwork,” he conceded. “You opened the door while being carried through it. Very efficient allocation of resources.”

He stepped closer once the door was wide enough, turning carefully so neither her feet nor the heels hanging from his fingers caught the frame. Lowering her required more attention than lifting her had, not because of her weight but because Shep had no intention of depositing her unceremoniously onto the passenger seat after spending the last several minutes advertising premium service. His arm remained secure behind her back while he bent, bringing her gradually toward the seat until she could feel it beneath her before he released the support beneath her knees.

Winnie kept her arm around his shoulders almost until the last second.

Shep noticed.

He also noticed that he was in no particular hurry to straighten.

For a brief moment he remained leaned into the open doorway, one hand braced near her while she settled her dress around her legs. Her declaration regarding the permanent retirement of the heels made his eyes drop toward them as he set them neatly on the passenger-side floor.

“Good,” he said. “They’ve lost privileges.”

His gaze returned to her bare feet and then her face.

“They can reflect on their choices overnight.”

The offer of control over the music surprised him enough that his brows rose. After the spirited defense Winnie had mounted for her playlist, unrestricted access to the stereo felt suspiciously significant. Shep closed the passenger door only after she was settled, then walked around the front of the truck and climbed into the driver’s side. He set his phone in its usual place, started the engine, and glanced across the console at her when she expanded the offer to anything he wanted.

“Anything?”

The Bread warning arrived immediately.

“There it is.”

His laugh was low as he reached for his seat belt.

“Conditional freedom.”

He buckled himself in, then looked pointedly toward Winnie until she dealt with hers too. There was no lecture attached to the glance. He simply waited, one eyebrow lifting slightly until the click answered him.

Only then did he reach for his phone.

Shep scrolled for a few seconds, bypassing several playlists she would have had entirely too much fun examining. He could have chosen something specifically to tease her. Bread would have been easy. So would one of the country songs she had accused him of using to commit too enthusiastically to sadness.

Instead, he chose Bill Withers.

The opening of “Lovely Day” came quietly through the speakers, warm and familiar without demanding much from the silence inside the truck. Shep set his phone down and rested one hand against the wheel, glancing toward Winnie as the song settled around them.

“This one.”

No defense. No explanation.

Just his choice.

His expression shifted when she returned to the subject of being carried, particularly when she suggested he establish boundaries before she began manufacturing reasons to avoid walking. Shep leaned back into his seat and considered her with exaggerated seriousness.

“All right.”

He looked prepared to negotiate.

“No fabricated injuries.”

A pause.

“No intentionally sabotaging your own shoes.”

Another.

“And you cannot stand perfectly capable of walking in the middle of the grocery store and announce that your legs have mysteriously stopped working.”

His mouth twitched.

“Those are my opening terms.”

The terms left an enormous amount of territory uncovered, and judging by his expression, Shep knew it.

He looked at her for another second before the humor softened.

“If you want me to carry you, Winnie, you can ask.”

There was no qualification beneath it. No requirement that she first establish sufficient cause. If she wanted closeness, she did not need to disguise it as necessity for him.

“You don’t have to earn it with bad shoes.”

He let that sit exactly as long as it needed to before reaching for the gearshift.

The truck eased away from the curb a moment later, Evergreen sliding past beyond the windows in familiar pools of amber streetlight and darkened storefronts. Shep drove one-handed, the other resting loosely near the console while Bill Withers filled the cab at a comfortable volume. There was something different about the drive now compared with the one that had brought them into town. Earlier, the space between them had held anticipation, both of them aware that the evening had officially become a date and neither entirely certain what shape it would take. Now her heels were abandoned on the floor, her hair had loosened from the careful arrangement she had started the evening with, and Shep could still feel the memory of her mouth against his.

He liked this version better.

The road toward her house was not long. Neither of them needed it to be.

Shep did not fill every stretch of quiet with conversation. When the song ended, he let another from the same playlist begin without announcing it, and the truck settled into the easy rhythm of road noise and music. Every so often he glanced toward Winnie, finding her curled comfortably into the passenger seat, barefoot and relaxed in a way that would have been difficult to imagine when he first arrived at her door.

Eventually the familiar turn toward her street appeared ahead.

Shep made it without comment.

Her house emerged through the trees a few minutes later, dark except for the exterior light left glowing near the entrance. He pulled into the drive and put the truck into park, but the engine remained running for another few seconds while the song continued quietly through the speakers.

Then he switched it off.

Silence gathered gently around them.

Shep looked across the console at Winnie.

There was still an invitation waiting between them. She had asked him to come inside before they ever left the restaurant, and he had not forgotten it. But sitting there now, after the gazebo and the dancing and the kisses and the absurd journey to the truck, Shep found he did not need to collect every available minute simply because she had offered it earlier.

Tonight had already been enough to change something between them.

He wanted the next time too.

That mattered more.

Shep reached across the console and found her hand, turning it gently beneath his so their fingers could settle together one last time.

“I think I’m going to change one part of the plan.”

His thumb moved slowly across her knuckles.

“I’m not coming inside tonight.”

There was nothing hesitant in the decision, and nothing withdrawing from her either. His gaze stayed warm on hers.

“Not because I don’t want to.”

His mouth curved faintly.

“I very much want to.”

He lifted their joined hands and pressed a quiet kiss against her knuckles before lowering them again.

“But I like where tonight ended.”

The words were simple because the feeling behind them did not require improvement.

“I like that you asked me to stay. I like knowing I could.”

His thumb brushed her hand again.

“And I think I’d rather go home wanting another hour with you than take every hour available just because neither of us wants to say goodnight.”

The smile that followed carried no regret.

Shep released her hand only long enough to climb out of the truck. He came around to her side and opened the passenger door, collecting her bag before retrieving the disgraced heels from the floor. When Winnie shifted as though preparing to climb down herself, his eyebrow lifted.

“No.”

His mouth twitched.

“We established precedent.”

He set the bag over his shoulder, placed the shoes securely in one hand and reached for her with the other arm already moving beneath her knees.

“Come here.”

The second lift was even easier than the first because neither of them had anything left to prove about it. Shep gathered her against his chest, waited until her arm settled around his shoulders, then carried her the short distance from the truck to her front door beneath the quiet mountain night.

At the porch, he finally lowered her carefully onto her bare feet.

Shep stayed close.

One hand remained lightly at her waist while the other passed her bag and heels back to her, and for several seconds he simply looked at her—the woman who had opened the door hours earlier in sage silk and nervous anticipation now standing barefoot on her porch with her hair mussed, lipstick gone, and happiness still bright in her face.

He bent and kissed her.

No teasing interruption this time. No music changing beneath them. Just a slow, warm goodnight kiss that lingered without asking to become anything else.

When Shep drew back, his forehead rested lightly against hers.

“Friday was good.”

His smile appeared.

“Very good.”

He kissed the tip of her nose, because apparently that had become something he enjoyed doing, then straightened enough to look at her properly.

“And for the record, I’m asking you out again before Lenora gets the opportunity to organize it herself.”

His thumb brushed once along her waist before his hand finally fell away.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Shep waited until Winnie was safely inside before walking back toward the truck. Only after the door closed behind her did he turn away, her heels no longer in his hand, her warmth no longer against his chest, and the ridiculous smile he had been carrying for most of the evening still firmly in place.

The truck started a moment later.

Bill Withers returned through the speakers.

And Shep drove home alone through Evergreen with absolutely no doubt that there would be a second date.