Cowboy Seeks Bride by Carolyn Brown Page A

he really sing?” she whispered.
    Buddy backed up and sat back on the stump. “They all d-d-do.”
    “All of them?” She nodded toward the other three O’Donnells.
    “All,” Buddy answered.
    Dewar’s fingers picked out a prelude to Ricky Van Shelton’s old song “Simple Man.” When he began to sing, Haley’s breath caught in her chest. His voice was deep and pure and goose bumps popped up on her arms. He’d be an instant star in Nashville with his looks, his voice, and his ability to make that guitar do everything but talk.
    The lyrics said that he was a simple man and he wanted a place to lay his head and three squares in a frying pan. Heat shot up from her neck to her cheeks when he sang about wanting a soft woman and warm bed. Dewar O’Donnell was certainly not a simple man. He was very complex, and just when she did think she had him all figured out and wasn’t even going to think about him again, he showed her another side.
    He finished that song and went right into another Ricky Van Shelton song, “Statue of a Fool.” It was a sad song about a man who felt like a fool for letting love slip through his hands. Haley was a city girl and loved the bright lights of Dallas, but she’d cut her teeth on country music from her father’s side of the family and zydeco from her mother’s side. So she’d heard both songs and knew the lyrics by heart.
    Finn stood up and dusted off his jeans. Dewar put the guitar in his hands. His voice wasn’t quite as deep as Dewar’s but had a haunting sound as he sang “Don’t We All Have the Right.”
    It was about a man who laughed it off when his woman left him because he thought she’d come back again. He sang that in love there was two ways to fall.
    Dewar took two long strides to where Haley sat and held out his hand. “May I have this dance, ma’am?”
    She stared unblinking up at him. “You dance?”
    “The question is, do you?” He smiled.
    She put her hand in his and he pulled her to her feet and into his arms. One of her hands went around his neck and one of his rested on her lower back. Two-stepping on grass by the light of a campfire with a cowboy whose touch made her insides sizzle was a heady experience.
    “Which way is best?” she whispered.
    “What?”
    “Which way is best to fall in love?”
    “Which two ways are there?” Dewar asked.
    “In and out,” she said.
    “I’d think the in way is less painful,” he said. “You ever been in love?”
    “Thought I was.”
    “And?”
    “I wasn’t, so I didn’t have to fall out of love because you got to be in love to fall out,” she said.
    Finn went from that song into another Ricky Van Shelton tune called “Somebody Lied.”
    It was an old beer-drinking, two-stepping song about a man having trouble getting over a woman. It didn’t apply to Haley, but tears welled up in her eyes at the way Finn delivered it, as if he felt the words rather than just sang them. Had he left behind the love of his life when he was deployed and she left him?
    Sawyer was the next entertainer and he veered away from Ricky Van Shelton to Mark Chesnutt’s “Goin’ On Later On.” It was too fast to two-step to so Haley stepped back, did a wiggle, and fully well intended to do some fancy footwork to the song, but Dewar grabbed her hand and showed that he was as adept at swing dancing as he was at two-stepping.
    She was out of breath when the song ended, but Sawyer chuckled and went straight into “Come on in, the Whiskey’s Fine.” It was something between a country swing and two-stepping and Dewar didn’t miss a single beat when he swung her out and back to his chest, all the time singing right along with his cousin.
    Sawyer sang about it being hotter than two rats in heat inside an old wool sock. Haley threw back her head and laughed when Dewar swung her out again. It felt like the lawn parties they had down on the bayou in Louisiana where there were no walls to hold in the giggles or the loud music from the