The Widow and the Wildcatter: A Loveswept Classic Romance by Fran Baker

tomorrow morning.
    She beat him to the punch. “Thanks for asking me, but I haven’t been dancing in so long, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how.”
    Why he didn’t grab the out she’d offered him and run with it, he couldn’t say. But he found himself trying to persuade her to go with him. “Dancing is a lot like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, you never really forget how.”
    “I don’t know.…” Part of her wanted to jump at the opportunity to get out of the house for a while, but the other part of her was afraid that accepting was the same as waving a red flag in front of a bull.
    “C’mon,” he cajoled her, his eyes gleaming their lazy way down her gingham blouse and blue jeans. “Get your glad rags on and go with me.”
    The cicadas chirped anxiously, echoing her heartbeat. But still, she hesitated. “What if Grandpa wakes up and needs something?”
    “While you’re getting dressed,” he said, “I’ll call and ask Skinny to come over and stay with him.”
    Joni glanced toward the cornfield. Floodlights illuminated the newly raised drilling rig and the trailer where the roughnecks were bunking. “He’s not going to the crossroads?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    Chance chuckled. “Because the last woman he danced with charged him with assault and battery.”
    “What happened?” she asked, shocked.
    “He attacked her with his two left feet.”
    She groaned and rolled her eyes in mock hopelessness. “What can I say?”
    He took a last drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out. “Try
yes
.”
    The shimmering silver of her laughter lit up the darkening sky. “All right already,
yes
.”
    He held the screen door open for her. “I’ll check on Grandpa, and then I’ll call Skinny.”
    She caught a drift of his pine soap as she slipped past him. “Meet you on the porch in twenty minutes?”
    “I’ll be there with bells on,” he assured her.
    Joni started up the staircase, then stopped and turned back to him. “By the way, did I tell you that Dr. Rayburn paid you quite a compliment yesterday?”
    “Really?” Chance paused in the living room doorway. “What’d he say?”
    She smiled. “That you’re the best dose of medicine Grandpa’s had in a long time.”
    “Hey, that’s great,” he said, flexing his shoulders and his dimples in heart-melting harmony.
    Those dimples made her panic, and she wondered if it was too late to break their— She shied away from the word
date
, but she couldn’t think of another to substitute.
    He saw the shadow of doubt dimming her eyes and knew he’d better distract her before she tried to back out on him. “You never did tell me what happened at the bank.”
    “The bank?” Her tone implied it was the furthest thing from her mind. “What about the bank?”
    He shrugged, sending all sorts of muscles into play. “I was just wondering how Jesse James reacted when you made your mortgage payment almost two weeks early.”
    “Oh.” She couldn’t suppress a small smile at the memory. “Well, when he finished picking himself up off the floor, he agreed to extend our other notes until our oil well comes in.”
    This talk about the loan started Joni thinking again about the farm.
    Like most farmers, they were in debt up to their ears. During the boom years, inflation at home and a weak dollar abroad had sent crop prices and land values skyrocketing. At the urging of economists and government officials alike, they’d planted fencerow to fencerow, borrowing money to buy seeds and fertilizer and diesel fuel on land that had been in the family since the opening of the Cherokee Strip.
    She remembered how the bust had caught them completely off guard. One day the banker was telling them the sky was the limit, and the next, he was calling in their loans. She’d never forget that day.
    Grandpa, while shaken, had taken it pretty much in stride. Joni had taken it better than she’d thought possible. But Larry … Larry had taken it hard.
    To keep the bank