She has no time to be anything other than the best, and no time to learn. Hunter had months to get there. Years. A life. Now she has to be better in as many seconds. She hits the half-smile again, and this time it lands. He flickers a grin back at her, one that comes up out of him from somewhere real, hastily suppressed. That makes her lips twitch, because she’s actually salivating, she can feel wolf’s teeth growing in her mouth. She will eat him, on the road to Grandma’s house. She stands up, making every bend and effort count, and puts both hands on the table and sets herself. She’s wearing last night’s T-shirt, but she makes herself feel the whalebone in a burlesque corset as clearly as the cold metal. Her body responds, adjusting to the constraint, stiffening her core. Her mood changes, sharper and starker. There’s the hardness of the tungsten under her fingers and the ball of her thumb—it’s called the mons veneris in palmistry, and wise lovers know to bite it with cautious intensity—and there’s the chilled blood running up inside her arms, and there—yes, there! Bring it on and bring it out—there is the restriction of each stay in the corset and the pleasant scratch of a misplaced fold of brocade along the curve of her right breast. She’s a hard-boiled woman in a hard-boiled speakeasy, got a gat in a violin case, got boys who’ll do bad things if she snaps her fingers. She’s a westerner with a Winchester and this is her saloon. She’s the sheriff in this town.