Colleen Collins - Let It Bree - Let It Bree / Can't Buy Me Louie

“To get to Denver, we could maybe do it on fifteen, twenty.”

“Great!” Bree’s eyes twinkled. “I have the solution!” She rolled back her shoulders, a big proud smile creasing her face. “We’ll coast into town, find a bar and…”

Kirk waited. “And…what?”

Bree grinned gleefully. “I’ll strip!”

“STRIP?”

It was the first word Kirk had said after his and Bree’s trek, with Val in tow, down the road from the Sundance Lodge to where they’d left the van the night before. He hadn’t talked the entire time, not even as they helped Val into the back of the van. But now that he and Bree were again sitting in the front seat, about to coast into Nederland, he was ready again to broach the subject of stripping.

“Yes, strip,” Bree said sweetly, as though she were talking about butterflies fluttering about flowers and not naked bodies gyrating on tabletops. “Heck, my best girlfriend did it in a coffee shop outside Butte, Montana, last summer and made a fast twenty dollars…enough to buy a bus ticket home.”

“Coffee shop? I thought places like that served coffee and doughnuts, not naked bodies.”

Naked. He shouldn’t have gone there. His mind started reeling with the sneak peek he’d gotten through those overstretched, ultrasheer pink undies.

Bree made an exasperated sound. “You know, being naked is not a big deal, not to a country girl anyway. When you think about it, we all strip every single night of our lives. So, that’s all I’m going to do. Strip like I would for bed. Well, with a little dancing thrown in.”

“Stripping,” he said, his voice cracking, “is a…sexual act.”

“Sexual?” She mulled that over. “Yeah, under the right circumstances, you’re correct. But nobody’s going to touch me. Well, except to shove money down my—”

“This conversation is officially over.” Kirk thrust the gearshift into neutral. Avoiding eye contact with Bree, he more or less announced to Val, whose head hung partially over the front seat, “I’m going to jump out, get this baby rolling, then we’ll coast into Nederland and figure out…”

Hell, he didn’t know what to figure out. He had a wanna-be stripper, a buddy bull and a de-gassed van on his hands and no time to properly disassemble and analyze this problem to see the big picture.

This was a Tarl Cabot moment. Time for action, not thoughts and words.

He opened his door, hopped out, and holding onto the door, jogged a few feet to give the van some momentum. As the vehicle began rolling downhill, Kirk leaped back inside, slammed shut his door, and held the thought that at least the humans in the van were still clothed, for the time being…

Ten minutes later, after a very silent ride downhill on the narrow mountain highway 119, the van slowly coasted into a gas station in Nederland.

Kirk glided across the asphalt to a phone booth and stepped on the brakes. The van stopped. There was no way they’d start again without a tow truck or gasoline…and at the moment, he had no means to obtain either.

“Well,” he said, shoving the gear into Park, “time to call the princess.” He started to open his door when Bree grabbed his arm.

“Look,” she said, not sure exactly what to say, but his calling Alicia didn’t seem the better of any options. “Let’s talk for just a minute, okay?”

Kirk shot her a glum look. “One minute.”

“Remember last night when I walked in front of you in my undies and T-shirt?”

He made a strangled sound, his face turning a ruddy color.

“Well,” continued Bree, talking faster, not wanting to waste even a second of her minute. “That’s more than I wear when I go swimming at Mr. Connors’s lake.”

Kirk made another strangled sound.

“I’m not hung up on being natural.”

“Stripping isn’t natural,” he said in a strained voice.

“It isn’t? Then what do you call it when you take off your clothes at night?”

He cleared his throat. “We’ve already had this discussion.”

“Humor me. What do you call it?”

“I call it taking off my clothes.”

“Same thing.”

Kirk released a tormented breath. “No, it’s not. When I take off my clothes at night, I don’t do it to entice women.”

“Not even Alicia?”

He shot Bree a look. “That’s personal, but for the sake of argument, I don’t strip to entice my fiancée.”

“What a shame…”

“Minute’s up!” Kirk started to get out.

“Wait!”

He looked over his shoulder at Bree, cocking an eyebrow.

“Look,” she said, pleading, “I don’t want Alicia driving up here and finding you with me and Val.” Bree was worried about Kirk and some flying princess fur, but even more than that, Bree was worried sick that someone from the “big city” would have seen her face splashed on TV. Maybe funky mountain people didn’t watch TV, or maybe they thought splashing faces on TV was a groovy sixties thing, but Princess Alicia, after finding her man with another woman, might do something very unprincess-like and turn Bree and Val over to the police.

Which was a wild card, because Bree still wasn’t absolutely certain that there were no “bad cops” in on the bull scam. Surely no Nederland police were…but if they called in “the girl and the bull” over some network-wide police radio…and some bad cops heard about it and pinpointed their location in this mountain town…

“So,” she said, fighting the urge to give in to an utterly un-Bree-like hysterical moment, “let’s you and me cut a deal. Give me ten minutes in a bar. If I don’t have gas money after that, you can call Alicia.”

Kirk flashed her a no-way look.

“Ten minutes!” she urged, “could mean money for gas, a drive to Denver where your pal will give me a lift to Chugwater. And ta da! I’m out of your hair and you’re at the rehearsal dinner. Easy. Simple.”

Bree looked around outside. “Plus, this is a pretty little mountain community, not some hole-in-the-wall. And it’s barely, what, ten in the morning? Sleazy types don’t go into bars at this time in the morning—”

“How do you know?”

“I’m from Chugwater, population two hundred. Well, almost. What you find in a small-town bar at this time in the morning are some wholesome, good ol’ boy cowboys who’re drinking coffee, a beer maybe, and they’d have one hell of a fun time throwing a few bills at a good ol’ country girl kicking up some hotcha.”

Kirk frowned, assimilating the string of words into some kind of sensible statement. After a moment, he repeated slowly, “…one hell of a fun time…throwing a few bills…at a good ol’ country girl kicking up some hotcha?”

“Heck, this whole stripping thing is more a joke than a problem. And best of all, Princess Alicia would never know you’d spent the night before your wedding rehearsal dinner sleeping in a motel room with another woman.”

Kirk leveled her a look. “That’s low.”

“But truthful.”

“You’re blackmailing me.”

“Yep, guess I am.”

He stared out his driver’s-side window at a gas station attendant dressed in a tie-dyed shirt with the words Buy Hemp, Be Free written in loopy purple script across the back.

“Could be there aren’t even cowboys in this town,” Kirk murmured. “You might be stripping for some hemp-loving Dead Heads.”

“What?”

Kirk stared off into the distance, imagining the days, weeks, months of listening to Alicia whine about his “Nederland fling” with another woman.

“Okay,” he finally said, sounding anything but okay. “You can attempt this cockamamy strip thing for ten minutes tops on the condition I’m sitting front row, right where I can protect you.”