Call Me Irresistible (26 page)

“Okay.”

He headed toward the door, then came to an abrupt stop and turned back to glare at her. “Are you going to critique?”

“I’ve just been in a mood, that’s all. Ignore.”

“I intend to,” he said, with a healthy dose of malevolence.

His bedroom had a pair of soft, spare chairs for reading; lamps with curled metal shades; and high windows that admitted light but not the views the rest of the house afforded, which gave this room a deep sense of privacy. An ice gray duvet covered the platform bed—a duvet that hit the polished bamboo floor even faster than their clothes.

Right away she could tell he was determined to correct past mistakes, even though he had no idea what those mistakes were. She’d never been kissed so thoroughly, caressed so meticulously, stimulated so exquisitely. He seemed certain that all he needed to do was try a little harder. He even put up with her attempts to take over. But he was a man who served others, and his heart wasn’t in it. All that mattered was her fulfillment, and he suspended his own satisfaction to deliver another pitch-perfect performance on her body. Carefully researched. Perfectly executed. Everything done by the book. Exactly as he’d made love to every other woman in his life.

But who was she to criticize when she brought so little added value to the process? This time she vowed to keep her opinions to herself, and when she could finally gather her thoughts, she rolled onto one elbow to face him.

He was still breathing hard, and who wouldn’t be after what he’d gone through? She stroked his sweaty, deliciously un-manscaped chest and licked her lips. “Ohmigod, I saw stars!”

His eyebrows slammed together. “You’re still not happy?”

His mind-reading tricks were getting out of hand. She manufactured a gasp. “Are you kidding? I’m delirious. The luckiest woman in the world.”

He just stared at her.

She fell back into the pillows and moaned. “If I could only market you, I’d make a fortune. That’s what I should do with my life. That should be my life’s purpose, to—”

He threw himself out of bed. “Jesus, Meg! What the hell do you want?”

I want you to want me, not just to make me want you.
But how could she say that without making herself look like another Beaudine groupie? “Now you’re getting paranoid. And you still haven’t fed me.”

“I’m not going to either.”

“Sure you are. Because that’s what you do. You take care of people”

“Since when did that become a bad thing?”

“Never.” She gave him a wobbly smile.

He stalked into the bathroom, and she lay back in the pillows. Ted not only cared about others, but he followed up on that caring with action. Instead of giving him a sense of entitlement, his agile, gifted brain had cursed him with the obligation to look after everyone and everything he cared about. He was almost certainly the best human being she’d ever met. And maybe the loneliest. It must be exhausting to carry such a heavy load. No wonder he hid so many of his feelings.

Or maybe she was rationalizing the emotional distance he kept from her. She didn’t like knowing he treated her the same as he’d treated all his other conquests, although she couldn’t imagine him being as rude to Lucy as he was with her.

She tossed back the sheet and climbed out of bed. Ted made everyone feel as though he shared a special relationship only with them. It was the biggest rabbit in his silk hat of tricks.

,

Spence and Sunny left Wynette with nothing settled. The town teetered between relief that they were gone and concern that they wouldn’t come back, but Meg wasn’t worried. As long as Sunny believed she had a shot at Ted, she’d be back.

Spence called Meg daily. He also sent a luxury tissue holder, a soap dish, and Viceroy Industries’ finest towel bar. “I’ll fly you out to L.A. this weekend,” he said. “You can show me around, introduce me to your parents, some of their friends. We’ll have a great time.”

His ego was too big to comprehend rejection, and trying to navigate the increasingly thin line between keeping her distance and not pissing him off was becoming more difficult every day. “Gee, Spence, sounds great, but they’re all out of town right now. Maybe next month.”

Ted was traveling on business, too, and Meg didn’t like how much she missed him. She made herself concentrate on regrouping emotionally and building up her bank account by taking advantage of her downtime on the drink cart while she waited for the golfers to play through. She found a jewelry supply store on the Internet that offered free shipping. With the tools and materials she bought, along with a couple of artifacts from the collection in her plastic bin, she worked between customers, assembling a necklace and a pair of earrings.

The day after she finished the pieces, she wore them, and the morning’s first female foursome noticed. “I’ve never seen earrings like those,” the group’s sole Diet Pepsi drinker said.

“Thanks. I just finished them.” Meg slipped them from her ears and held them up. “The beads are Tibetan Sherpa coral. Quite old. I love the way the colors have worn.”

“What about that necklace?” another woman asked. “It’s very unusual.”

“It’s a Chinese needle case,” Meg said, “from the Chin people of Southeast Asia. Over a hundred years old.”

“Imagine owning something like that. Are you selling your work?”

“Gosh, I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“I want those earrings,” Diet Pepsi said.

“How much for the necklace?” another golfer asked.

Just like that, she was in business.

The women loved the idea of owning a beautiful piece of jewelry that doubled as a historical artifact, and by the following weekend, Meg had sold another three items. She was scrupulously honest about authenticity, and she attached a card to each design documenting its provenance. She noted which materials were genuine antiquities, which might be copies, and she adjusted her prices accordingly.

Kayla heard about what she was doing and ordered some pieces on consignment for her resale shop. Things were going almost too well.

After two long weeks away, Ted showed up at the church. He was barely inside the door before they were pulling at each other’s clothes. Neither of them had the patience to negotiate the stairs to the hot choir loft. Instead, they fell on the couch she’d recently rescued from the Dumpster at the club. Ted cursed as he banged against the wicker arm, but it didn’t take him long to forget his discomfort and focus all his brainpower on remedying the mysterious flaws in his lovemaking technique.

She gave in to him as she always did. They rolled from the couch to the hard floor. The fans stirred the air over their naked bodies as he went through all the steps in the sex instruction video he must play in his head. Lights flashed, a sweeping arc across the tin ceiling. She clung to him. Begged. Commanded. Gave in.

When they were done, he sounded both wrung out and a little peevish. “Was that good enough for you?”

“Dear God, yes!”

“Damn right. Five! And don’t try to deny it.”

“Stop counting my orgasms.”

“I’m an engineer. I like statistics.”

She smiled and nudged him. “Help me move my bed downstairs. It’s too hot to sleep up there.”

She shouldn’t have introduced the subject because he jumped off the couch. “It’s too hot everywhere in this place. And that’s not a bed, it’s a fricking futon, which would be fine if we were nineteen, but we’re not.”

She tuned out his very un-Ted-like rant to enjoy the unrestricted views of his body. “I finally have furniture, so quit complaining.”

The ladies’ locker room had recently been refurbished, and she’d been able to snag the castoffs. The worn wicker pieces and old lamps looked right at home in her church, but he didn’t seem impressed. A fragment of memory distracted her from her visual survey, and she came up off the floor. “I saw lights.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“No. When we were going at each other . . .”
When you were going at me.
“I saw headlights. I think somebody drove up to the church.”

“I didn’t hear anything.” But he pulled on his shorts and went outside to look. She followed him and saw only her car and his truck.

“If anybody was here,” he said, “they had the good sense to leave.”

The idea that someone might have seen them together made her uneasy. She was allowed to pretend to be in love with Ted. But she didn’t want anybody to know it might be more than pretense.

Sex with a legendary lover wasn’t as fulfilling as she’d like, but two days later, she sold her most expensive piece, a blue glass Roman cabochon she’d wrapped with fine silver, using a technique she’d learned from a silversmith in Nepal. Her life was going too well, and she was almost relieved when she left the club the next evening and discovered someone had keyed the Rustmobile.

The scratch was long and deep, running from front fender to trunk, but considering the car’s overall dilapidated condition, hardly a catastrophe. Then other cars started honking at her for no reason. She couldn’t figure it out until she spotted the crude bumper stickers plastered on the back.

I’m Not Free but I’m Cheap

Mean People Suck. I Swallow

Ted found her crouched down in the employees’ parking lot, trying to peel off the disgusting stickers. She didn’t mean to yell, but she couldn’t hold it back. “Why would somebody do this?”

“Because they’re creeps. Here. Let me.”

His gentleness as he moved her aside nearly undid her. She grabbed for a tissue in her purse and blew her nose. “It’s not my idea of a joke.”

“Mine either,” he replied.

She turned away as he began methodically peeling up the edges of the second sticker. “People in this town are mean,” she said.

“Kids. That doesn’t excuse it, though.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself. The sprinklers went on in the flower beds. She blew her nose a second time.

“Hey, are you crying?” he asked.

She wasn’t exactly, but she was close. “I’m not a crier. Never have been. Never will be.” She’d had so little to cry about until the past few months.

He must not have believed her because he rose and set his hands on her shoulders. “You’ve put up with Arlis Hoover, and you’ve put up with me. You can handle this.”

“It’s just so . . . nasty.”

He brushed her hair with his lips. “It only says something about the kid who did it.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a kid. There are so many people here who don’t like me.”

“Fewer all the time,” he said quietly. “You’ve stood up to everybody, and that’s earned you some respect.”

“I don’t know why I even care.”

His expression grew so tender she wanted to weep. “Because you’re trying to build something for yourself,” he said. “With no help from anybody.”

“You help me.”

“How?” He dropped his hand, once again frustrated with her. “You won’t let me do anything. You won’t even let me take you out to dinner.”

“Setting aside the issue of Sunny Skipjack lusting after you, I don’t need everybody in this town knowing a sinner like me is getting it on with their sainted mayor.”

“You’re being paranoid. The only reason I’ve put up with it is because I’ve been out of town the past couple of weeks.”

“Nothing’s going to change now that you’re back. Our secret fling is staying that way.”

He temporarily dropped the subject and invited her to a private dinner that night at his place. She accepted his offer, but as soon as she reached his house, he dragged her upstairs and began playing his precise, calculated sexual games. By the end, he’d satisfied every cell in her body without touching any part of her soul. Exactly as it should be, she told herself.

“You’re a magician,” she said. “You’ve spoiled me forever for other men.”

He threw back the covers, dropped his legs hard over the side of the bed, and disappeared.

She found him in the kitchen a short while later. She’d pulled his abandoned black T-shirt over her panties, but left the rest of her clothes tangled in the duvet on his bedroom floor. His dark brown hair was rumpled from her fingers, he was still bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only a pair of shorts. His boxers, she happened to know, were tangled in the sheets.

He had a beer in his hand and a second waiting for her on the counter. “I’m not good in the kitchen,” he said, looking gorgeous and sulky.

She tore her eyes away from his chest. “I don’t believe you. You’re good at everything.” She blatantly stared at his crotch in a sad attempt to make up for her disappointment. “And I do mean everything.”

He could read her mind, and he practically sneered. “If I’m not living up to your standards, I apologize.”

“You’re delusional, and I’m hungry.”

He rested his hips against the sink, not done with being surly. “Choose what you want from the freezer, and maybe I’ll defrost it.”

He would never have talked to another woman so rudely, and her spirits rose. As she moved behind the center island, she thought about bringing up the contest, but since the national publicity had just boosted the bidding past nine thousand dollars, she couldn’t be so mean.