Ted looked pained and quickly announced that he and Kenny would join them. Torie glanced at Meg, and the mischievous glimmer in her eyes explained why Ted wanted to keep her far away from Skipjack. “Meg’s going to caddy for Ted again, right?”
Ted and Meg both spoke up. “No!”
But Kenny, for some unfathomable reason, decided that was a great idea, and with Spence saying the match wouldn’t be half as much fun without Meg, the handwriting was blood-spattered all over the wall.
When Spence disappeared to the men’s room, the conversation grew more sober. “Here’s what I can’t figure out,” Torie said to Ted. “Spence’s people made it clear last spring that he’d eliminated Wynette and decided on San Antone. Then a month ago, without any warning, he pops up again and says Wynette’s back in the running. I’d like to know what happened to change his mind.”
“The folks in San Antone are as surprised as we are,” Ted said. “They thought they had it sewn up.”
“Too bad for them.” Torie waved at someone across the room. “We need this more than they do.”
When it was time to leave, Dallie insisted on dropping Spence off at the inn, which was how Meg ended up alone in Ted’s Benz. She waited until they reached the highway before she broke the silence. “You’re not having an affair with Kenny’s sister.”
“I’d better tell her that.”
“And you never screwed around on Luce.”
“Whatever you say.”
“And”—she studied the easy way his hands curled over the steering wheel and wondered if anything ever came hard to this charmed creature—“if you want my continued cooperation with Spence—which I assure you that you do—we need to come to an understanding.”
“Who says I need your cooperation?”
“Oh, you need it, all right.” She slipped her fingers into her hair. “It’s fascinating, isn’t it, how impressed Spence is with my father and, by extension, with me? Insulting to my mother, of course, considering how powerful she is in the industry, not to mention being one of the most beautiful women in the world. Still, Spence did mention that he had her poster on his bedroom wall, and he’s definitely smitten with me, for whatever twisted reason. That means I’ve gone from a liability to an asset, and you, my friend, need to work a little harder to please me, starting with those cheapskate tips. Spence gave Mark a hundred dollars today.”
“Mark didn’t cost Spence three holes and I don’t know how many bad shots. But fine. Tomorrow I’ll tip you a hundred. Minus fifty dollars for every hole you cost me.”
“Minus ten dollars for every hole I cost you, and it’s a deal. By the way, I’m not big on diamonds and roses, but an open account at the grocery wouldn’t go unappreciated.”
He slanted her one of his saintly looks. “I thought you were too proud to take my money.”
“Take it, yes. Earn it? Definitely not.”
“Spence didn’t get where he is by being stupid. I doubt he bought that cockamamie story of your unrequited passion for me.”
“He’d better have bought it because I won’t let that man paw me again, not for all the golf resorts in the world, and irresistible you is my excuse.”
He lifted an eyebrow at her, then turned into the dark, narrow lane that led to her temporary home. “Maybe you should reconsider. He’s a decent-looking guy, and he’s rich. Frankly, he could be the answer to your prayers.”
“If I were going to put a price tag on my lady parts, I’d find a more appetizing buyer.”
Ted liked that, and he was still grinning when they pulled up to the church. She opened the passenger door to get out. He slipped his arm over the back of her seat and gave her a look she couldn’t quite fathom. “I assume I’m invited in,” he said. “Considering the intensity of your feelings for me?”
He had her in his high beams, those amber eyes delivering his personal elixir of rapt attention, perfect understanding, deep appreciation, and forgiveness for all her sins.
He was totally messing with her.
She pulled a tragic sigh. “I need to get past your otherworldly perfection before I can begin to think about exposing you to my lusty side.”
“How lusty?”
“Off the charts.” She slid out of the car. “Good night, Theodore. Sweet dreams.”
She climbed the stairs to the church doors with the glare from his headlights lighting her way. When she reached the top, she slipped the key in the lock and let herself inside. The church enfolded her. Dark, empty, lonely.
,
She spent the next day on the drink cart without getting fired, something she regarded as a major accomplishment, since she hadn’t been able to resist reminding a few of the golfers to dump their freaking beverage cans in the recycling containers instead of the trash bins. Bruce Garvin, the father of Birdie’s friend Kayla, was particularly hostile, and Meg suspected she had Spencer Skipjack’s interest in her to thank for her continued employment. She was also deeply grateful that news of her fake declaration of love for Ted didn’t seem to have spread. Apparently last night’s witnesses had decided to keep quiet, a miracle in a small town.
She greeted Birdie’s daughter, Haley, when she went into the snack shop to get fresh ice and replenish the beverages in the cart. Haley had either taken in the seams on her employee’s polo shirt or traded with someone smaller because the outline of her breasts was on full display. “Mr. Collins is playing today,” she said, “and he’s big on Gatorade, so make sure you have plenty.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Meg pointed toward the candy bar display. “Mind if I take some of these? I’ll toss them on top of the ice and see if they sell.”
“Good idea. And if you run into Ted, would you tell him I need to talk to him?”
Meg sincerely hoped she didn’t run into him.
“He’s turned off his cell,” Haley said, “and I’m supposed to do his grocery shopping today.”
“You do his grocery shopping?”
“I run errands for him. Mail packages. Do things he doesn’t have time for himself.” She lifted some hot dogs out of the steamer. “I think I told you I’m his personal assistant.”
“That’s right. You did.” Meg concealed her amusement. She’d grown up around personal assistants, and they did a lot more than run errands.
When she got home that evening, she opened the windows, glad the need for secrecy was gone, then took a quick swim in the creek. Afterward, she sat cross-legged on the floor and examined some unclaimed costume jewelry she’d gotten permission to take from the club’s lost-and-found box. She liked working with jewelry, and the glimmer of an idea had been poking at her for the last few days. She retrieved a pair of ancient long-nosed pliers she’d found in a kitchen drawer and began taking apart an inexpensive charm bracelet.
A car pulled up outside, and a few moments later, Ted wandered in looking sloppy and gorgeous in navy slacks and a wrinkled gray sport shirt.
“Ever hear of knocking?” she said.
“Ever hear of trespassing?”
His open shirt collar revealed the suntanned hollow at the base of his throat. She stared at it for a moment too long, then jabbed at the jump ring attached to the bracelet’s clasp. “I got a text message from Lucy today.”
“I don’t care.” He moved deeper into the room, bringing with him the nauseating scent of undiluted goodness.
“She still won’t tell me what she’s doing or exactly where she is.” The pliers slipped. She winced as she pinched her finger. “All she’ll say is that no terrorists have captured her and I shouldn’t worry.”
“Repeat. Don’t care.”
She sucked her finger. “Yes, you do, although not in the way most abandoned bridegrooms would care. Your pride’s injured, but your heart doesn’t even seem bruised, let alone broken.”
“You don’t know anything about my heart.”
The need to be disagreeable wouldn’t let go, and as she once again dragged her eyes away from that odious open shirt collar, she recalled a tidbit
she’d picked up from Haley. “Don’t you think it’s a little embarrassing for a man your age to still live with his parents?”
“I don’t live with my parents.”
“Close enough. You have a house on the same property.”
“It’s a big property, and they like having me nearby.”
Unlike her own parents, who’d booted her out the door. “How sweet,” she said. “Does Yummy Mummy tuck you in at night?”
“Not unless I ask her to. And you’re not exactly in a position to make Yummy Mummy cracks.”
“True. But I don’t live with mine.” She didn’t like him looming over her, so she uncoiled from the floor and wandered toward her only piece of living room furniture, the ugly brown upholstered chair Ted had left behind. “What do you want?”
“Nothing. Just relaxing.” He meandered over to a window and ran his thumb along one side of the frame.
She perched on the chair arm. “You have a tough life for sure. Do you actually work? I mean aside from your so-called mayor’s job.”
Her question seemed to amuse him. “Sure I work. I have a desk and a pencil sharpener and everything.”
“Where?”
“Secret location.”
“All the better to keep the women away?”
“To keep everybody away.”
She thought that over. “I know you invented some kind of whiz-bang software system that made you a gazillion dollars, but I haven’t heard much talk about it. What kind of job do you have?”
“A lucrative job.” He gave a quick, apologetic tilt of his head. “Sorry. Foreign word you wouldn’t understand.”
“That’s just mean.”
He smiled and gazed up at the ceiling fan. “I can’t believe how hot it is in here, and it’s only the first of July. Hard to imagine how much worse it’ll get.” He shook his head, his expression as guileless as a saint’s. “I was going to put in air-conditioning for Lucy, but I’m glad now that I didn’t. Adding all those fluorocarbons to the atmosphere would have kept you awake at night. Do you have any beer?”
She glowered at him. “I can barely afford milk for cereal.”
“You’re living here rent free,” he pointed out. “The least you could do is keep beer in the refrigerator for company.”
“You’re not company. You’re an infestation. What do you want?”
“This is my place, remember? I don’t have to want anything.” He pointed the toe of a scuffed, but very expensive, loafer toward the jewelry laid out on the floor. “What’s all this?”
“Some costume jewelry.” She knelt down and began to gather it up.
“I hope you didn’t pay real money for it. Eye of the beholder, I guess.”
She gazed up at him. “Does this place have a postal address?”
“Sure it has an address. Why do you want to know?”
“I want to know where I live, that’s all.” She also needed some things sent to her that were packed away in her closet back home. She found a scrap of paper and wrote down the address he gave her. She nodded toward the front of the church. “As long as you’re here, will you turn on the hot water? I’m getting tired of cold showers.”
“Tell me about it.”
She smiled. “You can’t still be suffering from the effects of Lucy’s three-month sexual moratorium?”
“Damn, but you women sure do like to talk.”
“I told her it was stupid.” She wished she were evil enough to pass on the news that Lucy had already taken a lover.
“We finally agree on something,” he said.
“Still . . .” She returned to putting the jewelry away. “Everybody knows you can have any brainless woman in Wynette. I don’t exactly see what your problem is finding sexual companionship.”
He looked at her as though she’d just joined the Idiots Club.
“Right,” she said. “This is Wynette, and you’re Ted Beaudine. If you do one of them, you’d have to do them all.”
He grinned.
She’d intended to annoy, not to amuse, and she took another swipe. “Too bad I was wrong about you and Torie. A clandestine affair with a married woman would answer your problem. Almost as good as being married to Lucy.”
“What do you mean by that?”
She extended her legs and leaned back on her hands. “No messy emotional crap. You know. Like real love and genuine passion.”
He stared at her a moment, those tiger eyes inscrutable. “You think Lucy and I didn’t have passion?”
“Not to be insulting—okay, maybe a little insulting—but I sincerely doubt you have a passionate bone in your body.”
An ordinary mortal would have been offended, but not St. Theodore. He merely looked thoughtful. “Let me get this straight. A screwup like you is analyzing me?”
“Fresh viewpoint.”
He nodded. Contemplated. And then he did a very un–Ted Beaudine–like thing. He dropped his lids and gave her a wicked eye-rake. Starting at the top of her head and sliding down her body, lingering here and there along the way. Her mouth. Her breasts. The apex of her thighs. Leaving hot little eddies of desire behind.
The absolute horror of not being immune to him hurled her into action, and she jumped up from the floor. “Waste of effort, Mr. B. Unless, of course, you’re paying.”
“Paying?”
“You know. A big wad of twenties on the dresser afterward. Oops . . . I don’t have a dresser. Oh, well, there goes that idea.”
She’d finally managed to annoy him. He stalked into the back room to either turn on the hot water or blow the place up. She sincerely hoped it was the former. Not long after, she heard the back door close, and a few moments later, his car pulling away. She was strangely disappointed.
The foursome teed off the next day. Ted and Torie playing Kenny and Spence.
“I had to go to Austin yesterday,” Spence told Meg, “and every time I saw a beautiful woman, I thought about you.”
“Jeez, why?”
Ted gave her a surreptitious poke. Spence threw back his head and laughed. “You’re something, Miz Meg. You know who you remind me of?”
“I’m hoping a young Julia Roberts.”
“You remind me of me, that’s who.” He resettled his straw Panama on his head. “I had a lot of challenges in my life, but I always faced them down.”
Ted whapped her on the back. “That’s our Meg, all right.”
By the time they reached the third green, she was wilting from the heat but still happy to be outside. She forced herself to concentrate on being the perfect caddy, along with shooting Ted adoring glances every time Spence got too cozy.
“Would you stop that!” Ted said, when they were out of earshot.
“What do you care?”
“It’s unnerving, that’s all,” he complained. “Like being trapped in an alternate reality.”
“You should be used to adoring glances.”
“Not from you.”
It was soon evident, even to Meg, that Torie was a highly competitive athlete, but on the back nine, she suddenly began missing putts. Ted never lost his easy charm, not until he was alone with Meg when he confirmed her suspicions that Torie was doing it deliberately. “That was barely a three-foot putt,” he groused, “and Torie lips the cup. Spence could be around for weeks. Anybody who thinks I’m going to let him win every match is crazy.”
“Which is obviously why Torie missed that putt.” At least someone other than herself understood Spence’s ego. She glanced around for the most recent head cover she seemed to have misplaced. “Concentrate on the big picture, Mr. Mayor. If you’re determined to destroy the local environment with this project, you need to be more like Torie and work harder to make Spence happy.”
He ignored her jab. “Look who’s talking about making Spence happy. It wouldn’t hurt you to be nicer to him. I swear I’m going to stage a public fight with you so he knows exactly how unrequited your passion for me is.”
He put a long wedge shot on the
green, tossed the club at her, and stalked off.
Thanks to Torie, Spence and Kenny pulled off a one-hole victory. Afterward, Meg headed for the ladies’ locker room, which, technically, employees weren’t supposed to use, but since it was equipped with a vast array of personal-care products sadly missing from her own collection, she used it anyway. As she splashed her heat-flushed face with cold water, Torie joined her at the sink. Unlike Meg, the heat didn’t seem to have affected Torie, who merely pulled off her visor to refasten her ponytail, then looked around to make sure the locker room was empty. “So what’s really between you and Ted?”
“What do you mean? Haven’t you heard the rumors about how I drove Lucy away so I could have him for myself?”
“I’m a lot brighter than I look. And you’re not a woman who’d fall for a guy who basically hates your guts.”
“I don’t think he hates me as much as he did. Now it’s more your run-of-the-mill loathing.”
“Interesting.” Torie shook out her long hair, then gathered it together again.
Meg grabbed a washcloth from the pile by the sink and ran it under the cold water. “You don’t seem to hate me, either. Why is that? Everybody else in town does.”
“I have my reasons.” She snapped the elastic back into place. “Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t scratch your eyes out if I really believed you were a threat to Ted.”
“I broke up his marriage, remember?”
Torie gave a noncommittal shrug.
Meg studied her, but Torie wasn’t giving anything more away. Meg rubbed the cold washcloth over the back of her neck. “Since we’re having this heart-to-heart, I’m curious how your husband would feel if he knew you were practically naked in a hotel room with Ted?”
“Oh, Dex didn’t mind the naked part—I’d just come out of the shower—but he wasn’t happy about Ted kissing me like that, even after I pointed out that I was an innocent bystander.” She disappeared into the nearest stall, still talking. “Dex got all huffy and informed Ted that he drew the line at kissing. I told Dex I wished he’d draw it someplace else because, even though I doubted that kiss was Ted’s best effort, it was still kind of fun. Then Dex said he’d show me all the fun I could handle, which, if you knew my husband, would make you laugh, but Dex was feeling crabby because, a couple of weeks ago, I’d tricked him into staying with the girls while I went with Ted to test the new GPS he made for his truck. Dex wanted to do the test run himself.”