He slammed the door and whipped around. “Apparently, I can’t make love according to your specifications, whatever the hell they might be.”
Once again, she’d inadvertently ventured into the killing zone. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“Yeah. Telling a guy he’s a bust-out in the sack is guaranteed to make him feel great.”
“You’re not a bust-out. You’re perfect. Even I know that.”
“Then what the hell is your gripe?”
“Why do you care?” she said. “Did you ever think it might be my problem instead of yours?”
“You’re damned right it’s your problem. And I’m not perfect. I wish you’d quit saying that.”
“True. You have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and you’ve gotten so good at hiding what you’re really feeling that I doubt you even know what you feel anymore. Case in point. Your fiancée left you at the altar, and you barely seem to have noticed.”
“Let me get this straight.” He leveled his finger at her. “A woman who’s never held a job, who has no direction, and whose own family seems to have given up on her—”
“They haven’t given up on me. They’re just—I don’t know—taking a short break.” She threw up her hands. “You’re right. I’m jealous because you’re everything I’m not.”
Some of the wind went out of his sails. “You aren’t jealous, and you know it.”
“A little jealous. You don’t show anyone what you feel. I show everything to everybody.”
“Way too much.”
She couldn’t hold it back. “I just think you could be so much more.”
He gaped at her. “You’re driving a drink cart!”
“I know. And the sad thing is, I don’t entirely hate it.” With a snort of disgust, he reached for the refrigerator again. She gasped. Lunging forward, she grabbed his hands and stared at his palms. “Oh, my God. Stigmata.”
He snatched them away. “A marking-pen accident.”
She clutched her heart. “Give me a second to get my breath back, and then show me the rest of the house.”
He rubbed at the red smears on his palms and sounded sullen. “I should throw you out is what I should do.”
“You don’t have it in you.”
He stalked from the kitchen, and she thought he might really do it, but when he reached the main living area, he turned away from the front door toward a floating staircase that led to the suspended, glass-walled room. She followed him up and entered his library.
It felt a little like walking into a well-appointed tree house. Walls of books surrounded a comfortable seating area. An open archway in the back wall led to a glass-enclosed walkway that connected this part of the house to a small, separate room constructed against the hillside. “Bomb shelter?” she asked. “Or safe zone to hide out from the ladies?”
“My office.”
“Cool.” She didn’t wait for his permission but crossed the walkway. Twin panels of ceiling lights came on automatically as she went down two steps into a spare room with high windows; a massive computer workstation of tempered glass and black steel; several ergonomic chairs; and some sleek, built-in storage cabinets. The office was spare, almost sterile. All it revealed about its owner was his efficiency.
“No nudie calendars or I-Heart-Wynette coffee mugs?”
“I come here to work.”
She retraced her steps and returned to the suspended library. “The Chronicles of Narnia,” she said, taking in a shelf of well-read children’s classics. “I loved that series. And Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I must have read it a dozen times.”
“Peter and Fudge,” he said, coming back into the room from behind her.
“I can’t believe you held on to these.”
“Hard to get rid of old friends.”
Or any friends, for that matter. The whole world made up Ted’s inner circle. Yet how close was he to any of them?
She surveyed his collection and found both literary and genre fiction, biographies, nonfiction on a head-spinning variety of topics, and technical volumes: texts on pollution and global warming; on plant biology, pesticide use, and public health; books about soil conservation and safe water; about creating natural habitats and preserving wetlands.
She felt ridiculous. “All my yammering about how golf courses are destroying the world. You’ve been on top of this from the beginning.” She pulled a volume called A New Ecology from the shelf. “I remember this from my college reading list. Can I borrow it?”
“Go ahead.” He sat on a low couch and crossed an ankle over his knee. “Lucy told me you dropped out your senior year, but she didn’t tell me why.”
“Too hard.”
“Don’t give me that.”
She ran a hand over the book’s cover. “I was restless. Stupid. I couldn’t wait for my life to begin, and college felt like a waste of time.” She didn’t like the bitter edge to her words. “Your basic spoiled brat.”
“Not exactly.”
She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. “Sure I was. Am.”
“Hey. I was a rich kid, too, remember?”
“Right. You and Lucy. The same übersuccessful parents, the same advantages, and look how you two turned out.”
“Only because we both found our passions early on,” he said evenly.
“Yeah, well, I found mine, too. Bumming around the world having a good time.”
He toyed with a pen he picked up from the floor. “A lot of young people do that while they’re trying to figure things out. There isn’t much of a road map for people like us, the ones who’ve grown up with high-achieving parents. Every kid wants to make his family proud, but when your parents are the best in the world at what they do, it’s a little tough to pull off.”
“You and Lucy did. So have my brothers. Even Clay. He’s not making much money now, but he’s amazingly talented, and he will.”
He clicked the pen. “You can match every success story with one about a trust-fund baby living an aimless, club-hopping life between stints at rehab, something you seem to have avoided.”
“True, but . . .” Her words, when she finally spoke them, sounded small and fragile. “I want to find my passion, too.”
“Maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong place,” he said quietly.
“You forget that I’ve been everywhere.”
“Traveling around the world is a lot more fun than traveling around inside your own head, I guess.” He discarded the pen and rose from the couch. “What makes you happy, Meg? That’s the question you need to answer.”
You make me happy. Looking at you. Listening to you. Watching the way your mind works. Kissing you. Touching you. Letting you touch me. “Being outside,” she retorted. “Wearing funky clothes. Collecting old beads and coins. Fighting with my brothers. Listening to birds. Smelling the air. Useful stuff like that.”
Jesus wouldn’t sneer, and neither did Ted. “Well, then. That’s where your answer lies.”
The conversation had gotten way too deep. She wanted to psychoanalyze him, not the other way around. She plopped on the couch he’d just vacated. “So how’s that fabulous contest coming along?”
His expression darkened. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“Last I heard, the bidding for your services had gone over seven thousand.”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.”
She’d successfully diverted the conversation away from her own defects, and she propped her feet on the footstool. “I saw yesterday’s USA Today at the club. I can’t believe how much national attention this thing has started to attract.”
He grabbed a couple of books from a narrow table and shoved them back on the shelf.
“Great headline in their Life section.” She sketched it out in the air. “ ‘Jilted Jorik Fiancé for Sale to Highest Bidder.’ They painted you as quite the philanthropist.”
“Will you just shut up about it?” He actually snarled.
She
smiled. “You and Sunny are going to have a great time in San Francisco. I highly recommend you take her to the de Young Museum.” And then, before he could yell, “Can I see the rest of your house?”
Again that snarl. “Are you going to touch anything?”
She was only human, and as she rose, she let her eyes drift over him. “Definitely.”
That one word blew the summer storm clouds from his eyes. He cocked his head. “Then how about I show you my bedroom first?”
“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.”
r /> 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.”