Part 21 (1/2)
”Gonorrhea is misspelled,” he pointed out. ”And the letterhead is bogus.” is misspelled,” he pointed out. ”And the letterhead is bogus.”
She crumpled the paper in her fist. ”Why didn't you show me this as soon as you got here?”
”I was afraid you wouldn't put out.”
”Ted ...”
He eyed her casually. ”Do you have any idea who might be behind this?”
She thought of the message on her bathroom mirror. ”Any one of the millions of women who l.u.s.t after you.”
He ignored that. ”The letter was mailed from Austin, but that doesn't mean much.”
Now was the moment to tell him his mother had tried to get her fired, but Meg couldn't imagine Francesca Beaudine doing anything as vile as sending this letter. Besides, Francesca would almost certainly have checked for spelling errors. And she doubted Sunny would have made the mistake in the first place, unless she'd done it deliberately to throw them off track. As for Kayla, Zoey, and the other women holding on to fantasies about Ted ... Meg could hardly throw around accusations based on dirty looks. She threw the paper on the floor. ”Why didn't Lucy have to put up with this c.r.a.p?”
”We spent a lot of time in Was.h.i.+ngton. And, frankly, Lucy didn't rile people like you do.”
Meg came up off the chair. ”n.o.body knows about us except your mother and whoever she might have told.”
”Dad and Lady Emma, who would probably have told Kenny.”
”Who, I'm sure, told Torie. And if big-mouth Torie knows-”
”If Torie knew, she'd have been on the phone to me right away.”
”That leaves our mysterious visitor from three nights ago,” she said. Ted's wandering eyes indicated her sarong was slipping, and she tightened it. ”The idea that someone might have been watching us through the window ...”
”Exactly.” He set his beer bottle on the wine crate. ”I'm starting to think those b.u.mper stickers on your car might not have been the work of kids.”
”Somebody tried to break off my winds.h.i.+eld wipers.”
He frowned, and she once again debated mentioning the scrawl on her mirror, but she didn't want to be locked out of her home, and that's exactly what would happen. ”How many people have keys to the church?” she asked.
”Why?”
”I'm wondering if I should be nervous.”
”I changed the locks when I took over the place,” he said. ”You have the key I kept outside. I have one. Lucy might still have one, and there's a spare at the house.”
Which meant the intruder had probably come in through the unlocked back door. Leaving it unlocked was a mistake Meg would make sure she didn't repeat.
It was time to ask the big question, and she poked the crumpled ball of paper with her bare toes. ”That letterhead looked authentic. And lots of government workers aren't great spellers.” She licked her lips. ”It could have been true.” She finally met his eyes. ”So why didn't you ask me about it right away?”
Incredibly, her question seemed to annoy him. ”What do you mean? If there was a problem, you'd have told me a long time ago.”
She felt as if he'd ripped the floorboards right out from under her. All that trust ... in her integrity. Right then she knew the worst had happened. Her stomach fell to her knees. She'd fallen in love withhim.
She wanted to rip her hair out. Of course she'd fallen in love with him. What woman hadn't? Falling in love with Ted was a female rite of pa.s.sage in Wynette, and she'd just joined the sisterhood.
She was starting to hyperventilate, so she did what she always did when she felt cornered. ”You have to go now.”
His gaze wandered down the thin silk sarong. ”If I do that, this won't be anything more than a booty call.”
”Right. Exactly the way I want it. Your glorious body, with as little conversation as possible.”
”I'm starting to feel like the chick in this relations.h.i.+p.”
”Consider it a growth experience.”
He smiled, rose from the couch, pulled her into his arms, and began kissing her senseless. Just as she started to fall into another Beaudine-induced s.e.xual coma, he enacted his legendary self-control and pulled away. ”Sorry, babe. If you want more of what I've got, you have to go out with me. Get dressed.”
She pulled herself back to reality. ”Two words I never again want to hear coming out of your mouth. What's wrong with you, anyway?”
”I want to go out to dinner,” he said evenly. ”The two of us. Like normal people. At a real restaurant.”
”A really bad idea.”
”Spence and Sunny have an international trade show coming up that'll keep them out of the country for a while, and while they're away, I'm going to catch up on my sadly neglected business.” He tucked a curl behind her ear. ”I'll be gone almost two weeks. Before I take off, I want a night out, and I'm sick of sneaking around.”
”Tough,” she retorted. ”Stop being so selfish. Think about your precious town, then picture the expression on Sunny's face if she found out the two of us-”
His cool faded. ”The town and Sunny are my business, not yours.”
”With that kind of self-centered att.i.tude, Mr. Mayor, you'll never get reelected.”
”I didn't want to be elected the first time!”
She finally agreed to a Tex-Mex restaurant in Fredericksburg, but once they got there, she maneuvered him into a chair that faced the wall so she could keep a lookout. That aggravated him so much he ordered for both of them without consulting her.
”You never get mad,” she said when their server left the table. ”Except at me.”
”That's not true,” he said tightly. ”Torie can get me going.”
”Torie doesn't count. You were obviously her mother in a previous life.”
He retaliated by hogging the chip basket.
”I'd never have taken you for a sulker,” she said after a long, heavy silence. ”Yet look at you.”
He shoved a chip into the hottest bowl of salsa. ”I hate sneaking around, and I'm not doing it any longer. This affair is coming out of the closet.”
His mulish determination scared her. ”Hold it right there. Spence is used to getting what he wants for Sunny and for himself. If you didn't believe that, you wouldn't have encouraged me to stay all palsy-walsy with him.”
He snapped a chip in half. ”That's going to stop, too. Right now.”
”No, it's not. I'll handle Spence. You deal with Sunny. As for the two of us ... I told you from the beginning how it was going to be.”
”And I'm telling you ...” He jabbed the broken chip in the general direction of her face. ”I've never sneaked around in my life, and I'm not doing it now.”
She couldn't believe he was saying this. ”You can't jeopardize something so important for a few meaningless rolls in the hay. This is a temporary fling, Ted. Temporary. Any day now, I'll pull up stakes and head back to L.A. I'm surprised I haven't done it already.”