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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 with him.
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 passage 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 relationship.”
“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 sexual 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 attitude, 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 i
nto 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.”
