Call Me Irresistible (Wynette, Texas #5)(62)

He hooked his thumbs in his back pockets. "You should have seen it five years ago before they capped it."

"What do you mean 'capped it'?"

He nodded toward a rusted sign she hadn't noticed. It hung crookedly between a set of weathered metal posts not far from some abandoned tires. indian grass solid waste landfill. She gazed out over the weeds and scrub. "This was the town dump?"

"Also known as that unspoiled natural area you're so worried about protecting from development. And it's not a dump. It's a landfill."

"Same thing."

"Not at all." He launched into a brief but impressive lecture about compacted clay liners, geotextile mats, leachate collection systems, and all the other features that distinguished old-fashioned dumps from modern landfills. It shouldn't have been interesting, and it probably wouldn't have been to most people, but this was the kind of thing she'd been studying when she'd dropped out of college her senior year. Or maybe she just wanted to watch the play of expressions on his face and the way his brown hair curled around the edge of his baseball cap.

He gestured toward the open space. "For decades, the county leased this land from the city. Then two years ago the landfill hit capacity and had to be closed permanently. That left us with lost revenue and a hundred and fifty acres of degraded land, plus another hundred acres of buffer. Degraded land, in case you haven't already figured it out, is land that's not good for much of anything."

"Except a golf course?"

"Or a ski resort, which isn't too practical in central Texas. If a golf course is done right it can offer a lot of natural advantages as a wildlife sanctuary. It'll also support native plants and improve air quality. It can even moderate temperature. Golf courses can be about more than idiots chasing balls."

She should have known someone as smart as Ted would have thought about all this, and she felt a little stupid for having been so self-righteous.

He pointed toward some pipes coming out of the ground. "Landfills give off methane, so that has to be monitored. But methane can be captured and used to generate electricity, which we plan to do."



       
         
       
        

She gazed up at him from beneath the bill of her baseball cap. "It all sounds a little too good."

"This is the golf course of the future. We can't afford to build any more Augusta Nationals, that's for damn sure. Courses like that are dinosaurs, with their overtreated fairways you can eat off of and manicured roughs sucking up water."

"Has Spence bought into any of this?"

"Let's just say that once I started outlining the publicity value of building a truly environmentally sensitive golf course-how important it would make him, and not just in the golfing world-he got very interested."

She had to admit it was a brilliant strategy. Being heralded as an environmental trailblazer would be fertilizer to Spence's huge ego. "But I've never heard Spence mention any of this."

"He was too busy looking at your breasts. Which are, by the way, definitely worth looking at."

"Yeah?" She leaned against the truck's fender, hips thrust slightly forward, shorts riding low on her hip bones, more than happy to buy a little time to think through what she'd just learned about Ted Beaudine.

"Yeah." He gave her his best crooked smile, which almost looked genuine.

"I'm all sweaty," she said.

"I don't care."

"Perfect." She wanted to shatter that cool confidence, rattle him like he rattled her, so she pulled off her cap, grabbed the ragged hem of her too-tight cropped T-shirt, and whipped it over her head. "I'm the answer to your hound-dog dreams, big boy. Sex without all the messy emotional crap you hate."

He took in the navy demi-bra that clung damply to her skin. "What man doesn't?"

"But you really hate it." She let her shirt drop to the ground. "You're an emotional-sidelines kind of guy. Not that I'm complaining about last night. Absolutely not." Shut up, she told herself. Just shut up.

One eyebrow arched ever so slightly. "Then why does it sound that way?"

"Does it? Sorry. You are who you are. Take off your pants."

"No."

She'd sidetracked him with her big mouth. And, really, what did she have to complain about? "I've never known a guy so anxious to keep his clothes on. What's with you, anyway?"

The man who was never defensive lashed out. "Do you have a problem with last night that I'm not aware of? You weren't satisfied ?"

"How could I not have been satisfied? You should market what you know about the female body. I swear you took me on that rocket ride to the stars at least three times."