Call Me Irresistible (Wynette, Texas #5)(79)

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 lust 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 crap?"

"We spent a lot of time in Washington. And, frankly, Lucy didn't rile people like you do."

Meg came up off the chair. "Nobody 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 bumper stickers on your car might not have been the work of kids."

"Somebody tried to break off my windshield 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 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."