He frowned at her. “You’re making this hard.”
“What am I making hard?” she asked, unable to hide her growing exasperation. “I just let you completely off the hook. No harm, no foul. Go forth and do whatever the hell you do without giving me another thought.”
“That would be the sensible thing for me to do,” he agreed.
“Then do it.”
He shook his head. “Can’t.”
“Why not? There’s the door. Walk out and that’s that. No big deal.” She held her breath waiting for him to take her advice and go. Instead, he sat right where he was, his expression glum. Beth sighed. “Mack, what is going on?”
“Have you had lunch yet?”
“I’ve had coffee and candy. In my book that qualifies.”
“Not in mine. Let’s go.”
“I don’t have time.”
“You do for this,” he coaxed, his lips twitching when her stomach growled. “I’ll have you back in an hour, like always.”
“It’s twelve-thirty. There’s not a decent restaurant anywhere that won’t be mobbed at this hour.”
“I’ll have you back in an hour,” he repeated.
Since he’d never before broken that promise, Beth finally gave in. And since the coffee and caffeine definitely hadn’t done what she’d intended—taken her mind off Mack—maybe another hour in his annoying company would do the trick. At least she’d be well fed at the end of it.
“Okay,” she relented. “One hour, and we don’t talk about us.”
“Deal,” he said.
Once again, the instant they reached the very popular crab house on the Potomac River, a table magically appeared. Their food arrived moments later—a dozen steamed and spiced crabs with coleslaw and potato salad.
Mack handed her a wooden mallet with a grin. “Pretend you’re bashing me upside the head, and you’ll get through these in no time.”
Cracking crabs was messy work, but the succulent meat was worth the effort. And thinking of each red shell as Mack’s hard head did give her a certain amount of perverse pleasure as she hammered away. She uttered a little sigh when she’d finished the last one. Only then did she realize that Mack had eaten very little.
“Weren’t you hungry? This is the second time today when you’ve sat there and watched me eat.”
“I’m trying to fatten you up,” he said.
“Planning to have me slaughtered like a pig?”
“Nope. Looking for a little more flesh to hang on to.”
The comment brought an immediate flush to her cheeks. “Mack!”
“Sorry,” he said at once, though he didn’t look especially repentant. “I promised you we wouldn’t talk about us. I suppose that precludes any talk of sex, as well.”
“There is no us,” she said flatly, refusing to get drawn into any discussion of sex.
“Yeah, you would have thought so, wouldn’t you?”
She stared at him, not sure how to take the wry note in his voice. “Meaning?”
“We’re not much alike. You’re serious. I’m not. You’re brilliant—”
“So are you,” she said impatiently, tired of him using his own stereotypical image as some sort of cop-out. “Stop denigrating your intelligence. You have a law degree, which you earned while playing professional football. You can’t juggle all that without being smart. And it must take some intelligence to run a successful football franchise, even if I don’t happen to get why you’d want to.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I think.”
“Since you’re busy laying out all our differences, how about this one? I’m a struggling researcher and physician and you’re very, very rich.”
He grinned. “Too obvious and not that important, unless, of course, you’re trying to decide whether to go after me for my money.”
Beth smiled as she was struck by a brilliant idea to get her research project moving along at a swifter pace. Maybe she should test the waters and see if he was open to the idea. Hopefully he wouldn’t conclude that she really was in this just for the money. “Actually I’m trying to decide whether to get you to fund a new research project,” she retorted cheerfully.
“Just tell me what you need,” he said matter-of-factly.
She stared at him in shock, totally unprepared for his immediate agreement. “I was joking,” she protested. “Or at least half joking.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered, not quite daring to believe he was as serious as he sounded. She had grants, but with just a little more funding she could hire the kind of assistant who would enable her to move her research along much more quickly.