Susan Elizabeth Phillips - Call Me Irresistible

“I say Angelina Jolie.” Kayla pulled out her lip gloss. “Seriously. Any woman who says she wouldn’t is either a liar or in deep denial. That woman oozes sex.”

“In your opinion.” Zoey, who’d been so morally righteous earlier, began fussing with her hair. “I’d choose Kerry Washington. A strong black woman. Or Anne Hathaway. But only because she went to Vassar.”

“You would not go gay for Anne Hathaway,” Birdie protested. “Anne Hathaway’s a great actress, but she’s not your sexual type.”

“Since I’m not gay, my sexual type isn’t the point.” Zoey grabbed Kayla’s lip gloss. “I’m merely commenting that if I were gay, I’d want a partner with brains and talent, not just beauty.”

Emma straightened her sunflower shirt. “I must admit that I find Keira Knightley oddly compelling.”

Kayla retrieved her lip gloss. “You always go for the Brits.”

“At least she got over her thing for Emma Thompson.” Torie tugged a paper towel from the dispenser. “What about you, Meg?”

Meg was more than a little sick of being manipulated. “I prefer men. Specifically hunky Texas men. Do you have any ideas?”

All around her, she could hear mental wheels grinding as the crazy women of Wynette tried to figure out how to respond. She headed for the door and left them to ponder.

By the time she’d returned to the table, she’d reached three conclusions: Ted’s problems with Sunny were his own to resolve. She would handle Spence on a day-by-day basis. And nobody was going to drive her out of this horrible town until she was good and ready to leave.

Meg saw Ted on the course the next day, but he was playing with Spence and Sunny, and he steered clear of her drink cart. When she got home that evening, she found a delivery truck parked at her front steps waiting for her. Ten minutes later, she’d sent the truck, along with its load of furniture, on its way.

She stomped into the hot, airless church. People kept trying to give her things she didn’t want. Last night Shelby had slipped the getaway check into her purse, leaving Meg to tear it up. And now this. Granted, she needed furniture, and when she’d spotted the portable air conditioners, she’d almost set aside her principles. Almost, but not quite.

She threw open the church windows, turned on the fans, and poured a glass of iced tea from the refrigerator. This was the second time in a week that somebody had tried to pay her to leave town. If she let herself think about it, she’d get depressed, and she didn’t want to be depressed. She wanted to be angry. After a quick shower, she pulled on shorts, a tank, slipped into a pair of flip-flops, and set off.

Stone pillars marked the entrance to the Beaudine estate. She wound through a grove of hardwood trees and crossed an old stone bridge before the road branched into a series of meandering lanes. The main house was easy to identify—low and sprawling, built in the Texas hacienda style of limestone and stucco with arched windows and doors framed in dark wood. Behind a low wall, she glimpsed a spacious pool, pool house, courtyard, gardens, and two smaller buildings in the same hacienda style, probably guest cottages. This wasn’t so much an estate, she realized, as a compound, and everywhere she looked, breathtaking views spread before her.

When the road circled back on itself, she chose another lane but found only a putting green and maintenance buildings. She tried again and came upon a small stone and brick ranch with Skeet Cooper’s pickup visible inside the open garage door. Nothing like keeping your caddy close by.

The last lane wound uphill where it opened onto a rocky bluff. And there it stood, a modern structure of perfectly balanced cream stucco rectangles topped by a butterfly roof. Sweeping sheets of glass faced south, along with sharp overhangs to shade the interior. Even without the small, sleek wind turbines mounted on the roof, she would have known this was his house. Its beauty, inventiveness, and functionality spoke volumes about its owner.

The front door opened before she could ring the bell, and he stood before her barefoot in a black T-shirt and gray athletic shorts. “Did you enjoy your tour?”

Either someone had tipped him off or security cameras monitored the property. Knowing his love of gadgetry, she suspected the latter. “The mighty ruler of the Kingdom of Beaudine is indeed all-knowing.”

“I do my best.” He moved back to let her in.

The house was open and airy, decorated in pale shades of gray and white—a cool, calming retreat from the punishing summer heat and the equally punishing demands of being Ted Beaudine. The furniture sat low, each piece carefully chosen for both its comfort and quiet, unimposing beauty. The most startling feature was a glass-enclosed rectangular room suspended above the soaring living area.

The house was almost monastically spare. No sculptures stood in the corners; no paintings graced its walls. The art lay outside in the views of river bluffs, granite hills, and distant, shadowed valleys.

She’d grown up in grand houses—her family’s rambling Connecticut farmhouse, their Bel Air home, the weekend house on Morro Bay—but this was something quite special. “Nice digs,” she said.

As he crossed the bamboo floor, a foyer light that had come on when he’d admitted her automatically shut off. “If you’ve shown up for sex, I’m bored with you,” he said.

“That would explain the large bed on the delivery truck, along with those comfy, man-size chairs.”

“And the couch. Don’t forget the couch. Not to hurt your feelings, but your place isn’t too comfortable. And from the phone call I just got, I hear you want to keep it like that. Why did you send that truck away?”

“Did you really think I was going to take presents from you?”

“The furniture was for me, not you. I’ll be damned if I spend another night on that futon.”

“Good thing you’re bored with me.”

“I might change my mind. As a matter of fact—”

“It isn’t your job to furnish my place,” she said. “I’ll do it when I get around to it. Although I have to admit you almost sucked me in with those air conditioners. Unfortunately, I’ve developed this totally asinine sense of personal pride.”

“Your loss.”

“You have enough people to take care of, Mr. Mayor. You don’t have to take care of me, too.”

She’d finally caught him off balance. He looked at her oddly. “That’s not what I was doing.”

“Oh, yes, you were.” She did her best to contain the thread of tenderness unraveling inside her. “I came here to rip your head off, but this house seems to have sucked away most of my righteous indignation. Do you happen to have anything to eat?”

He tilted his head. “Back there.”

The stunning stainless-steel kitchen wasn’t large, but it was dauntingly efficient. A limousine-long central island began as a workspace, then seamlessly extended into a sleek table large enough for a dinner party, with four wire-back chairs pushed under it on each side. “I don’t like dining rooms,” he said. “I like to eat in the kitchen.”

“I think you’re onto something.”

Forgetting her hunger, she wandered over to the room’s most striking feature, another colossal sheet-glass wall, this one looking down upon the Pedernales Valley where the river ran like a blue-green ribbon over jagged limestone shelves. Beyond the valley, the setting sun outlined the purple hills in a tangerine blaze. “Extraordinary,” she said. “You designed this house, didn’t you?”

“It’s an experiment in net zero energy.”

“Meaning?”

“The house produces more energy than it consumes. Right now about forty percent. There are photovoltaic and solar panels in the roof, along with rainwater collection. I have a gray water system, geothermal heating and cooling machines, appliances with kill switches to keep them from drawing power in the off mode. Basically, I’m living off the grid.”

Ted had made his fortune helping towns optimize electrical usage, so the house was a natural extension of his work, but it was still remarkable.

“We use too damned much power in this country.” He pulled open the refrigerator door. “I’ve got some leftover roast beef. Or there’s stuff in the freezer.”

She couldn’t keep the wonder out of her voice. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

He slammed the door and whipped around. “Apparently, I can’t make love according to your specifications, whatever the hell they might be.”

Once again, she’d inadvertently ventured into the killing zone. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“Yeah. Telling a guy he’s a bust-out in the sack is guaranteed to make him feel great.”

“You’re not a bust-out. You’re perfect. Even I know that.”

“Then what the hell is your gripe?”

“Why do you care?” she said. “Did you ever think it might be my problem instead of yours?”

“You’re damned right it’s your problem. And I’m not perfect. I wish you’d quit saying that.”

“True. You have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and you’ve gotten so good at hiding what you’re really feeling that I doubt you even know what you feel anymore. Case in point. Your fiancée left you at the altar, and you barely seem to have noticed.”

“Let me get this straight.” He leveled his finger at her. “A woman who’s never held a job, who has no direction, and whose own family seems to have given up on her—”

“They haven’t given up on me. They’re just—I don’t know—taking a short break.” She threw up her hands. “You’re right. I’m jealous because you’re everything I’m not.”

Some of the wind went out of his sails. “You aren’t jealous, and you know it.”

“A little jealous. You don’t show anyone what you feel. I show everything to everybody.”

“Way too much.”

She couldn’t hold it back. “I just think you could be so much more.”

He gaped at her. “You’re driving a drink cart!”

“I know. And the sad thing is, I don’t entirely hate it.” With a snort of disgust, he reached for the refrigerator again. She gasped. Lunging forward, she grabbed his hands and stared at his palms. “Oh, my God. Stigmata.”

He snatched them away. “A marking-pen accident.”

She clutched her heart. “Give me a second to get my breath back, and then show me the rest of the house.”

He rubbed at the red smears on his palms and sounded sullen. “I should throw you out is what I should do.”

“You don’t have it in you.”

He stalked from the kitchen, and she thought he might really do it, but when he reached the main living area, he turned away from the front door toward a floating staircase that led to the suspended, glass-walled room. She followed him up and entered his library.

It felt a little like walking into a well-appointed tree house. Walls of books surrounded a comfortable seating area. An open archway in the back wall led to a glass-enclosed walkway that connected this part of the house to a small, separate room constructed against the hillside. “Bomb shelter?” she asked. “Or safe zone to hide out from the ladies?”

“My office.”

“Cool.” She didn’t wait for his permission but crossed the walkway. Twin panels of ceiling lights came on automatically as she went down two steps into a spare room with high windows; a massive computer workstation of tempered glass and black steel; several ergonomic chairs; and some sleek, built-in storage cabinets. The office was spare, almost sterile. All it revealed about its owner was his efficiency.

“No nudie calendars or I-Heart-Wynette coffee mugs?”

“I come here to work.”

She retraced her steps and returned to the suspended library. “The Chronicles of Narnia,” she said, taking in a shelf of well-read children’s classics. “I loved that series. And Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I must have read it a dozen times.”

“Peter and Fudge,” he said, coming back into the room from behind her.

“I can’t believe you held on to these.”

“Hard to get rid of old friends.”

Or any friends, for that matter. The whole world made up Ted’s inner circle. Yet how close was he to any of them?

She surveyed his collection and found both literary and genre fiction, biographies, nonfiction on a head-spinning variety of topics, and technical volumes: texts on pollution and global warming; on plant biology, pesticide use, and public health; books about soil conservation and safe water; about creating natural habitats and preserving wetlands.