She felt ridiculous. “All my yammering about how golf courses are destroying the world. You’ve been on top of this from the beginning.” She pulled a volume called A New Ecology from the shelf. “I remember this from my college reading list. Can I borrow it?”

“Go ahead.” He sat on a low couch and crossed an ankle over his knee. “Lucy told me you dropped out your senior year, but she didn’t tell me why.”

“Too hard.”

“Don’t give me that.”

She ran a hand over the book’s cover. “I was restless. Stupid. I couldn’t wait for my life to begin, and college felt like a waste of time.” She didn’t like the bitter edge to her words. “Your basic spoiled brat.”

“Not exactly.”

She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. “Sure I was. Am.”

“Hey. I was a rich kid, too, remember?”

“Right. You and Lucy. The same übersuccessful parents, the same advantages, and look how you two turned out.”

“Only because we both found our passions early on,” he said evenly.

“Yeah, well, I found mine, too. Bumming around the world having a good time.”

He toyed with a pen he picked up from the floor. “A lot of young people do that while they’re trying to figure things out. There isn’t much of a road map for people like us, the ones who’ve grown up with high-achieving parents. Every kid wants to make his family proud, but when your parents are the best in the world at what they do, it’s a little tough to pull off.”

“You and Lucy did. So have my brothers. Even Clay. He’s not making much money now, but he’s amazingly talented, and he will.”

He clicked the pen. “You can match every success story with one about a trust-fund baby living an aimless, club-hopping life between stints at rehab, something you seem to have avoided.”

“True, but . . .” Her words, when she finally spoke them, sounded small and fragile. “I want to find my passion, too.”

“Maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong place,” he said quietly.

“You forget that I’ve been everywhere.”

“Traveling around the world is a lot more fun than traveling around inside your own head, I guess.” He discarded the pen and rose from the couch. “What makes you happy, Meg? That’s the question you need to answer.”

You make me happy. Looking at you. Listening to you. Watching the way your mind works. Kissing you. Touching you. Letting you touch me. “Being outside,” she retorted. “Wearing funky clothes. Collecting old beads and coins. Fighting with my brothers. Listening to birds. Smelling the air. Useful stuff like that.”

Jesus wouldn’t sneer, and neither did Ted. “Well, then. That’s where your answer lies.”

The conversation had gotten way too deep. She wanted to psychoanalyze him, not the other way around. She plopped on the couch he’d just vacated. “So how’s that fabulous contest coming along?”

His expression darkened. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“Last I heard, the bidding for your services had gone over seven thousand.”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

She’d successfully diverted the conversation away from her own defects, and she propped her feet on the footstool. “I saw yesterday’s USA Today at the club. I can’t believe how much national attention this thing has started to attract.”

He grabbed a couple of books from a narrow table and shoved them back on the shelf.

“Great headline in their Life section.” She sketched it out in the air. “ ‘Jilted Jorik Fiancé for Sale to Highest Bidder.’ They painted you as quite the philanthropist.”

“Will you just shut up about it?” He actually snarled.

She smiled. “You and Sunny are going to have a great time in San Francisco. I highly recommend you take her to the de Young Museum.” And then, before he could yell, “Can I see the rest of your house?”

Again that snarl. “Are you going to touch anything?”

She was only human, and as she rose, she let her eyes drift over him. “Definitely.”

That one word blew the summer storm clouds from his eyes. He cocked his head. “Then how about I show you my bedroom first?”

“Okay.”

He headed toward the door, then came to an abrupt stop and turned back to glare at her. “Are you going to critique?”

“I’ve just been in a mood, that’s all. Ignore.”

“I intend to,” he said, with a healthy dose of malevolence.

His bedroom had a pair of soft, spare chairs for reading; lamps with curled metal shades; and high windows that admitted light but not the views the rest of the house afforded, which gave this room a deep sense of privacy. An ice gray duvet covered the platform bed—a duvet that hit the polished bamboo floor even faster than their clothes.

Right away she could tell he was determined to correct past mistakes, even though he had no idea what those mistakes were. She’d never been kissed so thoroughly, caressed so meticulously, stimulated so exquisitely. He seemed certain that all he needed to do was try a little harder. He even put up with her attempts to take over. But he was a man who served others, and his heart wasn’t in it. All that mattered was her fulfillment, and he suspended his own satisfaction to deliver another pitch-perfect performance on her body. Carefully researched. Perfectly executed. Everything done by the book. Exactly as he’d made love to every other woman in his life.

But who was she to criticize when she brought so little added value to the process? This time she vowed to keep her opinions to herself, and when she could finally gather her thoughts, she rolled onto one elbow to face him.

He was still breathing hard, and who wouldn’t be after what he’d gone through? She stroked his sweaty, deliciously un-manscaped chest and licked her lips. “Ohmigod, I saw stars!”

His eyebrows slammed together. “You’re still not happy?”

His mind-reading tricks were getting out of hand. She manufactured a gasp. “Are you kidding? I’m delirious. The luckiest woman in the world.”

He just stared at her.

She fell back into the pillows and moaned. “If I could only market you, I’d make a fortune. That’s what I should do with my life. That should be my life’s purpose, to—”

He threw himself out of bed. “Jesus, Meg! What the hell do you want?”

I want you to want me, not just to make me want you. But how could she say that without making herself look like another Beaudine groupie? “Now you’re getting paranoid. And you still haven’t fed me.”

“I’m not going to either.”

“Sure you are. Because that’s what you do. You take care of people”

“Since when did that become a bad thing?”

“Never.” She gave him a wobbly smile.

He stalked into the bathroom, and she lay back in the pillows. Ted not only cared about others, but he followed up on that caring with action. Instead of giving him a sense of entitlement, his agile, gifted brain had cursed him with the obligation to look after everyone and everything he cared about. He was almost certainly the best human being she’d ever met. And maybe the loneliest. It must be exhausting to carry such a heavy load. No wonder he hid so many of his feelings.

Or maybe she was rationalizing the emotional distance he kept from her. She didn’t like knowing he treated her the same as he’d treated all his other conquests, although she couldn’t imagine him being as rude to Lucy as he was with her.

She tossed back the sheet and climbed out of bed. Ted made everyone feel as though he shared a special relationship only with them. It was the biggest rabbit in his silk hat of tricks.


Spence and Sunny left Wynette with nothing settled. The town teetered between relief that they were gone and concern that they wouldn’t come back, but Meg wasn’t worried. As long as Sunny believed she had a shot at Ted, she’d be back.

Spence called Meg daily. He also sent a luxury tissue holder, a soap dish, and Viceroy Industries’ finest towel bar. “I’ll fly you out to L.A. this weekend,” he said. “You can show me around, introduce me to your parents, some of their friends. We’ll have a great time.”

His ego was too big to comprehend rejection, and trying to navigate the increasingly thin line between keeping her distance and not pissing him off was becoming more difficult every day. “Gee, Spence, sounds great, but they’re all out of town right now. Maybe next month.”

Ted was traveling on business, too, and Meg didn’t like how much she missed him. She made herself concentrate on regrouping emotionally and building up her bank account by taking advantage of her downtime on the drink cart while she waited for the golfers to play through. She found a jewelry supply store on the Internet that offered free shipping. With the tools and materials she bought, along with a couple of artifacts from the collection in her plastic bin, she worked between customers, assembling a necklace and a pair of earrings.

The day after she finished the pieces, she wore them, and the morning’s first female foursome noticed. “I’ve never seen earrings like those,” the group’s sole Diet Pepsi drinker said.

“Thanks. I just finished them.” Meg slipped them from her ears and held them up. “The beads are Tibetan Sherpa coral. Quite old. I love the way the colors have worn.”

“What about that necklace?” another woman asked. “It’s very unusual.”

“It’s a Chinese needle case,” Meg said, “from the Chin people of Southeast Asia. Over a hundred years old.”

“Imagine owning something like that. Are you selling your work?”

“Gosh, I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“I want those earrings,” Diet Pepsi said.

“How much for the necklace?” another golfer asked.

Just like that, she was in business.

The women loved the idea of owning a beautiful piece of jewelry that doubled as a historical artifact, and by the following weekend, Meg had sold another three items. She was scrupulously honest about authenticity, and she attached a card to each design documenting its provenance. She noted which materials were genuine antiquities, which might be copies, and she adjusted her prices accordingly.

Kayla heard about what she was doing and ordered some pieces on consignment for her resale shop. Things were going almost too well.

After two long weeks away, Ted showed up at the church. He was barely inside the door before they were pulling at each other’s clothes. Neither of them had the patience to negotiate the stairs to the hot choir loft. Instead, they fell on the couch she’d recently rescued from the Dumpster at the club. Ted cursed as he banged against the wicker arm, but it didn’t take him long to forget his discomfort and focus all his brainpower on remedying the mysterious flaws in his lovemaking technique.

She gave in to him as she always did. They rolled from the couch to the hard floor. The fans stirred the air over their naked bodies as he went through all the steps in the sex instruction video he must play in his head. Lights flashed, a sweeping arc across the tin ceiling. She clung to him. Begged. Commanded. Gave in.

When they were done, he sounded both wrung out and a little peevish. “Was that good enough for you?”

“Dear God, yes!”

“Damn right. Five! And don’t try to deny it.”

“Stop counting my orgasms.”

“I’m an engineer. I like statistics.”

She smiled and nudged him. “Help me move my bed downstairs. It’s too hot to sleep up there.”

She shouldn’t have introduced the subject because he jumped off the couch. “It’s too hot everywhere in this place. And that’s not a bed, it’s a fricking futon, which would be fine if we were nineteen, but we’re not.”

She tuned out his very un-Ted-like rant to enjoy the unrestricted views of his body. “I finally have furniture, so quit complaining.”

The ladies’ locker room had recently been refurbished, and she’d been able to snag the castoffs. The worn wicker pieces and old lamps looked right at home in her church, but he didn’t seem impressed. A fragment of memory distracted her from her visual survey, and she came up off the floor. “I saw lights.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“No. When we were going at each other . . .” When you were going at me. “I saw headlights. I think somebody drove up to the church.”

“I didn’t hear anything.” But he pulled on his shorts and went outside to look. She followed him and saw only her car and his truck.

“If anybody was here,” he said, “they had the good sense to leave.”

The idea that someone might have seen them together made her uneasy. She was allowed to pretend to be in love with Ted. But she didn’t want anybody to know it might be more than pretense.