Susan Elizabeth Phillips - Call Me Irresistible

“You’re certainly pragmatic.”

“Like I said. I’m your dream girl.” Somehow she managed a cocky smile, but as she left the office and headed back across the courtyard her bravado faded. She was sick of feeling unworthy.

When she showed up for work the next day, no one seemed to remember that she’d been fired. Ted stopped by her drink cart. True to her word, she didn’t mention what had happened or his mother’s part in it.

The day turned blistering hot, and by the time she got home that evening, she was a sweaty, sodden mess. She couldn’t wait to get to the swimming hole. She pulled her polo over her head as she walked past the battered old table that held her jewelry supplies. One of the ecology books she’d borrowed from Ted lay open on the worn couch. In the kitchen, a stack of dirty dishes waited for her in the sink. She kicked off her sneakers and opened the bathroom door.

All the blood drained from her head as she saw what was scrawled across the mirror in a vicious smear of crimson lipstick.

GO AWAY

Her hands shook as she tried to scrub the words away, and queer little sounds escaped from her throat.

GO AWAY

Leaving lipstick messages on mirrors was the biggest cliché in the world, something that only a person with no imagination would do. She needed to get a grip. But knowing an intruder had sneaked into her house when she was gone and touched her things made her nauseated. She didn’t stop shaking until she’d erased the awful words and searched the church for other signs of invasion. She found nothing.

As her panic faded, she tried to imagine who had done this, but there were so many potential candidates she couldn’t sort through them all. The front door had been locked. The back door was locked now, but she hadn’t checked it before she’d left. For all she knew, the intruder had gotten in that way, then locked it afterward. She pulled her damp polo back on, went outside, and walked around the church but found nothing unusual.

She finally took her shower, darting nervous glances at the open door as she washed. She hated being frightened. Hated it even more when Ted loomed without warning in the open doorway, and she screamed.

“Jesus!” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

“I knocked.”

“How was I supposed to hear?” She jerked off the faucet.

“When did you get so skittish?”

“You took me by surprise, that’s all.” She couldn’t tell him. She knew that right away. His status as a certified superhero meant he’d refuse to let her live here alone any longer. She couldn’t afford to live anywhere else, and she wasn’t letting him pay rent on another place. Besides, she loved her church. Maybe not at this precise moment, but she would again, as soon as she got over being creeped out.

He pulled a towel from the new Viceroy towel rack, Edinburgh line, that she’d recently installed. But instead of giving it to her, he draped it over his shoulder.

She held out her hand, even though she had a pretty good idea what was coming. “Give me that.”

“Come and get it.”

She wasn’t in the mood. Except, of course she was because this was Ted standing in front of her, steady and sexy and smarter than any man she’d known. What better way to shake off her remaining jumpiness than to lose herself in lovemaking that demanded so little of her?

She stepped out of the shower and pressed her wet body against him. “Give it your best shot, lover boy.”

He grinned and did exactly as she asked. Better than she’d asked. Each time he took more care and postponed his satisfaction longer. After it was over, she wrapped a sarong around herself with one of the silk pieces she’d worn to his rehearsal dinner, then retrieved beers for both of them from the twelve-pack he’d stashed in her refrigerator. He’d already pulled on his shorts, and he took a folded piece of paper from the pocket.

“I got this in the mail today.” He sat on the couch, one arm draped along the back, and crossed his ankles on an abandoned wooden wine crate she’d turned into a coffee table.

She took the paper from him and glanced down at the letterhead. TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. He didn’t usually share the more mundane aspects of his mayoral job, and she sat on the arm of a wicker chair with faded tropical print cushions to read. Within seconds, she’d shot up only to discover her knees were too rubbery to hold her weight. She sank back into the cushions and reread the pertinent paragraph.

Texas Law requires that any person who tests positive for a sexually transmitted disease including, but not limited to, chlamydia, gonorhea, HPV, and AIDS, must provide a list of recent sexual partners. This is to notify you that Meg Koranda has listed you as one of these partners. You are urged to visit your physician immediately. You are also urged to cease all sexual contact with the above named infected person.

Meg gazed up at him, feeling sick. “Infected person?”

“Gonorrhea is misspelled,” he pointed out. “And the letterhead is bogus.”

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.”

“Tough,” she retorted. “Stop being so selfish. Think about your precious town, then picture the expression on Sunny’s face if she found out the two of us—”

His cool faded. “The town and Sunny are my business, not yours.”

“With that kind of self-centered attitude, Mr. Mayor, you’ll never get reelected.”

“I didn’t want to be elected the first time!”

She finally agreed to a Tex-Mex restaurant in Fredericksburg, but once they got there, she maneuvered him into a chair that faced the wall so she could keep a lookout. That aggravated him so much he ordered for both of them without consulting her.

“You never get mad,” she said when their server left the table. “Except at me.”

“That’s not true,” he said tightly. “Torie can get me going.”

“Torie doesn’t count. You were obviously her mother in a previous life.”

He retaliated by hogging the chip basket.

“I’d never have taken you for a sulker,” she said after a long, heavy silence. “Yet look at you.”

He shoved a chip into the hottest bowl of salsa. “I hate sneaking around, and I’m not doing it any longer. This affair is coming out of the closet.”

His mulish determination scared her. “Hold it right there. Spence is used to getting what he wants for Sunny and for himself. If you didn’t believe that, you wouldn’t have encouraged me to stay all palsy-walsy with him.”

He snapped a chip in half. “That’s going to stop, too. Right now.”

“No, it’s not. I’ll handle Spence. You deal with Sunny. As for the two of us . . . I told you from the beginning how it was going to be.”

“And I’m telling you . . .” He jabbed the broken chip in the general direction of her face. “I’ve never sneaked around in my life, and I’m not doing it now.”

She couldn’t believe he was saying this. “You can’t jeopardize something so important for a few meaningless rolls in the hay. This is a temporary fling, Ted. Temporary. Any day now, I’ll pull up stakes and head back to L.A. I’m surprised I haven’t done it already.”

If she’d hoped he’d insist their relationship wasn’t meaningless, she’d set herself up for disappointment. He leaned across the table. “It doesn’t have anything to do with what’s temporary. It has to do with the kind of person I am.”

“What about the kind of person I am? Somebody who’s completely comfortable with sneaking around.”

“You heard me.”

She regarded him with dismay. This was the unwelcome consequence of having a lover with honor. Or at least what he saw as honor. What she saw was a looming choice between disaster and heartbreak.

Between trying not to think about falling in love with Ted and thinking too much about a possible reappearance by her mysterious home invader, Meg didn’t sleep well. She used her wakeful nights to make jewelry. The pieces were becoming more complicated, as her small group of customers showed a distinct preference for jewelry that used genuine relics instead of copies. She researched Internet dealers who specialized in the kind of ancient artifacts she wanted to use and plowed an alarming chunk of her nest egg into an order with a Boston-area anthropology professor who had a reputation for honesty and who provided a detailed provenance for everything she sold.