Oh right, like she was going to fall for that. “Or my quesadilla, apparently.”
“No, just you. Because you left your quesadilla over there,” he said, pointing down the walk.
That drew her up short; Rebecca blinked, looked to where he pointed—there on the very next bench down was her neatly folded paper and her untouched quesadilla, just as she had left them. She quickly looked over her shoulder to the quesadilla guy, and realized, with a very sick feeling, that he had moved his cart between the time she bought her lunch and returned to buy her water. He had moved just enough to confuse her, which meant. . Oh. Dear. God.
Mortified, that’s what she was, absolutely paralyzed with mortification. She glanced at Matt from the corner of her eye, saw the smirk on his lips. “My sincerest apologies.”
He laughed, casually draped an arm across the back of the bench. “You know, I’ve had women do some crazy things to get my attention, but I can’t say I’ve ever had one be quite so inventive just to meet me.”
This was absolutely horrifying. “I assure you, I wasn’t trying to meet you—I made a mistake.” Like she’d have to do something that manipulative to meet someone like him? It was preposterous.
“Oh, yeah?” he asked, lifting that brow again. “Then why were you checking me out?”
“Checking you—that is absurd,” she said indignantly. She did not check men out. She was off men; she rarely even noticed them.
“So are you denying that when you were on the phone, you weren’t checking me out? Because baby, from where I was sitting, you couldn’t take your eyes off me.”
“I was on the phone. I wasn’t looking at anything.”
“Riiight,” he said with a wink. “If you need to deny it, that’s okay,” he said, and leaned forward. “But it makes me feel kind of special that you’d go to such lengths.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Rebecca said, and she came to her feet. “This may come as a shock to your obviously healthy ego, but I don’t need to concoct a scheme to meet a man. I am sorry to have bothered you.”
“No problem. It was quite entertaining. By the way, the full name is Matt Parrish. I figure you should at least get that for all your trouble.”
Of all the infuriating— “Really?” she asked, feigning wide-eyed surprise. “I’ll remember that. Matt Popinjay,” she said, and with a pert toss of her hair, turned to walk away, bristling. She marched to the next bench, picked up the quesadilla she bought and tossed it in the trash. And as she departed the capitol grounds, she told the smiling state trooper that the man seated on the bench beneath the big pecan tree was bothering her. The trooper assured her he would not bother her again.
From there, Rebecca walked as quickly as her Jimmy Choos would carry her to her Range Rover, and drove out of town, periodically shrieking at the windshield. How could she have made such a boneheaded mistake? All she could see was his smug look, but fortunately, by the time she reached the Little Maverick Preschool, she was calm again, because, she realized with a sigh of relief, she’d never see that man again. Thank God!
The school door opened as she parked and kids began to spill out. Grayson was the last to emerge, walking with his head down, his backpack almost bigger than he, his sandy brown hair (Bud’s hair) going in fifty different directions. The poor kid had really been down this morning when he found out that Bud was skipping out on him again. “Hey, honey,” she said as Grayson opened the door and crawled in, head first, onto his booster seat.
She helped him fasten his seat belt, noticed his corduroy pants had a hole in one knee. “So what happened to your pants?”
“I don’t know,” he said, leaning over to have a look.
“How was your day?” she asked as she started the Rover up. “Anything new?”
“I pushed Taylor down,” he said.
Rebecca frowned. “Why would you do such a thing?”
Grayson shrugged, returned to examining the hole in his pants. “I don’t like him.”
Grayson had always been a happy child, quick to make friends, but since they had moved to Austin, he seemed different. Not unhappy, precisely, but just not . . . happy. And when Bud canceled weekends on him, the boy didn’t take it very well. Rebecca pushed his bangs from his eyes and brushed the bit of dirt from a cheek that still had that baby roundness to it. “You can’t go around pushing kids down just because you don’t like them, Gray.”
He frowned, picked up her cell phone, and punched some of the buttons. “I wish Lucy lived here,” he muttered.