Not that he didn’t appreciate the package—he’d have to have a bona fide case of numb nuts if he didn’t. Hers was actually a pretty astounding case of beauty, the sort that made a man wonder why the hell she wasn’t in Hollywood instead of hanging around a boring state campaign.
Honestly, he was sick of thinking about it, didn’t want to think about it anymore, and as the weekend was upon him, he let thoughts of the alien beauty queen evaporate in the whirl of activities, beginning with his Friday night date with Debbie Seaforth, one of the county’s top prosecutors. When he took her home, she invited him in, even though it was only their second date. But he was a guy, and when a woman offered, well . . . Matt left Saturday morning after naked pancakes, rushed by his loft to change and get rid of the electric green condoms she had stuffed in his pocket on his way to a golf date with Judge Halliburton.
After golf, it was off to Lake Travis, where he met up with Ben’s brother Alan, a self-styled entrepreneur who was having another party on his houseboat. How Alan, a forty-year-old, could know so many luscious university students was something of a mystery to Matt, but who was he to question it? Even though at the age of thirty-six he tended to think of them as kids, he liked their (barely bikini) company.
On Sunday, it was the obligatory monthly dinner at his parents’ house in nearby Dripping Springs. This Sunday, Dad was barbecuing for the fam—sister Bella and her husband, Bill, and their six-month-old daughter, Cameron; and Matt’s two younger brothers, Mark and his wife, Nancy, and Danny, whose fiancée, Karen, was missing in action for the evening.
In the course of his work, Matt saw a lot of family dysfunction that could fry his brain if he let it, so he considered himself fortunate to have one of those families where everyone genuinely got along and enjoyed one another’s company. The only drawback (and this a fairly recent one) was that Mom was in her sixties now and was beginning to harp on Mark and Danny about grandkids. “Your father and I aren’t getting any younger, you know,” she lectured them. But Matt, the oldest, had had much tougher opponents than Mom, and when she brought up the subject with him, he’d kiss her on the cheek and say, “Have another glass of wine, Mom. It will take the edge off.” That one was always guaranteed to draw a snort of laughter from Dad.
Mom was a good sport. She chalked up his remarks to her stated belief that her oldest son was not the settling down type (Matt wasn’t sure if that was true, really, but he honestly just hadn’t met The One).
That evening, the conversation was pleasantly unguarded and focused on Danny’s upcoming nuptials (nine bridesmaids, poor sap). By the time Matt turned in late Sunday evening, he had successfully put Looney Tunes Rebecca out of his mind.
Monday was quiet. Tuesday morning, he appeared in court for a hearing. As the docket was called, he and the opposing counsel, Ricardo Ruiz, who happened to be a basketball buddy of his, were waiting in the corridor when another prosecutor and ex-girlfriend, Melissa Samuelson, went sailing by, pausing briefly to sneer at Matt.
Ricardo looked at Matt; Matt shrugged. “Wassup—are you working your way through the roster?” he asked, laughing.
“Yeah, right—I’ve almost made it through the Rs,” Matt said with a wink.
Ricardo, being the jovial type, laughed appreciatively, then asked Matt if the rumors were true.
Still thinking of female prosecutors, Matt asked with a devilish grin, “Which rumors?”
“District attorney. Everyone was talking about it at the bar association meeting last night.”
That surprised the hell out of Matt—there had been talk of it around the party bigwigs, but he hadn’t breathed a word to anyone, not even his father, the retired U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Winston Parrish.
“So?” pressed Ricardo, grinning. “You gonna be our next DA? You know Hilliard is on her last legs,” he added, stating what everyone knew to be true of the current DA.
“Oh man, is that going around?” Matt asked, trying to laugh it off with a shake of his head. “It’s just a rumor. Don’t believe everything you hear.”
Judging by the way Ricardo clapped Matt on the shoulder and laughed like they had a little secret, it was obvious he didn’t believe what he was hearing at that very moment.
Still, Matt blew it off. Austin was a small town in some respects, and around the courthouse, rumors like that took on a life of their own. By the end of the week, he and Debbie Seaforth would be getting married. But when the hearing resumed (and Matt’s request for a summary judgment was denied), the sparkle had not quite left Ricardo’s eye. “See you in court,” he said with a wink, and strutted out.