“So now I’m a moron?” Matt echoed, incredulous. “I didn’t know we were adopting the fourth-grade rules of name-calling. Look, I’m just saying that it is pretty hard to believe you didn’t want to be Miss Texas. I mean, you give off the impression that you need a lot of attention . . . a lot of attention.”
“See why I don’t like you?” she asked, poking her finger into his shoulder. “And I didn’t mean that it wasn’t anything. Wait . . . no, that’s not right. I mean, it was something,” she said, leaning forward, so far forward that he glimpsed a tantalizing flash of the lacy black bra (of which, truthfully, he had noticed beneath her filmy blouse more than once this evening). “It was great!” she declared. “It’s just . . . I mean, I never really saw myself as . . . that.”
“As what?”
“As a beauty queen! Duh!”
Well, good God, who could understand her? And how could she not see herself as a beauty queen? As far as he knew, the one requirement for a beauty queen was to be beautiful, and Rebecca Lear was definitely one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. Even when she was shit-faced.
The beauty queen was now sliding down in her seat and planting an elbow on the console to steady herself. “Lemme ask you something, Mattie. Have you ever thought that?”
“Thought what?” he asked, confused, and all right, a little lost in the lush pout of her lips again.
“Did you ever think that you didn’t really think that you’d be something?”
That gave him pause—primarily because he had to repeat the question in his head to decipher it. But then he said honestly, “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” she uttered softly, clearly disappointed.
He hadn’t thought that, had he? He’d always imagined himself a lawyer. His grandfather had been one, his dad was one. And didn’t he believe that he’d follow in his dad’s footsteps and be a judge one day, too? So why, then, did he feel so uncomfortable and have that vague notion he ought to be doing something good with his life instead of chasing a buck? Because he was hungry. He honked for the damn valet. When none appeared, he sighed and looked at Rebecca. “How exactly did you end up as Miss Texas if you didn’t really want to be Miss Texas?”
Rebecca looked up from her study of the radio and pierced him clean through with those blue eyes without even trying. How she did that was really starting to unnerve him
“I guess because . . . because everyone wanted me to.”
“Who, your parents?”
“Yeah, my dad. And my boyfriend. Or husband. Well, he was both,” she said, and dropped her gaze to the radio again. “Bud. He was both.” She made a whirling motion with her hand. “Boyfriend. Then husband. Oh . . . and jerk.” She laughed at her little joke.
This was not exactly territory Matt wanted to enter—not that he wasn’t mildly curious about the dolt who was stupid enough to let go of a woman like Rebecca. But then again, she did raise big red flags on a routine basis.
“But it wasn’t just them,” she continued, sounding almost as if she was arguing with herself. “It was me, too. I mean, I didn’t enter the pageant at gunpoint, did I?”
“I would guess not.”
“And I went through all that stuff to get there, didn’t I?”
“I would assume,” he said, and tried to imagine Rebecca putting hemorrhoid cream under her eyes. Nope, couldn’t see it.
“No, I did it. But still . . .” she sighed, swung a hooded gaze to him. “Hey, Mattie, do you remember when you were young and full of . . . of . . .”
“Piss?” he offered, noticing how elegant her hands were.
She smiled; her eyes were now an incredible smoky blue. “Hope. You know, hope about life. The future and who little Mattie was going to be. Remember?”
“I suppose so.” Although it was near to impossible to conjure up the young Matt anymore. That was such ancient history.
Rebecca nodded slowly and looked down, and he wondered if she was having A Moment. “Sometimes, I wonder if the young Rebecca would have liked me very much,” she said, and propped her head on her fist, slanting toward him. “I wonder if she would have liked me at all.”
The hair on Matt’s neck rose; danger, danger Will Robinson! He cocked his head to one side, tried to see if she was crying. He couldn’t tell, but in a valiant effort to stave off any tears (Over what again, exactly? Having won the Miss Texas title?), he said, “Everyone wonders, don’t they? Don’t we all wonder if we have achieved what we set out to achieve? Or if we became the man—or woman—that we’d always believed we could be?”
Rebecca didn’t say anything.
Damn it, where the hell were those steaks? “Look, let’s talk about something else, okay? Let’s talk about . . . hey, what about your son? So what is he, like seven? Eight? In school? What does he like to do?” Against his better judgment, Matt dipped his head a little lower to see if she was crying. “Rebecca?”
But instead of answering, Rebecca’s head slid off her fist, and landed, facedown, smack in the middle of his crotch.
Chapter Thirteen
One reason I don’t drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time . . .
NANCY ASTOR