“Do you see her often?” Rebecca asked.
“Too often,” Matt said with a roll of his eyes. “My folks live in Dripping Springs, and my brothers and sister and I troop out for dinner every Sunday night if our schedules allow. My folks get a little testy if we don’t make it. So what about you? See your parents much?”
Well, let’s see . . . Dad’s an ass and Mom avoids him like the plague, so no, we don’t get together much, she thought, but said, “Not too often. Dad lives in New York most of the time, and Mom lives in California.”
“Ah. Opposite ends of the country. I’ve been handled a couple of divorces like that,” he said, as he pulled the cork. “Frankly, I was thinking you and I were going to end up like that,” he said as he poured a glass of wine and handed it to her. “Opposite ends of the universe, I mean.”
Rebecca sat in one of the padded wicker chairs. “You did?”
“Well, yeah,” Matt responded matter-of-factly. “We’ve been going around and around, wouldn’t you say?”
Rebecca’s heart did a funny little skip. “Going around and around what?” she asked, forcing herself to take a sip of wine as Matt fell lightly into the seat next to her.
That made him laugh, as if they shared some little intimate joke, and he leaned over, put his hand on her forearm. Involuntarily, her body flinched; how embarrassing that even the smallest of his gestures could send a shock of light through her.
“You’re stiff as a board, Rebecca,” he said softly. “Are you afraid?”
Afraid? Ha! Like I have something to be afraid of! Lord, no! I am just . . . just what if he says he loves you again? “Would you like some cheese?” she asked abruptly, leaning forward so that her arm escaped his scorching touch, and busied herself by putting some cheese on a cracker. “Gouda!” she exclaimed, feeling strangely nervous, and deathly afraid of any silence. “I love Gouda, don’t you? Once, when I was in France, I found this little cheese shop, and I ordered two pounds of it. But my French isn’t very good—actually, I don’t know French at all, just a few words and phrases, but anyway, the shopkeeper said he didn’t have that much and he’d deliver the cheese, which, if you think about it, is kind of a funny thing to say, but anyway, when they brought the cheese around, it was more like two wagonloads.” She thrust the cracker at him. “It was Gouda.”
Matt’s steady gaze did not waver as he respectfully put the cracker down. “Rebecca—”
“It’s good you had a clean shirt,” she blathered as her mind raced wildly.
Matt looked down at his clothing. “I always keep an extra shirt in the car. You never know, right?”
“No. You always know,” she said.
Matt glanced up. “What?”
Her heart began to sink, because she realized, as her gaze dropped to his shoulders, that his extra shirt was exactly the problem. “I always know,” she said, still staring at his shirt. “I always know where I am going to be, without question. And the fact that you don’t always know where you are going to be or who you are going to be with is just a little . . . a little . . .”
“Disconcerting?”
“Disconcerting.”
“But why would that be disconcerting for you?” he asked.
“Because,” she said, and put her glass down, “because I always know. At least I think I do, but honestly? When it comes to you, I don’t know anything.”
“I do,” he said calmly.
“Great. I feel like a fifteen-year-old girl again, and wondering how I could have met the one man who really lights a fire in me, and he is the type to carry extra shirts in his car, and I am the type to never need an extra shirt.”
“Really?” he asked, looking pleased. “I light your fire?”
Rebecca moaned and sank back against the wicker chair. “I’ve really, truly, lost my mind.”
Matt laughed and playfully squeezed her knee. “It’s okay, Rebecca—I don’t think an extra shirt in the car is a statement about the way I live. And like you, I’ve lost my mind, because you really light my fire, too.”
“Are you sure?” she asked uncertainly. “This isn’t one of those conquest things?”
He smiled a little. “If this was one of those conquest things, as you put it, I wouldn’t be doing this much talking.”
That went shooting straight to the pit of her groin, and Rebecca smiled. She straightened up in her chair. “How do you know it’s not an infatuation?”
Matt sighed wearily. “You’re really a lot of work, girl, you know that? This is real, Rebecca. Believe me. Look, I know you probably have a hard time trusting because you must get a lot of fawning over you all the time, simply because you’re so drop-dead gorgeous—”
“Oh!” She stared helplessly at the fan above her head. “Matt, sometimes I think you are about the smartest man I have ever met, and then you’ll come out with some boneheaded comment like that.”