“Why didn’t you like him?” Ashley demanded, with childish curiosity.
“Ashley, that’s hardly your business,” Tate scolded. But he glanced at Lainey, as if hoping for an answer.
“I’m afraid he told some big ol’ lies,” Lainey said to Ashley. “Who’d want to marry a liar-pants?”
Ashley giggled. “Not me.”
Megan was walking across the lawn towards them, finally.
“Where were you?” Tate asked her.
“Taking a walk, and going to the bathroom. Stop being such a freak.” Megan glared at him.
He was staring at her critically.
“No, my lipstick’s not messed up,” she added. “Seriously, dude. Get a life and stop trying to run mine.”
“We told Frank Sinclair to leave town yesterday,” Tate said. “This morning, Kyle saw him near his pickup truck, and chased him off. Now there’s an APB out for him. You are not to speak to him.”
“So you’ve told me,” Megan said, icicles dripping from her voice. “And I already agreed that I would not speak to him again. Are you having fun ruining my damned life? I hope so.”
“Oooh, Megan said damned,” Richard crowed gleefully.
“So did you, just now,” Schuyler pointed out.
Megan turned to her younger brothers and sisters. “All right, everybody, race you to the main house. First one to the front door gets a dollar.” They all turned and shot off like rockets, with Megan running after them.
Tate turned to Lainey. “I’m sorry. I had no idea about your engagement being over.”
“That’s because you didn’t ask,” Lainey said heatedly. “And speaking of not asking, I should have asked you—what the heck did you have my glass for?”
He looked her right in the eye. “I was going to run your fingerprints. Would you like to know why?”
“I’m all ears. All pointy, tufted, ears.” She let the tufts spring up from her ears for just a moment before she shifted them back.
He laughed, but quickly grew serious again. “I did it because I think you’re my fated mate, and because I want to include you in my life. I know you said you wanted to take things one day at a time, and you didn’t want to share anything of your past with me, but I was hoping I could persuade you to reconsider. However, the most important thing in my life is my family, and I had to find out what kind of person you were before I went any further and invited you to be one of us. I had to find out if there was some nefarious reason you didn’t want to tell me who you were.”
“Yes, Tate, there was,” she said, reeling from the revelation. He felt that whole “fated mate” thing too? He actually wanted her to be part of his family? “And the nefarious reason’s name is Miles Bauer. Oh, and my parents. They wanted to force me to marry him.”
“Why?”
“It would greatly increase their social standing. My parents are the ultimate social climbers. They view everything and everyone as a way to get ahead. My brother Donny is very handsome, and they trotted him out like a trophy at every occasion. Me—I was always the invisible girl, until Miles suddenly took an interest in me. Or so I thought.” Her heart pounded painfully against her chest.
“What do you mean?”
She winced at the memory. “It all started at Donny’s birthday party. My parents threw this big birthday party for him and pretended that he’d invited me. I didn’t even know they were going to be there, or I wouldn’t have gone. We’d had a falling out when I quit working for their company, and I hadn’t spoken to them in a couple of months. So I show up at this restaurant, and Donny shows up, and it turns out Donny hadn’t sent me the invite, and even he didn’t know they were springing a surprise party on him, or he wouldn’t have gone, because he doesn’t want to be around them any more than I do. They’d sent him an invite pretending that I had invited him there.”
“And how did that man figure into this?” He said that man with an expression of contempt.
“When I showed up, there was this handsome guy there, and he made a beeline for me and paid attention to me and nobody else all night. Beautiful girls were throwing themselves at him, and he only paid attention to me. I should have smelled a rat, of course.” Once Lainey had thought of that night with wonder and amazement; now, she only thought of it with bitterness.
“You’re a beautiful girl, Lainey. I’m sorry if anyone’s ever told you otherwise.” Tate’s eyes locked on hers and held her gaze, and she believed that he meant it with every fiber of his being.
Then he asked, hesitantly, “So…you were in love with him?”
“Now that I look back on it, no. I was dazzled that someone so handsome and charming would like me, and he was incredibly sweet and attentive and seemed fascinated by everything that I said. But I never, ever felt anything for him like I felt for you.”
Tate smirked with self-satisfaction. “How about the sex? Am I better than him?”
“Come on, really?”