Call Me Irresistible (25 page)

The last lane wound uphill where it opened onto a rocky bluff. And there it stood, a modern structure of perfectly balanced cream stucco rectangles topped by a butterfly roof. Sweeping sheets of glass faced south, along with sharp overhangs to shade the interior. Even without the small, sleek wind turbines mounted on the roof, she would have known this was his house. Its beauty, inventiveness, and functionality spoke volumes about its owner.

The front door opened before she could ring the bell, and he stood before her barefoot in a black T-shirt and gray athletic shorts. “Did you enjoy your tour?”

Either someone had tipped him off or security cameras monitored the property. Knowing his love of gadgetry, she suspected the latter. “The mighty ruler of the Kingdom of Beaudine is indeed all-knowing.”

“I do my best.” He moved back to let her in.

The house was open and airy, decorated in pale shades of gray and white—a cool, calming retreat from the punishing summer heat and the equally punishing demands of being Ted Beaudine. The furniture sat low, each piece carefully chosen for both its comfort and quiet, unimposing beauty. The most startling feature was a glass-enclosed rectangular room suspended above the soaring living area.

The house was almost monastically spare. No sculptures stood in the corners; no paintings graced its walls. The art lay outside in the views of river bluffs, granite hills, and distant, shadowed valleys.

She’d grown up in grand houses—her family’s rambling Connecticut farmhouse, their Bel Air home, the weekend house on Morro Bay—but this was something quite special. “Nice digs,” she said.

As he crossed the bamboo floor, a foyer light that had come on when he’d admitted her automatically shut off. “If you’ve shown up for sex, I’m bored with you,” he said.

“That would explain the large bed on the delivery truck, along with those comfy, man-size chairs.”

“And the couch. Don’t forget the couch. Not to hurt your feelings, but your place isn’t too comfortable. And from the phone call I just got, I hear you want to keep it like that. Why did you send that truck away?”

“Did you really think I was going to take presents from you?”

“The furniture was for me, not you. I’ll be damned if I spend another night on that futon.”

“Good thing you’re bored with me.”

“I might change my mind. As a matter of fact—”

“It isn’t your job to furnish my place,” she said. “I’ll do it when I get around to it. Although I have to admit you almost sucked me in with those air conditioners. Unfortunately, I’ve developed this totally asinine sense of personal pride.”

“Your loss.”

“You have enough people to take care of, Mr. Mayor. You don’t have to take care of me, too.”

She’d finally caught him off balance. He looked at her oddly. “That’s not what I was doing.”

“Oh, yes, you were.” She did her best to contain the thread of tenderness unraveling inside her. “I came here to rip your head off, but this house seems to have sucked away most of my righteous indignation. Do you happen to have anything to eat?”

He tilted his head. “Back there.”

The stunning stainless-steel kitchen wasn’t large, but it was dauntingly efficient. A limousine-long central island began as a workspace, then seamlessly extended into a sleek table large enough for a dinner party, with four wire-back chairs pushed under it on each side. “I don’t like dining rooms,” he said. “I like to eat in the kitchen.”

“I think you’re onto something.”

Forgetting her hunger, she wandered over to the room’s most striking feature, another colossal sheet-glass wall, this one looking down upon the Pedernales Valley where the river ran like a blue-green ribbon over jagged limestone shelves. Beyond the valley, the setting sun outlined the purple hills in a tangerine blaze. “Extraordinary,” she said. “You designed this house, didn’t you?”

“It’s an experiment in net zero energy.”

“Meaning?”

“The house produces more energy than it consumes. Right now about forty percent. There are photovoltaic and solar panels in the roof, along with rainwater collection. I have a gray water system, geothermal heating and cooling machines, appliances with kill switches to keep them from drawing power in the off mode. Basically, I’m living off the grid.”

Ted had made his fortune helping towns optimize electrical usage, so the house was a natural extension of his work, but it was still remarkable.

“We use too damned much power in this country.” He pulled open the refrigerator door. “I’ve got some leftover roast beef. Or there’s stuff in the freezer.”

She couldn’t keep the wonder out of her voice. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

He slammed the door and whipped around. “Apparently, I can’t make love according to your specifications, whatever the hell they might be.”

Once again, she’d inadvertently ventured into the killing zone. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“Yeah. Telling a guy he’s a bust-out in the sack is guaranteed to make him feel great.”

“You’re not a bust-out. You’re perfect. Even I know that.”

“Then what the hell is your gripe?”

“Why do you care?” she said. “Did you ever think it might be my problem instead of yours?”

“You’re damned right it’s your problem. And I’m not perfect. I wish you’d quit saying that.”

“True. You have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and you’ve gotten so good at hiding what you’re really feeling that I doubt you even know what you feel anymore. Case in point. Your fiancée left you at the altar, and you barely seem to have noticed.”

“Let me get this straight.” He leveled his finger at her. “A woman who’s never held a job, who has no direction, and whose own family seems to have given up on her—”

“They haven’t given up on me. They’re just—I don’t know—taking a short break.” She threw up her hands. “You’re right. I’m jealous because you’re everything I’m not.”

Some of the wind went out of his sails. “You aren’t jealous, and you know it.”

“A little jealous. You don’t show anyone what you feel. I show everything to everybody.”

“Way too much.”

She couldn’t hold it back. “I just think you could be so much more.”

He gaped at her. “You’re driving a drink cart!”

“I know. And the sad thing is, I don’t entirely hate it.” With a snort of disgust, he reached for the refrigerator again. She gasped. Lunging forward, she grabbed his hands and stared at his palms. “Oh, my God.
Stigmata.
”

He snatched them away. “A marking-pen accident.”

She clutched her heart. “Give me a second to get my breath back, and then show me the rest of the house.”

He rubbed at the red smears on his palms and sounded sullen. “I should throw you out is what I should do.”

“You don’t have it in you.”

He stalked from the kitchen, and she thought he might really do it, but when he reached the main living area, he turned away from the front door toward a floating staircase that led to the suspended, glass-walled room. She followed him up and entered his library.

It felt a little like walking into a well-appointed tree house. Walls of books surrounded a comfortable seating area. An open archway in the back wall led to a glass-enclosed walkway that connected this part of the house to a small, separate room constructed against the hillside. “Bomb shelter?” she asked. “Or safe zone to hide out from the ladies?”

“My office.”

“Cool.” She didn’t wait for his permission but crossed the walkway. Twin panels of ceiling lights came on automatically as she went down two steps into a spare room with high windows; a massive computer workstation of tempered glass and black steel; several ergonomic chairs; and some sleek, built-in storage cabinets. The office was spare, almost sterile. All it revealed about its owner was his efficiency.

“No nudie calendars or I-Heart-Wynette coffee mugs?”

“I come here to work.”

She retraced her steps and returned to the suspended library. “
The Chronicles of Narnia,
” she said, taking in a shelf of well-read children’s classics. “I loved that series. And
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.
I must have read it a dozen times.”

“Peter and Fudge,” he said, coming back into the room from behind her.

“I can’t believe you held on to these.”

“Hard to get rid of old friends.”

Or any friends, for that matter. The whole world made up Ted’s inner circle. Yet how close was he to any of them?

She surveyed his collection and found both literary and genre fiction, biographies, nonfiction on a head-spinning variety of topics, and technical volumes: texts on pollution and global warming; on plant biology, pesticide use, and public health; books about soil conservation and safe water; about creating natural habitats and preserving wetlands.

She felt ridiculous. “All my yammering about how golf courses are destroying the world. You’ve been on top of this from the beginning.” She pulled a volume called
A New Ecology
from the shelf. “I remember this from my college reading list. Can I borrow it?”

“Go ahead.” He sat on a low couch and crossed an ankle over his knee. “Lucy told me you dropped out your senior year, but she didn’t tell me why.”

“Too hard.”

“Don’t give me that.”

She ran a hand over the book’s cover. “I was restless. Stupid. I couldn’t wait for my life to begin, and college felt like a waste of time.” She didn’t like the bitter edge to her words. “Your basic spoiled brat.”

“Not exactly.”

She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. “Sure I was. Am.”

“Hey. I was a rich kid, too, remember?”

“Right. You and Lucy. The same übersuccessful parents, the same advantages, and look how you two turned out.”

“Only because we both found our passions early on,” he said evenly.

“Yeah, well, I found mine, too. Bumming around the world having a good time.”

He toyed with a pen he picked up from the floor. “A lot of young people do that while they’re trying to figure things out. There isn’t much of a road map for people like us, the ones who’ve grown up with high-achieving parents. Every kid wants to make his family proud, but when your parents are the best in the world at what they do, it’s a little tough to pull off.”

“You and Lucy did. So have my brothers. Even Clay. He’s not making much money now, but he’s amazingly talented, and he will.”

He clicked the pen. “You can match every success story with one about a trust-fund baby living an aimless, club-hopping life between stints at rehab, something you seem to have avoided.”

“True, but . . .” Her words, when she finally spoke them, sounded small and fragile. “I want to find my passion, too.”

“Maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong place,” he said quietly.

“You forget that I’ve been everywhere.”

“Traveling around the world is a lot more fun than traveling around inside your own head, I guess.” He discarded the pen and rose from the couch. “What makes you happy, Meg? That’s the question you need to answer.”

You make me happy. Looking at you. Listening to you. Watching the way your mind works. Kissing you. Touching you. Letting you touch me.
“Being outside,” she retorted. “Wearing funky clothes. Collecting old beads and coins. Fighting with my brothers. Listening to birds. Smelling the air. Useful stuff like that.”

Jesus wouldn’t sneer, and neither did Ted. “Well, then. That’s where your answer lies.”

The conversation had gotten way too deep. She wanted to psychoanalyze him, not the other way around. She plopped on the couch he’d just vacated. “So how’s that fabulous contest coming along?”

His expression darkened. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“Last I heard, the bidding for your services had gone over seven thousand.”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

She’d successfully diverted the conversation away from her own defects, and she propped her feet on the footstool. “I saw yesterday’s
USA Today
at the club. I can’t believe how much national attention this thing has started to attract.”

He grabbed a couple of books from a narrow table and shoved them back on the shelf.

“Great headline in their Life section.” She sketched it out in the air. “ ‘Jilted Jorik Fiancé for Sale to Highest Bidder.’ They painted you as quite the philanthropist.”

“Will you just shut up about it?” He actually snarled.

She smiled. “You and Sunny are going to have a great time in San Francisco. I highly recommend you take her to the de Young Museum.” And then, before he could yell, “Can I see the rest of your house?”

Again that snarl. “Are you going to touch anything?”

She was only human, and as she rose, she let her eyes drift over him. “Definitely.”

That one word blew the summer storm clouds from his eyes. He cocked his head. “Then how about I show you my bedroom first?”