Page 14 of Just What She Needed

Once they were seated at a table with their food, Rhys held up a red packet of sauce. "Hot sauce?"

"No, thanks." Rhett indicated the orange packets on the table in front of her. "I have mild."

"Mild?" Rhys pushed the hot sauce across the table with his forefinger. "C'mon, Rhett. Be adventurous."

Using her own forefinger, Rhett pushed the red packet back. "I used up my daily allotment of adventurous when I went on that blind date."

"What?" Rhys spread his hands wide and tried to look hurt. Tried, because his eyes were sparkling with mischief. "You don't think coming out with me is an adventure?"

After regarding him with amusement for a moment, Rhett devoted her attention to mixing the sour cream and cheese sauce into her potatoes. "No, not an adventure. It's fun." She couldn't resist a glance to see how he took that pronouncement.

A pleased smile lit his face before he attempted that hurt look again. "That's all I get? Fun?"

"Well, let's see." Rhett unwrapped one of her tacos. "My awful, horrible, disastrous blind date was adventurous. You really want to be lumped into that category?"

The mock hurt vanished, and his smile reappeared. "I'll take fun over that any day." He took a huge bite of his burrito and swallowed before speaking again. "Have you found a place to live yet? You said the other day you were just staying with your sister for a bit."

"I haven't started looking, to be honest. I'm waiting for my house in Claiborne to sell first. Claiborne's where I've lived all my life," she added to answer the question she saw in his eyes. "And I mean all my life. I was born there."

"Hm." Rhys wiped the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin. "If you've lived there all your life, why are you moving to Dallas?"

Rhett couldn't stop the humorless laugh that escaped. "Because I hated it all my life. Then after my husband died last year and I found out he was—” No, she wasn't going there and skipped right past it. "My daughter is married and lives in Fort Worth, so there wasn't anything to keep me in Claiborne. I realized I didn't have to stay there anymore. And here I am. So how about you? How long are you in town?"

"Permanently." Although he answered her easily, his eyes narrowed at her, and she knew he hadn't missed what she didn't say about Todd. Instead of bringing it up, though, he continued satisfying her curiosity. "Every time Illicit played Dallas, I liked it. I always wished I had more time to spend here, so with Dax off to Stanford in a couple of months and Sienna busy with her senior year, I decided now was the time to move here."

There was no way to stop the excited stutter of her heart at the news that he was staying in Dallas. Because now that she'd actually met him and knew him a little as a real person instead of a face on a poster or a voice on the radio, she wanted to get down and dirty with him even more than before. Of course, given his history of dating much younger women, she probably didn't have a chance in hell, but she still relished the fact that it was now a better possibility than it had been.

"Well, I think it's a great place to live. Obviously," she added. "The first time I saw you, though, I just thought you were probably in town for some business type of thing."

Rhys made a sound of amusement. "What gave you that idea? The broken water pump or the inoperable mobile phone?"

"What? Oh! No, that wasn't the first time I saw you." She frowned a little, trying to remember just when it was. "I guess it was the first of last month, because that's when I quit this horrible job I had. Lilith—that's my daughter—decided we needed to celebrate, so she and Mel took me to this club. You were there that night."

A grimace wrinkled his nose. "Yeah, I remember that."

She couldn't help but laugh at his expression. "You look like you enjoyed yourself almost as much as I did. I still can't believe Mel and Lilith thought that kind of place would be up my alley at all. They had fun, but I didn't."

"That's not my kind of scene, either," Rhys said. "The only reason I was there that night is because Trinity, the girl I was dating at the time, was into that. You know, clubbing every night, being seen, that sort of thing. The only reason I went out that night was so she'd stop pestering me about it. Didn't work, though. She wanted to go back the next night, so I told her to go, and take her belongings with her. And that was the end of that."

Of course the silicone-enhanced blonde Rhett had seen him with would be named something like Trinity. Rhett barely refrained from rolling her eyes and tried to put it out of her mind.

"So, if you don't like clubbing and things like that, what do you like to do?"

"Hm, let's see. I like going to listen to music, but not in clubs. Bands in small bars are more my speed, and they're always better than that electronic dance shit. And I don't even like doing that very often." He shrugged. "I don't know. I've done all the clubs and the parties and going somewhere trendy every night. It was fun then, but I guess I've moved past that. I like quieter things now where I can actually talk to someone and have them hear me, and we can get to know each other. Like we're doing now."

"That's more my speed, too." She laughed a little. "My sister, however, is the party animal. She swears I'm not cramping her style by staying with her, but I think she's just being nice."

"Are you going to stay at the condos? I know there are a few available."

"No." Rhett gathered up the empty wrappers and piled them on the plastic tray. "Mel's place is nice, but if it's shown me anything it's that I don't want to live in a high-rise, or an apartment of any kind."

"Really? Why not?" Rhys shook the ice in his cup, peered through the clear plastic top, and put it with the trash on the tray.

"There's too much missing from a high-rise," Rhett explained. "Like a yard. I miss walking in the grass and planting flowers. And birds singing. You can't hear them where we are, and you can't go out in the evening and listen to the crickets sing. And rain."

Rhys leaned his chin in his hand. "Rain? What about it?"

Feeling a little foolish, she shrugged one shoulder. "It's just that I wanted to go outside the other day when those showers moved through and listen to the rain fall. I've always thought it sounded soothing. But when I went out on Mel's balcony, I found out the one above it overhangs right to the edge of hers and it was bone dry. I couldn't hear the rain falling at all. I miss that."