other people had laughed at her. He’d been nice to her in the old days, when the high school hierarchy had liked to crucify the farmers’ daughters who wore their coveralls to school and smelled of their daddy’s dairy farm.
She gave him a small smile. “Oh, Mick, you old silly, I’m not gonna kill you. Now get naked. Pretty please?”
This was beyond ridiculous, even for him. Oh, sure, he’d been caught naked with women before, once even in the coat-check room of an upscale Chicago restaurant. But never so close to home. Never in his own realty office. Never with a local girl whose family would riot at the thought of their darling hooking up with the wickedest playboy in Derryville, Illinois.
And never, never with Louise Flanagan, his lab partner from tenth grade biology. Louise not only outweighed him by forty pounds, she was the four-time champion hog wrestler at the state fair. Plus, Mick’s and Louise’s grandfathers were long-standing enemies.
“Louise, I’m not going to take my clothes off.”
She cocked the hammer.
“Shit.” He tugged his shirt from the waist of his pants.
“That’s good. Shirt first, that’s proper. But no more cursing,” she said with a tsk. “That’s one of your bad habits. That, your drinking and your cigar smoking are going to be the first things you give up when we get married.”
That one nearly made him choke. “Married?”
She nodded. “Yessir. And soon. Got to get you tied down and rescue you from your overactive manly urges.”
Manly urges. If he’d ever had any in his life, the image of marrying Louise wiped them out of his memory banks.
She continued. “I mean, I knew when I heard about those TV people coming here to do their show that I had to step in before it was too late. I can’t have you losing your head and giving this whole town more reason to think you’re just a good-for-nothing playboy. Not when I know better.”
She gave him a worshipful smile that told him he’d been residing on a pedestal and had never known it. That almost distracted him from the fact that she’d called him a good-for-nothing playboy. But nothing was distracting him from the loaded gun, which she wagged suggestively toward his body.
“Louise…”
“Come on, your shirt’s easy. Just pretend it’s Saturday.”
The twisting turns in the conversation were giving him a headache on top of his hangover. “What?”
“Half the women in this town make a point of driving down your street on Saturday afternoons because they know you’re gonna be mowing your lawn,” she explained.
Half the women in town? No wonder his street was like Daytona during Pepsi 400 weekend when he cut the grass. “So?”
She sighed heavily, explaining as if he were a six-year-old and she a weary parent. “So…you always do it sooner or later. It’s usually after four, when you’ve finished the cutting and you’re just doing the edging and cleanup. And by the way, Mick, you do such a nice job on your lawn, much better than when the Edgertons owned your house.”
“What do I do, Louise?” he asked, still wondering whether she liked him or hated him, wanted to marry him or wanted to kill him. Hmm…when he thought of it that way, she suddenly reminded him of just about every other woman in his life.
“You know what you do,” she said. “You know when you’re almost done, and you’re ready to cool off with a long, wet soak from your garden hose…? That’s when traffic’s the heaviest.”
She gave him a look that said he was supposed to understand what the hell she was talking about. He didn’t. Rolling her eyes, Louise said, “You weren’t this thick in high school.”
“Somehow my brain doesn’t work well when it’s envisioning taking a bullet.”
“Sorry, it can’t be helped. I know even as nice as you are you won’t get naked and be forced to marry me by my daddy unless I force you to get forced first.”
He began to see, as crazy as it was. Louise, the girl he’d been nice to back in high school, wanted to force him to get forced into marrying her so she could help save his unsalvageable reputation. “My head hurts.”
“Stop drinking so many beers on Sunday nights with the fellas after your football games.”
“So, you know my entire weekend schedule, not just my Saturdays in the yard?”
“Oh, yes, Saturdays. Back to the shirt. You always take it off when you hose yourself down after you’re done. Then you get a beer from the fridge on your porch and you pop open the bottle and guzzle the thing down while you’re all wet and shiny.” A pink flush rose in her plump cheeks. “Tons of women plan their Saturday shopping around your yard work. Except, of course, on rainy days. Then they meet in the basement of the dress shop and play cards.”
Welcome to small-town life. Christ, why the hell did he live here again? “That’s crazy.”
Louise obviously saw his disbelief. “Men. You’re all thick. Didn’t you realize why Mrs. Richardson crashed her brand-new Buick into the back of your neighbor’s old AMC Pacer? She was watching you, watching all that sweat mix with the dirt and grass on your shoulders and your arms. Trying to see what we all want to see.”
His hands instinctively dropped to the front of his pants.
Louise giggled again. “Not that.” Then she stammered and looked away. “Well, yes, that. But also, your, um, you know…”
“My…” Hair? Back? Earlobes? What was the woman talking about? And who the hell knew women were as lewd as men when it came to ogling the opposite sex, even if it was a complete stranger? Of course, no one was really a stranger in Derryville.
“Your thingie,” she whispered.
His thingie. A number of thingies on his body tightened up as he waited to hear what all the women in town wanted to peek at.
“My what?” he asked, hoping she meant his checkbook, which should be enough to scare off most women. But he doubted it.
“Your…tattoo!”
He stiffened, his jaw clenching, the response as instinctive as it was predictable. Few people knew the origins of his tattoo, the one spread across his lower back, just below his hips, riding his ass like a low-slung pair of jeans. The tattoo was one subject that was off-limits in his life. As was the woman who’d originally inspired him to get it.
“Forget about seeing my tattoo or anything else. I’m not taking off my clothes.”
Her smile broadened. “Oh, yes, you are.”
“Put down the gun. You already said you wouldn’t kill me.”
She lowered the gun and took careful aim at every man’s Achilles’ heel. The one between his legs.
Muttering another curse—which earned him another tsk—he yanked off his shirt, dropping it to the floor. His Northern brain had no part in that decision. The
