Georgia?” she asked, surprised since that’s about all she’d ever known about her Time magazine hero.
“Yeah, but not here. I moved here after high school. I’m from the northwest part of the state, a place called Joyful.”
Joyful, Georgia. “Sounds quaint and sweet, like a picture-postcard small town.”
“It’s hell with white picket fences,” he replied matter-of-factly, indicating that subject was closed. “Now, come on, tell me. How’d Rosemary get you here?” he asked. “And why?”
Uh-uh. No way was she going into detail on either of those questions. “Doesn’t matter. She was obviously playing a joke on both of us, so I think I’ll get my check and go.”
His eyes narrowed. “Not so fast. I think it does matter. She got me here with some story about you knowing of a link between a murder in Atlanta and the death of a local restaurant owner.”
Though her heart skipped a beat, Melody managed to keep her expression serene. “Really? How strange.”
He stared for a moment, then slowly asked, “So you’re saying you don’t know anything about the death of Charles Pulowski in the kitchen of his own restaurant?”
She gaped. “Pulowski? His last name was Pulowski? And he owned a restaurant named Chez Jacques?”
“So you do know him.”
Shaking her head, she said, “No, but I’ve heard of him. I lived on his chocolate volcano cake during finals in college.”
He didn’t react at all. Some men would have made a comment about the cake not hurting her figure. Some women might have been fishing for such a comment. But he wasn’t such a man. And she wasn’t even going to think about whether she was such a woman.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Detective Walker murmured, his voice steady, that soft drawl low and warm but strictly business…as if he wasn’t the least bit distracted by any thoughts of her appearance.
This man was so different from most of the men she met. So completely the opposite of her ex-husband, whose smooth delivery back when they were dating had made his incessant compliments and comments about her looks seem almost charming, instead of piggish. Now she knew better.
Detective Walker seemed to have flipped a switch. From self-deprecating charmer when he’d arrived, to no-nonsense cop now.
His current disinterest was…unsettling. Not that she was drop-dead gorgeous or anything. She’d always been more of a fresh-faced, wholesome, big-smile model rather than a classically beautiful one…which was why the Luscious Lingerie thing had been such a fluke. And an embarrassment.
She’d put on a few pounds after she’d quit modeling. And she’d eaten her way through her divorce, needing to sample every form of chocolate ever invented. So she was nowhere near her size-four model days. Several sizes from it, in fact.
But she still turned heads on occasion when she made the effort. Then again, she hadn’t made much of an effort this morning, doing nothing more than yanking her hair into a ponytail and scraping some lipstick across her lips. So maybe that explained it. Mental note: start making an effort. You never know when you’re going to run across somebody from your sex list.
Realizing he was still waiting for an answer, Mel finally said, “I can say with perfect honesty that I have never met this Charles Pulowski, and unless he disguised himself as a waiter and delivered my chocolate volcano cake, I have never even laid eyes on him.” Perfectly truthful. And as much as he needed to know.
“I don’t think he’d have gone incognito as a waiter without you noticing him.” He sipped his coffee, then added, “He was seventy years old and weighed almost four-hundred pounds.”
Gulping, Melody sent up a quick thanks that she hadn’t met the man and that the list had been a joke. Besides, even if Rosemary thought it hadn’t been, the list was still only a guideline…she was allowed to hop into bed with any of the men on it. That didn’t mean she was required to. At least, that’s how she interpreted it.
She wasn’t so sure Rosemary would say the same. Especially after today. Then again, Rosemary might still be dead by the end of the week, depending on how much she groveled over this ambush, so who cared what she thought?
“Well, then I definitely never met him,” she replied.
He didn’t appear entirely convinced, but didn’t press. “So it was a scam. Why is Rosemary trying to set you up?”
Again, no flattery. No smarmy comment like Bill might have made when trying to pick up a woman he’d just met about how ludicrous it was to think she’d need someone to set her up.
A part of her wondered briefly if he wasn’t flirting simply because he wasn’t interested in her. But she quickly put that thought under a sharp stiletto heel in her brain and ground it out of existence. Considering she’d wanted him with every molecule in her body at first sight, she’d have to get violent if she thought he felt absolutely nothing in return.
She doubted that. He might not be flirting or sizing her up, now, but he had earlier. Besides, there was an intensity about the way he watched her that made her think he was every bit as aware of her as she was of him.
“She have some idea that you need to hop back on the horse because you fell off the marriage wagon?” he asked.
“Something like that, I guess,” she admitted. “She’s determined to throw me kicking and screaming into—” your bed “—the dating pool. But one thing I do not need is a date.”
No, she merely needed an orgasm. Or a hundred.
“So why does Rosemary think you do? Or is it just her being her spoiled puppeteer self, deciding to pull your strings the way she tries to pull everyone else’s?”
Ooh. He didn’t like Rosemary. There was a point against the man. If he said he hated cats, she’d have to scratch him off her list altogether. That’d been her first real indication that Bill was a jerk—he’d hated her cat. Which was why she’d gotten another one a couple of years ago.
Since this guy was destined to be delisted, anyway, given her way-too-unmanageable-and-dangerous response to him, she considered mentioning her two felines, Oscar and C.C. Instead, she answered his question with a pointed stare. “Rosemary is my best friend. She was my maid of honor.”
“How long were you married?”
“Almost six years. The divorce was final a few months ago.”
“That’s tough. I went through it several years ago.”
“Is that why Rosemary’s trying to set you up?”
Nick—she was mentally calling him Nick now, instead of Detective Walker, which probably wasn’t too smart but she couldn’t help it—rolled his eyes. “No, she’s doing that because she’s a pain in the ass.”
Sharing his rueful grin, because it was true and because his voice held a hint of amusement rather than dislike, she murmured, “She can be.”
“And,” he continued, “I suspect she thinks if I get distracted by someone,
