“Enough points to get you to go out with him?”
Jeanette sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Dana Sue pulled up another stool. “Okay, I have about two minutes. Let’s talk about this. You’re attracted to him, right?”
Jeanette nodded.
“Then what’s holding you back?”
“I already know how it’s going to end.”
Dana Sue’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? Do you tell other people’s fortunes, too?”
Jeanette chuckled at her feigned amazement. “Okay, stop. You know what I mean. Just look at the kind of family he’s from, to say nothing of the fact that he’s flat out told me that this job is a stepping stone, not a final destination.”
“You have a problem with him being rich and ambitious?”
It sounded ridiculous when put that way. “Of course not, but come on, Dana Sue, we’re talking about his family and his future. I don’t really fit in with either one. I’d say this little blowup I had with his mother makes that plain.”
“You fit in if he says you do,” Dana Sue countered. “Where did you get this crazy idea that you don’t measure up or aren’t worthy of having a good man in your life?”
Jeanette thought of the history that had proved exactly that, but she was changing, or trying to. She was starting to value who she was and what she had to offer, which was exactly why she didn’t want someone in her life who wouldn’t put her first.
“Tom might have chosen me over his mother today, but I can’t count on him always doing that.”
“Always, no,” Dana Sue conceded. “Look, no one can promise you this won’t end badly, but the only way to find out is to give it a chance. Good men don’t come along every day. All of the evidence isn’t in yet, but Tom may be one of them. Don’t leave him for someone like Mary Vaughn to get her claws into.”
“Mary Vaughn thinks he’s gay,” Jeanette confided.
Dana Sue stared at her with openmouthed shock, then they both dissolved into giggles at the absurdity.
“Because he won’t go out with her, I’ll bet,” Dana Sue said when she could speak again.
“Bingo,” Jeanette confirmed.
“Well then, I think you have a moral obligation to show the world otherwise,” Dana Sue told her with mock seriousness. “Start making out with him on every street corner in town. You owe him that in return for him standing up to his mother for you.”
“Oh, yeah, that’ll be good for his reputation,” Jeanette said.
“It can’t hurt,” Dana Sue insisted with a wink. “And it might be a whole lot of fun.”
Jeanette considered her past experience with Tom’s kisses and concluded that her friend was right. It would be a whole lot of fun.
It would also be the start of a whole lot of trouble.
CHAPTER TEN
Even though he’d told Jeanette he’d call her, Tom had found a hundred excuses not to. His reluctance had nothing to do with his mother’s edict. He was still a bit shaken by how strongly he’d reacted to his mother’s attack on a woman he hardly knew. He’d been furious. He’d felt this overwhelming desire to protect Jeanette, to leap to her defense, something he’d never before felt with another woman.
Not that Jeanette needed his protection. She might look like a vulnerable waif, but she’d more than held her own with a woman who many rich and powerful people considered formidable. He wasn’t entirely sure, though, that Jeanette understood the potential for fallout. His mother had a wide circle of friends and an unfortunate vindictive streak. She might have been in the wrong in the incident at Chez Bella, but her vanity had been offended and she would blame Jeanette for that no matter how ridiculous the claim.
He thought he’d tied his mother’s hands a bit with his own edict, but he couldn’t count on that preventing her from stirring up trouble forever, especially if she got his father involved. Between them, they knew how to make someone’s life miserable—he could attest to that firsthand.
The real reason he’d been reluctant to make that call was fear. When Jeanette looked at him with those big brown eyes, something inside him shifted. He lost focus, which had never once in all of his thirty-five years happened to him before. It scared the daylights out of him.
All those years of steering clear of marriage-minded debutantes had kept him footloose. He’d always dated aggressive, sure-of-themselves women like Mary Vaughn, who was a little old for him, frankly, but obviously willing to have some sort of fling. He’d just about run out of excuses for turning down her invitations and found it oddly disturbing that he felt he needed to. He knew it was because of his feelings for Jeanette. He’d never allowed himself to be tied down to one woman in the past, especially a woman who claimed to have no interest whatsoever in him. Playing the field, choosing women who were sophisticated and undemanding, made it easier to keep his career as his number-one priority.
He’d already told Jeanette that Serenity was not where he intended to spend the rest of his life. It was too small and provincial for him, but the town manager’s job was two steps up from the building and zoning job he’d had in a town barely big enough for a traffic light and one significant step above the chief financial officer’s role he’d had in another tiny community. Serenity was just one more stepping stone.
Two years here, three at the outside, and he’d be ready for a bigger city, maybe even Charleston, which would probably drive his parents straight into an early grave. They were still reeling from his decision to work in local government. If he insisted on working right under their noses, they would probably die from the supposed humiliation of having their son employed as a public servant, no matter how lofty the capacity. His father especially wanted him to have the perceived power that came with elected office.
“No McDonald has ever worked for low wages
