He reached toward her and touched her shoulder. “Tag’s still on.”
Laura blushed furiously. “Oh, sweet heaven, how did I miss that? Yes, the dress is new, but I didn’t buy it for tonight, I swear. I bought it last week, because it was on sale and I fell in love with it and Adelia said it looked good on me.” She drew in another breath. “And now I’m babbling on and on about it. Sorry.”
His gaze held hers, which should have unnerved her, but instead seemed to settle her.
“Adelia has excellent taste, apparently.”
“She does.”
“Are you ready to go?”
“Just let me snip off this stupid tag and I will be,” she told him.
Fifteen minutes later they were at Sullivan’s, where they were greeted by Dana Sue, rather than the hostess. She grinned at Laura. “I saw the reservation and decided to see for myself if the two of you were here together again tonight. It’s getting to be a habit. As soon as I saw the reservation book, I stopped off at Wharton’s today to place my bet.”
Laura groaned. “Way to pile on the pressure, Dana Sue. I’m surprised any couple in this town lasts more than a second with all these interested parties on the sidelines. Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen cooking instead of out here meddling?”
“My daughter would never forgive me if I didn’t get the latest scoop firsthand. Annie, Sarah and Raylene have become your biggest boosters since the fall festival success. They’re already bubbling over with ideas for next year. They’re determined to see that you top yourself. I think they’d like to see it take over the state fairgrounds, though that strikes me as overly ambitious.”
“It would also defeat the purpose of promoting Serenity, don’t you think?” Laura said wryly.
“Well, there is that, too,” Dana Sue said. “Let me show you to your table. I gave you a prime spot.”
Laura glanced around as they were shown to a table in the middle of the floor. “Where everyone can see us?”
“That’s the idea,” Dana Sue said cheerfully. “Or I could tuck you into that secluded little booth in the corner over there. I should warn you, though, that choosing that will stir up even more talk.”
“I want the corner,” J.C. said decisively. “If you have one of those fancy folding screens you could use to hide us from view, all the better.”
Dana Sue laughed. “Now that really would stir things up.”
J.C. regarded her somberly. “I wasn’t entirely kidding.”
“Sorry, a secluded booth is the best I can do.”
“The booth is fine,” Laura said quickly before J.C. decided they should be having dinner in some other part of the state and dragged her back out the door.
As soon as they were alone, she looked into his eyes. He seemed a little panic-stricken.
“Already regretting this plan of yours?” she asked him.
“There was no plan,” he said. “The words just sort of tumbled out of my mouth, and here we are.”
“We were here the other night and you didn’t look like a deer caught in the headlights.”
“That was different. It wasn’t a date. This is.”
“And that changes things,” she concluded, knowing it was true. It did change things, whether two people wanted it to or not. Hadn’t the very same thought occurred to her earlier?
“Of course it does.”
“Then why did you ask me out? You’d already made the ground rules very clear. I certainly wasn’t expecting this sudden shift in attitude.”
“You suggested we stop seeing each other just to quiet all the talk around town,” he said, then shrugged. “I didn’t want to stop.”
He looked so thoroughly bemused by his own reaction, she didn’t have the heart to keep pushing. “May I ask you something?”
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “It may have been a long time since I’ve dated, but I do believe give-and-take is part of the evening.”
“Okay, then. Why the hard-and-fast rule about not dating up till now?”
“I’m no good at it,” he said simply. “Not the dating part, the rest of it.”
“The relationship?” she guessed.
“The relationship, marriage, any of that. Fullerton men have really bad track records. It’s probably genetic or something.”
“You’re the medical expert, but I don’t think genes have much to do with relationship staying power,” Laura said. “Do you know any of this firsthand, or are you relying totally on family history?”
He gave her an approving look. “Cleverly worded,” he said. “Yes, I was married.”
“And?”
“It didn’t last,” he said tightly.
“Something you did?”
He frowned at the question. “It must have been.”
“You’re going to have to explain that. Either it was or it wasn’t. Who asked for the divorce?”
“I did.”
“Because you didn’t love her anymore?”
His scowl deepened. “Do you really need to know every last detail? It was a long time ago.”
“And it obviously shaped who you are, at least in terms of how you relate to women, so, yes, being a woman who’s sitting here with you right now, I need to know.”
“Okay, then,” he said, pausing before adding with unmistakable reluctance, “I came home one night after a very long shift at the hospital during my residency and found my wife in bed with the chief resident, who was technically my boss.”
He said the words in a burst as if he wanted to get the humiliation out there and over with.
Laura bit back a gasp. “What a lousy thing to walk in on!” She regarded him curiously. “How, in any way, are you to blame for that?”
“I must have been a terrible husband for her to cheat like that. My dad had the same bad fortune with my mom. She was a serial cheater. He just never had the gumption to leave her.”
“Thus the Fullerton-men-are-bad-bets theory,” she concluded. “Okay, I will allow that you might have made equally bad choices when it came to women, but their behavior is all on them. You didn’t turn them into cheaters.”
He shrugged. “Maybe we did. I can’t speak for my parents’ marriage. I was pretty young when things got bad, so who knows how the cheating started. But I was in med school, then doing an internship and then a residency. All of it was more demanding than you can possibly imagine. I was never around.”
“Your wife didn’t know what it would be like when she married you?”
“She said she
