Yours Seductively

Chapter 5.1 (Part 1)

   Jane was painting when her telephone rang that evening. Still holding her brush in one hand, her eyes focused assessingly in the lake-and-forest scene taking shape in front of her, she reached with her left hand for the cordless phone she'd placed nearby. "Hello?"

   "It's Tyler."

   That took her attentions away from the canvas. "Well, hey, Ty," she drawled, masking her surprise. "What's up?"

   "I, er, just thought I'd call and say hi. I suppose you thought I was rather short at the diner earlier."

   She leaned back in her stool. "You do take your job seriously, don't you, Counselor? One might have thought you were facing poor Mark from the opposite side of a courtroom, rather than in Dora's Cafe."

   "Poor Mark?" He obviously didn't care for the term. "I hardly think the description fits."

   "I really don't know the particulars of his divorce, and I'd just as soon not hear them. Mark's my accountant, and the details of his personal life don't concern me." Once again, she remembered what a mess she'd found herself in the last time she'd offered comfort and friendship to a man in the middle of a divorce.

   "Just watch yourself around him, okay? That squeaky-clean choirboy image he puts on doesn't quite give the full picture."

   "Are you telling me I shouldn't trust him as my accountant?" She asked bluntly.

   After only a momentary hesitation, Tyler conceded, "No, I have no reason to believe there's anything questionable about his work."

   "Then that's all that matters, isn't it? Nothing else is relevant to me."

   "So your lunch with him was strictly business?"

   "You could say that," she agreed coolly. "My business."

   She could almost hear him winced. "Look, Jane, I didn't mean to sound intrusive," he said awkwardly. "It's just—we'll, you haven't been back in tow very long and you probably aren't aware of some of the things that go around here."

   "Honoria hasn't changed that much while I was away. And I know how to plug in to the gossip lines—if I had any interest in doing so."

   "I didn't call to gossip." He sounded annoyed by the implication.

   "Then why did you call?" She challenged him.

   "I want you to have dinner with me tomorrow night."

   Jane nearly dropped her paintbrush. She had to call on her acting skills to respond with cool amusement to his tactless invitation. "Was that a request—or an order?"

   "A request," he replied, his tone a bit rueful. "I'm sorry if I sounded abrupt. I'm afraid I'm out of practice when it comes to this sort of thing. It's been a few years since I asked a woman to dinner."

   A few years? Had he really not been on a date since his wife died? Not quite sure how she felt about that, Jane considered the invitation.

   Whatever his reason for asking, it was only dinner, she reminded herself. Her longtime fascination with Tyler made her want to accept—but also made her wary of doing so. She was just starting to feel comfortable in town again. She was hesitant to risk firing up the gossips with an experiment that would probably end up going nowhere.