Page 34 of Her Cadillac Cowboy
She snapped her menu shut and slapped it onto the table. “That answer frustrates me.”
His eyes widened, and she smiled.I bring her here to neutral ground to talk peace and reason, and she starts throwing emotional accusations. His brow wrinkled.
“Josh McKinley, you are the most overbearing, arrogant, contradictory son of a pea-shooter that ever walked the face of the earth.”
“Don’t accuse me...”
“If you intend to veto the topic of conversation that is most important to me, then you’ll have to come up with something better to discuss than ‘anything else,’” she demanded.
“I’m not...”
“I am not the one who refused the initial conversational gambit. I am not the one refusing to be reasonable about the warehouse or this conversation.”
“But...” God, he loved it when she stood up for what she wanted. Except when what she wanted stood in the way of fulfilling his promise to Uncle Sampson.
“You have a responsibility,” she continued, “as my host this evening, to see to your guest’s needs, and you will fulfill that responsibility or suffer the consequences.”
“Be reasonable.”
“I will not speak another word to you until you demonstrate to me that you have chosen the topic of our discussion.”
Her tirade couldn’t have astonished him more if she’d suddenly grown snakes for hair.
Sara turned to the waitress who’d crept forward during the verbal barrage, and ordered the salmon en fusillade, bullet potatoes, and a knife-edge salad.
Josh’s gaze narrowed. He considered Sara’s performance with awed suspicion. What was she up to? He remembered watching her father use the same kind of wheedling manipulation on her mother. The comparison disturbed him. The Sara he’d known as a teenager would not have stooped to such behavior. Maybe he should play along and see what she wanted.
“Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing for the last ten years?”
She halted, her fork halfway to her mouth. Salad dressing dripped onto the linen tablecloth. “You want to know what I’ve been doing for the last ten years?” she echoed.
“Sure, but tell me after you put your fork down.”
Her blush fascinated him. Someday, he would trace that blush from where it started.
The fork clattered onto the salad plate. “I hardly know where to begin.”
“Why did you leave Luville?” he asked.
“For the same reason you did. I went to college.”
He hadn’t gone to college—not then—which she damn well knew. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Why didn’t you come back to stay?”
“Again, just like you, I couldn’t get what I wanted here.”
“I wanted excitement. Are you telling me that’s what you wanted?”
“In a manner of speaking. I always thought of Carson’s as the most exciting thing in Luville. Since Carson’s was going to be Donny’s, I sought my excitement elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“Oh, New York to start with. Just about everywhere else, once I discovered my talent for negotiating oil contracts.”
“And where was ‘everywhere else?’”
“Just places.”
“Like?”
