The Big Heat

Despite the fact that Marlene’s comment was manipulative, Cade did feel protective. It was his nature. Even though it was damned inconvenient at times, he couldn’t even pass a stranded motorist without stopping to help. Plus, he never should’ve ignored his gut with Meeks. He felt damn guilty that they’d campaigned against Sunny by endorsing Meeks.

“I wish we’d never endorsed him,” Marlene said, uncannily echoing his thoughts. “You boys are better than that.” At thirty-four and thirty-two, Cade and Linc weren’t exactly boys but Marlene liked to refer to them that way and they let her. She pursed her lips. “Do you think he made it up?”

Cade shook his head. “I’m not a Meeks fan but I don’t think he wrote it. It’d be too easy for him to get caught.”

“How embarrassing for poor Sunny,” Marlene said, slanting a look at Cade. “Like I said, she needs a decent man.”

The phone rang and Marlene took the call, sparing Cade the need to reply.

He picked up the flyer again and studied it. Shoulder-length blond hair, nice smile, okay figure but nice legs, average height. Not knock-you-down gorgeous but those eyes…And why’d he have a gut-clenching sense of recognition deep inside him?

He shifted from one foot to the other and deliberately looked away from her picture. According to the flyer, her interests were running—that explained the nice legs—stained-glass design and urban revitalization.

Linc looked over his shoulder. “Looks like a nice woman.”

“Yep.” Attraction—intense, irrational, unwelcome—stabbed at him. “Not my type,” Cade added, just to set the record straight. He liked his women laid-back, easy-going. Marlene had used the word shallow, which he considered a bit harsh. This woman, despite her easy smile, struck him as intense. No, thanks. Instinct told him she’d be trouble with a capital T. “I’m just looking.”

“You and every other guy in Memphis,” Linc said.

A totally alien, proprietary feeling swamped Cade. What a piss-him-off idea that every other guy in Memphis was looking at her picture and feeling the same feeling of…he didn’t even know how to describe it. He just knew he didn’t like it.

Linc canted his head to the side. “Those are some nice legs. Not that I’m actually looking, ’cause Georgia would have my ass.”

“Yeah? Then maybe you shouldn’t look. She might drag you out to pick china patterns again.”

“Easy, bro.”

“We all have to vote for her,” Marlene said, jumping back into the conversation after hanging up the phone. “I, for one, don’t appreciate and am not taken in by a smear campaign. Boys?”

Linc threw up his hands. “Hey, I’m there. Count me in.”

Cade put the flyer back on Marlene’s desk. “Sure. But we might as well piss in the wind. She’s screwed.”

And in the meantime, he’d make a phone call. He didn’t want to get involved and he sure as hell didn’t want to meet her, but maybe he could help from behind the scenes.

“WHAT A SPINELESS TOAD,” Sunny Templeton fumed.

“If you think you’re going to faint, put your head between your knees,” Sheila, her mentor, friend and campaign manager instructed.

Sunny stared at the flyer. “I’m not going to faint but my head may very well explode.” She sucked in a deep breath, trying to control the temper that occasionally got her in trouble.

“Exploding heads aren’t good,” Sheila said.

“Nope. And exploding heads don’t figure out where to go from here.” She rested her head against the steering wheel of her ’67 ragtop Mustang and calmed herself. “Actually, I’m not sure whether I’m more angry with him or with me for not anticipating he’d do something like this when I pulled ahead of him.”

Well, there was no use sitting in the parking lot of the community center where she’d just made a campaign speech. The stupid flyer had been on every windshield in the parking lot when she and Sheila had left the building.

She cranked the car. It turned over the first time. The body and interior might desperately need restoration but it ran like a dream. The early November sun slanted through the windshield like a soothing balm.

She felt calmer, more rational once again. “We need a plan. Something more constructive than me suggesting Cecil do something anatomically impossible.” Okay, maybe she wasn’t totally rational just yet.

“I think the best way to handle it is to ignore it,” Sheila said. “Meeks is looking for a reaction and I say we don’t give him one.”

“Good idea.” Sunny nodded her agreement. “This—” she nodded toward the flyer crumpled next to the gearshift “—has nothing to do with the campaign or my qualifications.” Her temper escalated all over again. “Can you believe he called me a girl?”

“Of course he did. You’re a thirty-year-old successful entrepreneur with a strong civic track record. He’s desperate to invalidate you and party girls don’t run for city council. He knows people have responded to your sincerity. They know you genuinely care about this city.”

Sunny knew that was true. Granted there were some really dirty parts and nobody was naming it the most beautiful city in the U.S., but she loved Memphis with its rich history and diversity. Running for city council wasn’t about the power or ego gratification—she sincerely believed she could make a difference. If she thought Cecil would do a better job for the district and the community she never would’ve stepped up to the plate. “Well, we’ve run a clean campaign based on the issues. Let’s hope voters are turned off by his stunt.”

“Sunny?”

“Yeah?”

“Um, I’m not being critical, just curious.” Sheila was always so careful not to offend whereas Sunny tended to be much more blunt and plain-spoken. “Why’d you do a singles’ ad on the Internet?”

“I guess for the same reasons everyone else does. It offers a much broader base of men to choose from. You can sort of get to know them and if they’re creeps, you just don’t write back anymore. Plus, since I design Web sites, it just seemed like the natural technology fit for me.” It was mostly the truth. Sunny offered a rueful laugh. “It never occurred to me that it could come back to bite me in the butt.”

“Have you met anyone?”

“Not yet.” It was a dismal state romantically—well, sexually, to be more accurate—that she was in.

Speaking of which, she made a right onto Tolliver and caught the red light directly across from the looming billboard.

There he was, Cecil Meeks, unfortunately larger than life, plastered on the billboard for the city, or at least the portion driving by on busy, congested Tolliver Boulevard, to see. Even more unfortunate, he was flanked by The Bounty-hunting Brothers, as she’d mentally tagged them. Cade and Linc Stone. The caption proclaimed, “We’ve Got Your Man.”

Sheila sighed. “He may be a toad, but he’s a smart toad. Those billboards were a good move.”

“Yep. Very smart.” She thought it was big of her to give credit where credit was due, even if she did despise Cecil Meeks. She hadn’t liked Cecil when she’d joined the race. She knew by the end he’d either earn a grudging respect from her or she’d despise him. She was ready to be signed up for the latter.

“Those two looked fully capable of hunting down and hauling back pretty much anyone. Probably over half the female population in the city would do the crime and skip a court date just to have one of those two haul them back,” Sheila said, with a semidreamy look on her face. Sunny knew the feeling.

“I’m counting on Memphis women voting with their brains instead of their hormones.”

She supposed there were enough women who would find Cade’s tawny-eyed, piercing, I’ll-kick-your-ass-and-enjoy-doing-it stare sexy, or swoon over Linc’s longer hair and devil-may-care smile. Sunny sniffed and wrapped her fingers tighter around the steering wheel. If you liked those kinds of looks in a man, that was.

She never had. She’d always preferred more intellect than brawn. And those muscle-bound types tended to have control issues and since she liked being in control it was pretty much an oil and water situation. Plus, not long after the billboards went up she’d overheard two campaign volunteers discussing the Stone brothers. Both of them had a reputation for changing women almost as regularly as their underwear.

Which was why it was confounding that she’d developed a thing for Cade Stone. Tall and dark with those golden eyes, that sensual, unsmiling mouth and an element of the untamed about him, he’d been a shock to her system from the first time she’d laid eyes on that offensive billboard.

Even now, driving past the image, with Cecil launching his dirty offensive in the campaign’s eleventh hour and Sheila riding shotgun in her car, she tingled from head to toe. Heat coursed through her and left her wriggling in her car seat.

It was nutty that she felt such an intense physical, mental, emotional response to a he-man photo…and it was every dang time she drove past. And lately she’d become so…entangled that he’d shown up, brimming with muscle and testosterone, in her dreams. She’d imagined his kisses in exquisite detail—his mouth on hers, the scrape of his sexy scruff as he slid his lips down her neck and across her collarbone, the bunching of his muscles beneath her fingertips as she grasped his broad shoulders, the feel of his hands mapping her body. And then she’d wake up, gripped by restlessness, her body humming with arousal. It was just so damn weird to be sexually fixated on someone she’d never met and most likely wouldn’t like anyway.

It had been sheer desperation then, that drove her to take out that singles’ Web ad. If a man on a billboard could leave her hot and bothered, why not a guy on the Internet?

Unfortunately, none of her Internet dating responses had bumped Cade Stone out of the fantasy hot seat…yet. And that was the part of the truth she’d left out for Sheila. No one else had an inkling that a simple drive-by sighting left her nipples hard and her hoo-ha wet.

She turned right off Tolliver and half a block later bypassed the alley that housed the garage behind her house. She always opted for the on-street parking in the front.