“No-no-no-no.” Gretchen chased after the topmost document—her preprinted council meeting agenda around which she had written vital facts and cogent counterpoints during conference breaks all day. The only document of its kind, essentially her blue-inked brain for the next two hours, swept beneath a darkened human resources door. In a distant galaxy, Chase Meier may have said something apologetic or sarcastic or something, but she was too busy letting curses fly.
“Son-of-a-biscuit.”
“Pluck it all.”
“Awww…noodles.”
“Oh my god,” said Chase. “You knocked me clear into a Disney movie.”
She folded herself like a map, knees and right temple to the cold floor, behind up—her movement severely limited by her red pencil skirt—and leveled her one-eyed stare beneath the door. The agenda was a good five feet inside. Darn it but these slippery floors.
One glance back at the reason for this catastrophe, and the blood that already filled her cheeks from her catawampus position pulsed like a heartbeat.
Chase Meier stood in a suit and casually-loosened tie, hands slung low on hips, neck craned a good ninety degrees atop his shoulder, GQ grin on his face. Not offering assistance. Not collecting papers. Not doing anything but staring at her unladylike posture.
Gretchen attempted to scramble to her feet, but with one slung into a four-inch heel and one naked as the day she was born, she wobbled.
His firm grip took hold of her elbow and steadied her.
She yanked the bottom hem of her suit jacket into place and swiped at a crazy strand of hair that had broken free of its business curl and tangled in her eyelashes. In truth, she felt like crying. Going into a city council meeting woefully unprepared was the stuff that kept her awake some nights. That, and spicy pizza rolls. But she was not about to give this…this redneck rubbernecker the satisfaction. Besides, tears were most certainly not mayoral—especially from someone who wished to advance the notion that women had precisely the right temperament to lead government. Gretchen sucked in a greedy inhale of chutzpah, broke free of his rather ambitious hold on her sleeve, and mined for some decorum.
“My only fully realized agenda for the meeting that starts—well, now—might as well be on the dark side of the moon.” She began collecting fallen papers and files at willy-nilly lightning speed.
He crouched down and did the same. “So wing it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Wing it. I’m sure it’s inside that Harvard brain somewhere.”
“Stanford.”
“Whatever.”
“Mayors, sir, do not simply ‘wing it,’” she said, with all the caustic disbelief she might have expressed had he suggested she replace the convocation with a pole dance.
“Surprising things happen when you let loose of the reins a little. All I’m saying.” Chase held out the last of his collected pages and her other floral shoe dangling from his finger by the strap.
The innocently intimate sight was so off, so something she would never allow under any circumstances, that it knocked the rebuttal clear from her tongue. Chase Meier had single-fingeredly silenced government but for one lame-duck utterance.
“I’m late.”
She rammed her bare foot into the heel in question and bustled—click-click-click—to the meeting room door
s. Door swung wide, Dale Euclid’s beet-faced complexion was there to greet her. His stare was already tight.
Chase Meier crowded the doorway behind her.
In her rush, it hadn’t even occurred to her why he was walking the marbled hall. Why he was dressed like a funeral director instead of a ruffian with a sundial on his belt. He held the door for her and flashed the same smile he had let loose in the hallway at precisely the moment someone could have parked a lawn implement up her backside.
“Yancy added me to the meeting tonight. So, see? Agenda wouldn’t have been accurate anyway.” Jazz hands on a bull rider were definitely not jazz hands. More like a surrender before handcuffs to law enforcement. Still, the bad boy tried. “Surprise.”
Chase Meier’s rezoning presentation was the stuff of legend. Not because it was flawless—far from it. He clearly had little business acumen and even less experience with electronics, as evidenced by his love-hate display with the laptop-fed projection screen. But when Darcy—traitor—came to his technical rescue and he made a joke about it being like getting back up on a bull after he’d knocked you off—to the tittering delight of the record crowd—Gretchen knew Chase could have insulted the beloved Texas governor and Mother Theresa and he still would have won favor.
From everyone but her.
She saw him as the snake oil salesman that he was. Selling debauchery under the guise of a sound and sizeable investment in a struggling local economy. Lining his pockets at the expense of city servants whose resources were already as elastic as taffy. But the dollar amounts were impressive and the conceptual drawings for a tasting and event room were Architectural Digest-caliber because his sister-in-law and resident world-class artist, Olive Blake-Meier, had sketched them. Despite her fervent intentions otherwise, Gretchen found herself daydreaming of being inside the finished distillery—a sleek nod to the industrial history of the space and everything that staked a claim as rustic Texas.
“I move that we vote on the proposed zoning changes for the eleven hundred block of Main,” said Councilman Digger Owens.