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smile of absolute thrill lit his handsome face. “What a sense of humor,” he sighed in sincere appreciation. “I’ve never met a woman who could retaliate so well.”
    Dinah quelled an urge to blush like an excited game-show matron who’d just been kissed by Bob Barker. This was the strangest compliment any man had evergiven her, and yet she felt inordinately pleased by it. Everything was getting confused. He was nothing but trouble, and she was afraid of him. But she realized suddenly that she was glad he’d come back to Mount Pleasant.
    “She’s blushing, she’s blushing,” he chanted in a ridiculous adolescent tone. “I love it.”
    Dinah began to laugh hopelessly. Rucker wrapped a hand around her arm and tilted his head towards hers, laughing along with her. “You’re easy to please,” she said finally.
    “You’re easy to be pleased around,” he whispered.
    After a mild battle over who would pick up whom for the VFW spaghetti dinner, Dinah won. She wasn’t going to let this persuasive, dangerous man come near her home, a small clapboard farmhouse hidden in a stand of pine trees a few miles from town. She had a feeling that if he ever got over the threshold, he’d never leave. She might never let him leave. And that would be foolish.
    She was rarely late for anything—old beauty queen training, she thought wryly—so at precisely seven o’clock, the autumn darkness drawing slowly around her, Dinah parked her station wagon outside room number 4 of the Schwartz Mountain Motel and Taxidermy Shop, waved at David Schwartz, who was burning one last pile of leaves on the lawn that fronted the main office, and blew the horn for Rucker. After thirty seconds she blew again. The door banged open and he filled the frame, silhouetted by the cozy light of his bedside lamp.
    Dinah acknowledged a decidedly feminine response to the outline of his body. His long legs tied in nicely to trim, muscular hips and a sturdy torso that widened into magnificent shoulders. His was the kind of body that just naturally drew women’s eyes, no matter how haphazardly he clothed it. Rucker is living proof that grits ought to be the breakfast of champions, she thought. Her eyes widened as she saw the possum inhis hands. He held it up proudly, as if it were his baby, then lifted one of its long, pink paws so that the slack-faced little animal appeared to be waving at her. Dinah nearly choked on laughter as she waved back.
    He set the possum on the bed, shut the room’s door, and walked gingerly toward her car, his boots in one hand. He settled into the passenger seat, and Dinah felt her pulse accelerate at the effect of his overwhelming presence in the small space.
    “How do I look?” he asked cheerfully. “I was watchin’
Wheel of Fortune
when you drove up, and I hadn’t put my boots on yet. Sorry.” He waved large, angular hands at his outfit. “I don’t know how to coordinate clothes. But this outfit usually does pretty well when I go someplace nice.”
    “What’s
Wheel of Fortune
?”
    He stared at her for a moment. “Great balls of fire, just the country’s favorite game show. Dinah, what do you do up here at night in the mountains?”
    “Read a good book or play the piano if I’m not busy doing something related to being mayor, which takes up a lot of my spare time.”
    “We’re gonna have relationship problems if you don’t like important stuff like
Wheel of Fortune
,” he told her drolly.
    “We can’t have relationship problems if we don’t have a relationship. You enjoy doing this outrageous Redneck Everyman routine, don’t you?”
    He looked grandly perturbed. “Routine? Are you suggestin’ that this is not my true personality?”
    “I’ve done a lot of reading about you lately, dear boy. Gloria Steinern said you’re—let’s see, how did she put it—you’re ‘an irresistible red-clay phenomenon who loves to play devil’s advocate.’ She also said that she thinks you’re Phil Donahue at