“I’m committed,” I whispered.
“You can’t eat that. Give that to me.”
“No.”
I stuffed another bite of the coaster in my mouth.
The butler handed me a fresh drink while Beck was apoplectic beside me. At least Ethel was too concerned with her granddaughters to pay me any attention.
I had finished choking down my coaster when the butler announced that dinner was served. I didn’t know what I was expecting, but a formal dinner with white-coated servers behind each place setting wasn’t it.
“I am severely underdressed,” I said to Beck under my breath.
“Yes, you are,” he hissed back and pulled my chair out for me.
Once we were seated, the servers placed bowls of lobster bisque in front of us. It was my favorite soup, but after that coaster, I wasn’t feeling that great.
“Wine, miss?” my personal server asked, motioning to my glass.
“Yes, please!”
I reached for a spoon for my soup and hesitated. There were three different spoons to my right, and none of them looked like the typical wide soup spoon.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe…” I picked up one.
“Wrong spoon,” Beck growled at me.
“You grew up in a compound in the desert. You don’t know which spoon is which,” I said out of the side of my mouth.
He kicked me under the table.
“And how did you two meet?” Ethel asked as I took tiny sips of soup from an even tinier spoon, which in hindsight was totally the spoon you were supposed to stir your coffee with and not the soup spoon.
“It’s a fantastic story. Isn’t that right, Beck?” I said, stalling.
I couldn’t very well tell her he was my boss, could I? That didn’t sound like the sort of upstanding family she would want her granddaughters to be a part of.
“We met, uh…” Beck gave me a blank look. “We met in a…”
God! Men.
My time to shine! All my romance-novel reading was about to pay off. I took a sip of my wine.
“It was a dark and stormy fall night,” I began. “I had just been mugged, my ID, my wallet, and my family’s heirloom cast-iron skillet had been stolen! The thief ran off into the night. I was cold, penniless, and alone in the train station.”
Beside me, Beck pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I thought I was ruined! Then out of the shadows, a man on horseback rode up.”
“My word,” Ethel exclaimed, pressing a hand to her chest. “On horseback in the middle of the city?”
“You have a pony?” Annie asked Beck. “Here? Where is he? Can I meet him?”
“It was in Harrogate,” I said, backtracking.
Ethel frowned. “I know several of the Harrogate Girls club members. I met them at the Art Zurich Biennial Expo. They never mentioned anything about a daring horseback rescue. I feel like they would have said something.”
“It didn’t happen like that,” Beck said, his grip on his wineglass so tight I thought it was going to shatter. “Tess wasn’t mugged; she was drunk.”
