Without A Clue. Trish Jensen

in to her obviously—yet heretofore unrealized—warped mind. The thought of having an affair with the man was…

      Ridiculous. This wasn’t like her at all. One time she’d read a study that most men sized up women within seconds of meeting them and classified them as “yes” or “no” in the sexual sense. She’d snorted at the time. Men. It figured. She knew it had taken one look at Christie to make Mike decide a walk down the aisle with Meg wasn’t in the plan. Well, no matter. Good riddance to Mike.

      She couldn’t exactly feel that way about Christie, though, considering Christie was Meg’s sister. And Meg was long used to Christie stealing Meg’s boyfriends. It just would have helped if Christie hadn’t decided to do the stealing a day before Meg’s wedding.

      Then again, after the wedding would have been worse. So Mike and Christie had done her a favor. That was her story, and she was sticking to it.

      Men were basically dogs, but women sometimes helped by wagging their tails just right.

      Yet, here she found herself doing almost exactly that. Not that her sizing up Matt Rossi sexually happened in the first couple of seconds. Well, maybe. But she shouldn’t be thinking of him in that way at all. There was nothing redeeming about him save his looks—that short, dark, mussed hair with those intense brown eyes—and she hated that this alone was enough to make her think lascivious thoughts.

      Meg went for the mind. She didn’t think about men that way until she found their brains sexy. That was her story, and she was sticking to it.

      Until Rossi.

      This was an aberration, she decided. One she could just brush aside. He might be intelligent, but in a really annoying way. His brain was not sexy. So being hot for that gorgeous body was a rare, stray, hormone-charged anomaly. That was her story and she was sticking to it.

      “When you drop down from the clouds, let me know,” she vaguely heard.

      Meg shook her head and looked up. Tina was grinning. That was ominous. Tina never grinned unless she’d just kicked a guy between his rocks and his hard place.

      “I was just thinking about a new plot twist,” Meg said.

      “Like doing it with the murder victim?”

      “Tina—”

      “Just an observation,” Tina said, examining her nails.

      “Well, observe something else.”

      “Like how gorgeous Mr. Murder is?”

      “Is he? I hadn’t noticed.”

      “Oh, good. Then you won’t mind if I flirt with him a little.”

      “Do it and die, babe.”

      “Ha! I knew it!”

      Meg was mortified at her knee-jerk reaction. “I’m just saying don’t mess with the guests.”

      “Right.”

      “Do you want to mess with me right now? And I might mention I’m PMSing.”

      “I’m out of here.”

      “Good decision.”

      The problem was, Meg wasn’t PMSing. Unless PMS stood for “Please, Matt, Sex.” Which was dumb as dumb could be. Sure, he was good-looking. But he was also infuriating. The man had walked in and honestly believed he could take over. Just because he owned the place, he thought he could just waltz in and take control.

      Control. That was the word. He was into control. Which made him so unappealing in the sexiest kind of way. Her father had been a control freak, too. Until her mother had died when Meg was ten, Jeanie Renshaw had been a buffer between father and children. But once she was gone the household had become a boot camp. And Meg had been the designated sergeant, being the eldest.

      Learning to improvise had been so necessary. Checklists and protocols had become evil before she’d even turned into a teenager.

      A rap on her office door brought her head up and her brain down from the clouds of memories. She looked at Mr. Checklist himself, standing in the doorway, busy scribbling notes on a legal pad. Great. More lists.

      Meg took a moment to realize she didn’t appear all that professional in jeans and a Black Death European tour T-shirt. But they were under the gun and she had to be prepared to do anything from paperwork to housework.

      She sighed. “Don’t come in, Mr. Rossi.”

      “Too late,” he said, strolling through the door.

      She didn’t think she could stuff that legal pad down his throat, but she’d love to give it a shot. “Look, you’re the dead guy. You’ve got one major speech and then you’re gone until you return as the ghost. From then on, you wing it. We’ve been through this.”

      “I think we should be caught making love before the murder.”

      Meg was never speechless. Right now her vocal chords had gone south. “Huh?” was about as much noise as she could conjure.

      He looked at her with something very akin to pity. “You. Me. In bed.”

      She needed to swallow. In fact, breathing might be a good idea, too. Fantasizing was out of the question, even if her brain was malfunctioning and doing it anyway.

      “I’m—” she kind of squeaked, then cleared her throat “—not sure why that’s necessary.”

      “Because we’re having an affair,” he said, tapping his notes. “We need to be caught.”

      “I’m not certain that’s necessary,” she repeated. Although it sounded fun in theory.

      He sighed and dropped his pad on the desk. “Do you want this weekend to be successful?”

      “Well, yes.”

      “Then it needs to have a little ‘oomph.’”

      She swallowed. Hard. “Oomphing” sounded a little naughty. And nice.

      “And you have to kill me.”

      “Excuse me?”

      “You are my killer.”

      “The maid is your killer.”

      He looked utterly exasperated. Although he looked really good exasperated, she felt she should own that emotion at the moment. He was driving her nuts.

      With the patience of a saint trying to reform a sinner, he said slowly, “What motivation does the maid have for murdering her boss? That puts her out of a job.”

      Talk about motivation. She was becoming more motivated by the moment to be his killer. “She’s having an affair with one of the men that you are promising to ruin.”

      He shook his head. “Too many affairs happening. Just you and me.”

      Meg tossed down her pen. “Why don’t you just rewrite the entire script?”

      “As a matter of fact—”

      Meg stood, knocking over her chair. “Stop right there. We are one day away from this production. The actors all have their scripts. You’re asking them to change at this point?”

      “It’s not a huge change.”

      “You’re changing the murderer. That sounds pretty drastic to me.”

      “Wouldn’t you like to kill me?” he asked, a twinkle in his brown eyes.

      “Right now? Absolutely. And I’m a pacifist.”

      “Good. Then you won’t have to fake it.” He sat down and laid all of his notes between them, sideways. “Now here’s how I see it…”

      Meg looked down at a detailed checklist.

      Murdering him was not going to be a problem.

      MATT