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that's not what I was asking you and you know it."
    Jack set down his overloaded bun and leaned toward her. Sam was obviously a resourceful woman. A survivor. Her husband had been some flaky artist type who hit the road right after their third kid was born, the kid named for one of the fifty contiguous states, Montana or Nevada, he couldn't remember which. And though she had a degree from Hanover in medieval art history or something equally useless, she'd found a way to make ends meet.
    "Why did you agree to this," Jack lowered his voice to a whisper, "this make-believe relationship?"
    "For my kids' future."
    "Fair enough, but—"
    "Look, Jack. I've done nothing but think about Kara's proposition for two weeks straight, turning it over in my brain and looking at it from every possible angle, and it always seems to boil down to this—if my children and I can play a part for six months, we can reap the benefits for the rest of our lives. When will an opportunity like this come again? My two older kids understand what is expected of them, and why we're doing this."
    Jack leaned over the table and whispered, "They can't tell anyone —not even their best friends, or the deal is off."
    "They know that."
    "Same goes for you, Samantha."
    She nodded, and Jack got to watch as she smoothed a hand through the loose red curls that framed her angelic face. Sam was thirty-six, but she could have easily passed for twenty-nine. Her skin was peachy and smooth and devoid of makeup, except for a clear sheen of lip gloss and maybe some mascara. She was wearing a very soft-looking pale blue sweater with tiny satin-covered buttons down the front, which made him frown. Unbuttoning all those suckers would be a time-consuming affair.
    "Too late for that, Jack," she said. "My best friend already knows. Her name is Monte McQueen, and she works with me at the salon, and she was there the night Kara came over. Her son, Simon, knows too. And then my lawyer, Denny Winston, whom you've met."
    "Indeed."
    "How about you? Who knows on your end?"
    "Stuart and Kara, of course, and my mother will have to be informed eventually."
    Samantha blinked. "Right. Your mother. I read about her. She's this society bigwig, right? When will you tell her?"
    The choking feeling was upon him again, and Jack yanked at his tie. Marguerite Dickinson Tolliver was going to go postal when she heard about this—no doubt about it. The great disappointment of her existence was that at the age of thirty-eight her only child had yet to select a beautiful woman of status and grace with whom to procreate, naming the whole lot of them Something Dickinson Tollivers.
    Though Jack had successfully kept encounters with MDT to a minimum over the last two decades, there was no way she wouldn't find out about him cavorting around town with a hairstylist, and there was no way he wouldn't hear MDT's opinion about it. She had ways of knowing what went on in Indianapolis, even from a thousand miles away.
    "I thought it would be best to wait until everything was a done deal," Jack said matter-of-factly. "My mother spends the winters in Florida, so she's out of town for the time being. It can wait."
    Samantha nodded.
    "Tolliver? Hey, stranger!" A heavy hand smacked down on Jack's right shoulder just as he took another bite of heaven. He looked up into the glistening red face of Brandon Miliewski, a gambling-industry lobbyist with whom Jack had wasted many evenings as lieutenant governor. "I heard you might throw your hat into the ring for Ditto's seat? Is that true? And who is your lovely lunch companion?"
    Jack swallowed his mouthful and motioned toward Samantha, who was already shaking hands with Miliewski. "This is a friend of mine, Samantha Monroe."
    "A pleasure," the lobbyist said to Sam. His gaze flew back to Jack. "So, is it true?"
    Miliewski was jangling the change in his trouser pockets and seemed in no hurry to move on, and Jack knew that whatever answer he gave to this man would be echoing