Then he gave her a sheepish grin. "And I feel kind of possessive about your underwear. I especially don't like the idea of another man imagining you in it."
For a long moment she stared at him. Then she laughed. "Oh, D. B., what do you think I did before I returned to town?"
The laugh, the question, they both scared the hell out of him. He lifted a shoulder. "I don't know. You worked in a bar, owned one, maybe. I don't care."
She laughed again. It wasn't a pleasant sound. "Oh, yes. You will."
He smothered another unmanly sense of panic. "What are you talking about?"
Her expression was unreadable. "For over twenty years I was a stripper."
"No!" The denial burst out. "That's just a rumor."
She nodded. "I admit there's been plenty of those too. I was never a prostitute. Nor a gangster's moll, or some politician's girl on the side either. There was an occasional man in my life, but what I gave, I gave away for free. However, the truth is, I was a stripper."
D. B. closed his eyes. "I don't believe you."
She laughed again, the sound bitter. "You don't want to believe me. You want to think I left here when I was seventeen years old and found some kind of job you consider acceptable."
Her arms crossed over her chest again and her mouth pursed. "How would you like this little fiction to go? Oh, I've got it. You'd like to think I worked for minimum wage somewhere ... a diner, maybe, or a toy store. On my nights off, you'd like to think I went to a community college, where I earned a degree in business - no, home ec. On Sundays I attended a church service, followed by a walk in the park before cheerfully tackling my homework."
"I'm not so parochial as that," he said, stung.
She smiled, a smile that wasn't soft and warm, but hard and cynical. "No, you're right. You thought perhaps I worked in a bar, or owned one. On my days off, I went to college."
D. B. didn't believe this - any of it. That he'd so royally screwed up, that she was looking at him with this disturbing mix of sadness and contempt, that Bob Dylan's music was still chugging through the speakers as if nothing catastrophic were happening to what had been, just a few months ago, a well-ordered, middle-aged life.
"All right, then," he said with resignation. "Tell me how it was, Samantha."
"My mother died when I was sixteen. She was hit by the train as she walked home from her cocktail-waitress job, the job that was right here in this bar."
D. B. nodded, though he hadn't known about her mother working in Bum Luck.
"A few months later I was pregnant by a college boy who breezed into town for the weekend and who swore he'd love me forever. He didn't give me his real last name." She spoke the words with cool matter-of-factness. "I gave birth, decided I didn't know one damn thing about being someone's mother, then left Hot Water to find my fame and fortune."
"And to forget," D. B. interjected.
She froze, then gave him a stiff nod. "Score one for the judge. But now, where was I? Ah, yes. Fame and fortune. I fancied myself a dancer, you see. One of my Wilder ancestors performed a mean fandango, I believe. I bought a bus ticket to Las Vegas and found that diner job. I also took classes - not academic ones, but dance classes at a nearby studio."
"And then?" He still wasn't sure he believed her story.
"And then it was a remarkably short leap to the local strip club. Two of the girls I took classes with stripped, and they kept telling me about the great money, that I'd have more free time to practice my craft, that it really didn't mean anything." She shrugged. "I was a Wilder, after all. I wasn't exactly shocked by the idea. And in reality, it didn't mean anything. It didn't mean anything at all."
D. B. tried to take it in. He'd never deluded himself by thinking she was inexperienced, of course. Part of the appeal of their relationship was that they were two mature people with mature attitudes about each other, about sex. Though she made him as horny as a boy, they came to each other with the confidence of adults who'd been around the block a time or two.
But this? That she'd spent more than twenty years taking her clothes