Every time she opened her mouth to explain, he told her to quit worrying. She finally shut up, but she didn’t stop fretting. She wasn’t sure what concerned her the most: her mother’s delighted, if mistaken, impression that she and Tate were involved or the possibility that her parents would discover that he was auditing her taxes. Either one posed a minefield of hazards that the man next to her couldn’t possibly have considered when he innocently accepted her mother’s invitation. She still didn’t understand why he’d agreed to do that, much less why he’d wrangled that dinner invitation from her, but right now she didn’t have time to puzzle that part out. She was far more concerned with this sinking feeling of dread that she was about to end the evening with either an entirely inappropriate fiancé or a companion who’d been hog-tied and sternly lectured until he agreed to drop his inquiry into her financial affairs. “Tate, maybe we should forget about this,” she suggested hopefully.
