LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

time seemed to slow. Later she would recall the way papers had fluttered to the floor as his assistant scrambled off the credenza and jerked up her panty hose. Later she would want to kill Lyle. But right now she could only stare in disbelief.

      This wasn’t happening, she told herself. He was her husband. He was supposed to love her.

      “Next time you should knock,” he said as he bent over and grabbed his pants.

      She had, she thought, too stunned to feel much of anything. Then she turned on her heel and ran from the room.

      

      FORTY-NINE HOURS and eighteen minutes later, Jill decided that being buried alive was too good for Lyle. Still, she was due some serious revenge. Unfortunately, as she had no idea on how to get the revenge she so desperately needed, she contented herself with imagining him lying on the edge of a desert highway, gasping for breath as she zoomed by at a comfortable ninety miles an hour. She liked the vision of her soon-to-be ex-husband as roadkill.

      “Lying weasel rat-fink dog,” she muttered as she slowed at the bottom of the freeway off-ramp and turned west.

      The lying weasel rat-fink dog was currently back in San Francisco, moving into what should have been her junior partner office with a window. No doubt he would celebrate what should have been her promotion by taking out his assistant, then seducing her with wine from the collection she’d put together, and carrying her off to what had been their bed.

      Yes, it was true. Jill’s day had gone from bad to worse. It wasn’t enough to catch her husband in the act; later that afternoon she’d been fired.

      “I hope Lyle gets a sexually transmitted disease and Big Willie falls off,” she said aloud, before correcting herself. “Not exactly ‘Big’ Willie. In fact, nothing to be proud of. I had to fake most of those orgasms, you rat bastard lying weasel dog.”

      Worse, she’d cooked for him. Jill could accept a bad sex life, but to think she’d ducked out of important meetings so that Lyle could come home to meals she’d prepared really made her teeth ache.

      She wanted to roll down the windows and scream into the sea-soaked air that she hated her husband and couldn’t wait until their divorce was final. She wished she’d never met him, had never fallen for him and had never married him. But there was no point in frightening the seagulls on the sidewalk and the two old guys playing checkers in the park.

      The only bright spot in an otherwise completely black situation was that Shelley’s hair had turned out movie-star gorgeous. Something to hang on to, Jill thought as she pulled to a stop at a red light and looked around for the first time since leaving San Francisco. Really looked.

      Jeez, she was back in the one place she never wanted to be. Obviously her string of bad luck had continued, she thought, as she realized she was the only person on the planet who really could go home again.

      Los Lobos, California—a small, touristy coastal town where folks vacationed every year. You could get homemade ice cream at the local Treats ’n Eats, homemade pie at Polly’s Pie Parlor, and the best fajitas in the state at Bill’s Mexican Grill. Residents never locked their doors, except during tourist season. The pier was a national treasure and the Halloween Pumpkin festival on the beach was one of the biggest events of the year. For some it was paradise; for Jill, it was like being sentenced to serve time in hell. It was also something else Lyle was going to have to answer for.

      At least the family home had been turned over to the Conservancy Society, so she was saved the humiliation of having to live in her old bedroom. The house where she’d grown up was in the process of being restored to its original Victorian prissiness, and so she was temporarily moving in with her aunt Beverly.

      The thought of the older woman’s gentle smile and potpourri-filled house pushed Jill’s foot down on the accelerator. She drove through the center of town—such as it was—and came out on the south side. After making a series of turns, she pulled up in front of a two-story house built in the 1940s. The wide porch had an overhang supported by stone-covered pillars. Several worn pieces of rattan furniture filled the space and offered a place to sit and watch the world go by. Jill found herself in more of a “curl up and lick her wounds” kind of mind-set, but that would pass, and when it did she would appreciate the old rocking chair by the swing.

      She parked in front of the house and climbed out. Aunt Bev must have been watching from the big bay window because she stepped out of the house and started down the stairs.

      Beverly Antoinette Cooper, known as Bev to her friends, had been born into money. Not gobs and gobs but enough that she’d never had to hold a job, even though she’d spent a couple of years as a schoolteacher when she’d first graduated from college. Petite, with fiery red hair and a big smile, she’d been the younger of the two children in her family. She’d moved to Los Lobos when her sister had married Jill’s father and had decided to stay.

      Jill had never been more grateful for the family connection. Her aunt wasn’t one to judge or criticize. Mostly she offered hugs, affection and occasionally odd advice. Bev considered herself gifted—psychically—although the jury was still out on that one. Feeling better than she had since walking in on Lyle and his assistant going at it on his credenza, Jill walked around to the sidewalk, where she stopped and smiled.

      “I’m here.”

      Her aunt grinned. “Nice wheels.”

      Jill glanced at the gleaming black BMW 545. “It’s transportation,” she said with a shrug.

      “Uh-huh. Lyle’s?”

      “California is a community-property state,” Jill said primly. “As he acquired the asset after our marriage, it’s as much my car as his.”

      “You took it because you knew it would piss him off.”

      “Pretty much.”

      “That’s my girl.” Her aunt glanced at Jill’s shirt and raised her eyebrows. “Takeout?”

      Jill looked at the stain on the front of the hundred-percent Egyptian cotton custom-made shirt she’d shrugged on over her jeans. The sleeves hung well past her fingers and she could have fit inside the garment two and a half times, but this was Lyle’s special shirt that he’d ordered from Hong Kong at the tidy price of five hundred dollars. He’d owned four. The other three were tucked inside her suitcase.

      “Burrito,” she said as she rubbed at the brownish-red smudge just under her right breast. “Maybe some hot sauce. I stopped at Taco Bell on the way down.”

      “Tell me you ate in the car,” Bev said impishly. “Lyle always did have a thing against eating in the car.”

      “Every bite,” Jill told her.

      “Good.”

      Bev held out her arms. Jill hesitated only a second, then flung herself into the smaller woman’s warm embrace. She’d been holding it together for two days, only allowing herself to deal with the logistics of packing up her world. All her emotions had been stuffed down until it was safe to let them go. That moment turned out to be right now.

      Her face heated, her chest tightened and a shudder raced through her.

      “I saw him doing it with her,” she whispered, her voice thick with pain and the tears she tried to hold back. “At the office. It was so disgusting. He didn’t even take his clothes off—his pants were hanging around his ankles and he looked ridiculous. Why wouldn’t she make him get naked?”

      “Some women don’t have any self-respect.”

      Jill nodded. “At least I always made him get naked.”

      “I know you did.”

      “But that wasn’t what hurt the most,” she continued, her eyes burning. “He stole my promotion. I’d been working so damn hard and I brought in all that business and he got my promotion and I got fired.”

      The tears broke free.

Скачать книгу