All She Ever Wanted - Barbara Freethy [28]
"I have to protect the privacy of my clients."
"From your wife?" She slipped in front of him, leaning against the edge of the desk. "You can trust me."
"It's not about trust."
She wanted to ask him what it was about, but not now, not here, while he was so obviously distracted. "Take a break, Drew. There's a free concert in the park. We could take a blanket, make a picnic. It would be fun."
"I don't have time. Didn't I just tell you that? And don't you have something more important to do than make a picnic and listen to some band?"
She had a million things to do to keep their lives running like a well-oiled clock, but at the moment she didn't feel like focusing on laundry, bills, the kids' homework, the latest PTA project, or cleaning the house. She wanted to talk to Drew away from the house and work. She wanted to talk to him about the book, about seeing Natalie and Cole. Before she could say so, Drew's cell phone rang.
He immediately picked up with a brisk, "Hello." His expression softened. His mouth curved into a smile. Then he laughed. Laura couldn't remember the last time she'd heard him laugh. "You're the best, Valerie. I owe you." He paused. "I'm sure you will collect. Hang on a second." He put his hand over the phone and turned to Laura. "This is going to take a while. Do you mind?"
She did mind—not because he wanted to finish a work call from one of his associates, but because Valerie Cain had put a smile on her husband's face. "We need to talk, too."
"Later. All right?"
Did she have a choice? As Laura left the study, she was tempted to eavesdrop, but she forced herself to shut the door behind her. She had to trust her husband. Trust was the basis of a good marriage. It wasn't as if Drew even had time to have an affair. He worked twelve hours a day. Of course,
Valerie was also at work. Didn't most affairs happen in the workplace?
She had to stop thinking this way. Drew wasn't being unfaithful. Just because they didn't sleep together all that much didn't mean anything. They'd been together ten years. The frequency of sex often fell off after that amount of time. Didn't it?
Had she done something wrong? She kept a nice house. She put healthy dinners on the table every night. She tried to keep Drew's home life smooth and trouble free. Had she gained too much weight? She knew she was up ten pounds from when they'd first married, but she tried to eat right and exercise, and she always dressed well. Maybe she should get liposuction or Botox. Pausing by the hall mirror, she frowned at the little lines around her eyes and mouth. Maybe she was starting to look old. She was almost thirty, not the nineteen-year-old girl Drew had fallen in love with. Or maybe it was all in her imagination. Who knew what went on in Drew's mind these days? She certainly didn't.
With a weary shake of her head, she walked up the stairs and checked on her daughters, who were supposed to be reading. Instead they were squabbling over their dollhouse. "Books, girls," she said sharply. She had a rule that the girls practice their reading every day for at least an hour. They both muttered something under their breaths, but the books came out from beneath the bed.
Laura continued down the hall to her bedroom. She'd decorated the room in pretty pastels and floral patterns that were supposed to calm and soothe, but today the flowers only made her feel tense and irritated. Her mother would tell her she had nothing to complain about. She had a husband, a house, children. Those were the things she had been trained to want her entire life, because as her parents had told her on numerous occasions, she hadn't been blessed with an enormously high IQ like her two older sisters. Her father had even joked when he'd sent her off to college that she better come back with her Mrs. degree. And she had done just that. Sometimes she wondered if she had been so desperate to have a man that she'd rushed Drew down the aisle. Not that she hadn't loved him—she had, and she still did.
But since she'd run into Natalie and Cole at the bookstore