The Quickie - James Patterson [4]
I sat and drank, and stared at Paul.
At first, I’d been pretty resigned to Paul’s change in behavior after his latest and most pressure-filled promotion at work. I definitely thought it was unhealthy for him to be so stressed out all the time, but I also knew that investment finance was what he did. It was what he was good at, he’d told me many times. How he defined himself.
So I let it slide. His distance from me. The way he’d suddenly begun to ignore me at meals, and in the bedroom. He needed every ounce of concentration and energy for the office. And it was temporary, I told myself. Once he got up to speed, he would ease back. Or, at the very least, he would fail. I’d lick his wounds, and we’d be back to normal. I’d get to see those dimples again, that smile. We’d be back to being best friends.
I opened the night table drawer and took out my charm bracelet.
On my first birthday after we were married, Paul had bought it for me from, of all places, the preteen store Limited Too. So far I had six charms, the first, and my favorite, being a rhinestone heart, “for my love,” he’d said.
I don’t know why, but every year, each chintzy, puppy-love charm meant a million times more to me than the meal in the fancy restaurant he always took me to.
This year, Paul had gotten us into Per Se, the new white-hot spot in the Time Warner Center. But even after the crème brûlée, there was no gift.
He’d forgotten to get me a charm for the bracelet. Forgotten, or decided not to.
That had been the first sign of real trouble.
The Times Square neon billboard for trouble came in the form of the twenty-something blonde outside his office on Pearl Street — the one he’d taken into the St. Regis.
The one Paul had lied to my face about.
Chapter 5
I WAS DOWNSTAIRS IN THE KITCHEN, laying the pink chops down into sizzling butter, when there was a hard rap on the window of the back door. The butterflies swirling in my stomach surged, changed formation. I looked at the clock on the microwave.
Eleven on the dot.
Here it was, here he was, I thought, dabbing the sweat from my forehead with a kitchen towel as I crossed to the door. It was actually happening.
Right here.
Right now.
I took a deep, deep breath and slipped open the dead bolt.
“Hi, Lauren.”
“Hi back at you. You look nice. Great.”
“For somebody who’s soaking wet, right?”
The rain that swung in with the door spattered a constellation of dark, wet stars on the kitchen’s pale stone tile.
And then he stepped in. Quite the entrance, I might add.
His tapered, six-two frame seemed to fill the room. In the candlelight, I could see that his dark hair was freshly cut, the color of wet white sand where it was shaved close to his skull.
Wind roared in, and the scent of him, cologne and rain and leather from the motorcycle jacket he wore, hit me head-on.
Oprah has probably devoted a couple of hours to how you get to this point, I thought as I struggled for something to say. Harmless workplace flirting that leads to infatuation that leads to a furtive friendship that leads to . . . I still wasn’t sure what to call this.
I knew some married female co-workers who took part in harmless flirting, but I’d always put up a wall when I was dealing with men professionally, especially the handsome, funny ones like Scott. It just didn’t feel right, going there.
But Scott had gotten over my wall somehow, gotten inside my defenses. Maybe it was the fact that, for all his size and good looks, there was an innocence about him. Or maybe it was how he was almost formal with me. Old-fashioned in the best sense of the word. Or how his presence in my life seemed to have increased in perfect ratio to Paul’s pulling away.
And as if that weren’t enough, there was something nicely mysterious about him, something subtle under the surface that pulled at me.
“So, you’re actually here,” Scott said, breaking the silence between us. “Wait, I almost forgot.”
For the first time, I noticed the wet, tattered brown bag he was holding. He blushed as he took a little stuffed animal out of it. It was a Beanie