The Quickie - James Patterson [45]
For a while, all I could do was blink.
Lunch at the St. Regis?
“Vicky Swanson?” I said, vividly remembering the woman I’d seen when I went down to surprise Paul. “What does she look like?”
“Blonde,” Paul said. “Late twenties, I guess. Kind of tall.”
Oh, God, I thought.
No! It couldn’t be.
Another twist to this unending nightmare.
Lunch at the St. Regis!
Paul hadn’t cheated!
I gasped, struggling not to throw up.
Just me!
Chapter 65
I STOOD THERE in stunned silence.
Paul hadn’t ruined everything.
It was me. I had.
Just little old me. I was the one.
Talk about putting a hitch in my dinner plans. I’d been preparing to dredge up our affairs in order to get Paul and me past them.
Except I was the only one who’d had an affair!
I stayed standing, dazed, my face frozen like the screen of a computer in safe mode. Paul laughed as he squeezed my hand.
“It’s a bombshell, I know,” he said. “I just love you, okay? See, I actually thought Vicky was bullshitting me. ‘Hey, would you like to come work at twice your salary?’ she said. So what your brilliant husband did, as a lark really, was say that if they tripled it, they had themselves a deal.
“Vicky called me this morning with the good news. It’s all approved, pending the paperwork! The only problem is, we have to move. To Greenridge, Connecticut! As if moving out of Yonkers to blue-blood horse country is a problem. They’re even going to relocate us. Sell our place and give us a low-interest mortgage on our new one. This is it. Imagine! One person working, a baby, a new house with enough room for a nursery. The American Dream on steroids. This is the break we’ve been waiting for, Lauren.”
My head was spinning like a blender on ice crush. I couldn’t believe it. Not only was I the only one to have cheated . . .
But we’d just hit Lotto?
I sank onto my stool like a boxer after a very bad round.
“I love it, Lauren — I’ve actually robbed you of the power of speech,” Paul said with a laugh.
“Wait,” he said, taking a Sam Adams out of the fridge. “Didn’t you say you wanted to talk to me about something?”
I might have been on the verge of simultaneous heart and brain failure, but I wasn’t stupid.
I’d learn to live with the secret of my affair somehow, I decided. Especially since I’d just found out that I was the only one who had actually had one.
“Oh, right,” I managed to mumble. “Do you want rice or stuffing?”
Chapter 66
PAUL AND I MADE LOVE that night for the first time since I got pregnant. I’d clicked into deep-cleaning survival mode due to his latest revelations and was folding some laundry, when I spotted a black teddie that I’d tried to seduce Paul with one afternoon before everything crazy started.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was taking off my jeans and slipping into the best of Victoria’s Secret. There wasn’t even any cringing mental debate when I saw the sexy version of myself in the bathroom mirror. My breasts were already larger — oh, goody!
From the suddenly stunned look on Paul’s face when I came into the bedroom, I gathered he thought so, too. The Wall Street Journal he was reading dropped from his fingers sheet by sheet until he was holding nothing but air.
“Well, well. Looks like you’re going to score twice in one day, cowboy,” I said as I ripped the top sheet off the bed, sending the financial pages flying. That was pretty much the extent of our foreplay.
I don’t know what had gotten into me. Could I blame my hormones? Why not? I was demanding and very specific in bed. At first, Paul looked a little shocked. Not that he didn’t comply with every command. Obedient and shocked.
I felt something primal take hold of me, and I let it. Isn’t that one of the big points of sex? We tear off our clothes, our inhibitions, the trappings that society demands. Thousands of years of civilization — what’s right, what’s wrong — are all tossed out the window and we’re back to square one. Sex is the truth under all the lies. We are alive, it