She got it mostly dry and brought it out to him. He thanked her and pulled it back on, buttoning it as she turned away from him, and busied herself with Emma's diaper bag.
Roman closed the last button and reached for Cami's shoulder. He turned her and she slowly looked up at him, confusion and a hint of sorrow touching her eyes.
"It's going to be okay. We're just in a strange situation, that's all. We'll work through this, and we'll do it together. No apologies and no worries. We have a beautiful daughter that we created, and we are going to raise her as loving and devoted parents, and as really good friends. We can do that for her and for each other." He smiled at her.
His confidence and kindness unraveled the tangled knot of stress and emotion in her stomach, and she wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned her head on his chest.
"You're right. We can do this. We'll figure it out." She smiled a little again and then let him go. "Thank you so much for all that you've done for us and all that you are doing. It's so appreciated."
Roman nodded and took her hand, walking to the door with her. "It's absolutely my pleasure."
He hugged her tightly again and then with one last longing look in his eyes, he turned and walked out of the door, closing it softly behind him.
He went home and went inside the house, only to walk straight into Agnes who looked at him with hawk eyes from head to toe. "You look like hell. What have you done to your shirt?"
Roman was in no mood for dealing with his mother-in-law. "I spilled something on it earlier and tried to wash it out." He began to walk toward the staircase to go to his room, but she kept talking to him.
"You know, you're a lucky man to have a wife like my daughter in your life to help you out. You certainly couldn't do anything without her. It's a good thing she's such a smart and beautiful woman, or you'd never get a chance to meet anyone like that Senator she brought in for you.
“You're damn lucky to have her. If you were half the man you ought to be, you'd show her some appreciation for everything she does for you." Agnes snapped at him and he stared at her as she turned and headed out of the front door.
"Please don't come back," he whispered to the closed door. He couldn't believe she thought her daughter was the reason that the Senator was even involved with them in the first place. He continued up the stairs to his room, showered, and changed his clothes.
He was sitting outside by the pool later that evening when Denise walked out to talk to him. She sat beside him in a lounge chair and looked at him with consternation.
"I can't get Carmen to call me back. I know it's because you offended her at the party and now I have to work extra hard to get back into her good graces again!" She scowled at him.
He lowered his brow at her. "Why don't you leave her alone and wait for her to call you?" he asked, certain that Carmen would share his thoughts and suggestions.
She shook her head adamantly. "No! I don't want her to think that I don't care if we're friends. She has to know that I mean business and that I'm her best friend."
Roman shook his head and looked away from her.
"I've decided to go another route to get to her, and that's to go through Edward. Maybe he can help her understand that I'm serious about our friendship." She glared a little.
"She ought to consider herself lucky to be friends with me, after all, she was just his nanny; she was just hired help and she was screwing him on the side, so he felt obligated to her and he married her. I can't imagine why; she's not even white like him. Most of the other ladies in society are just nice to her because she's the Senator's wife, but me... I really mean it.
“I'm trying to be friends with her and support her, even though she's just really a nanny and from a lower class of people. You would think she'd be grateful to me for sacrificing myself like that for her, and she would want to spend some time with me. How else is she ever going to shine?"
Roman stared at his wife in disbelief. "You're kidding! You think she's married to the Senator because he felt obligated to her? He loves her! It doesn't matter what color her skin is, Denise, all that matters is that they fell in love!" He felt anger building up inside of him and compounding with every passing moment.
"What are you talking about, saying that she should be lucky to have you as a friend? Wasn't it you who was just saying recently that we needed to be friends with them so other people would look up to us and see how important we are? It sounds to me like you already feel that important and you think she should be looking up to you for social importance!"
Denise scoffed and shook her wild red curls. "That's not what I'm saying at all! You're putting words in my mouth like you always do! By the way, Mother told me how awful you were to her when you came home this afternoon, and you think that you've done all the work bringing the Senator in for business and to buy that stupid boat! How dare you! You know damn good and well that it was me that did all the work with them and brought them in!"
She stood up in a huff and stormed off muttering about how ungrateful he was and how she could do so much better than him any time she wanted to. The door closed behind her and he leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly.
He was trying to remember why he married her at all, and then visions of her as they had been when they were hot lovers came back to him and he remembered exactly why he had married her. Then he knew that the biggest reason he had married her was no longer a factor, and he searched, without result, for a reason to still be married to her.
The following day he was elbow deep in work at his office when he realized he’d left a flash drive with some files he needed back in his office at the house. He tried to call Denise to ask her to bring it to him but she didn't answer her phone. Though the Senator was their most significant client at that time, he was by no means their only client, and Roman realized he'd have to run and grab the file himself. Just as he was picking up his keys, the phone rang at his desk and he picked it up.
"Hello?" he answered.
"Roman, it's Cami." Her voice came through the line and it felt like a soothing wave of warm sunshine to him. He sat back down and couldn't help the broad smile that spread over his face.
"How are you doing?"
"Oh, I'm good! We both are. Your daughter is playing with some of the new toys you bought her. She loves the giraffe, by the way," Cami said, smiling and thinking how nice it was to pick up the phone and talk to him whenever she wanted.
"Great!" Roman said happily, thinking of Emma smiling and laughing at the little squeaker giraffe he'd gotten for her. "What's going on?" he asked lightly.
"Well, Emma is going to be meeting her new pediatrician here in San Francisco the day after tomorrow and she's also going to get some shots. I thought you might want to come with us." Emma did not like shots, and Cami thought it would help to have Roman there to cheer her up.
Roman jumped at the chance to do his daddy duty. It was a delight and pleasure for him to be able to be involved with her as much as he could. "Yes! Absolutely. Just text me the details and I'll be there. Oh, and please tell Janine so she can put it in my calendar, too."
Cami smiled. "Okay, I will. Thank you, Roman, it means a great deal."
He nodded, thinking of them both with a light and happy heart. "I'm glad to do it. I'll patch you through to Janine." He transferred the call and Janine picked it up. Roman reached for his keys and hurried out to his car.
Thoughts of Cami and Emma filled his heart and made him smile as he drove through the city to his house. He wasn't looking forward to the doctor giving Emma shots, but he knew they were necessary, and he vowed to be there for her anytime she needed him. He couldn't think of many more times a baby needed more comfort than when getting shots.
A while later, he pulled up in front of the house and saw a little green car in the driveway. He frowned slightly, wondering why it was there and he headed to his office to get the flash drive. He had it tucked into his pocket and was just about to leave when
he heard Agnes on her cell phone, complaining about something and he knew he wouldn't be able to get to the front door without going past her. He gave it a quick thought and decided to go through the back of the house and around the grounds to the front, to get to his car. It would take an extra couple of minutes, but he was glad to sacrifice those to avoid his mother-in-law.
He slipped quietly through the house and out of the back door. He was just walking past the pool house when he heard people inside it and he stopped in his tracks. There shouldn't be anyone in his pool house. He walked over to the door and opened it, stepping inside and stopping dead in his tracks when he saw what was going on.
Roman was standing at the door that opened into the living room area of the pool house, and in the center of the room was a folding massage table opened up and laid out, and beside the table was an armless chair. And seated on that chair was a young muscular man with long black hair. His body was bare except for his shorts, which were sitting in a pile at his ankles as he leaned back at an angle on the chair.
Sitting astride him, wearing nothing at all, was Denise, her hips rocking wildly over his, her fiery red curls bouncing with abandon as she rode him, and her hands clamped to the back of the chair behind his head. The man's hands were grasping her hips, holding her down onto him, and his mouth was filled with the tip of one of her massive breasts.
Because of their loud moaning and raucous sex, they had not heard him come in, nor did either of them see him until he had almost reached them.
"What in the hell do you think you're doing?" he shouted as he got close to them. They both stopped moving instantly and turned in a flash, staring at him. Denise hopped off him, leaving him sitting in the chair, nude and fully aroused, staring in shock at Roman.
"Get your damn clothes on and get the hell out of here now!" Roman yelled at the man.
"Armando!" Denise called out, reaching her hand toward her lover. "Hurry! Before he does something awful to you!"
Armando jumped up swiftly from the chair and reached down to his ankles, yanking his shorts back up over his hips to his waist. He glanced momentarily at Roman, his eyes wide with fear, and he quickly folded up his massage table as Denise ran to Roman and stood between him and Armando.
Roman looked down at her in disgust. "I'm not going to do anything to him except call the police to arrest the trespasser on my property if he doesn't get the hell out of here right now!"
Armando had his table folded and was edging along the wall past Roman toward the front door in record time. He vanished and Roman had a feeling the little green car would be gone when he got back to the front of the house.
He turned and looked at his wife. "What in the hell do you think you're doing?" he repeated, yelling at her.
She shook her head and held her hands up to him. "Nothing! It was nothing, he was just massaging me and it got a little... uh... it just sort of happened, but it was just this once and nothing like that has ever happened with anyone else before, ever!" She nodded and stood there nude before him.
He was thoroughly disgusted, but he knew in his heart that he had no room at all to pass judgment on her. She didn't have a child outside of their marriage. Something that her friend Amanda had said to him at the party when she tried to seduce him, came back to him then.
Roman took a step toward her, his eyes sharp and piercing as he watched her face. "I heard from one of your friends that we have an open marriage. I heard that you sleep around quite a bit. Is that true? Are you seeing anyone outside of our marriage? Are you sleeping with other men?"
She paused for a long moment, looking as though she was carefully weighing her answer, but then she shook her red curls and said softly, "No, of course not. No. It's like I said, it was just this once. We didn't even really do much, it just happened right when you came in."
He looked at the floor where the massage table had been and then looked back up at her. There were three used condoms lying there, and none of them had been the one that Armando was wearing when Denise hopped off him.
"Just this once, huh?" he asked in disgust. "Don't ever do it again."
He turned and walked out of the pool house, leaving her standing there speechless, looking after him.
He got back into his car and drove to his office with a million thoughts and feelings rushing through him. She'd been screwing her masseur. It obviously wasn't her first time with him. No man goes around with four condoms in his wallet.
Armando had known he'd be busy with her for a while, and if Denise had provided them, that meant that she had a box of them there at the house. Condoms were something she didn't use with him because they never had sex anymore, and when they had been intimate during their early years of marriage, she'd been on the pill, so they didn't use condoms then, either.
There would have been no reason for her to have a box of them at the house, unless she regularly had lovers there. Whatever the truth of it was, it wasn't their first time together. Roman was thoroughly sickened by it, and more than anything, he wished that he could have found out some other way than by catching them in the act, because he knew he would never get that memory or scene out of his head, and it was one he wanted to forget as soon as he saw it.
He wondered if Amanda had been right, and if Denise had been screwing around with other men for a while. She wasn't going to tell him, so that only left him wondering, and angry with her.
He realized that he couldn't get angry with her or try to chastise her in any way, because of Cami and Emma, and it filled him with doubt and regret that he was in such a sham of a marriage.
It stayed on his mind all afternoon as he worked, and when he went home that night, she met him in the foyer and asked him to talk with her. At first, he didn't want to, but then he knew that if he was going to have to ask her to understand about Emma, he was going to have to take as much as he gave. He followed her into their library and closed the door behind them.
They sat across from each other on the chairs in the large room, and Denise started talking to him right away.
"Roman, I'm sure today was hard for you, but we need to work this out." She looked at him with wide eyes and some emotion that closely resembled fear and panic.
Roman wanted to yell at her. He wanted to be angry with her and shake her, he wanted to express his confusion, hurt, and anger at her, but all he could think of was how he was going to tell her about Emma, and he knew that he had no right at all to any of what he wanted to do.
"How long has this been going on, Denise?" he asked quietly, trying to keep his emotions in check.
She shook her red head adamantly. "Just this once!" She spoke in a rush.
He leveled his gaze at her. "Denise, I'm not stupid."
She fidgeted with her fingers in her lap. "Well, maybe one other time."
He turned his face from her and sighed loudly. "We aren't going to get anywhere with this conversation if you don't start telling me the truth,” he said in a monotone.
Denise rolled her eyes and slumped her shoulders.
Roman looked directly at her again. "How long have you been sleeping with the masseur?”
She bit her lip. "A couple of years," she answered quietly.
He was shocked. He stared at her in amazement. "Were you sleeping with him while you were still sleeping with me in my room?"
She paused and then shook her head. "No."
He felt almost certain that she was lying.
Roman leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. "Are there others? Have there been others?"
She shook her head again. "No!" She said it too quickly.
He stared into her relentlessly.
She sighed. "Yes."
Roman didn't look away or flinch at all. "How many?"
Denise continued to chew on her lower lip. "Just... a few."
He shook his head slowly. "Anyone I know?"
She shook her head. "No one you know, really."
He leaned back into the sofa and sighed. "Why?" H
e eyes were steady on her.
"I don't know. It just kind of happened, I guess."
He shook his head, wondering again why they were still married. "Perhaps we should think about just ending this marriage. You don't love me, you don't want to be with me, and you're obviously interested in other men. I can't imagine there's any reason at all why we should stay together." Roman rubbed his hands over his forehead and closed his eyes for a minute as a headache began to form at the front of his head.
She almost jumped off the sofa toward him, stretching her hands out in front of her, waving them at him. "No! No, Roman, I don't want to do that! I want to stay here with you and be your wife. We need to try to work on things! We need to try to save our marriage! I just made a mistake!" She got off her sofa and rushed over to him to sit beside him.
The Baby Shower Page 105