Lauren tensed as she faced the statuesque beauty in the floor-length dress. “What do you mean?”
Jeannette’s hazel-green eyes glowed with an unhappy light. “Grace Deveraux was going to give me a piece of her mind about my now-defunct marriage to her son. You cleverly stepped in and stopped her.”
Lauren didn’t know why exactly, but she had the feeling Jeannette would have relished such an emotional scene, if only for the embarrassment it would have caused Mitch, and indeed the whole Deveraux clan.
For all their sakes, Lauren did her best to inject calm into the potentially explosive situation. “It wouldn’t benefit any of us to talk about anything but the wonderful cause we are celebrating tonight,” Lauren said tactfully, looking around them. The ballroom had been turned into a whimsical children’s library, complete with faux stacks and cozy reading nooks and a yellow brick road that paved the way from buffet tables to volunteer sign-up stations. The waitstaff were dressed as characters from favorite children’s books. Some were from classic tales—like Mother Goose, The Hardy Boys, and The Wizard of Oz. Others were more modern. Life-size portraits of kids reading were stationed strategically around the room. The centerpieces were made of balloons. Linens and napkins were crayon colors. Jeannette’s assistants were costumed like turn-of-the-century librarians, complete with old-fashioned eyeglasses.
Lauren turned back to Jeannette and continued with respect, “You’ve done a really incredible job here tonight with the party.” That was no surprise, of course. Jeannette Wycliffe was best known for her excellent work. She was also very beautiful, although there was a brittleness in the dark-haired woman’s demeanor that hadn’t been there before her marriage to Mitch. She looked, Lauren thought, like someone who’d been very dissatisfied by life.
“Thank you,” Jeannette returned just as quietly, finally pulling herself together, too. “Your father’s birthday party is coming together very well also, I might add.”
Lauren smiled, still glad she had hired Jeannette to plan and oversee it. She and her father might have their differences, but she wanted only the best for Payton, as he did for her. “We’re really looking forward to it.”
Jeannette nodded. And then, just when Lauren thought they were going to be able to end their conversation on that pleasant, professional note, Jeannette caught her arm before Lauren could turn away.
“Look, Lauren, I know we’re not friends, but I saw you come in with Mitch. And I just have to say it,” Jeannette said, her voice quivering emotionally. “I think dating him is a big mistake. Take it from me—he won’t make you happy.”
Caught off guard by the raw hurt in Jeannette’s tone, Lauren said just as quietly, “You don’t know that.”
“I wish I didn’t,” Jeannette said miserably. “But the sad fact of the matter is that Mitch Deveraux doesn’t care about what anyone else wants. When it comes to him, it’s all about him and his goals. Goals he would do anything to achieve.”
A chill went down Lauren’s spine at the certainty in Jeannette’s eyes.
Lauren stared at her, not knowing what to say that would benefit either of them at that point.
She took a step back, felt a warm, strong hand closing around her elbow. She looked up to see Mitch standing beside her. He nodded at his ex-wife. “Jeannette.”
Jeannette smiled back at Mitch tightly. “Mitch.”
“If you’ll excuse us.”
“Certainly.”
Mitch eased Lauren away. His expression was impassive, his body rigid with tension and something else that might have been disapproval. Clearly, he hadn’t wanted Lauren and Jeannette trading notes on him. “Ready to leave?” he asked crisply.
Lauren glanced across the ballroom and saw that Gabe and Amy Deveraux were already escorting Grace out, as well. Deciding they had all done enough to advance the cause of literacy for one night, Lauren breathed a sigh of relief. “Absolutely.”
Mitch waited until they were driving away from the hotel before finally asking, “What did Jeannette say to you?”
“She doesn’t think we should be dating.”
“No surprise there,” Mitch sighed as he drove past the guardhouse and then, instead of following the rest of the cars toward the main highway, turned the Lexus onto a side street, away from the congested main thoroughfare. “If she can’t have me, she doesn’t want anyone else to, either.”
“So I take it this means Jeannette didn’t want the divorce,” Lauren guessed as they bumped along on a roughly paved lane fronting some beach houses.
Lauren knew it was none of her business, but she couldn’t help it. She was more curious now than ever about the reasons for the end of Mitch’s marriage, as well as the reasons behind Jeannette Wycliffe’s anxiety tonight. Jeannette was an accomplished career woman in her own right. Lauren had never seen her looking so uneasy or upset before, but she had clearly been both tonight.
“You could say that.” Mitch turned again so they were driving over a narrow one-lane bridge through an even more remote area of marsh grass and water marked with signs that read, Breach Inlet. Deadly Currents. No Swimming. No Wading.
Lauren swallowed as Mitch’s car bumped along even harder. They reached the other side of the bridge and hit solid ground again. A steep slope of big boulders and a narrow strip of beach separated them from the water below.
“But you did want the divorce?” Lauren asked. She felt herself tense when another Danger sign came into view.
“Yes.” Mitch swore, slowing even more as the car pulled hard to the right.
“Why?” Lauren asked. She watched Mitch stop the car on the berm, well out of harm’s way, and cut the engine.
“Because she lied to me,” he said.
Chapter Seven
“A big lie, or a casual itty-bitty one?” Lauren asked as Mitch switched on the emergency flashers.
Mitch turned to Lauren. “Is there a difference?” He wished she wouldn’t ask these questions, but he also knew her well enough by now to realize there was going to be no dissuading her. Hence, they might as well just get it over with.
“Well—” Lauren drew back slightly to give him room to maneuver, as he reached past her to open the glove compartment “—if Jeannette was throwing you a surprise party and didn’t want you to know and told a few fibs to cover her tracks, that would be one thing.”
Yes, Mitch thought, it would have been. Unhappily, it wasn’t the case. Mitch grabbed the flashlight. Abruptly feeling way too confined, he got out of the car and moved around to inspect the tires on the passenger side of the car. Lauren followed suit. As he had feared, the right front had a flat.
Aware Lauren was still waiting for an answer, he said, “It was a big lie.”
“And that’s all you’re going to tell me,” Lauren ascertained, sounding disappointed.
“I don’t talk about this,” he said.
“Maybe you should.”
Which was, Mitch thought, exactly what his mother and sister had said when he had refused to tell them. “It won’t change what happened,” he stated gruffly, already circling around to the trunk.
“But it might make you feel better about it,” Lauren said, turning to face him. “Because right now you still seem pretty ticked off, and it’s been—what—a year since the two of you divorced?”
“Two,” Mitch corrected, handing over the flashlight to her. And Lauren was right—he was still pretty peeved about it, whenever he thought about it, which wasn’t often. “For you to understand,” Mitch said finally, still looking for a way out of a conversation this personal, as he jerked off his tie, tossed it inside the car and rolled up his sleeves, “I’d have to go way back.”
Lauren smiled. “I don’t mind.”
“Don’t you want me to call you a cab?”
“You could. But it would probably take forever for them to get out here this time of night. I can wait till you put on the spare. Which, unless I miss my guess, is exactly what you were just getting prepared to do.”
Lauren smiled, looking all the more determined. “Good effort for a way out, but I don’t think so. I’d rather stay, lend a hand if necessary, and hear your side of the breakup. Because obviously your brief run-in with Jeannette annoyed the heck out of you, even if you’d like to pretend it didn’t.”
Mitch studied Lauren for a moment, thinking. He could tell by the gentle, compassionate way she was looking at him she was sincerely interested in him and wanted to help him get over whatever he’d been through. He also knew he did trust her to be discreet about something like this. He couldn’t say why exactly, when the circumstances of their getting together had created a lot of questions in his mind. He just knew on a gut level that whatever he told her in confidence about his romantic past would remain just between the two of them.
“How did you get involved with her anyway?” Lauren asked as Mitch opened the trunk and took out an emergency road kit.
“It was at one of those charity events. I had just started attending them on behalf of the company. And as usual, Jeannette had done an incredible job. I complimented her and we got to talking. One thing led to another and we started dating.”
“How old were you then?” Lauren watched as Mitch set up the spotlight so it illuminated the entire side of the car, then went to the passenger compartment and set the emergency brake.
“Twenty-five and so was she.” Mitch went back to the trunk and removed the jack and the wheel wrench.
“You were both pretty young, then.”
Some of the old bitterness came back to haunt him as he recalled how completely Jeannette had betrayed him. “Looking back now, I can see how cleverly she stage-managed every detail of our courtship, but all I really knew then was that it was exciting and she seemed to want everything that I wanted.” Mitch hunkered down beside the car. “Especially the stable family life and the kids.”
“But she didn’t.”
“No,” Mitch said as he blocked the front and back of diagonally opposite tires with two blocks, to keep the car from shifting while he worked on it. “And I blame myself for that because we didn’t once sit down in a businesslike manner and go over everything point by point.”
Lauren shrugged and shook her head so her golden-brown hair was blowing away from her face instead of into her eyes. “It probably wouldn’t have gone over too well if you had—it’s not very romantic.”
Mitch circled around to the front of the car again. “I’m beginning to think romance has no place in relationships,” he said as he returned to the flat and used a wrench to loosen the lug nuts.
Lauren edged closer, still studying him intently. “You really mean that?”
Mitch glanced up at her. If he didn’t know better, he would think Lauren was really interested in him in a man-woman way that had nothing to do with the deal they’d made with her dad or the rewards they would both reap at the end. “I really do,” he said softly.
“So, back to your story.” Lauren leaned against a boulder. “When did the two of you decide to get married?” she asked.
“A year to the day after we started dating.”
“I remember the wedding.” Lauren smiled. “It was some blowout according to the write-up it received on the society page.”
Mitch slipped the jack under the axle, next to the flat. “Jeannette went all out with the arrangements,” he said, as he positioned the handle on the jack. “It took her just two months to pull everything together.”
“Did she continue working after you were married?”
“No.” Mitch turned the jack handle clockwise until the tire cleared the ground. “She wanted to concentrate on our life together.”
“When did the deception occur?” Lauren asked, moving back slightly so he’d have plenty of room to work.
Mitch grimaced, remembering. “Almost immediately.” The next was even harder for Mitch to admit because it demonstrated how big a fool he had been. “For nearly two years she made a great show of trying to get pregnant. She had me convinced that she wanted to have our baby more than anything in the world.”
“And you bought it.”
Mitch removed the lug nuts. “Hook, line and sinker.”
“How did you discover she didn’t really want this?”
“I was worried because she hadn’t conceived.” Mitch lifted the wheel off and set it on the ground. “And I wanted us to go to a specialist, to make sure everything was in working order.”
“But she didn’t.”
“No,” Mitch said as he headed back to the trunk to get the spare tire. “She argued for more time, said if we just relaxed it would happen. In the meantime, she began looking for a big house in the historic district and she started throwing a lot of very big, elaborate parties. She was trying to emulate my aunt Winnifred’s lifestyle and, frankly, I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about it,” Mitch confessed, positioning the spare tire on the wheel. “I like a party as much as the next guy, but for me, work comes first. Anyway, I could see Jeannette was getting really frustrated with me and the situation. And I knew it wasn’t going to get any better until we knew the truth. So I pulled all kinds of strings and made an appointment with a fertility expert.”
“Jeannette wasn’t happy about that.”
Mitch frowned. “No. Not at all. She canceled and rescheduled at the last minute several times. Eventually,” Mitch sighed as he tightened the lug nuts, using a crisscross pattern, until they were equally snug. “I just made an appointment, picked her up for what she thought was a lunch date and took her to the doctor’s office. And it was as we were walking into the doctor’s office that she finally took me aside and told me the truth.” Mitch grimaced as he turned and looked Lauren straight in the eye. “She’d had her tubes tied six weeks before we walked down the aisle. And she’d been afraid to tell me. She said she knew the two of us didn’t really need children to be happy. She cited my aunt Winnifred as an example, because Winnifred had never had kids and was quite happy, as well as one of the most popular hostesses in the city.”
Lauren looked as shocked as Mitch had felt at the time. “You must have been devastated,” she whispered, upset.
“As well as furious,” Mitch conceded, using the jack to lower the vehicle back to the ground. Pausing, he turned to Lauren. “I felt like such a chump. Looking back, I can see there were signs from the very first that she wasn’t being as truthful with me as she should have been, but like a fool I ignored them.”
Still looking a bit stricken, Lauren regarded Mitch with all the sympathy and understanding he ever could have wished for. “Did Jeannette ever plan to tell you?”
“No.” Mitch removed the jack and wheel blocks. “And she was hurt and angry I’d forced her hand.”
“You must have been pretty hurt, too.”
Mitch nodded, knowing he had never felt as betrayed as he had then. “When I thought about all the lies she’d told me, the level of deception Jeannette had perpetrated, I knew I couldn’t stay married to her a second longer. So I asked for an immediate divorce.”
“And she gave you one.”
“Not for almost a year, even though we were living apart,” Mitch said. “And that’s when it began to get really ugly behind the scenes. Jeannette couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe it was over as far as I was concerned. She said if I had ever really loved her, I could get past it. She even offered to try to have her tubal ligation reversed if I would do my part and allow her to have what she really wanted too, which was to become the leading social hostess in the city.”
“You said no,” Lauren guessed, looking as if she agreed with his decision one hundred percent.
Mitch shrugged and carried the jack, wheel wrench and jack handle back to his trunk. “I’d fallen in love with this image she’d created for me, not the real Jeannette. Once I saw who she was, there was no pretending we’d ever have a viable marriage. So I threatened to sue her f
or fraud if she didn’t give me what I wanted—which was a quick divorce with no financial settlement—we both walked out of the marriage with exactly what we walked in. She finally relented, only because she wanted to land another rich husband and she knew her chances of that would be diminished if the truth ever got out.”
“No wonder your family has no affection for Jeannette,” Lauren murmured as Mitch returned for the flat tire. “After the way she led you on about giving you a child…”
“They don’t know about any of that.” Mitch returned the tire to the trunk, too. “I never told them.”
Lauren rose gracefully to her feet. “Why not?”
“Bad enough I’d been snared by a fortune hunter.” Mitch reached into the emergency kit for a packet containing disposable cleaning cloth and ripped it open. “I had no desire to add to my humiliation.”
“But you told me,” Lauren said, standing up to face him. “You’re not sorry you confided in me, are you?”
“No,” Mitch said. And it was true. He wasn’t. Because something right had come out of it. He felt as if he’d been purged of the awful bitterness he had been carrying around inside himself for so long.
Lauren smiled, looking relieved. “Did the experience put you off marriage forever?”
“No.” Mitch scrubbed the grime off his hands. Then deciding he needed a second cleaning cloth if he was to do the job right, broke open another packet. “But if I were to marry again, I’d go about it in a much more organized, businesslike fashion.”
Lauren gave him a streetwise look that said, Here we go again. “By doing what?” she asked as Mitch decided against switching off the spotlight and tossing it in the trunk just yet. Wanting a moment to enjoy the sea air and the quiet moonlit evening before they finished packing up, he leaned against the car and folded his arms in front of him.
“For starters, I’d pick someone from a similar background, who understands that money and social standing are not the key to happiness.” Someone like you, Lauren. “And then I’d insist we talk about all the important things, like family, first. I would want whomever I marry to want kids as much as I do. And, this time I’d insist on a prenuptial agreement. I’d want a detailed contract about how the money should be split up if and when the marriage dissolved.”
His Marriage Bonus Page 9