Ouch. Maxine winced, lifting her chin up and out of his strong hand. “I just have trouble expressing myself.” But only with Fin. He steamrolled her with his slew of words and fast and furious potshots.
“Having an opinion about how he’s treated you is more than fair, if you ask me. If I were you, I’d be pretty pissed off at what he’s done. Yet, I watched you shrink a couple of inches in height when he went into demand mode. This is 2010, Max. You don’t have to walk ten paces behind him.”
She didn’t. Okay, maybe she walked five or so, but definitely not ten. That was an exaggeration. Wasn’t it? Shaking her head, Maxine decided to change course again. “Why are you getting so worked up about it? Why do you care how my ex-husband talks to me?”
“Almost ex-husband,” he corrected with a half smile, “and the Max I knew would have run up one side of him and back down the other. I guess I was just surprised at how you jumped at the chance to pacify him instead of telling him to take his shitty attitude back to his mini-mansion and barely-beyond-jailbait girlfriend. The Max I knew once gave a bully a thorough tongue-lashing in front of a whole gymnasium of students because he had the ’nads to call Mindy Weirtz flat-chested in front of you.”
Maxine’s head cocked to the left, calling up the memory. She had read Leon Matheson the riot act, hadn’t she? Like she’d written it herself. A small smile lifted her lips upward. “I liked Mindy. She was always nice to me. She helped me with my algebra. I sucked at math.”
“So you don’t like ‘you’ enough to at least have even a small, angry protest on your behalf? I wonder what the old Max would have to say about that?” he pondered out loud, giving her a questioning glance that held a challenge.
Oh, fuck the old Max. The old Max had that kind of energy. The new, now older, far less firm, sans pom-poms and rhinestone-bedecked tiara Maxine didn’t. Instead of reacting, she chose to change tactics. Divert, distract, defuse. The three “Ds” to winning any battle successfully. You didn’t need an opinion or a quick retort to do that. “Want to share how you know so much about me and my pending divorce?”
Campbell smiled, deeply grooved dimples popping up on either side of his mouth. “It’s like you said, the women here talk. That I happen to be in their space when they do is merely coincidence. And in case you’re wondering, they all think your almost ex is a—”
“Penis-less wonder.” Maxine chuckled, breaking the tension beginning to creep between them. “Well, thanks for sticking up for me. I promise in the future I’ll work on being a big girl and sticking up for myself.”
“I’d say you owe me that cup of coffee for beating that jackass about the head and shoulders with my sharp tongue and pithy wit.”
Her tongue darted over her parched lips in nervousness. “Thank you isn’t enough?”
Campbell let her hand go, but his smile didn’t leave his face. Shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans, he said, “Nah. I gave your almost ex a verbal lickin’. That’s worth at least a cup of coffee.”
If she said anything right now, Maxine knew she would stammer—knew it. Yet she opted to open her mouth anyway. “I—well, I’m—busy. I mean—I can’t—because I’m busy and—”
The space between them diminished before she knew what was happening—his face, handsome and hovering, quite suddenly directly in front of hers, cutting off her babble. The graze of Campbell’s lips on hers, shocking and wonderful all at once, left her startled and overheated. They were firm but soft, and so hot she found herself wanting more, leaning into him, forgetting Jake and feeling only the gut-deep reaction his mouth evoked.
The moan that almost slipped from her mouth into his was stifled when Campbell began to back away, still smiling. “I didn’t invite you for a night of floggers and ball gags, Max, just a cup of coffee. I’ll call you,” he said with a deep chuckle, turning and heading back down the road before she could say no.
Maxine looked down at Jake, her heart crashing so loud, she heard it in her ears. “Whaddya think a ball gag is, Jake?”
Jake growled up at her.
“Yeah, I feel the same way,” she agreed with his assessment of the situation, shrugging her shoulders. “Some things you’re just better off not knowing, eh, pal?” Duplicating the sharp tug Campbell had given him, she tried to pull Jake back down the hill.
Instead of following merrily behind her like she was the Pied Piper of all things big, four-legged, and drooling, Jake flopped down on the pavement, put his nose between his paws, and groaned.
Wrapping the leash around her wrist, Maxine gave a gentle yank. “Aw, c’mon, Jake! It’s hot. I’m tired. I’m hungry. So hungry I swear I’ll eat your dog biscuits if you don’t cooperate. Now move it, buddy!”
Jake sighed.
She put her hands behind her back, placing the leash between them and pulled with a grunt as sweat trickled between her breasts. “Jake, you beast. Get up!”
A whistle came from the distance, sharp and clear, and then someone called out, “Jake! Get a move on, boy!”
She sighed. Campbell.
Jake was on his feet in a half second flat, moving toward Max at breakneck speed. She squinted into the fading sunlight to see Campbell’s broad back becoming a distant dot just before she was dragged back down the hill.
What did a girl have to do to get a little respect?
Be Campbell Barker . . . You know. Your booooyfriend who kisses like a dream?
Oh, shut it, would you?
Lenore Erickson eyed the caller ID on her phone and blew out a breath of angry air. She thrummed her fingers on the base of the phone, wondering where her receptionist, Delores, was. A glance at the clock on the wall told her. Lunch. Delores never missed lunch.
She ran a hand through her hair, shaking off the stray dark strands with disgust when they pulled from her scalp.
And the phone continued to ring.
Clearly her sister Lacey wasn’t giving up.
Not that Lacey ever gave up when she wanted something. Like, for instance, someone else’s husband.
With a clench of her teeth, she yanked the phone to her ear and spat, “Belle’s Will Be Ringing. This is Lenore Erickson. How can I help you?”
“Oh, stop, Len. It’s Lacey and you darn well know it,” Lacey grated with her whirring whine.
“Lacey, Lacey, Lacey. Hmmmm . . .” She let her voice wander as though she was puzzled by who exactly Lacey was. Then she smacked her lips. “Wait! Is this Lacey Gleason? The one who’s marrying that slimy prick Finley Cambridge before he’s even paid the blood money to his attorneys for a divorce from my best friend Maxine—you know, his wife? Is that the Lacey I’m talking to?”
A hiss of irritated air swirled from the other end of the line. “It’s not like that, Len.”
Her eyebrow rose in disdain. “Reeeally? So you mean you’re not planning a wedding to a man who’s not even divorced yet? Wow. Guess you’re back in my will. You know what that means? You, yes, you, the Lacey who’s no longer an adulteress, get the gravy boat shaped like a pig. Festive, right? And pink. Very pink.” Len didn’t even attempt to hide her fury with her baby sister—her pampered, overindulged, lazy, husband-stealing sister. Each time she thought of the pain Lacey had caused, it made her gut clench into a hard knot.
Lacey sniffed, resorting to tear tactics. “Please, Lenore. Can’t we try and get past this? What’s done is done.”
Len scoffed in response. Loud. “Done? Is that old mule that’s almost three times your age divorced yet? No. No, I don’t think he is. Done implies that all those nagging loose ends like marriage vows have been tied up. Severed, I believe is what they call it these days. And last I checked, Lace, my best friend Maxine was still married to your rich fiancé, all while she lives in a retirement village with her mother and can’t even afford a gallon of milk because her husband—your fiancé—is a cheap fuck and won’t throw her a bone. So as far as I’m concerned, nothing’s done, lamb chop. I haven’t heard the fat lady sing. Not one note.”
“I swear I didn’t mean for it to happen the way it did, Lenore! If Mason hadn’t screwed up—”
“Mason? You’re blaming Mason? Please. Stop. It was you who wrote that engagement announcement, wasn’t it?” That Lacey still didn’t get the kind of damage she’d created, the kind of pain she’d inflicted, meant she had no conscience as far as Len was concerned.
Lenore braced herself for her sister’s defense by gripping the edge of her walnut-stained desk with a white-knuckled hand. The defense that had absolutely no personal accountability and a whole bunch of pathetic justifications for some truly despicable bad behavior.
“Yes, but I told him—”
“Right,” she snarled, cutting her off again. “You told Mason not to print it for a month, and because it ended up in the wrong pile, or whatever the hell happens at a newspaper when glitches like this go down, and instead ended up in the society pages a month early, he screwed up?” Lenore gave the earpiece a hard knock with her knuckle. “Hey in there, brainiac! You should have never, ever written it to begin with, Lacey! Don’t you think it was just a little premature, dare I say, presumptuous, to do something like that, seeing as Finley hadn’t even told Maxine he wanted a divorce yet? Did you know that the man you’re engaged to, that teenybopper airhead dabbler, called the paper and almost had Mason fired? He’s our cousin, a cousin with two kids and a wife and no sugar daddy with a blanket of cash to cover up with if he loses his job.” Spittle had formed at the corner of her mouth. She wiped it away with an angry thumb.
“But he didn’t lose his job,” Lacey cried in protest, her voice holding that familiar plea, the one that was supposed to bring the house down. “I made sure Finley took care of it.”
“That was real sporting of you, Lace. But you forgot to ask him to take care of his kid—who read that announcement right along with Maxine—in a newspaper. What do you suppose it felt like to find out your husband and the father of your child was leaving you for the friggin’ receptionist at an automobile dealership?”
“If you would just listen to me!”
The sobbing.
Lacey was a whiz at sobbing, with big, wide, tear-filled blue eyes while she wrung her dainty hands, all put-upon. Lenore’s own eyes rolled upward as her fingers flipped through swatches of tablecloth samples. “Listen to what? Listen to you tell me how your panties just fell off your pert backside when you hopped into bed with another woman’s husband? If that’s what I’m listening to, I’d rather listen to oh, I dunno, someone’s skin being peeled from their living body. So save it.”
Not an inch. She refused to give Lacey an inch. All of her short life she’d been treated like someone had stamped “Fragile” on her forehead. If Lacey’s lower lip trembled in displeasure even a little, their parents were assholes and elbows to rectify and pacify. When Lacey wanted something, no matter the cost financially or emotionally, their parents provided. Lacey never went without.
Well, not this time. Maybe, had she not been so spoiled, had she been required to pay even the slightest consequence, she’d have thought twice before she wonked Lenore’s best friend’s husband. Like maybe a whole two minutes after said best friend had kindly secured a job for Lacey at Finley’s dealership. The job Lenore had begged Maxine to give her sister who had no purpose and no plans for the future other than to hook up with geriatrics that had fat bank accounts and belonged to someone else.
How she hadn’t seen the dalliance coming could officially be filed under the Seven Wonders of the World. Never would she have thought Lacey would cross a boundary so un-crossable—so sacred. Her sister’d done some shady things in her time. She’d weaseled, manipulated, used her beauty and body to garner whatever it was that she wanted at the time, but this, in Lenore’s mind, was unforgivable.
So unforgivable Lenore had finally put her foot down and refused to help with a single wedding plan, thus creating the biggest family brawl at Sunday dinner six months ago, making World War Two look like nothing but a wee spat.
“Lenore, you’re my sister. How could you not be involved in my wedding?” Her tone took on that of a petulant child, which wasn’t any huge surprise. Lacey was almost twenty-two years younger. A surprise gift from God, as her parents had put it. It was as though her parents had forgotten how to parent when Lacey came along, or maybe they were just too tired to put the kind of effort into disciplining her that was required to teach a child the entire world didn’t tip on its axis just because you made the “pouty face.”
“You plan weddings for a living. What’ll it look like if you don’t plan mine?”
Ah. She was busting out the familial card. Nice. Len scowled. “It’ll look just like what it is. It’ll look like I think what you’ve done to Maxine and her son is disgusting. It’ll look like I just can’t support planning a wedding before a divorce has even happened. It’ll look like I’m ashamed that my own sister would slink off with a pig of a man while my best friend and her kid are penniless!”
The raspy sigh of Lacey’s aggravation that the not quite ex-wife of the man she was marrying had the audacity to inconvenience her plans grated in Len’s ear. “God, I’m so sick of hearing about Maxine and how broke she is. She’s not your sister. I am! And if she needs money, why doesn’t she just get a job?”
“That’s a good question, Lace. One you might ask yourself. But you don’t apply for jobs, do you? At least not the ones that require you do much more than spread those firm thighs, right?” Slamming the phone down, Lenore had to lean forward and clutch her belly with both hands to keep from projectile hurling.
Fury on Maxine’s behalf rippled along her spine in waves of heat. Grief that her sister was making the biggest mistake of her life while trashing someone else’s, with their parents’ support, jabbed her like a hot poker in the gut. Nothing else had gotten through Lacey’s thick skull; maybe being as crude as possible, laying it all on the line, would get the message across.
Tears of her own stung Len’s eyes. She’d been so relieved when Maxine had finally left Fin—when she’d finally seen the light about his cheating.
When she’d found out it was her sister he was leaving Maxine for, the guilt she’d experienced that she’d had a hand in his infidelity, even if it was only by relation, made Len sick. Maxine was never anything but good to Lacey when she’d talked Fin into giving her the job at the dealership. In return, she’d had that kindness thrown right in her face.
Letting her head drop to her hands, she put her elbows on her desk, ignoring the calls from frantic bridezillas, shoving the pictures of ridiculously overdone wedding cakes to the far side of her work space. It was days like this, times like this when she missed Gerald so much that a hollow ache, one that came and went in painful fits and starts, sprouted deep in her soul.
Gerald would have understood. He would have had her back when her parents had taken Lacey’s side in this fiasco. He would have listened to Len rant when she’d concluded that Lacey’s marrying Finley meant her parents could breathe a sigh of relief because their beautiful but helpless daughter would have someone to take care of her instead of making her take care of herself.
And Lacey would end up just like Maxine if Fin managed to live another twenty years. She’d devote her life to him just like Maxine had, and he’d leave her with nothing for her efforts. Clearly, it was going to take a two-by-four to her head before she realized it.
Lenore’s finger traced the heavy silver picture frame on her desk that housed a smiling Gerald, making her smile back at him. She did it often, as though he could still see the warmth her eyes held, feel the comfort and love just his presence in a room once brought her. Though that smile turned to sad longing when she remembered everything Gerald had purposely left behind.
Her.
Their life.
Their world.
Whoa. Stopping now, she chided herself. Pity was a bottomless vat she had no time to indulge even a quick swim in.
There were brides who needed her. Floral arrangements to
approve. Doves to find.
Shaking off her anger with Lacey, she swung around in her office chair to look out the window. The view of Saint Ignatius across the street from her basement business always soothed her.
However, the tall man looking directly at her, a fine specimen of bomb diggity doing his best to be covert while under cover of a tree trunk, was anything but soothing.
CHAPTER FIVE
Note from Maxine Cambridge to all ex-trophy wives who are struggling through the painful process of sucking it up: Look, cash is cash. If in your forced independence you find you must participate in events that bring heightened color to your cheeks, creating the urge to crawl under a table and curl into the fetal position while you rock yourself into a forgetful state, remember this. Be brave, she-warrior. Do note you’re fighting the good fight on behalf of all ex-trophy wives everywhere who are struggling to assert their right to be in the workplace! Hold your head high when humiliation rears its ugly head. And should you doubt this noble cause, I reiterate: Cash is cash. That means sometimes, into everyone’s life, a little troll-tossing must fall.
“That you, kiddo?”
From the kitchen entryway, Campbell poked his head around the corner of his father’s small, musty garage. “None other than.”
Garner Barker tinkered with a battered toaster oven sitting under a small tabletop lamp on his workbench. He pushed his glasses up to give Campbell a gruff smile. “How’d it go at Mona’s? She can be pretty testy. Sharp tongue, that woman.”
Sharp daughter, that woman. He fought a smile and a fond memory of Max half-dressed in Mona’s bathroom. A memory that might have brought him to full arousal if not for the watchful eye his father had on him. “Mona’s fine. No trouble at all.” He came to stand by Garner, placing a hand on his shoulder. “It’s hot in here, Pop, too hot for you to be tinkering with some old toaster oven when we can just as easily buy you a new one.”
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