Ladies' Night

by Andrews, Mary Kay

  “We’re just two people out for a drive. No big deal. You’re not speeding and you didn’t even drink all your wine, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And I had a beer, over the course of two hours,” he said. He glanced toward the backseat. “How’s the dog?”

  She grinned sheepishly. “How’d you know?”

  Instead of answering, he reached around and pulled the wriggling dog out of the bag, setting her carefully on his lap.

  “She popped her head out of there a couple times, back at group,” Wyatt said. “It was all I could do to keep a straight face. Every time she heard your voice, the whole bag would move—she was wagging her tail so hard.” The dog stretched its neck and rewarded Wyatt by licking his chin.

  He held it at arm’s length, checking its undercarriage. “Hello, little girl,” Wyatt said, rubbing the top of the dog’s head, then scratching its belly. “What’s your name?”

  “Meet Sweetie,” Grace said. “The new kid on the block.”

  Sweetie put her front paws on the passenger window, straining to see out the window.

  “Where’d you get her?” Wyatt asked.

  “Sweetie has kind of a sad story.” While she recounted the tale of the dog’s rescue, her adoptee climbed over the console, wriggling its way under Grace’s arms. “But she’s feeling better now. The vet fixed her up, gave her some IV meds, kept her overnight.”

  “And you got yourself a dog,” Wyatt said. “What’s Rochelle think about that?”

  “She doesn’t know,” Grace admitted. “My mom is not really what you’d call a pet person. You can’t really blame her, I mean, we live above a bar. So I’m guessing I’ll try to keep her a secret, until I figure something out.”

  “Do you think you’ll be getting your own place pretty soon?”

  “I hope so,” she said fervently. “I’m too old to be moving back in with the folks. You’ve seen what Rochelle’s like. I love her, but she’s … got an opinion about everything. If my asshole husband will start making the payments the judge has ordered him to make, and if I can get my blog up and generating income, I hope I can move out, sooner rather than later.”

  “What are you going to do with Sweetie until then?” Wyatt asked. “You can’t keep hiding her in a purse.”

  “I know. She does seem pretty laid back. She’s house-trained, so that’s a big plus. The vet said she was amazingly calm while they treated her, and she’s been so good all night tonight, not making a peep, just sleeping in my tote bag.”

  Grace scratched the dog’s ears affectionately. “She’s really a very chill little girl. My plan is to keep her in my room with me at night and sneak her down the back steps first thing in the morning, for a potty break.”

  “What about during the days?”

  “That house where I found Sweetie? It’s on Anna Maria. I was out for a run and spotted this cool old rattan sofa in a pile of junk on the curb. I struck up a conversation with the landlord, this old guy named Arthur, who, it turns out, used to be kind of fishing buddies with my dad. He invited me in to see the house. It’s a wreck right now, but it’s got wonderful potential, and it’s in a great location—a block from the bay. I’m going to be working on it, fixing it up, redecorating it for Arthur, getting it ready to rent again. I’ll be photographing and writing about it for my blog. Sweetie can stay there with me during the day while I work on it. In fact, I’m thinking I’ll write her into the story, too. It was her house, after all.”

  “Look, he’s turning up ahead,” Wyatt said, pointing at the Lexus. “He’s headed back out to the beach. I bet he lives out there.”

  “Not at Cortez, for sure,” Grace said. “We’re not fancy enough. I bet he lives at Longboat Key.”

  “You’re probably right.” Wyatt said.

  Grace stayed back a few car lengths but made the same turn. She kept on Cortez Drive, passing the turnoff for the Sandbox in the fishing village, crossing the bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway and into Bradenton Beach. At the light at Gulf Drive, the Lexus signaled to make a left turn.

  “Well, he’s definitely not going to Anna Maria,” she said, following as the black car turned south.

  The moon was nearly full, and as they followed the road paralleling the ocean, they could catch occasional glimpses of silvery water through the thick fringe of Australian pines and sea grapes lining the road in the intermittent patches of undeveloped land.

  Grace smiled, as she always did when passing the sign for Coquina Beach. “That was our beach, growing up,” she said. “How about you, which beach did your family go to?”

  “Holmes Beach, mostly,” Wyatt said. “Once I could drive, though, I was too cool for school. A bunch of us used to hang out at Siesta Key, where the rich girls were—or so we thought.”

  As they drove, the landscape changed from sparsely developed to the manicured civility of Longboat Key. High-rise condo complexes hugged the shores of the gulf on the right and the bay on the left, and imposing stucco homes painted in sherbet hues were set back behind hedges and gates. Grace slowed when she saw the Lexus’s brake lights and then turn signal.

  She waited until it made the left turn into a sprawling development called Lido Bay. “Should I keep following him, you think?” She glanced over at Wyatt. “If it’s Stackpole, I really don’t want him to notice us.”

  “Up to you,” Wyatt said. “I don’t want to get us in trouble either, but I’d like to know if it really is Stackpole.”

  He looked out the window at the homes lining the neatly landscaped street. All the homes were done in a similar hybrid Tuscan/Spanish-mission style, with stucco walls painted in pinks, peach, apricot, and buff, with red barrel-tile roofs. “Nice real estate,” Wyatt said. “Wonder what these homes sell for?”

  “Hmm, four or five years ago they were probably selling for seven hundred to eight hundred thousand dollars,” Grace said. “The ones on canals or directly on the bay used to go for over a million. Now? You could probably move in here to a perfectly lovely home for under three hundred thousand.”

  “If I had three hundred thousand, I wouldn’t want to live here,” Wyatt said. “Too cookie cutter for my taste. Huge houses all jammed in here together on these little-bitty lots. Anyway, that’s never gonna happen.”

  The Lexus made a wide left turn, and, as Grace started to follow, its brake lights went on. “Better slow down,” Wyatt said. “Maybe turn off your lights. We don’t want him to see us.”

  Grace pulled to the curb four houses down from the driveway where the Lexus turned in and, as suggested, cut her headlights.

  “Come on, Cedric,” Wyatt quietly urged. “Get out of the car and let us see your pretty face.”

  “Damn!”

  As they watched, the garage door slowly, soundlessly rolled up, and the Lexus pulled in, with the garage door rolling down right behind it.

  Grace burst out laughing, and after a moment Wyatt laughed, too. “Well, that was certainly anticlimatic,” she said, turning around and driving out of the subdivision.

  He was still sizing up the real estate. “Even with the real estate market in the toilet, that subdivision was pretty high cotton,” he mused. “Wonder what kind of money a judge makes in Florida?”

  “Don’t know,” Grace said. “But remember, Camryn said his wife’s family is loaded. So maybe it’s her money. Or maybe he does well in the stock market. Or he’s cornered the market for black-market Oxycodone.”

  He gave her a startled look.

  “Just kidding,” she said. “Remember, we don’t even know if that really was Stackpole. It could be anybody. It could even be Paula’s husband, if she has one.”

  “Don’t think so,” Wyatt said. “Remember, we checked her driver’s license. Paula lives on Anna Maria. Not Longboat.”

  “I’d love to know what that fight was about,” Grace said, after a moment. “Paula seemed so different tonight, and then, wham, something really upset her apple cart.”

  She reach
ed down and scratched Sweetie’s silky brown ears. The dog hopped across the console to Wyatt’s lap and scratched at his door, whining.

  “Uh-oh,” Grace said. “I think somebody needs a pit stop.”

  “Why don’t you pull over up here at Coquina Beach,” he suggested. “It’s a nice night, and I haven’t been to the beach since all this crap started with Callie. We can take her for a walk, if you want.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You know dogs aren’t allowed on the beach, right?”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t,” he said. “Besides, Sweetie’s been such a good girl, she deserves a little treat, right Sweetie?”

  The dog’s tail beat a tattoo on the window.

  “I swear she knows her name already,” Grace said.

  She parked the car beneath one of the towering Australian pines and clipped a leash to Sweetie’s new pink collar, extracting a plastic bag from her tote bag.

  * * *

  Grace slipped off her shoes and Wyatt did the same with his flip-flops, and they left them, side by side, in the soft white sand at the parking-lot edge. After Sweetie had taken care of business and Grace had disposed of the plastic bag, they took the boardwalk over the dunes, past gently waving fronds of sea oats.

  The tide was out, and the moon bathed the beach with a silvered pearlescent sheen. The ocean surface was as calm as a puddle after a summer storm, lapping gently at the edge of the shore. Only the faint breeze rippled the water.

  Sweetie paused and looked startled when her feet first touched the damp sand, then sat on her rump and gave Grace a quizzical look.

  “Come on, girl,” Grace said, tugging gently at the leash. “Let’s walk.”

  “I’ll bet she’s never been to the beach before,” Wyatt said.

  Grace tugged again, and finally the little dog stood and began trotting toward the water. She got all the way to the surf line, stopped, and looked back at her mistress.

  “It’s okay,” Grace coaxed. “You can get your feet wet. Give it a try.”

  To demonstrate, Grace waded in, letting the warm ocean water lap against her ankles. “It’s like bathwater,” she told Wyatt, who followed her in.

  The dog edged in and immediately scampered back onto the dryer sand, barking as the wavelets edged toward her.

  “Okay,” Grace agreed. “You walk on the sand; we’ll walk in the water.”

  “Can I take her?” Wyatt asked. Grace handed over the leash.

  “Come on Sweetie,” Wyatt called, veering onto the beach. “Let’s run!”

  He broke into a trot, and the dog obediently followed behind. After less than a hundred yards, though, Sweetie ran toward the shell line, where mounds of crushed seashells and seaweed marked the high-tide line.

  Sweetie sat, barked, and began nosing in the shells, digging frantically and occasionally stopping to give an excited yip.

  “What’s she doing?” Grace asked, when she caught up to the pair.

  “She smells something” Wyatt said. “I think she must have some terrier in her, the way she’s going after it.”

  Suddenly, the little dog yelped. She backed away slightly and gave a menancing growl, barked again, crouched, and growled again.

  “It’s a ghost crab,” Grace laughed, as the pale creature scuttled away. She bent down and picked up the dog. “Stay away from crabs, Sweetie. Crabs are not your friend!”

  They walked down the beach in companionable silence, with Sweetie meandering along, sniffing the air and occasionally stopping to growl at imagined threats to her security. After half a mile or so, by unspoken agreement, they turned and walked back toward where the car was parked.

  A concrete picnic bench was perched under the shadows of one of the big old pines. “Let’s sit for a little bit,” Grace suggested. She sat on the tabletop and placed Sweetie in her lap. Wyatt sat beside her.

  “We used to come out here and go ‘parking’ in high school,” she said, with a sigh. “Seems like a long time ago.”

  “When I was in high school, we liked someplace a little more secluded,” Wyatt said. “There was this dead-end street over on Holmes Beach. You could pull your car way up under the trees, and it was on a little bit of a rise, with a perfect view of the water. Although”—he laughed ruefully—“I don’t remember being that interested in actually looking at the water back then. I was a horny little bastard, back in the day.”

  “And now?” Grace turned to look at him, her gray eyes teasing.

  He hesitated, but stood abruptly, brushing sand from the seat of his pants. “I don’t remember.”

  She felt her face aflame with embarrassment, jumping to her feet and startling the dog, who yipped her reaction. “We should probably go.”

  “Look. I’m not divorced yet. You’re not divorced yet. I’m pretty sure this is against every divorce-recovery-group rule Paula ever thought of.”

  “This?”

  He sighed. “You know. Us getting together. Gotta be against the rules.”

  Something inside her rebelled. Against rules, and best intentions and common sense. That mischevious smile of hers was back. “I won’t tell if you won’t.” She tilted her face up, waiting to be kissed.

  And then … he coughed politely. She opened her eyes and saw that he was putting on his shoes.

  * * *

  Ever since they’d pulled over to the Coquina Beach parking area, Grace had been anticipating this moment. Wondering what she would do if Wyatt tried to kiss her. Or even touch her.

  Okay, maybe she’d been wondering all of the above since the minute he’d walked into Paula’s office earlier in the evening. Not that he hadn’t been kinda hot the other times, unshowered, dressed in his Jungle Jerry’s safari work clothes. She didn’t usually go for all that down-and-dirty muscley, manly type, but somehow, on Wyatt, it worked. Then, tonight, he’d obviously made an effort to look good. Was it for her? And had he noticed that she’d dressed up tonight, too? She hadn’t anticipated how crazy all of this was making her feel.

  It had never occurred to her that they would come this close—and he would so totally and completely shut her down. Dammit, she was no good at flirting after all this time.

  But maybe Wyatt didn’t know that.

  Grace cursed all that stinking moonlight. She gathered her keys, her shoes, and her dog and stomped off toward the car.

  “Jesus!” Wyatt’s voice was hoarse. He grabbed her arm as she was unlocking the car. “Don’t think I don’t want this, Grace. I do. More than I can tell you, I want it. But where do we go from here? It makes no sense.”

  She spun around to face him. “I don’t care. I don’t want to make sense. I just want to be held, and be kissed.” She raised her eyes. “By you. Does that make me a criminal? Or some kind of a slut?”

  “No! Of course not. Don’t call yourself that.”

  She felt her jaw clench. “That’s how you’re making me feel.”

  She placed Sweetie on the backseat, brushed the sand from her feet, and sat in the driver’s seat, with the engine running. A moment later, he got into the car.

  “Grace?”

  She didn’t answer, just pulled the car out of the lot and onto the beach road, keeping her eyes straight ahead. Sensing the tension in the air, Sweetie whined from the backseat, but Grace kept her back stiff.

  “Look,” he said, running his hand over his gleaming head. “I’m playing way out of my league here. You know?”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  He closed his hand over her shoulder, but she wrenched it away. He tried again. “You are incredibly beautiful, smart, and sane, and nice.”

  “Sane?” She raised one eyebrow. “Nice? What kind of left-handed compliment is that?”

  “I don’t know!” he shouted. “I don’t know anything. I haven’t been with another woman in eight years. Okay? I have no idea what I am saying or doing tonight. My instincts say go for it, but I’m afraid, all right? What happens if you and I … start something? Where does it go?” You say you’d
never take your husband back, but maybe you’ll change your mind. How do I know?”

  “How do I know you won’t take Callie back?” she retorted. “Right now? I just don’t care. I really don’t. I’m tired of worrying about what might happen. I’ve got no control over anything: your marriage, what’s left of my marriage, that asshole judge, my career. From now on, I’m going to do just what everybody else in this world does. I’m going to do what feels good. And the hell with the what-ifs.”

  “I don’t have that luxury,” he said quietly.

  27

  It was the most erotic sensation she could ever remember having. She was having smoking-hot, crazy sex—under a Hawaiian waterfall of all places. Or she guessed it was a Hawaiian waterfall, from the profusion of flowering orchids and waving palms surrounding them. She couldn’t see her lover’s face, but my God, his body was sleek and hard and muscled and tan all over, and he had magic hands that did the most amazing things, and it seemed to go on forever and ever, until he had her body humming like a concert violin. And then, just as she was about to climax, a gigantic parrot swooped in and landed on his shoulder. “Gimme shots, gimme beer,” the parrot called. Her lover turned his head. It was the honorable Cedric N. Stackpole Jr.

  The horror made Grace sit straight up in bed so abruptly that Sweetie, who’d been nuzzled on the pillow next to hers, yelped.

  “Shhh!” Grace bundled the dog into her arms and hugged her close. “It was just a dream, Sweetie. No, not a dream, a terrible, terrible nightmare.” She shuddered at the memory of it. Looked over at the nightstand to realize it was five in the morning. “Stupid men,” she said, pounding the bed with her fist. “Stupid, stupid men!”

  Sweetie hopped off the bed and made a beeline for the bedroom door. “Okay,” Grace said wearily. “Let me put some shoes on.”

  * * *

  The only good thing about waking up early from a nightmare was getting to work early, Grace decided. It was still dark outside when she unlocked the door of the house on Mandevilla and switched on the lights.