A frisson of awareness buzzed up Mateo’s spine.
“Don’t you agree?” he asked, watching her face. “We don’t need to promote this ‘wedded bliss’ story line while we’re in town. I’ll probably never see these people again, you know, since our marriage has an end date.”
He tilted closer for an answer and let the silence brew up around them in the confines of the elevator car. “Maybe...” she finally said, her beautiful eyes still on the numbers. “Maybe we can just see how it goes.”
That buzz rattled down his legs, his arms, almost shaking his teeth in surprise. “See how what goes?”
The elevator dinged and the doors opened. Roxanne strode out—she always walked like it was a game of Follow the Leader—and Mateo was right on her heels.
“We can see how what goes, Roxanne?” he demanded as they strode down the hospital hallway, careless of the people in their vicinity.
She looked around and shushed him. “Just...us,” she said quietly but without slowing down as she headed to the hospital exit, a bright sun and blue sky showing beyond the glass door. “Maybe we can see how ‘us’ goes. We don’t have to rush into a divorce.” Beyond stunned, beyond shocked, Mateo bit back an urge to laugh and shrug off her words. Was she fucking with him? “And what about your contract?” he asked, more demanding than he needed to be.
“We didn’t know we’d like each other when we signed that contract,” she said, chin high and shoulders back as she walked through the glass doors into a blazing summer day. “We didn’t know we would support each other.” She glanced at him and Mateo felt the quick hot stroke of those blue eyes. “There is a lot that contract doesn’t cover.”
Panic threatened to choke him like a garrote. “But why do you want to—”
“Well, it’s about goddamned time!” Underneath the shade of the overhang that protected patients being picked up or dropped off, a harsh female voice called out. Mateo blinked, his eyes still adjusting to the bright light. Out of the shadows, a blonde woman in jeans and high heels came clacking up to them. “You’re in town a week and you can’t take a second to come see your mother?”
Mateo straightened in surprise.
“D’you know I had to hear it from the bartender at the country club that you’re in town?” The woman had a long, bedazzled talon pointed at Roxanne. On spindly heels, she was taller than his flip-flop-wearing wife. “You know how embarrassing that was for me? Just when I got all those bitches kissing my ass for money for their social clubs, you give ’em an excuse to laugh at me.”
The woman seemed to have no care for the filth spewing out of her mouth, or the people coming and going who could hear it. Mateo tilted his head at her in wonder.
“Mateo,” Roxanne said quietly, looking down. “This is my mother, Tonya Medina.”
Inside of a blink, he was pulled into the woman’s tight embrace. Rock-hard breasts poked into his chest and he was engulfed in the scent of menthols and musk, an acrid and overwhelming odor. “You poor thing,” Tonya said into his ear. She had the harsh rasp of a lifelong smoker, a bastardized echo of Roxanne’s throatiness. “What you gotta put up with to be married to this one.” She stroked his back. “But we can put up with anything for the right price, am I right?”
Mateo jolted back from her and Tonya smiled, her full lips sticky and shiny.
Well-done plastic surgery made it look improbable that the woman was Roxanne’s mother, but Mateo could see hints of resemblance in the mouth and the shape of her eyes, even though those eyes were green. Whatever her hair color had originally been, she was now a blonde, big curls cut at her shoulders and frosted at the tips. She was...attractive; Mateo imagined that she’d been beautiful once, with those lips and the carriage of a woman who’d always known that men looked. What had worked then, what Mateo found so off-putting now, was the way she looked back. She stared at a man, even her son-in-law, like she was starving. And he was her feast.
He had no idea how to respond.
“Mom, I’ve been busy with Father Juan.” Roxanne had put on her sunglasses and she seemed to be looking somewhere beyond Tonya’s left shoulder. “I planned on coming by when he was better.”
Tonya tsked, crossing her arms in her silk tank top and plumping her breasts up high. “That man’s still got his grip on you. You’re a full-grown woman but you act like you’ve got Stockholm Syndrome or something.” She cocked her hip toward Mateo. “You’re not buying into her bullshit, are you? That man practically kidnapped her when she was little. He should be rotting in jail; he’s lucky he had the chance to be hit by a truck!”
Mateo straightened, ready to hold back his wife, but she just kept that still, sunglass-covered gaze aimed over her mother’s shoulder.
Tonya raised the back of her hand to her mouth, leaning closer to Mateo. “I mean, we all know what priests get up to,” she fake whispered. “It’s revoltin’.”
Mateo finally noticed the people around him through his shock, the way they hustled past, eyes pointed at the ground. Everything he’d ever learned about small-town nosiness was defied by the way the people of Freedom were actively trying to give Roxanne privacy for this very public humiliation.
“I’ve asked you not to talk about him that way,” Roxanne said, dispassionately. Where had she gone?
Her mother rolled her eyes. “You never could take a joke. At least I knew where to track you down. It’s about time I met this looker.”
She took a step closer and hooked her sharp fingernails into the edge of his t-shirt sleeve. “She’s gonna tell you a lot of nonsense,” the woman murmured near Mateo’s shoulder. “Don’t listen to her. You wanna know the truth, you come talk to me. My door is open anytime.”
She turned her head and gave Roxanne a predator’s smile. She’d positioned them so anyone glancing over would assume Mateo was with her. “So when y’all coming by the house?”
“Soon.” Roxanne was far away.
“Don’t make me wait too long. You gotta see the new pool I put in. It’s got a waterfall and everything. And we should probably talk terms.” Mateo flinched as her nail tapped at his elbow. “Looks like there’s going to be a few more people eating into the pie. I’m gonna need to protect my cut.”
With a final nail stroke down his arm, Tonya Medina grinned at her daughter and then turned, her hips rolling in her low-slung jeans as she walked away. Mateo laced his fingers through his wife’s and tugged her to get her moving, glad he’d parked their SUV in the opposite direction. He walked fast, let the Kansas sunshine burn away that woman’s touch and presence.
He pushed Roxanne into the passenger side, slammed his door on the driver side, and cranked the air conditioning. They sat in the turbo engine roar as the ancient AC filled the interior with hot air.
“You should head back,” he heard Roxanne say quietly.
“What?”
Roxanne was looking out the passenger window, her chin in her hand and her sunglasses still on. “I’m going to stay at least another week, make sure Father Juan is on the mend. But you should go back to the Monte and start—”
“Joder, like hell I will!” Mateo burst out. “I’m not leaving you alone with that viper!”
Roxanne slipped her head down so her hand fully covered her mouth.
“Hey, hey,” he said, turning her to face him. He took his ball cap off and then reached up to slide her oversized sunglasses off her face. The coolness in her eyes... She might as well have still been wearing the glasses.
“Hey!” he said, shaking that sleek arm in his grip. “She’s the worst. She’s a fucking nightmare. She needs to meet the king, they’d be a match made in heaven. All this time, I thought I had it so fucking bad. But she...” He jabbed his finger toward the window. “Your mother is a goddamned sociopath.” He leaned close to make her see. “And you still turned into this brilliant, ambitious, kind, generous creature. She uses he
r body like a...guillotine, and yet you...” Mateo closed his eyes and pulled Roxanne toward him, burying his head against her neck. “You’re a gift. You’re a fucking gift.”
Father Juan was right. Her value was beyond measure.
Mateo kept his eyes closed, kept her pressed against him with his grip on her biceps, and only began to relax when he felt one of her hands curl into his hair. “She’s not a sociopath.” He could feel her throaty words vibrate against his forehead. “She’s a narcissist with tendencies toward a histrionic personality disorder.”
He huffed against her neck. “My therapist won’t diagnose the king.”
“I’ll give you my therapist’s number. She’s brilliant.”
He stayed where he was, finding comfort in the silk of her skin and the brush of her hair, letting her warmed rose scent wash away the stench of Tonya.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said against her skin. “You’re stuck with me. Show me the joys of a Kansas summer.”
May: Day Eight
Their lives settled into a surreal, all-American summer camp, which neither of them had attended as kids. They’d wake up early to go on a jog before the May sun heated up, or they’d walk the two blocks to the high school, passing lawns full of tiny grasshoppers popping out of the dewy grass, to work out in the gym until the football team came crashing in. After a big diner breakfast (Roxanne liked to “carb load” every couple of days; Mateo generally only had coffee and toast unless Roxanne ordered waffles with chocolate chips and whipped cream), they’d head to the hospital where they’d spend a couple of hours with the steadily improving Father Juan.
Sitting at the side of his bed, Mateo discovered that Father Juan was fiercely intelligent, endlessly compassionate, and definitely the source of Roxanne’s smart-ass sense of humor. Father Juan treated him kindly and inquired about his life and background outside of what had been reported in the media, but Mateo understood that the jury was still out on him, as far as the priest was concerned. Mateo didn’t mind. He recognized the contradictory impulse to protect the fiercely strong Roxanne; the more her spine stiffened, the more Mateo wanted to massage it and tempt her to lean back against him.
Once she ceded Father Juan to the parishioner or townsperson who’d come in to spend the day with him, she’d check in with William, who was keeping tabs on Medina Now Enterprises, and then turn off her phone, turn to Mateo, and ask, “What do you want to do today?”
As requested, she was showing him the joys of a Kansas summer. One day, she drove down dusty farm roads until she pulled over into a ditch and led him to a thorny patch of blackberries that were so sweet and juicy they made him want to cry. Sticky and stained, they’d barreled through the brambles to a secluded farm pond, where’d they’d stripped down to their underwear and swam themselves clean. Another day, they’d wandered through room after room of a dilapidated Victorian mansion, tall and stately through its peeling paint, that had been transformed into a used book store. Books were crammed floor-to-tall-ceiling in rooms titled “Steamy Romance,” “Cozy Mystery,” and “Books Your Professor Made You Read” and decorated thematically. Mateo’s favorite was the “Fantasies Like Lord of the Rings” room, painted in rainbows and populated with weathered garden gnomes.
What was so crazy about their days was how normal they were. For the first time in their five months together, he had a sense of life not as a prince and a billionaire, but as two regular people, Mateo and Roxanne. They wore jeans and t-shirts, they drove a car that had a suspicious rattle, they went to the drug store for antacids, and washed their clothes at a laundromat. This Roxanne, this “normal” Roxanne, liked to keep a schedule, liked her hair off her neck in high ponytails or thick, top-of-her-head buns, used the Wall Street Journal as the bookmark for her tome-like fashion magazines, and was considerate in a way that surprised him. When she made a point of keeping their mini-fridge stocked with fruits and veggies for him, or grabbed him a Freedom Community College ball cap when he’d mentioned days before that he liked the logo, he was out-of-proportionally touched. When he kissed her and told her thank you, she’d kissed him back and thanked him for never expecting conversation first thing in the morning.
In that summer camp time, all that separated them from every other citizen in Freedom was the number of times they were hugged, back-slapped, and arm-pumped. Roxanne, and Mateo by extension, received thanks everywhere she went. It was during their fourth or fifth incident, when Roxanne was resisting a second free chocolate malt from the owner of the local drug store, who was thanking her for purchasing and preserving the old movie theater, that Mateo realized how genuinely surprised she was by all the gratefulness.
“Doesn’t this happen every time you’re here?” Mateo asked as they walked down Main Street, looking for children to give the ice cream treats that had been forced upon them.
Roxanne wiggled her head and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t really get into town often. I come to visit Father Juan; I mostly stick to the parish.”
It was another Freedom resident who finally helped Roxanne clearly see her place and reputation in her hometown. They’d been at a local bar, playing pool and drinking cheap beer, when a gorgeous, opulent woman in her mid-thirties strolled up to his wife. Rather than stiffening up, as Roxanne usually did when approached by a citizen, she had relaxed and beamed, shaking the woman’s hand in her own. Roxanne introduced her: Cynthia Madsen was the heir and owner of Freedom’s largest employer, Liberty Manufacturing, an auto parts manufacturing plant. Mateo immediately understood why the two women got along.
As he stepped back and allowed the two gorgeous women to play against each other, he sipped his beer and tried very, very hard not to get fuzzy headed by the view.
His wife’s quiet murmur under the blare of country honky-tonk snapped him back to attention.
“They don’t make fun of me?” Roxanne had asked, her blue eyes focused on the cue ball.
Leaning on her cue stick, Cynthia Madsen threw back her thick head of black hair and laughed. “Are you kiddin’?” she said in her slow Kansas drawl. “Do you know how annoying it is to be in this town, every day, working your ass off to keep it alive, and still be outdone by someone who’s never here? I’m queen but you’re the patron saint. Anyone who tried to badmouth you would be run out of town on a rail.”
Roxanne straightened slowly, her eyes still on the felt. “But...what about my mother?”
Cynthia’s full mouth smiled sympathetically. “Sweetie, no one holds her sins against you. If she’s the cross we gotta bear for you, we’re more than happy to take its weight.” She picked up her stick and leaned over the table. “Now move over. I’m not going to win your donation for the youth center if you keep yappin’.”
Roxanne won, even after Cynthia teased her into making it the best of three, and yet she still promised the woman a check the following morning. With a barely civil goodbye to Cynthia, Mateo had paid their tab, rushed Roxanne to the Bronco, and pulled off on the shoulder of the first dark road he encountered to take his wife, hard and fast and sweaty, on the long bench of the front seat.
Their sex life was...enthusiastic. And constant and energetic and not really restrained to their hotel room, although that’s where Mateo liked it best, giving him the room to stretch her out and the light to see her fully and the time to touch and lick and kiss all that delicious skin. Freed from the restraints of the contract, their sex seemed less compulsive, more fun, so when he made love to his wife in that pond, holding on to the deck while she twined those heart-stopping legs around him, they’d both grinned at each other like fools as she pulled him into her hot, tight depths. She’d pounced on him one morning after his shower, deep-throating him as she pressed him against the metallic wallpaper and following him down when he lost his knees. He’d loved her, long and slow, one evening after a couple had stopped them at dinner to tell them how her $500 prize for a local art contest had pos
itively affected their daughter’s depression. He’d made her orgasm, again and again, as soft as a sigh.
Neither of them discussed the future, the contract, or Roxanne’s startling suggestion that, perhaps, they didn’t need to plan on divorcing. Mateo didn’t ask; Roxanne didn’t tell. He recognized the avoidance bubble he was floating in; did he really want to start poking at it? If he asked her about staying together and she declared it an impulse—or worse, if she said “yes” now but then later changed her mind—his fall would shatter him. Why risk it right now when so much teetered on the brink? He had to preserve what little worth he had for the people of the Monte. She liked his company, she liked his cock, she liked his supportive hand at the small of her back. He could give her those things and preserve the bulk of himself, the mass of his heart, for the people who truly needed him. Who were right now waiting for his return.
His plan made perfect sense.
It was the mantra he repeated over and over to himself now—My plan makes perfect sense, don’t fuck it up, I have a plan and it makes sense—as he watched his wife grab on to a rope, move back several steps, and then go running full tilt and screaming to fling herself in a high arc over a twenty-foot drop. As the rope began to swing back, she let go, tucked up, and made an impressive cannonball puncture into the quarry pond below, splashing the kids laughing and yelling on the bank. When a nine-year-old boy extended his hand to help Roxanne out, she grabbed on...and jerked him into the navy-blue water with her. The other five kids and teens they’d brought to the quarry pond, a crystal-cold pool created by a hidden water flow and a fifty-year abandoned mine carved into the stone, used that as an excuse to clamber in and splash, dunk, and essentially try to drown his wife.
Sitting on a beach towel on a flat, wide ledge cut about ten feet up into the stone, Mateo physically relaxed when he saw her laughing, sputtering, and giving as good as she got. Emotionally, he was a fucking wreck.
He’d been surprised when they’d picked up a van at the local rent-a-car site after saying goodbye to Father Juan, his wife being cagey about their plans for the day although she’d told him to wear his swimming trunks. He’d been more surprised when they’d pulled up to the neat, two-story home behind St. Paul’s Catholic Church, walked into a living room furnished in soft couches and bean bags, and met six kids who, in swim clothes and towels, seemed to know more about his day than he did. He’d been shell-shocked when a teenage girl and the nine-year-old boy greeted Roxanne with hugs, hugs she returned with hard squeezes and back rubs. They introduced her to the other four kids and Roxanne introduced Mateo to all of them.
Lush Money (Filthy Rich) Page 25