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He admired the bravado of the performance, and that she was successful at it. She was an astute shopper, and you had to really look closely to see that she wasn’t wearing a designer label after all, or that if it was, it was “vintage,” aka secondhand, rather than new.
Few people, male or female, did look that closely. They were too busy being struck dumb by her lush bow of a mouth, her dazzling blue eyes, her dynamite figure and her perfect bone structure.
With the towel still carefully wrapped around her, she walked across the carpet to the mirror-fronted closet that ran along one side of the narrow entrance to their hotel room, and he couldn’t take his eyes from her prettily manicured bare feet, which appeared to react with a sensual delight to the lush thickness, as if they were more accustomed to walking on nails.
This was rapidly becoming one of MJ’s favorite leisure-time activities—lying on a king-size bed surrounded by a heap of snowy pillows while he watched Alicia dress. The hair and makeup routines he could skip. Those took place in the secrecy of the bathroom, they were too arcane and technical, and the blow dryer was noisy. In any case, he considered that she looked just as good with no makeup, bed hair and a pillow-crease mark across her cheek.
But the way she shimmied her breasts into a pushup lace bra, or let a sheath of silky fabric slide down her body …
In the month since they’d started sleeping together, Alicia getting dressed was a process that frequently reversed itself before it was even finished and transformed into a completely different activity in a very satisfactory way.
Not today.
Today she was a little coy.
She did that sometimes—went inexplicably distant as if she didn’t want him to have too much of a good thing. When he reached out his arms for her—now, for example—she did that smile again and shook her head. “Later.”
“Why?” he lazily asked.
“Because later I’ll taste of chocolate.”
He didn’t point out that they could have now as well as later. He thought he understood why she needed to keep a hold of the reins in their relationship sometimes, and it didn’t bother him.
Tonight, especially, he’d been quite sincere in what he’d told her. He did want this to be a really special, unforgettable evening. He’d bought her something. His anticipation about seeing her face when she opened the gift almost outweighed his anticipation about her tasting of chocolate.
Forty-five minutes later, she was ready to go, wearing a splashy, strappy floral dress that showed off the light golden glow of her newly tanned shoulders. She’d spent most of the afternoon out by the pool, catching the March sunshine that was so much stronger here than it would have been in New York, while he’d gone off on his covert shopping mission.
While she was in the bathroom just now, he’d slipped the gift into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and he hoped the bulge didn’t show. He didn’t want to give it to her yet. Before dessert, maybe, when they were both replete with good food and just pleasantly mellow from a glass or two of wine.
He curved his arm around her bare shoulders as they walked into the five-star restaurant together. Her shoulders were sun-warmed and touched with pink and perfectly smooth. He wanted to pull her close, but this was a public place and he hadn’t been raised to feel comfortable about full-on displays of affection in front of strangers. Instead, he let his hand slide down to the small of her back and recognized his own sense of proud possession.
She turns every head in the room, and she’s with me.
He was dizzy about it. Even dizzier an hour and a half into their meal, after a little more wine than he’d planned.
“I’m having a great time,” he told her.
“Me, too.” She smiled. “You can be pretty funny, do you know that?”
“So can you.”
He’d never felt like this before. An ambitious young doctor didn’t have much time to devote to finding the right woman. Of course he’d dated. During his internship, three years ago, he’d been quite serious about a fellow doctor whom he’d met on his rotation through the E.R.
But it had been a nightmare, in the end. Adrienne was a single mother. She did a really great job with it but juggled the most horrific schedule. The deeper he went into the relationship, the more it appalled him. They went weeks without spending any kind of quality time together, and he wasn’t comfortable in the role of instant dad. As the eldest son in the McKinley family, he shared his father’s perception that they were building a dynasty, and he wanted kids of his own.
If Adrienne hadn’t had her own mother close at hand, she couldn’t possibly have managed motherhood and the demands of medical study, but it meant that MJ felt as if he was taking her mom on board as well as her son. Cynthia was a nice woman, but the countless hours of help she gave her daughter made her feel entitled to comment and judge and interfere at will about everything. He couldn’t blame her for that, but it didn’t mean he liked it.
To cut a long story short, the relationship hadn’t worked, and he’d come away from it after six months feeling as if there just wasn’t room for both people in a partnership to have such a full schedule and so many emotional demands.
He’d made a conscious decision at that point only to get involved with women who had a little less ambition and drive, and preferably not much baggage. A relationship shouldn’t be harder and more demanding than his career, for heck’s sake. A relationship was about downtime and emotional nourishment.
He’d only known Alicia for four months and wasn’t yet asking himself any questions about the future, but so far she gave him more emotional nourishment than any woman he’d ever met.
Just that smile …
“Dessert menu?” she asked.
“Wait a moment. I have something.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the square, dark blue velvet box.
She saw it in his hand, went completely still as if in shock, put her fingertips against her mouth and swallowed. “Oh, MJ …” she breathed.
“Open it,” he said softly and passed it to her. She couldn’t take her eyes off it, and cradled it in her hand as if it was as fragile as a quail’s egg.
“Yes,” she said, half-laughing, almost in tears. “Oh, yes!”
Her fingers were shaking. It took her a good thirty seconds to get the box open, and there it was, the diamond hair clip dazzling white and gold against the deep blue. He’d had a private, hour-long session in the back room of the very exclusive Vegas jewelry store this afternoon, where he’d been shown tray after tray of bracelets, necklaces and earrings, but this was what he’d settled on because of her beautiful hair.
“Ohh,” she said abruptly and put the box down. “Oh, wow. Wow. It’s—it’s beautiful.”
“Do you like it?” Rather an ego-driven question, he realized at once. But it was sincere, too. He wanted to know. He wanted her to love it. “They’re diamonds.”
In case she was in any doubt.
Six figures’ worth. He wasn’t going to reveal the exact price he’d paid, but she would have to realize it was a lot.
She was staring down at it, hadn’t moved to touch it again, wasn’t speaking. He took a too-large gulp of wine and regretted it. He already felt a little hazy. Focusing on her face more closely, he realized she wasn’t reacting quite the way he’d expected.
“I—I can’t accept this, MJ.”
“Of course you can. Why not?”
She groped for words, while the velvet box sat on the table in front of her, untouched. Why didn’t she take out the clip and look at it more closely? Trace those pretty fingertips over the diamonds and gold? Why was she having such trouble? He could almost see the wheels turning in her head.
Stupidly, he took yet another gulp of wine, and then he looked at the square velvet box again and suddenly he knew. She had thought there was going to be a ring in there. She was convinced. It was the right shape, maybe a tiny bit larger, such an easy mistake to make. What had she said to him before she’d opened it?
“Yes. Oh, yes!”
Ah, hell, and there should have been a ring.
In an instant, it was startlingly clear to him. She’d thought at first that he was proposing, but she’d quickly realized her mistake. Anything less than a ring looked to her like a payment for sex, like the beginning of the end. She was a waitress. It was probably what she thought she deserved.
Now she was trying to calculate whether the gift was worth—literally worth—taking, whether it was all she was ever going to get from the relationship, whether he was using it to start the process of kissing her off and what room she had to maneuver in all of this.
It made him wince and it made him ache.
He’d wanted so much to make her happy with the expensive gift, not send her into a spin of desperate calculation and doubt like this. He cared about her happiness, he realized. Cared far more than he’d thought.
“Let’s get married.” He said it before he knew he was going to, and it was crazy and impulsive and the exact opposite of his usual considered decision-making, but he didn’t want to take it back. He took her hands across the table. “Alicia, it’s not a ring. You thought it was going to be, but it’s not and that’s my fault, but let’s get married anyhow, and we’ll get a ring for you later.”
She laughed, not daring to believe him now, when she’d been wrong before. “Married, MJ?”
“Yes, why the hell not? Tonight. This is Vegas. If we skip dessert, we can probably be married in half an hour.”
“Half an hour? Married?”
“I want to, Alicia. I really, really want to!”
Now she was laughing and crying. The tears sparkled on her lashes, and he didn’t regret what he’d said for a moment. “Yes, MJ. If you really mean it, yes!” she said.
It took a little longer than half an hour but not by much. At ten in the evening, there they were in the glitzy chapel, wearing their dinner clothes, still pleasantly mellow and happy from the wine, and saying their sketchy vows.
Alicia wore her strapless dress, a kiss of sunburn on her shoulders, and the glittering diamond barrette in her gorgeous piled-up hair, while MJ’s whole body buzzed with a giddy sense of triumph and rightness that almost took his breath away.
Chapter Five
But that was then.
He arrived home from the hospital at nine o’clock. It was now twenty-six hours, 520 miles of driving, four hours of surgery and five hours of medical admin and patient care since he’d first found Alicia’s note.
The kitchen was just the way he’d left it, with the microwave dish still sitting on the countertop, containing some crumbs and half a shriveled chicken nugget. It was, what, Thursday? Their housekeeper, Rosanna, came on Mondays and Fridays. She usually replenished their grocery supplies on a Friday, he understood, so there was probably not much food left in the place.
He’d never needed to think about this kind of thing in his life. Mom was a great cook. In college and medical school, he had the full meal plan. Later, living on his own, he’d eaten out or ordered in for almost every meal that he hadn’t grabbed at the hospital café. On his marriage, he’d given Alicia a free hand and she’d set everything up. Most of the time, he never even knew where it came from—if Rosanna had cooked it, or Alicia herself, or if it came from a deli or a caterer. This was New York City. Food just … was.
Except when it wasn’t.
His gut felt terrible, a mix of physical hunger and emotional wrenching that he didn’t know how to damp down. He didn’t want to go out. He didn’t want to hunt up take-out menus and get on the phone. He didn’t really want to eat at all but knew he should.
Life went on.
He needed to have some semblance of a brain in place, in order to talk to Alicia about what happened next.
In the end, he found a couple of eggs and a loaf of sliced bread in the freezer, and made an inept version of scrambled eggs on toast. He didn’t think to put butter in the skillet, so the eggs stuck, and when he tried adding water to unstick them, he ended up with unappetizing eggy slush ladled onto toast that went soggy in seconds.
He ate it anyhow, disguised with some chunks of cheese and a too-liberal shake of pepper and salt.
Then he called his wife.
She would know it was him before she even had the phone to her ear. MJ would have come up on her phone screen. And she must have expected a call from him, anyhow. She knew he wasn’t going to let this go. She sounded guarded and polite, and he fought for the right tone.
“How’re the kids?” he heard himself ask. Heard the scratch in his voice, too.
Hell, it hurt not to be with them. Alicia would have said he barely saw them, but, shoot, that didn’t mean he didn’t care. His awareness of their peacefully sleeping presence when he came home to the apartment at night or left in the early morning nourished him at a level he’d never tried to put into words. The times he did see them were incredibly precious, if demanding, and for all the times when he wasn’t around, he had enormous confidence in Alicia as a mother.
Damn, did he not tell her that enough, or something?
He tried to remember the last time he had, and couldn’t. To him it was so obvious—why did she need to hear it?
“They’re asleep,” she said. “Tired.”
“What did you do today?”
“Went to a park. We had a picnic. Which ended up taking place in the car because it began to rain. But we had fun anyway.” The forced cheeriness in the word fun reminded him that he wasn’t the only one who’d had to carry on as usual today, despite the upheaval of their separation.
“I’m glad,” he answered her mechanically, then cut to the chase. “What have you said to them, Alicia? What do they know?”
“I haven’t said anything yet. For them, we’re on vacation, that’s all. At some point, of course—”
He jumped in. “You can’t just spring it on them. And you can’t do it when I’m not around. We have to tell them together. I will not have my children exposed to that kind of conflict or have them doubt my role as their father in any way.” In his urgency, he spoke with more anger than he’d intended.
Hell, he was so unused to anything like this!
He wasn’t thinking of the prospect of divorce, there—of course he wasn’t used to that!
But he wasn’t accustomed in any area to having his will thwarted. This seemed almost shameful on his part, certainly nothing to be proud of, but that’s how it was. He was a top surgeon. People did what he wanted. Always.
Alicia, too. Maura and their previous nanny, Kate, another two nannies before that. And Rosanna, the rare times he saw her.
Abby and Tyler were almost the only human beings who ever defied him.
“Time to get out of the bath now, sweetheart. Both of you.”
“No! Not yet!”
“No, no, no!”
He realized he wasn’t comfortable when that happened. He tended to opt out and have Alicia or the nanny take over. “Here, they’re unmanageable tonight, and I’m tired.”
But Alicia was speaking now. He focused quickly on her voice down the line. “Of course I won’t just spring it on them, MJ. Is that really who you think I am? Someone who would risk destroying my own children’s sense of emotional security that way, like Anna and James are doing? Someone who would use them as a weapon against you?”
“No … No, I’m not suggesting that.”
“You seemed to be.”
“Look, it wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t. Our marriage is nothing like what Anna and James had. If you’re saying it is—”
“No, no, I’m not. You’re right. There’s no comparison.” Something they agreed on! He felt a brief moment of relief.
“All I’m saying is that I want us to do this right. If we have to do it at all. I don’t want it, Alicia. If there’s anything I can do, anything I can say, any way I can change, or we can both change, talk so that—” He stopped.
Hell, was he begging?
She stayed silent at the end of the phone, after he’d broken off. He waited, head pounding, jaw tight. Should he seize the window opened up by her silence? Take the initiative? He didn’t know how.
She spoke again before he had any answers. “You’ll have to come up here again.” The words were slow and careful. “I do know that. Maybe it’s best not to put it off. Can you get some time?”
“This weekend,” he said quickly, while the back of his mind buzzed, rearranging his schedule, working out a few favors he could call in. In his position, it wasn’t easy to get a chunk of time off at short notice.
Alicia knew that, and he hoped she would see his willingness as a step toward—
Toward having this whole thing just go away!
But he’d begun to accept that this wasn’t going to be an easy fix.
“If you could, that would be great,” Alicia said, still with that slow, careful way of talking, as if she was having to bite her tongue not to yell at him or blurt out a hundred deeply felt grievances. “It doesn’t need to be the whole weekend….”
“It’s going to be the whole weekend. I’ll drive up Saturday morning, back down Sunday night.” Another ten hours in the car. He didn’t care.
“All right, if you want. I think you’d better book into a motel.”
“What will the children think of that?”
Thick silence. “Make a reservation, please, MJ. It—it may turn out that you can cancel it …” He felt a rush of relief and hope. Short-lived.
“… if we can stay civilized enough for you to sleep in the study.”
“In the study?”
“I made up a folding bed there for Maura—of course, she never used it—and I haven’t put it away yet. There are really only the two bedrooms. Abby and Tyler are sharing. But they don’t need to know where you’re sleeping. Anyway, they’re not going to see our choice of sleeping arrangements—” a pause “—the way an adult sees it.”
“No.”
So this was how she saw the physical side of their marriage, as a “choice of sleeping arrangements.” It felt like a body blow. Like a kick in the—
Yeah. There.
“Was there anything else you wanted to say?” Alicia asked him carefully.
“Uh, no. Face-to-face, of course. But not now. Could you call and cancel Rosanna for tomorrow? I don’t want her—”
“Yes, okay, that’s probably a good idea.” She took a breath. “So can you text me with a rough arrival time? In case I’m out with the kids?”
“Sure.” He got through another couple of rounds of practical back-and-forth, then flipped the phone into the breast pocket of his shirt, his mind still snagged on the “sleeping arrangements” thing like ripped skin snagged on a rusty nail.
In other words, it hurt. Bad.
Did she mean it that way? Was she completely dismissing the sex life he’d always viewed with such satisfaction and pleasure and pride?
They were great in bed together. They were. They were dynamite.
But even as he thought this, he realized his attitude was a little out-of-date. He was thinking back to that sizzling week in Las Vegas and the vacations they’d taken together early in their marriage, before they’d decided to try for a baby. Those times stood out in his memory like a series of magazine-perfect honeymoons, four or five of them, some only a couple of days, others a week or more. Las Vegas, Bermuda, Paris, Aspen, Martinique.
He could call up a thousand pictures. Alicia in a red bikini with her luscious breasts bouncing as she walked along a tropical beach and her blond hair shining brightly in the sun. Himself taking the bikini off in the privacy of their suite, by pulling at that saucy string bow that only just held things together in the front. Lying back in a foaming private spa together, champagne within reach. Sitting across the softly lit table from her at a three-star restaurant, anticipating the moment when they would get back to their Paris hotel room and he could pull her into his arms.
At home, lately, sex had been different, he realized. They were both tired. He needed the release but didn’t need the slow, sensual build. It was over in minutes, and even though he was vaguely aware that she didn’t show the abandonment she once had, he put this down to the same priorities that dampened his own performance—just do it and get some sleep.
While he was burning with the knowledge that he would miss her body in his bed the way he would have missed air or gravity, she seemed to be implying that she wouldn’t miss their lovemaking at all. For the first time, it occurred to him that maybe she’d left him for the worst and hardest reason of all.
She’d found another man.
At the very thought, he felt as if someone had knifed him in the gut.
When he dragged himself into bed at ten o’clock, he felt her absence like an illness, and when he woke up at three after a couple of hours of unrestful sleep, he found he was holding her pillow in his arms as if he was cradling his own pain.
It smelled of her hair and her shampoo … it just smelled of her … and he was surprised that she’d left it behind now that he thought about it. Very surprised. She almost always took it with her when they went away, cramming it into a suitcase or nestling it into the corner of the backseat in the car. Its presence in their marital bed spoke to him, helped him, even though he couldn’t work out what it said.
He almost slid the pillow back to its rightful position on her side of the bed, but then in a moment of … he didn’t know—weakness? hope?—he pulled it closer again and hugged it like a child, or like an ardent lover, until sleep came over him.
Chapter Six
“What’s happening today, Mommy?” Abby wanted to know, five minutes after she woke up.
“Well, we need to go to the store. And I thought we might check out the library. Then we’ll come home and make cookies, hey?”
“Cookies!” Tyler said.
“Won’t that be fun?” Alicia agreed brightly.
It would. And also a nightmare. Faking having fun with your kids was harder than faking an orgasm, and, yes, Alicia had done both.
Like a good wife and mother, she felt guilty about both, also.
But, oh, yesterday had been so hard!
All she’d wanted to do was curl up into a tight ball of misery and sleep for about six months, in the hope that when she woke up again, the pain would have gone away and the rest of her life would miraculously make sense.
But you couldn’t do that. Children didn’t let you.
She loved Abby and Tyler so much, and since leaving MJ she’d been feeling it in her heart and her stomach and her bones to an almost feverish extent. She wanted to hug them against her body fifty times a day. She wanted to gaze and gaze at them. Her marriage to MJ had been worthwhile a hundred times over, no matter how ugly their divorce might be, because of these two.
She’d been saying “I love you” so often that at one point yesterday Abby had sighed theatrically, put her hands on her hips and told her, “We know that, Mommy.”
She loved them, but they were exhausting, and the little guilt monitor in the back of her brain kept telling her that she’d taken the easy way out, until now.
Taken the trophy wife way out, by leaving the kids with Maura or, before her, Kate and Robyn and Sveta, for hours and hours at a stretch, paying for endless mommy-and-me classes and toddler gym classes and toddler swim classes, so that—whether it was mommy and me, which it was sometimes, or Nanny and me, which it was too often—the kids were packaged into organized activities that left most of the real work to someone else.
Since leaving MJ was so much about not wanting to be a trophy wife anymore, she couldn’t take the easy way out now.
Oh, she wasn’t such an idealistic fool as to be attempting this without MJ’s money behind her. She’d married him in the first place as an escape from the grinding poverty trap, and she had no intention of taking a step backward into the trap’s evil jaws. But she was going to be as honorable about it as she could, taking only enough from him to ensure that his children were raised in the comfort and security he would want for them. Would insist on, in fact.