She wore tight jeans with rips in the knees, hoodie tied around her waist. She was lovely. And Tim’s entire mood changed.
“We don’t have anything yet but I’m friendly with the produce manager at the big Safeway. One of my parishioners. Let’s go see if he’s clearing out produce. I bet we’ll get something, no matter what his stock looks like. Let’s go in your car, then you can drop me back here.”
“I knew you’d help if you could,” she said, smiling so beautifully.
“Let’s go then,” he said. He took her elbow to guide her, walked her away from the garden. He leaned down to talk with her and they laughed together.
Tim never looked back at Beau.
“Interesting,” Beau said. Then he proceeded to spread fertilizer.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Delaney family home was in a posh, gated neighborhood in Mill Valley. Guests had to be cleared by the guard at the gate to enter. It was much more house than Lauren wanted or needed, especially with the girls being gone, but Brad found it and contracted the purchase without her involvement six years ago. It was an eight-thousand-square-foot showplace. She had been stunned but helpless. What was she to say? We don’t need all this since I’m not planning to be married to you that much longer? She had two choices—she could sign the purchase agreement and at least be a co-owner of the massive property. Or she could refuse and he’d just buy it himself.
“Be sure to put your things away,” he instructed before their guests arrived. “I don’t want people thinking we have separate bedrooms.”
“Even though we do,” she muttered.
“You sometimes sleep in the guest room down the hall because of your hot flashes,” he said, creating her lie for her.
“No one is going to be wandering around the bedrooms,” she said. “And I don’t have hot flashes.”
He touched her cheek. He laughed. “Any second now, Lauren. You’re not as young as you used to be.”
Feeling a little ancient and emotional with her baby a college graduate on her way to law school, she lashed out. “What do you suppose they’d all think if they knew the truth?”
“Just what I think,” he said easily. “You’re a half lunatic who imagines ridiculous things all the time.”
She gritted her teeth and remained silent, picturing that quaint Victorian in Alameda, how quiet and sweet it was. The girls had gone out to pick up a few last-minute items for the party and would be walking in the house any second. Guests would start to arrive in an hour. The caterers were busy; their van was parked in the garage so they had a clear path from the van to the party site, the kitchen, butler’s pantry, dining room and patio. They were expecting about 100 people. Obviously she couldn’t get into an argument with him now. Actually she couldn’t get into an argument with him ever. Disagreeing with Brad was disastrous.
The last straw should have been when he had given her chlamydia. He denied it, insisted it wasn’t him and his argument was so unflinching and convincing even she began to wonder where she might’ve gotten it. She hadn’t had a lover, not ever. She began to worry about a contaminated tampon or used underwear someone had returned to a store with their germs on them. She knew better, yet her doubts, as ridiculous as they were for a woman who had studied chemistry, persisted. Finally, her gynecologist calmly and firmly said, “You could only get it from a person you had sex with. You can’t even get it from a blood transfusion. Period.”
Of course it had been Brad. He’d been unfaithful before, hadn’t he? Of course it was him. That’s when she stopped having sex with her husband. Three years later she’d been emptying his pockets for the dry cleaner and there it was—a condom. Of course. Because he didn’t want to get chlamydia again.
She’d left the condom on the pillow in his room. He told her she was an idiot—he’d picked up the condom in the nurse’s supply station, they sometimes used them for external catheters and he thought he might need it for a patient but didn’t and hadn’t put it back. Why would he leave a condom in his pants pocket if he was screwing around? But she knew it was a lie and she stayed in the guest room. She told the girls she liked to stay up late reading and their father needed his sleep to be alert