“—to you, Micah, Rhodes, Alex, and your omma,” she finished. She flashed me a look I only half saw out of the corner of my eye. “Did he grill you guys?”
“Only some of us,” I mumbled, face heating up. “Obviously, he knew my mother didn’t crawl out of her deathbed just to murder her old cook. Micah had already left for work. And Alex was with Christie and her staff during the time of the murder. There were only two people—according to Davis—who had opportunity to commit the murder, and alibiing eachother out is pointless, since a wife would easily lie for her husband, and vice versa.”
“But you can alibi each other out,” she said, grinning away. “You two were too busy banging each other’s brains out in the dirt to be going around murdering cooks.”
“Yes, thank you,” I cried over Elin’s, Freya’s, Natalie’s, Rose’s, and Marcus’s snickering. “I know what we were doing—didn’t need the reminder.”
She laughed at me without a lick of shame. “The point is that the murder had nothing to do with you, or your family. What happened to Mrs. Prado was horribly tragic for her and her family, but you’ve offered to pay for her funeral, and you petitioned the estate lawyer to convert the salary you were going to pay Mrs. Prado into a college fund for her grandkids. What you’re doing is very generous, Sue,” she said, slipping into the wrong name easily. “And it’s your best. The best you can do, so please, don’t sit here torturing yourself. Let’s just enjoy celebrating you and your husbands tonight, especially since you guys have something to celebrate these days.”
It was wrong to smirk and grin on the heels of discussing the brutal murder of someone who took part in raising me, so I bit hard on my lip—fighting back the rising smile that grew from thoughts of Micah and Rhodes.
After a rocky, and I mean mountainous, bad start, I finally figured out the key to true peace in this house—
Sex.
Micah and I were rolling around in the sheets nearly every minute of every day except for all the minutes of the day that Rhodes and I were banging away. To say the spark ignited into passion that grew into a towering inferno of raging lust is putting it mildly. The three of us were far from fighting these days. Just the opposite. We’d fallen into a nice routine of eating breakfast together before work and school, laughing and being silly with Nari while cooking dinner, and burning up the sheets all the free minutes in between.
The only one who wasn’t in on the new terms of the truce... was Alex.
If anything, my relationship with him had gotten even worse. Alex’s cold shoulder morphed into an Arctic chill. He left every room I walked into. He attended meals with me for Lily’s sake, but afterward he’d hustle heraway for the next activity in her routine, and left the three of us sitting in the awkward.
I did try once the week before to talk to him, but he just stopped me and said—surprisingly politely—that he’d prefer we maintain strict boundaries and only speak when it had something to do with caring for Lily.
I let him go without a word, swallowing my hurt, because what right did I have to push and harass him?Wedidn’t have a relationship to fight for. We didn’t even have a co-parenting relationship to fight for.
I wasn’t his wife. I wasn’t Lily’s mother. I was nothing to him at all.
At least I’m something to Micah and Rhodes,I reminded myself.The next time I leave this house, I’ll be packing some good memories with me. The memories of my first, third, twelfth, and thirty-third screaming orgasm. Plus, the memory of waking up the next morning after those orgasms with their arms around me, and no nightmares retracting their claws from my mind.
And even though Rhodes and Micah claimed all they wanted out of the last days of their marriage was lots of hot sex, I could feel things changing between us. Micah was joking, teasing, and laughing with me now—instead of jabbing, taunting, and laughing at me. Some nights, we didn’t even have sex. We’d just curl up in bed laughing at old-school comedy reruns and bemoaning the current state of comedy television.
As for Rhodes, we never touched on what I blurted out in the woods about wanting to stay together and work on the marriage he didn’t know we didn’t have, but things seemed to change with him all the same. Sex really seemed to mellow the guy out the way early morning runs never could. Over the last couple weeks, he’d been opening up to me about the pressure he was under—having to run a business based in two states and support a family of five. Even though the manor and Omma’s care were paid for by the estate, Latana was still an expensive town to live in—as ultra-rich communities tend to be. Just one semester at Lantana Day School costs fifteen thousand dollars.
I wish I could’ve freaked out over those numbers, but Omma spent twice that a semester to send me to Titan Prep. Competition was fierce in a community that can afford to send their kids to any college they want. If you wanted your kid to have the edge, you had to pay for it.
Even though there wasn’t much my thirty dollars an hour and I could do to relieve his financial pressure, it seemed to help him just having me listen and hear him out without judgment. So much so that over the last week, he’d been opening up to me about growing up under the weight of being Rhodes Newbury of the Chicago Newburys.
He had to be perfect at all times—never letting the public see a crack in the façade. And most importantly, never sharing family business with an outsider. Meaning that his whole childhood, his parents and grandparents refused to have any kind of conversation with him about his father’s addiction, while also forbidding him to talk about it with anyone else. He was forced to keep all of it—his dad stealing from him, the nights he went hungry in a penthouse with the lights shut off, the move to his grandparents’ when he was ten, and the slow destruction of his parents’ marriage—pushed down deep inside.
So deep, he didn’t tell his two best friends anything about it until they all got drunk one night in their dorm room. And he never told Sue at all for reasons I didn’t have to guess.
I knew from our first real conversation what a big deal it was for Rhodes to open up to someone—which just made my stupid, lovesick heart squeal that he chose me.
“Look at you grinning away,” Courtney teased, lighting my cheeks on fire. “You’re so cute when you’re in love.”
“Not love,” I rebutted immediately—almost harshly, but I couldn’t help it as thoughts of Dan floated through my head. “Love requires truth and transparency on both sides. We aren’t in love. But I... I guess I’d be comfortable saying we’re in lust. Possibly in friendship some days.”
“Uhhh-huh,” she teased, hiding her smirk behind the menu.
I ignored her, and the shared strange looks between the beauticians. They were obviously wondering why a woman getting ready for her blowout anniversary bash was denying she loved her husbands.
“So, who all is invited to this thing?” Courtney asked.
Again I wanted to shrug but Freya’s immediate, mind-reading glare kept my shoulders where they were. “Rhodes’s mom and grandmother. Micah’s parents, and Alex’s cousins,” I rattled off. “Also, pretty much every bachelor, bachelorette, and couple in Lantana with the highest networth—including Charles Layton,” I mentioned. “Did you know Lily’s first-grade teacher was heir to the Lantana Lakes Lager fortune?”
“Whoa.” She whistled. “I didn’t know that, but good for him. That’s some tasty beer right there.”
I had to agree. Micah and I had taken to splitting a can while we curled up watching reruns ofThe I.T. Crowd. And by that I meant, he poured it down my chest and licked the lager off my nipples while the show played in the background.
