When he pushed out the front door, his arm was around one stunning woman, and he was pulling me slightly behind him. Which was why, for a second, I didn’t notice the gaggle of photographers, the bright black spots the flashbulbs left behind.
“Goddamn,” Alex muttered, snapping my arm close to his side so that I was forced into the light, unable to shrink away as my natural instinct had been. He dropped his hand from Ophelia’s waist, but his image had already been captured on film, his arm tight around a woman who was not his wife.
“This isjustthe kind of crap I didn’t want,” he said to no one in particular. I knew what he was thinking, what every gossip column in the country would have to say about this little me´nage a` trois. I knew what this could do to his polished, pristine image.
THE HONEYMOON’S OVER. ALEX RIVERS’S SECRET LOVE LIFE. TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE. Headlines crowded my mind, and I pressed my fingers against my eyes, trying to block out the flashes from the cameras and the fact that my name was going to be dragged through the mud only three weeks after my wedding. I could feel Alex’s arm tense beneath my fingers, and I stroked his wrist.It was only an accident, I wanted to say.Nobody could have seen this coming.
Belatedly I remembered Ophelia, who a minute ago had been too woozy to stand by herself. I looked down at the floor, half expecting her to be passed out, but she was at Alex’s side, tall and straight and smiling beautifully, clutching his arm even as he tried to throw her off.
And that’s how I knew she had planned the whole thing.
I had forgiven Ophelia the time she wore my pearls to a premiere and lost them in the back seat of a director’s limo. I had forgiven her when she left me stranded at the dentist after a root canal because of a casting call for a part she didn’t even get. I had forgiven her for using the rent money to enroll in a transcendental yoga class for stress management, for telling me I wasn’t trendy enough to come club hopping with some of her actor friends, for forgetting my birthday almost every year we’d lived together. But as I watched Alex seething, shielding me with one arm from an inevitable accusation, I knew that I would never forgive her for this.
Alex murmured something about finding John and the car, and as he moved away I grabbed Ophelia from behind, spinning her around.
Even as she turned, she was watching the reporters who were still tracking Alex, her photo opportunity. “Howcouldyou?” I said. Ophelia lifted her eyebrows. “How could I what?”
I narrowed my eyes. In the ten years I had known Ophelia, I had always been her fall guy, and I had never once complained. But that was before she set out to intentionally hurt me, to hurt my husband.
“You told them we were coming here. You set Alex up.”
Ophelia’s mouth tightened. “Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me to do, Cassie?”
Her words stopped my flood of anger.Yes, but, I wanted to say,youweren’t supposed to go about it that way. You weren’t supposed to trick him. You weren’t supposed to use me. “He was starting to like you,” I said quietly. Ophelia rolled her eyes. “If the positions were reversed, he would have done exactly the same thing. He probablyhas.”
“No,” I said firmly. “He has not.”
I turned my head to see Alex storming back. He grabbed my wrist, and without sparing Ophelia even a look, pulled me away from the restaurant.
I let Alex open my car door, and then I leaned my head back, watching the stars wink while he settled down beside me and told John we were ready. “Well,” he said carefully, “by tomorrow morning I will have been branded as a two-timing son of a bitch, and the more careful bloodhounds will notice the perversity of me screwing my wife’s best friend.” He stared out the window, away from me. “You realize that from the camera angle, you probably won’t be in the picture. Your hand maybe, but that will be airbrushed out. Of course, as planned, your friend Ophelia will feature prominently, with my arm around her waist.”
I touched his leg lightly. “I’m sorry, Alex,” I said. “I didn’t know she was going to do anything. Ophelia’s not usually like that.”
“You’re nearly as good an actress as she is,” Alex said. “I can almost believe you.” He turned to me, his eyes dark. “I’m only going to tell you this once,” he said, “so please keep it in mind. I don’t like being paraded around like a circus animal. It’s bad enough that I have to think twice before I walk outside in the middle of the day, that just because I’m good at what I do I have to live in a fishbowl. But I won’t be used, Cassie, not even by you.”
This whole fiasco was indirectly my fault, and because of that, I let him take his anger out on me. “I understand,” I whispered, and I focused on the shadows of the rolling night.
IT WAS WELL AFTER THREE IN THE MORNING WHEN I WOKE UP AND realized Alex hadn’t come to bed. We had come home, and after saying goodnight to John, Alex had walked into the library, shutting the door behind him and making it perfectly clear he didn’t want me around. I had walked up the stairs and into the bedroom, letting the carpet sink under my feet. I stripped to my skin, still hoping. I lay in bed and told myself we were bound to have an argument at some point. I fell asleep imagining his hands running down my sides.
When his half of the bed was still empty in the middle of the night, I began to panic. I pulled a thin white silk wrapper from the closet, something that had been in Alex’s bedroom before I even arrived. I didn’t think he would have driven away without telling me; I didn’t want to believe he was with somebody else. Tiptoeing down the hall,
I opened the doors to the guest suites, breathing a sigh of relief when each bed was smooth and made.
He wasn’t in the library either, or the kitchen, or the study. Hesitant, I opened the heavy front door of the house, leaving it ajar in case it would lock behind me, and I made my way down the marble steps.
The grounds were well lit for the sake of the hidden security cameras, so it was no trouble to find the path that wound behind the house, between the outbuildings, toward the boxwood maze. I was halfway to the gardens when I heard the rhythmic splashing from the pool.
Over the pungent strains of chlorine, I could smell the bourbon, and I did not know if it was because Alex had drunk an exorbitant amount, or because I was naturally attuned to the scent by the memory of my mother. The sweet, strong odor hit me right behind the eyes, just like it used to, and took me back twenty years.
Once, when I was thirteen and I had come to hate the smell of bourbon that seemed to be steeped into the wallpaper of our house and funneled through its air vents, I had emptied every last bottle down the sink. My mother, when she found out, went into a rage. She tore at my shirt, ripping it across the sleeve, and backhanded me across the face before she broke down in my arms, crying like a child.If you lovedme, she said,you wouldn’t do this to me. And because I did not know the opposite was true, I swore I wouldn’t do it again. I sat at the kitchen table watching her drink a tiny bottle of Cointreau she kept for cooking.
As her hands stopped shaking she glanced up at me, smiling, as if to say,You see? And for the first time I noticed how very much I was growing up to look like her.
Now a bottle of bourbon lay on its side, dripping into a puddle that ran into the shallow end of the pool. Alex held a second bottle by the neck. He was sitting on the smooth stone bench that lined one underwater side of the pool, and when he saw me step into the spotlight he toasted me. “You want a drink,che`re?” he drawled, and when I shook my head he laughed. “C’mon now,pichouette. You an’ I know it’s in the blood.”
I stood up as straight as I could. “Come to bed, Alex,” I said, trying to keep the shiver out of my voice.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I got some swimming to do yet.”
