“Why don’t you just get the divorce and take the one million dollars per the prenup?” Stu asked me after several minutes of heavy breathing and eventual silence. “I make a decent salary from Baxter, and that acting job you’re always talking about could come through any day now.”
There it was. The inevitable proposal. It had never taken me long with a guy to receive a proposal.
Go to Tahiti with me.
Date me exclusively.
Move in with me.
Marry me.
Stu wasn’t exactly asking me to marry him, but fucking him for the last thirty days had turned him into my puppy crush. I had no desire to date, let alone move in or marry Stu Dobbs. I needed him, though.
“I told you, Baby. One million dollars for divorcing a man I’ve spent three years with isn’t fair. He has millions. Baxter Enterprises alone is valued at over a billion dollars and he owns more than half of it. He’ll be a billionaire by the end of the year if not the year after. One million isn’t even daily interest on his wealth. I deserve more, and I’m going to get it.”
He nuzzled me close and kissed me on my forehead.
“You’re sure he saw Regina Davenport on Monday?”
“Yeah, Adams drove him. He took the old lawyer, Warren, and the lawyer’s two privates with him.”
“Banks and Croft?”
“Yeah, those two. The blond is kind of hot in her pin stripe suites. Croft just creeps me out.”
“And they were there for a full hour?”
“Yeah. More like an hour and a half.”
“So, that’s one session. He can’t get to ten,” I muttered to myself. “And this Davenport woman, she’s a sex therapist, you said?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t he just go to a marriage counselor?” Stu asked.
“Well, he is fifty-five, Dobbs, if you know what I mean,” I replied sarcastically.
“Oh. The boss is having that kind of problem?”
I didn’t say a word. His non-disclosure agreement with me was a part of the prenuptial. I couldn’t discuss anything private about Dirk to anyone. I didn’t really have a problem telling Stu more, but he had a habit of not keeping his trap shut.
“How did you get that in the prenup anyway?” he asked after I didn’t answer.
Stu was referring to the divorce clause that I had asked for and which Dirk had agreed to.
In the event he asked for a divorce, I insisted he go to a counselor for ten sessions. I had dated him for six months before he proposed. I had a knack for reading men. He wasn’t the counseling type. He barely opened up to me and even when he did, it came nowhere close to being vulnerable.
Dirk Baxter was like most men in that respect. A closed up can of emotions and memories with no one being allowed close to them with a can opener. If Dirk couldn’t finish ten therapy sessions and he went through with the divorce, I got a fifty million dollar settlement and twenty thousand a month in alimony for twenty years. That was a lot more than a straight one million dollars.
I also never thought he would see a sex therapist. My plan to nearly neuter him had backfired.
“It was just a simple, reasonable request.” I smiled as I ran my finger over Stu’s chest. I had smeared the blood on his chest into a half-dollar size circle and it had dried up.
I had made that simple, reasonable request after a weekend in Aruba, where we hadn’t left the suite the entire time. Sex and room service had been the menu for the entire weekend. I had worn his resolve down and the counseling sessions actually seemed reasonable to him.
Warren had objected when we got back to the states. He objected to everything related to me, but Dirk had finally got him to relent. He said he would never have to even consider going to those counseling sessions because he would never ask me for a divorce. He was not the type of man to back out of a commitment.
On Sunday, though, the night after he had slipped away from his security detail, he came to me and asked for a divorce. He tried to be gracious and compliment me for the things I had brought into his life. He tried to package his rejection in a nice little package for me. I didn’t appreciate the present.
I threw a couple of wine glasses and then reminded him of the prenup. The counseling clause.
