Buch lesen: «The Other Wife»

I wanted her to be some evil demon who’d stolen my husband with promises of chandelier sex and perfect baked Alaska.

But as I looked into her blue eyes—such a vibrant color compared to my own plain brown ones—I couldn’t hate her.

“I didn’t know,” she said, taking a step closer, lowering her voice. “Not until I read the obituary in the paper.”

I decided to believe her. If he’d fooled me for fifteen years, surely he could have fooled her, too. A hundred questions filled my mind, but before I could speak his mother was reaching for me. So I gave the other wife a slight, dismissive nod, and slipped back into the perfect portrait of what everyone expected of me.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her walk away. We were members of the same club now, she and I.

I hoped like hell I wasn’t going to find anyone else with a membership before this day was over.

Shirley Jump

Bookseller’s Best Award winner Shirley Jump didn’t have the willpower to diet or the talent to master under-eye concealer, so she bowed out of a career in television and opted instead for a career where she could be paid to eat at her desk—writing. In the worlds Shirley gets to create and control, the children listen to their parents, the husbands always remember holidays and the housework is magically done by elves.

She sold her first book to Silhouette Books in 2001 and now writes stories about love, family and food—the three most important things in her life (order reversible, depending on the day)—using that English degree everyone said would be useless.

Though she’s thrilled to see her books in stores around the world, Shirley mostly writes because it gives her an excuse to avoid housework and helps feed her shoe habit.

To read excerpts or just find information on her latest title, visit her Web site at www.shirleyjump.com.

The Other Wife
Shirley Jump

www.millsandboon.co.uk

From the Author

Dear Reader,

People always ask me if my stories are based on my real life. I can honestly say the bigamy part of this one is not, although the quest for change, for finding your place in the world, is a part of all of us. We grow up, but we may never grow away from things that hold us in place. Penny’s quest is one that resonates with me, and I hope it does with you, too.

I don’t own a Jack Russell terrier, and neither of my dogs can do anything more incredible than fetch the newspaper on snowy mornings, which isn’t such a bad trick when it’s hovering around zero. Max, Annie’s dog, is based on my real-life Max, who forgets he’s way too big to be a lapdog and is as incorrigible as a toddler.

I have loved reading the Harlequin NEXT line since it debuted and am thrilled and honored to be a part of it. This book was definitely a blast to write, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed dreaming up the story line.

Shirley

To my good friend Janet Dean, who has helped me make

every book better and supported me even when I thought

there was no way I could pull off a funny story about a

two-timing husband and his piano-playing dog.

Also, a big thanks to Joe Murphy and his adorable wonder dog, Katie, who has brought smiles to hundreds of people over the years.

Finally, as the owner of a shelter dog myself, a huge thank-you to all the hard workers and valuable volunteers at animal shelters across the country. Consider opening your heart and home to a rescue animal. Yours might not sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but will undoubtedly bring some wondrous fun to your life.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 1

The last person I expected to see at my husband’s wake was his wife.

Yet, there she stood, to the right of his casket, wiping away her tears with a lacy white handkerchief, a fancy one with a tatted edge and an embroidered monogram, the kind your grandmother hands down to you because tissues aren’t as ladylike.

She was tall, this other wife, probably five foot eight, and wearing strappy black heels with little rhinestones marching across the toe. I wanted to grab her, shake her and tell her those stupid shoes were completely inappropriate for the funeral of the man I’d been married to for fifteen years. Go get yourself some pumps, I wanted to scream. Low-heeled, sensible, boring shoes.

I wasn’t mad at her. Exactly. I was madder than hell at the man lying on the top-grade satin in an elaborate, six-thousand-dollar cherry box, a peaceful expression on his cheating face.

Even in death, he looked ordinary and normal, the kind of guy you’d see on the street and think, oh, he’s got the American Dream in his hands. A slight paunch over his belly from too many years behind his desk, the bald spot he’d been trying to hide with creative combing, the wrinkles around his eyes from finding humor in everything from the newspaper to the cereal box.

Just your typical forty-year-old man—a forty-year-old whom I had loved and thought would be sitting beside me on the porch, complaining about the neighbors’ landscaping habits and debating a move to Florida, long into our old age. A man who could make me laugh on a dime, who’d thought nothing of surprising me with flowers, just because. He’d been a typical man in a hundred different ways—and so had our marriage.

Sure, a little dull at times, marked by trips to the dry cleaner on Tuesday and scrambled eggs every Sunday morning. But it had been a marriage, a partnership.

Or not, considering the two-wives-at-one-time thing, something I’d discovered last night in a picture of his double wedded bliss, stuffed behind the AmEx in his wallet.

Forty-eight hours ago, my life had been normal. While I was picking out a roast for dinner that night, paramedics had been rushing him into the hospital. Someone found my number on his cell phone because I, being the practical one, had seen some commercial about setting up an I.C.E. list, in case of emergency, and inputted my cell number. Dave, the spontaneous one, had laughed at me, but kept the number there.

The voice on the other end told me he’d had a heart attack. I’d rushed to Mass General, then stayed by his bedside fretting, pacing, shouting at the doctors to do something. But there wasn’t anything they could do.

The Big Macs and Dave’s habit of burning the candle on all ends had caught up with him.

Either that or the weight of his conscience had squished an aortic valve. In my less-charitable moments, I wanted to think it was the latter.

“Penny,” someone said, laying a hand on my arm.

Kim Grant, my next-door neighbor, who had baked cupcakes to welcome Dave and me to the neighborhood last month, stood before me in the receiving line with a look of true sympathy on her face. A flash of guilt ran through me. I still hadn’t returned her Tupperware container.

I hoped she wasn’t in any rush for her plastic.

“Hi, Kim. Thanks for coming.” The words flowed automatically, the same ones I’d said already a hundred times today, feeling sometimes that I was the one giving out comfort instead of receiving it.

Yet, even as I stood in Kim’s embrace, in my peripheral vision, I was always aware of her, standing at the edge, blending in with the other mourners, as well as someone could blend when dressed like Marilyn Monroe. The insurance company my husband had worked for was large, and nearly a hundred people from the offices were there. I doubted anyone noticed her.

How many of them, I wondered, knew about her? Did anyone? Or did everyone?

Had I been the only one left out of the secret? The poor, silly wife, sitting at home with a pot roast waiting on the table, completely oblivious to the train wreck that had derailed her marriage.

I still didn’t know her name, where she lived, or how long she’d been married to him. All I knew was that she’d been with my husband, in the Biblical sense, that day. Dave, the man who preferred T-shirts over sweatshirts and cotton blend over straight cotton, had been rushed into the E.R. naked. I knew he’d left the house dressed that day—I was the one who’d finished pressing his shirt while he hopped into the shower.

I thought of that shirt, remembering how I’d run my hand over the flat fabric while it was still warm, pleased with the neat creases, then, later, the kiss Dave had given me as a thanks. The way he’d smelled of steam and starch and Stetson.

“That’s the way we found him in the Marriott, ma’am,” one of the paramedics told me, shrugging, as if it were completely ordinary to bring in a naked guy on a gurney.

“The Marriott?” I’d asked—twice—trying to get my head around that. Had it been a meeting gone wrong? A robbery? And then, the worst had hit me. “Was he—” I paused, my entire marriage flashing before my eyes like a jerky home movie, with edits I couldn’t see, moments left on the cutting-room floor “—with anyone?”

“The, ah, bellhop said he checked in with his wife.” The paramedic had looked at me hopefully. I didn’t answer, letting the silence push him to add more. “She wasn’t there, though. Apparently already left because they were, ah, done.”

Done. I didn’t have to ask what Dave had done. The nudity was a pretty good clue.

“I’m so sorry, Penny.” Kim’s voice drew me back to the present. “Dave was such a great guy.”

I used to think that. Had even bragged about him to my friends when we met, about how I got the last great guy on earth.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one.

She crossed my line of vision again, as she read the tags on the flowers to the right of the casket. I maintained my position in the receiving line, stoic and reserved, the portrait of the grieving widow.

Lillian, Dave’s mother, stood beside me, tears flowing nonstop, shoulders shaking a little as she cried. Still, Lillian Reynolds maintained a level of reserve, as always the gracious former debutante who’d married a lawyer. She didn’t know about the second wife and I wasn’t going to announce it between “ashes to ashes” and “dust to dust.”

Maybe, I thought, if I never spoke the words, I could pretend it had never happened, that this other wife was a figment of my imagination.

“It was so sudden,” Kim said, shaking her head as she looked at Dave.

As Kim continued speaking words I didn’t hear, I glanced at my husband, lying there in his good blue suit, the one with the silver pinstripe that we’d picked out at JCPenney last Christmas, and for a second, felt a pang of grief so sharp I wanted to collapse. He was gone. Forever. For five seconds, I didn’t care about the bigamy, didn’t care what else he had hidden from me, I just wanted my husband back.

I wanted my life back, damn it. Rewind the clock, stop the tape, just get me out of this lily-scented twilight zone.

I wanted to be able to wake up, knowing that today would be the same as yesterday, that the numbered boxes on the wall calendar in the kitchen would follow one another with the reliable sameness of ironed shirts and scrambled eggs.

Insanely, I stared at his chest, willing it to rise and fall. It didn’t.

So I stood there in Perkins & Sons Funeral Home, wearing a black suit I’d had to borrow from my sister because I was in no condition to shop, and trying not to picture my husband having a heart attack while he was on top of another woman, probably using the same well-practiced missionary moves he’d used on me last Saturday.

The Marriott, I’d found out, after pumping the paramedic a little more, was in downtown Newton. A convenient location. But for whom? For him? For her? The hotel was only three miles from our house. Close enough that he could have stopped by for a little afternoon delight with me. Also close enough that had I gone to my usual Thursday manicure instead of going to a last-minute client meeting, I would have passed right by the hotel parking lot and maybe seen the “Insurance: The Investment for Those You Love” bumper sticker on his Benz.

For a guy who worked in risk management, he’d clearly liked to live on the edge.

I stepped back from the casket, from the cloying fragrance of the enormous white bouquet sent by the company, pressing a tissue to my eyes, willing my own tears to stop. I was mad at him, mad at myself, mad at the world. And yet, another part of me just wanted to curl up in the corner.

Kim finished whatever it was she had to say to me, so I smiled politely and thanked her for coming. She released me and moved to stand in front of Dave, dropping to the kneeler and making the sign of the cross over her chest.

I had a few uncharitable thoughts about God just then, ones that I was sure were going to get me sent to hell, so I turned away from my husband to do what needed to be done.

Face the other wife.

She skipped signing the guest book and had stopped at the casket, her hands gripping the velvet-covered rail, tears flooding her eyes. Now that she was closer, I could see that she wasn’t Marilyn Monroe—she was a mess, all wrinkled and jumbled. The perfectionist in me wanted to get out the iron and the starch, maybe a lint roller, too, and straighten her out before sending her back out the door.

She was pretty, I’d give her that. Buxom and blond, the typical other woman. Except, I was a blonde, too. Just not so well endowed.

Had it been that simple? He’d needed some 36Ds to keep him company so he’d married another woman? My 34Bs weren’t enough? I could have gotten a Miracle Bra, for God’s sake.

Her diamond ring, the same shape as mine—apparently Dave hadn’t been inventive enough to get something other than a marquise cut when he proposed a second time—sparkled in the muted light. Her mascara ran in dirty little rivers along her cheeks, and for a moment, I felt sorry for her. Had she known about me before today?

Had she loved him?

And would it really make a difference to me if she had?

She stepped back from the casket, but hesitated, clearly wondering if she should do the receiving line. Always the polite girl I had learned to be, I stepped forward, reached for her hand. “I’m sorry,” I said, before she could turn away or, worse, say it first.

Her eyes widened with surprise. “Me, too,” she said softly. “I really am.”

I wanted her to be some evil demon who’d stolen my husband with promises of chandelier sex and perfect Baked Alaska. But as I looked into her blue eyes—such a vibrant color compared to my own plain brown ones—I couldn’t hate her. But damn it, I wanted to. It would have made the whole thing a lot more convenient.

“I didn’t know,” she said, taking a step closer, lowering her voice. “Not until I read the obituary in the paper.”

I decided to believe her. If he’d fooled me for fifteen years, surely he could have fooled her, too. A hundred questions filled my mind. But then his mother was reaching for me, wanting to introduce me to some distant cousin I’d never see again, so I gave the other wife a slight, dismissive nod, and slipped back into the perfect portrait of what everyone expected of me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her walk away, those crazy shoes sparkling in the muted light of the funeral parlor. We were members of the same club now, she and I.

I hoped like hell I wasn’t going to find anyone else with a membership before this day was over.

CHAPTER 2

Somehow, I got through the wake without smearing Dave’s good name or shrieking like a lunatic. My sister Georgia, Dave’s brother Kevin, and Dave’s mom were all there, keeping me company in the line beside the casket. That was it for family. My parents had died when I was seventeen, my grandparents shortly thereafter. Dave’s father had passed away seven years ago from a heart attack, leaving Lillian to begin retirement as a widow.

I went home the night of the wake and cleaned a house that didn’t need cleaning, organized closets that were already perfect and went through every pen in the house, scribbling the tips across an old magazine, looking for duds.

For something to do, to keep me from thinking.

At the funeral the next day, I did everything I was supposed to do. Laid a white rose on his casket before they lowered it into the ground, said thank you to everyone who offered their sympathies, turned down the offer of another casserole I wasn’t going to eat. After a funeral dinner hosted by the ladies of the same church that had married and now buried my husband, I sent my sister home, telling her I would be okay. I thought of trying to talk to Dave’s brother, to find out what he knew about this other woman, but right now, I wasn’t strong enough to handle one more thing.

The other wife didn’t show at the funeral and for an hour or so I pretended I was the only woman in Dave’s life, that the words the pastor said about my late husband were true. “Good man…loving husband…devoted son.”

At the end of the day, I slipped into the limo beside my mother-in-law to go back to the house Dave and I had bought a month ago.

The house where we were going to start a family.

He’d told me it would bring good luck, this change of residency. We’d been discussing the idea of kids for ten years, but I’d always had an excuse, a reason we should wait. I’d put him off and put him off, hoping that someday, Dave would just give up on the idea.

But then, finally, after Christmas, I had relented, finally conceding my fight to add anything more complicated than a potted plant to our lives. Because I was thirty-seven and Dave forty, we’d gotten checkups to make sure nothing was wrong. It wasn’t his fault, the doctor had said. Dave had plenty of sperm to go around.

I stifled a laugh in the back of the limo. He’d had plenty of sperm to go around, all right.

My mother-in-law gave me a sharp glance, then let out a sigh. “Are you okay, Penny?”

“Yeah.” As fine as I’m ever going to be after coming face-to-face with my husband’s extracurricular life. “Lillian, if you want to stay at my house for a few days—”

“No. I’m going back to Florida, back home.” She averted her face, watching the pastel tones of spring pass by the window. “I’m best going through this on my own. Do you understand, honey?”

She’d flown up as soon as I’d called her from the hospital and hadn’t left my side since. I couldn’t blame her for wanting some time away from this, to deal with her loss.

“Yeah. I feel the same way.” Though I wanted to be alone for an entirely different reason, so I could sort out the mess of my husband’s life and figure out how I could have been so easily duped by the same man whose underwear I had washed every Saturday. How could I have been handling those Fruit of the Looms and never realized he was a cheater? A bigamist?

A stranger?

I reached out and clasped Lillian’s hand, giving it a squeeze. A tear ran down her face. She smiled at me, her eyes kind and worried. I’d always liked my mother-in-law, figuring I’d gotten awfully lucky to have married into a family where the normal jokes hadn’t applied. Considering my own parents had been the dysfunctional poster children for how not to parent, I had latched on to Lillian soon after meeting Dave.

“Thanks for being here for me the last two days,” I said. “I needed the support.”

“I needed you just as much, dear,” Lillian said, then sighed. “He’s gone for both of us.”

And for someone else. I bit my tongue. “He would have hated this, you know. The big funeral. The music.”

“The flowers.” Lillian laughed. “God, how Dave hated flowers at funerals. Said they were a waste of good landscaping plants.”

I thought of the mums in our garage, the ones we’d planned on planting this weekend. He’d left me with a bunch of plants and a life half-done.

In the space of a day, my life had been thrown into a shredder, taking with it what I had hoped for my future, what I believed about my past, and what I thought I knew about my heart.

Talk about killing a whole bevy of birds with one stone. Dave’s death had pretty much wiped out a species.

We pulled up in front of the house, the limo easing to a stop without even a squeak of the brakes.

Through the car’s tinted windows, I saw her. Again. Like a bad nightmare I couldn’t get rid of. Sitting on the swing—the swing Dave had installed last month—on my front porch, waiting.

“Who’s that?” Lillian asked. “I don’t think I saw her at the funeral.”

“She’s a good friend of Dave’s.” I didn’t want to lie, but I couldn’t tell anyone the whole truth. Not today. Maybe not ever. Heck, even I didn’t want the whole truth.

“I’ll let you two visit,” Lillian said, giving me a final, comforting pat. “I want to go see Kevin again before I head to the airport.”

Later, when I was ready, I’d corner Kevin and see what he knew. He and Dave had been close, going on annual fishing and hunting trips. He had to have told his older brother something.

Then as soon as I solved this mystery—and dealt with any financial ramifications—I’d bury it all in the back of my mind and get back to my predictable days.

It was the only way I knew how to deal.

I got out of the limo, said goodbye to Lillian, then strode up my walkway, not looking at the newly mulched beds waiting for plants. Ignoring the freshly painted white picket fence, the new front door. Projects we’d done last weekend. Apparently my weekend with him since the one before he’d been in “Toronto.”

A fresh wave of pain slammed into my chest. Toronto, Denver, Dallas—how many of those trips had been lies? And to think I’d packed his suitcase, even throwing in a sexy note once in a while, and one time, a pair of my panties, because I felt bad for him attending those boring insurance conventions and client meetings.

I’d thought I was being so clever, such a perfect wife. Clearly, I hadn’t, not if my husband had gone out and found himself a spare.

The other wife rose when I approached, still clutching that lace hanky. “I should have introduced myself,” she said, extending a hand. “Susan Rey—” She cut herself off before giving me my own last name. “Susan.”

Susan. It wasn’t the name of a woman you could hate. It was one of those nice names, the kind given to the girl down the street who always let you play with her Barbies. She should have been named something else—Bambi, Cinnamon, Cassidy—something I could latch on to and despise.

“Penny,” I said, shaking her hand and feeling weirdly like we were at a cocktail party, meeting for the first time over the crab dip.

“I know you probably have a million questions,” Susan began, her voice filled with a nervous giggle.

I nodded. Actually, I thought a million was a low estimate.

“And I’d love to answer them,” Susan said. She was neater today, more put together in jeans and a black top, but still with the same damned shoes. “But they’ll have to wait.”

“Wait? Why?” I wanted her to just tell me everything, to rip that Band-Aid off in one quick swoop.

Susan shifted on those heels and bit her lip. Her lipstick was darker than mine, I noticed, a shimmery cranberry compared to my muted coral. “Well…I have a favor to ask you,” she said.

“A favor? You’re asking me for a favor?” The whole day had become as surreal as a Jackson Pollock painting. I wanted to hit the wall, hit the mums, anything. Hit her, actually. “I want a favor, too. I want to know what you were doing with my husband.”

“I can’t—” She pressed a hand to her eyes, then fluttered her fingers. “I can’t talk about that right now. I need a little space. I just found out about you, too, you know. You have to give me some time.”

I didn’t want to feel sympathy for her. I wanted to hate her. Right now, anger was a lot more comfortable to wear than grief.

But damn it all, she had that nice name and big blue eyes and looked like the kind of woman I’d have coffee with. Not someone I could give a permanent placement on my shit list.

“Later, I promise,” Susan said, and for some reason, I believed her. “But for now, I need you to take care of something for me. It’ll be easy, I’m sure.” She smiled, then stepped back and gestured into the shadows of my porch. When she did, I saw a cage.

It was small and tan, and filled with something that was so excited—or so vicious—it was shaking the plastic crate, causing it to tap-tap-tap on my wooden porch.

“What the hell is that?”

“Harvey the Wonder Dog,” Susan said with a burst of enthusiasm, as if she’d just given me a long-awaited Christmas present. She backed down my stairs and onto my walkway. “And he’s all yours.”

“He’s what? But—”

“I can’t take care of him,” Susan was saying, still moving very fast, considering her shoes. “Dave had left him at my house while we went into the city and then…” She left off the rest. “Anyway, I’ve brought all his things. You’ll love him. Really.” Then she was reaching for the door of her black Benz, a car much like mine.

What had Dave done? Bought everything in pairs?

“Wait!” I shouted, barreling after her. “What are you doing?”

“Leaving.” Susan withdrew a set of keys from her pocket and thumbed the remote. “Sorry.”

“You’re sorry… Sorry you married my husband? Sorry you showed up at his wake? Sorry you were on my porch, waiting for me to come home from burying him? Or sorry you dumped an animal on me that I don’t want?”

Susan wheeled around, her hand on the door handle. “Sorry. But I’ve had him since Thursday and I can’t take care of him anymore.”

“He’s your dog. Yours and Dave’s,” I said, the words thick as a turnip in my throat.

“No, he’s not. I’m not even a dog person. He was Dave’s. I never even met Harvey or knew Dave had a dog until Thursday. Now, he’s yours.” Susan let out a sigh. “Think of Harvey as a part of Dave, left to you.”

Then, before I could ask her anything else, Susan had climbed inside her car, slammed it into gear and left, leaving me choking in her exhaust.

And apparently with one more member of the Dave Reynolds fan club.