Candy let out an undignified screech in the other room. “You f**ker!” she shouted, but then, mere seconds later, I could hear her talking on the phone to what I could only assume was Pepper.
Turner was grinning. “Works every time. Women love to turn on each other.”
“Pepper? Why’s she called Pepper?” I asked.
“Trust me on this: You don’t want to know.”
I did trust him on that. Ironically, I’d come to trust him about a good number of things.
Turner had turned out to be a good friend to me, and he was always a great distraction, but as soon as I was alone again, I went back to obsessing about Iris.
How could you be in love with a person you didn’t really know? Someone that had fed you nothing but lies?
Someone you knew with certainty you couldn’t trust?
I was of two minds on the subject, one telling me you couldn’t, or at the very least, that it was an idiotic thing to do.
The other was unmindful of logic, uncaring of consequences, so long as I could have the thing I needed.
The woman I needed.
And this train of thought was beyond useless, because in the end, everything was out of my control, including my own heart.
CHAPTER TWO
FIVE WEEKS LATER
I was just getting home from the gym when I got an unexpected call from the photographer, Lourdes. I didn’t have anything scheduled with her, so I knew it was a social call.
We chatted amiably for a bit, and I found myself asking her out for a cup of coffee the next day. The question just sort of came out, and she accepted, her tone warm and friendly.
After I hung up, I wondered what the hell was wrong with me.
But I didn’t cancel, and I found myself meeting her the next afternoon.
We talked for hours.
We had so much in common. On paper, we’d be perfect together.
Also, she was a knockout in every sense of the word. Just stunning.
She had natural, tan golden skin and dark, mysterious eyes that were alluring and exotic. I remembered her mentioning something to me a while back about being half Spanish, half French, and she favored the former, looks-wise.
She had a slight accent that I couldn’t quite place, and that she said was mixed, because she’d done so much traveling and living abroad. It gave everything she said a sultry vibe.
She was a year older than I was, but her face was unlined. She was one of those ageless women that drove other women crazy.
Needless to say, Tammy had always hated when I did photo shoots with her.
She wore a white sundress with a wide collar and flirty hem that showed off her tan cle**age and legs to perfection.
She was a gym devotee, like myself, and it showed in every lithe, toned inch of her. She didn’t overdo it, though, managing to keep her feminine curves, along with the muscles.
We even used the same gym, though she went at night, and I preferred the morning. We talked about working out together sometime, but both of us knew that if we did, it wouldn’t be a regular occurrence.
You didn’t mess with someone’s workout schedule.
The very idea was sacrilege, we joked.
I’d been a developing a real, honest to God adult crush on her before Iris had come along and scrambled all sense out of my brain.
Now I found that, no matter how good Lourdes and I were on paper, I just couldn’t see myself getting romantically involved with anyone any time in the near future.
Regardless of the absence of its desire, my heart was already involved elsewhere.
“How are your boys?” I asked her.
She had two sons, the oldest twenty, the youngest eighteen. They were her pride and joy, and she smiled fondly at the question.
“Very good, in general. Both are attending UNLV, though my youngest, Gustave, isn’t sure what he wants to study. That’s normal, though, right, for a freshman?”
I wasn’t the one to ask about that, as I’d known that I wanted to be an author since I was six years old, but I figured she wanted a general answer, as opposed to a specific one. “Completely normal, I’m sure. Are they talking to their dad yet?”
She’d shared with me before that her sons hadn’t spoken to their father since she’d separated from him, well over a year ago.
She bit her lip and shook her head. “No. They’re holding firm. Both of them swear they never want to see him again. I’m not sure what to do about it. I can’t stand my ex-husband, but I’ve never spoken a bad word about him to them. Not one harsh word. In fact, they only heard why we were getting divorced because of him, and he told them about it because he was trying to turn them against me. My oldest, Rafael, beat the shit out of him for it.”
I blinked. This was the first time I’d heard about that part of it. I knew her ex had cheated on her, knew we had that in common, but she’d never given me specifics. “Why would he use him cheating as a way to turn them against you?”
She flushed, suddenly looking extremely uncomfortable. “I don’t want to tell you. You’ll think I’m a psycho.”
Of course that had me twice as intrigued. “Well, now you have to tell me.”
“Promise you won’t judge me?” she asked, chewing on her lush lower lip.
“Promise. I told you about my ex-wife deep throating her new fiancé in my entryway story, so it’s only fair.”
She grimaced. “That’s true. But you didn’t go crazy on her when you saw it, right?”
“I didn’t. I left for a few days, then came back, kicked her out of my house, and filed for divorce.”
“That’s a perfectly reasonable response. Mine wasn’t that. Not even close.”
She paused, and I just kept watching her expectantly.
“Well, first I should mention that it was Valentine’s Day when I caught him.”
“What an ass,” I put in.
“Yes. What an ass. He butt dialed me on Valentine’s Day, right as he happened to be screwing my ex-best friend. I heard it all, recognized his voice and hers, calling each other by name, caught all of the noises. Everything. Sadly, it was a very good connection.”
“Wow,” I mouthed.
“Yeah. Wow. So he comes home, a bit later, acting like nothing happened, like he’d done it a hundred times, which I’m sure he had. He came into the house and went straight to the shower, which, after I thought about it, he’d done a lot over the years.”