Ladies' Night by Andrews, Kay (find a book to read TXT) 📗

because she needed to clutch something. It was the first time she’d seen him since their day in court.

He was dressed for golf, in a spotless white polo shirt, crisp black shorts, golf shoes, his aviator sunglasses pushed back off his forehead.

“I came to see the floor show,” Ben said. “Good thing it’s free.”

“How’d you know where to find me?” Was he following her?

“Your mother told me you were working at a house over on Mandevilla. You’re not that hard to find. She really, really doesn’t like me, you know.”

“That makes two of us,” Grace snapped. “I’m surprised she actually spoke to you at all. But then, probably you lied to her. Lying seems to be your good thing.”

He smiled. His orthodontics were a thing of beauty. “I told Rochelle I had something to give you. I guess she assumed it was money.”

“But it’s not.”

“No,” Ben said. And his smile dissolved, like Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire cat. “No money. Just some advice.”

He took a step into the room. “I got a call this morning, from Anna Stribling, at Home Depot. It seems she had some ‘concerns,’ as she called them, about the originality of our material on Gracenotes.”

“Oh?” Grace wondered if he could see her hands shaking as she clutched the broom.

“Yes. She was specifically wondering if J’Aimee’s corn-crab chowder recipe was original. Because, she said, she’d had a disturbing e-mail from you, accusing us of stealing your material.”

“Which you did. A blatant rip-off,” Grace said. “My photos, my recipe, my everything. And that’s what I told her.”

“But you don’t have any proof of that, do you?” Ben raised one eyebrow, amused.

“Because you hacked into my Web site and erased it. And put that filthy porn link on there,” Grace fairly spat the words at him.

“And you don’t have any proof of that, either.”

Ben took a step closer. She could smell his elegant cologne. The Clive Christian 1872 that sold for $310 a bottle at Saks. Everything about Ben was elegant. “What I told Anna during our chat today is this. I told her that you’re delusional. That you’re bitter and jealous and emotionally fragile. I mentioned that you’re in court-ordered counseling. I think she felt a lot better after our conversation. In fact, I know she felt better, because Home Depot just agreed to take a bigger Gracenotes banner ad starting next month.”

Grace clamped her lips together to keep her jaw from dropping. She hoped Ben wasn’t close enough to detect the sense of defeat that swept over her, threatened to knock her off her feet and destroy her hard-won equilibrium.

Ben towered over her—intimidation through proximity was his motto. “Don’t fuck with me, Grace,” he said, his voice light and even. “You’ll get mowed down every time. Know this. If you send out any more of those incendiary e-mails, I’ll haul your ass back to court in a New York second. And that judge will be only too happy to shut you down for good.”

She took two steps backward, nearly tripping over the damned broom. “Get out,” she said, recovering quickly. She poked the broom at his spotless two-toned golf shoes. “OUT!”

He stood his ground. She jabbed at his ankles. “I said out!” He chuckled, shook his head, and strolled for the door, with Grace right on his heels. He’d left the door open, and now she saw an unfamiliar car in the driveway, a gleaming ebony Porsche Pantera.

“Nice car,” she spat.

He gave her a mock bow. “Glad you like it, since I have you to thank for it. And you know? I actually like this one much better. It handles so much smoother.”

*   *   *

She finished ripping out the rest of the carpet, without the music, now that Ben had managed to poison that source of joy. Slowly, she swept the living room and dining room floors, taking grim satisfaction from the cockroach body count.

Grace retrieved her cleaning supplies—bucket, mop, sponge, and spray cleaners—from her car and attacked the filthy windows, using an entire roll of paper towels on the front room. Logistically, it made no sense to spend so much time cleaning a house that still had so far to go in the rehab process, but she did it anyway, inhaling the scent of the strong pine cleaner as she filled her bucket with hot water.

When she found herself humming as she mopped, she got her iPod and turned it on again. The music filled her head and helped erase, temporarily, the image of Ben, smug, self-important, all-powerful Ben. “Gonna wash that man right out of my hair,” she muttered, dumping the gray mop water down the toilet and flushing it with a flourish.

Finally, satisfied that the surface layers of crud had been eradicated, along with Ben’s overpowering cologne, she set down her mop and picked up her camera again.

She photographed the front rooms, pleased with the way the afternoon sunlight slanted in, leaving atmospheric shadows on the old oak floors. She was so absorbed in her work she was startled at the sudden rattle of rain on the tin roof of the porch.

Time to go, she thought. She had to pick up Sweetie at the vet’s office, get cleaned up before her Wednesday-night “therapy” session, and, in the meantime, figure out how to hide a dog from her mother.

23

Wyatt Keeler stood in front of the tiny closet he shared with Bo, barefoot and dressed only in his cotton boxers, and felt gloom. He walked over to the closet, opened the door, and his mood did not improve. He hadn’t thought about clothes in months, not since the breakup with Callie. Okay, maybe even before that. His style guidelines in adulthood had gotten simple; he liked clean, and he liked cool. As in temperature, not trendiness.

At one time, he’d prided himself on being a sharp dresser. Just the right label jeans, good-quality classic shirts, ties and jackets. Nothing too flashy or outrageous. He’d learned a lot from his fraternity brothers in college. He’d been, like the ZZ