The Other Man Read online

  My hands clawed into the sheets as he introduced me to the skill of his wicked tongue. He lapped at my sex, making himself at home down there, soft and gentle in a way I hadn’t thought he had in him.

  Something occurred to me as he made me come, yet again.

  If he was as complicated of a man as he was a lover, I was in trouble.

  He moved up my body, kissing my lips, his sex nudging between my legs.

  All soreness was forgotten, by both of us, apparently, as he pushed himself into me.

  He did recall it briefly, though, when he was buried nearly to the root. “Too sore?” he murmured.

  I bit his lower lip in answer, whimpering into his mouth as I didn’t feel coherent enough to talk. He took it for the answer he wanted.

  With a rough groan, he shoved himself home.

  And then he was gone, as sudden as he’d come.

  He never said goodbye.

  I passed out and he left.

  That was it.

  He didn’t even leave his number, or ask for mine.

  There was no way whatsoever for me to misinterpret what that meant.

  I honestly didn’t think I’d see him again. I was resigned to that. Not happy about it, but not bitter either.

  Not bitter, because he’d given me something. Something I hadn’t thought to feel again.

  Hope.

  Sad as it was, for better or worse, my life had fallen apart soon after I’d turned forty, and I hadn’t imagined, couldn’t even conceive of the idea that my best years of my life lay still ahead of me.

  And now, because of Heath, anything seemed possible.

  The revelation was liberating.

  A heavy weight had left my body; the dead weight of a marriage that I was finished letting deprive me. Of anything. Just finished.

  I didn’t want to be deprived of anything anymore, or ever again.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  It was a few days later, and I wanted to blame the wine, but I wound up telling my girlfriends all about him. Way too many salacious details. I hadn’t meant to so much as mention him, but was hard to hold anything back from the girls. They were those kind of friends.

  We had a running bi-weekly girls’ night that I hardly ever missed. The group had been going on and off for several years, and though I’d only joined up with them about a year prior, it felt longer. Like I’d known some of them forever.

  It was an impressive group of women. Over a dozen of us. Successful women. Beautiful women. Funny, entertaining. Some single, some married. A bit of anything you could want, really.

  It was a large group, but it didn’t feel large. We came in all ages, and no one broke off into cliques. We all mixed well together.

  Well, I should explain more. It was more than a girls’ night. It was more of a weekly, impromptu therapy session with friends. And alcohol.

  “How old is he, exactly?” Frankie asked, sounding zero percent judgmental, and one hundred percent fascinated.

  I’d met Frankie first. She had her own reality show, and I’d been shooting her for a spread in a magazine that featured said show.

  We’d hit it off right away, but that was just how Frankie was. I’d been going through a rough time, and we’d bonded, fast and deep. She’d quickly invited me to a girls’ night and introduced me to the others.

  I’d been impressed with her right away. She was uniquely beautiful and wildly unconventional, in her looks and lifestyle, and the way she handled it never stopped impressing me. She had so much acceptance for herself and who she was, but also of her friends. It was hard not to adore someone who was that loving of both herself and others.

  I had a serious girl crush on her, but it was purely platonic. A. Because I wasn’t gay. And B. Because I was pretty sure her wife, Estella, would claw anyone’s eyes out that tried to come between them.

  I grimaced. “Twenty-five.”

  Her smoking hot wife, Estella, whooped, high-fiving the air. “You go, hot mama! It’s about time.”

  “Hell yeah,” Danika said succinctly. She was one of my favorites. A sarcastic soul after my own heart. She was extravagantly gorgeous, a striking, exotic woman of some mixed Eurasian heritage. Her face and body were flawless, aside from a slight limp when she walked, but I didn’t think that detracted from any of it.

  I’d started attending these get-togethers just after she’d gotten married to a great heaping hunk of a man that put on one of the most successful magic acts on the strip.

  “He’s not much older than my children,” I said, eyes swinging to Lucy, the therapist and voice of reason of the group.

  “Don’t do that to yourself,” said Danika. “He’s twenty-five. Hardly a child.”

  Easy for her to say, I thought, as she was sitting somewhere in her late twenties.

  “I don’t honestly think I’d have done it,” I said, words still aimed at Lucy, “if I’d had a clue he was that young before we hooked up. Unfortunately, I only asked him his age after.” I knew that was likely bullshit. My lust had been too overwhelming to be stopped at the word twenty-five. I was trying to save face, though I didn’t actually need to, not in front of this group.

  “Stop that,” Lucy said gently. “Don’t beat yourself up. You didn’t commit a crime.”

  “What’s the lowdown on a cougar relationship happening, doc?” another one of the ladies, Candy, spoke up, asking a question I didn’t have the balls to.

  Lucy held up her hands in a sort of c’est la vie gesture. “It just depends on the individuals involved. I don’t hand out verdicts for relationships. You know this.”

  “But what is the usual pattern for a thing like this playing out?” I asked her. I knew better than to accept her pat answer. She had all the likely scenarios, all the usual dysfunctional relationship patterns memorized.

  Ugh, I’d thought the word relationship about a guy I’d only met twice. I was so old school.

  I’ve been out of the dating pool too long, I thought.

  Lucy looked amused. “What, you want me to cite off the statistics for you?”

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing them,” I mused.

  “I’m not going to do that. You are a responsible woman. A good woman. As long as no one is being exploited, and no one is feeling used, I say do as you like. How’s that for a lowdown?”

  Less than satisfactory, I thought. But I’d take it. At least she wasn’t outright cautioning me against it.

  “I’m encouraged, frankly,” she continued. “I see it as a good sign that you’re finally willing to enter the dating world again.”

  “Don’t sound like dating to me,” Candy muttered, but there was nothing catty in the way she grinned at me.

  I couldn’t argue with her. “It definitely wasn’t a date.”

  “You should never give it up that fast, sweetie,” Sarah, another lady in the group, one well into her sixties, told me. “I’m not judging you. It’s just, well, men never come back when you give it up that fast. Any chance at a relationship flew out the window when it resorted to sex that quickly.”

  She wasn’t wrong. I opened my mouth, mostly to say, rather defensively, something like, oh I don’t know, ‘Who said I was looking for a relationship?’ but I never got the chance.

  Bianca, one of the quieter members of the group, shocked us all by butting in. “That’s just not true.”

  Every single one of us looked at her. She was a woman that stood out in a crowd, no matter how exceptional her company. She was beautiful, tall, with pale blonde hair and abundant curves. She had just the sort of eye-catching beauty that one expected to see in the wife of a famous billionaire, and it just so happened that she was one.

  Her expression was calm, her face angelic, both in its beauty and peacefulness. There was something so suppressed about her manner, as though she’d learned to avoid making much noise in a very profound way. She participated in the group, but she rarely added in her two cents like this. That role was usually reserved for the louder voi
ces. And when she did pipe in, I noticed that everyone usually took it to heart.

  “James and I,” she continued, a becoming blush breaking out across her cheeks. “We . . . didn’t wait to have sex. Not at all.”

  “But I’d bet money you weren’t hooking up that soon after you met him,” Candy pointed out.

  Bianca’s blonde brows shot straight up. “You’d be losing money on that bet. He was going down on me in an airplane galley, it had to be, God, like only the third time I ever ran into him.”

  That was met with a pregnant moment of shocked silence, then a brief burst of awkward laughter as everyone came to the conclusion that she was putting us on.

  She was not, her expression told us.

  “Him getting you off is a far cry from you getting him off, in terms of keeping him on a string,” Candy shot back.

  “That is fucking hot, though,” someone put in. I glanced at the source. It was Sandra. She was a bit older than I was and worked in the Cavendish art gallery with Danika. It was a well-known fact that she was semi-obsessed with Bianca’s husband. She was always a little too fascinated with the subject when he came up.

  Bianca’s blush got a few shades darker, her eyes darting around the room. “I’d already gone down on him, by then. Technically, I think that was the second time we ran into each other. Still turned into a relationship. A marriage.”

  Danika let out a low, appreciative whistle. “Wasn’t he your first?” she asked her, sounding impressed.

  We were getting a rare gem if even Danika hadn’t known about that, as the two women were close friends.

  Bianca nodded.

  “That brazen fucker,” someone muttered. Frankie, I think.

  We were all just staring at Bianca. I, personally, wanted to hear the rest of the story. I’d read some of the tabloids about them, but this was different. This was the real story, the most I’d ever heard from Bianca about her much talked about relationship with one of the hottest men on the planet.

  “What about actual intercourse?” Sarah asked, like it was a perfectly reasonable question.

  “That same night, after the galley incident,” Bianca answered matter-of-factly.

  “Brazen fucker,” Frankie repeated.

  “He’s so fucking hot,” Sandra muttered.

  “How’s it going, in general, and also with your ex-husband?” Jackie asked me, bringing the subject back around since it’d clearly gotten out of hand. Bianca had started to look uncomfortable. “Is he still being antagonistic?”

  “He is, but it’s tapering off, I think. And things in general have been good. It took some time. The divorce was a big readjustment for me, but now I’m . . . content with having him gone. I have more free time now. Free time that I value. I find that I enjoy a good book over a bad husband. No contest.”

  That was met with a round of elaborate toasting. We had some enthusiastic readers in the group.

  “What about your kids? Has there been any communication between your ex and the kids lately?” Lucy asked.

  I shook my head. “He alienated his children when he mistreated their mother, and rather than take responsibility for that, he’s decided to blame me. It’s baffling, to be honest. I knew how my boys would react. I don’t understand how he’s surprised by it. They’re overprotective and loyal to a fault. Frankly, I’m a little worried that they’ll never forgive him.”

  “It’s not your job to mediate their relationship with their dad,” Lucy told me in her no nonsense voice. “That is their business.”

  I nodded that I understood her. I tried to take her words to heart. It was a burden I’d be happy to set down for good.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  When the gathering wound down at an early hour, I was still wired. I did not want to go home to an empty house.

  I told Danika so.

  She grinned. “Me neither. Tristan’s working tonight, and he has a good hour left of his show. We should take a taxi to the casino and enjoy another round.”

  “No need to take a taxi,” Bianca added, having overheard us. “I have a car and driver right outside.”

  We all smiled. Sometimes it was very cool to have filthy rich friends.

  But still, I mulled it over. My oldest son, Rafael, worked at our friends’ bar there, and I didn’t think he needed to see his mother tipsy.

  “Rafael . . . ” I began.

  Danika waved her hand in air. “Your boys adore you, we all know that. He’ll be happy to see you. Stephan and Javier both work tonight, too, so it’s the perfect time to do it.”

  Stephan was Bianca’s best friend, and Javier was his husband. They owned the best bar on the Cavendish property, and soon after meeting and hitting it off with them, they’d offered Rafael a job there when they’d heard he was looking for a bartending gig.

  They were delightful, and Danika was right, it was perfect timing as I was always looking for an excuse to see them.

  “Sold,” I said easily, as it had not been a hard sell.

  We tried to talk Frankie and Estella into joining us, but they had plans that involved not waiting an extra hour or two to get home to their St. Andrew’s cross. They were heavy into kink, to put it simply.

  We said goodnight to them with hugs and airy cheek kisses.

  “Hey, Blake,” I said as I got into the dark SUV idling at the curb in front of Bev’s house.

  “Hey, girl,” Blake said, smiling at me in the rearview mirror. She was Bianca’s longtime bodyguard/driver/friend.

  “How come you didn’t come into girls’ night this time?” Danika asked as she slid in beside me.

  Blake was usually a participant. She went where Bianca went, with few exceptions.

  “I had to make some phone calls for work, so I stayed out here.”

  “Hey,” Bianca said to Blake, patting her on the shoulder as she got in last. Another security guard, a male I wasn’t familiar with, closed the door behind her, then climbed into the front passenger’s seat.

  “Hey,” Blake said back. “How was the therapy session?”

  Danika shot me a teasing smile. “Pretty awesome. You missed out with this one. Lourdes had some bombshells to impart.”

  I found myself blushing as I thought of all the things I’d let slip out of my mouth with just a few glasses of wine as lubricant. “She’s exaggerating. You didn’t miss anything important.”

  “You might as well just tell me,” Blake said as she put the car into drive. “Bianca will spill the beans later, if you don’t. We all know it.”

  I waved my hand in the air. “That works for me. Let her tell you. I can’t seem to open my big mouth without oversharing. Some details no one needs to know.”

  Blake laughed. “Oh no. Will someone at least clue me into what kind of details she’s talking about?”

  Without a word, Danika met her eyes in the rearview mirror and held her hands out with a good ten-inch gap between them.

  We all started giggling.

  “Well, hell,” Blake said when she caught a breath. “I missed a doozy, huh?”

  I glanced at the one male in the car, but he was sitting in the passenger’s seat, eyes aimed forward, acting like he couldn’t hear us. I appreciated that.

  “Where’s James?” I asked Bianca. I just assumed he was out of town, because when he wasn’t, he usually showed up in person to pick her up, sometimes even coming early to sit in on girls’ night.

  He was famously possessive of her time and person.

  “New York. It was only a two-day trip, and I’d have missed girls’ night, so I stayed in Vegas.”

  Danika snorted. “I bet he loved that.”

  Bianca bit her lip, but it didn’t hide her smile. “He did not. I’m expecting him home anytime now, though he’s scheduled to come back in the morning. You know how he is.”

  “I can confirm that Mr. Cavendish boarded a flight about four hours ago, Mrs. Cavendish,” the man in the front seat said.

  Bianca grinned. “See. I know m
y man.”

  Danika nodded that she did. “Whenever I catch myself thinking that Tristan is a possessive nut-job, I just remember that he’s mellow compared to James.”

  “Just keep telling yourself that,” Blake muttered, eyes on the road.

  That got another round of laughs.

  Going anywhere with Bianca Cavendish was an experience.

  The two, yes two, bodyguards we had with us that night were what they considered a light detail. There was no current known threat to the soft-spoken woman, but due to past dangers to her person, and how high profile she was, (She and her husband were in the tabloids on a weekly basis. Just a few days ago, I’d seen media coverage of her shopping for shoes. Seriously.) she required at least two bodyguards when she went out in public.

  I’d once asked her why two, and James had answered for her with, “One to cover her, the other to shoot back.”

  In this instance, since we were in her husband’s resort, and at her best friend’s bar, it was fairly effortless to set up. A section was roped off for us, the male bodyguard manning the ropes, with Blake sticking close to Bianca.

  We sat on low, cushy sofas in the swanky bar and got beyond the normal VIP service. Both owners greeted us with the drinks they knew we wanted before we could even order, and sat down for several minutes to chat with us.

  I took a sip of the spectacular cabernet Stephan had handed to me and waved at my son, who was manning the bar.

  He grinned and waved back.

  Rafael had a great personality for bartending. He liked people, liked to chat them up, liked to listen to their stories, enjoyed bantering with the tipsy and the outright drunk.

  Currently, he was deep in discussion with one of the customers, a middle-aged man that looked three sheets to the wind.

  Raf was good at humoring drunk people, though, and looked genuinely interested in whatever the other man was saying.

  I decided to leave him be until he was unoccupied, because even though I was friends with the owners, this was a job for Raf, and I’d taught him from a young age that all jobs should be taken seriously, even the fun, part-time ones.