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“What nonsense? I don’t know what you’re talk—”
“You damn well do know what we’re talking about! It’s two months now, two whole months since I got that insane call from you, telling me you’d married that—that Greek super-stud and that you’d found him in the arms of his bubble-brained mistress a week later, and in all that time, I’m not supposed to ask any questions or so much as mention his name.” Annie folded her arms and lifted her chin. “That is a load of crap, and you know it.”
“It isn’t.” Laurel shut off the water and folded her arms, too. “There’s nothing to talk about, Annie.”
“Nothing to talk about.” Annie snorted. “You got yourself knocked up and let the guy who did it strong-arm you into marrying him!”
Laurel stiffened. “Must you say it like that?”
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?”
After a minute, Laurel nodded. “I guess it is. God, I almost wish I’d never gone to Dawn’s wedding!”
Susie sighed dramatically. “That must have been some wedding.” Annie and Laurel spun toward her and she flushed. “Speaking metaphorically, I mean. Hey, come on, guys, don’t look at me that way. It must have been one heck of a day. Annie’s ex, coming on to her...”
“For all the good it’s going to do him,” Annie said coldly.
“And didn’t you say that friend of yours, Bethany, met some guy there and ended up having a mad affair?”
“Her name’s Stephanie, and at the risk of sounding cynical, I don’t think very much of mad affairs, not anymore.” Annie jerked her chin toward Laurel. “Just look where it got my sister.”
“I know.” Susie shook her head. “And Damian seemed so perfect. Handsome, rich—”
“Are you two all done discussing me?” Laurel asked. “Because if you aren’t, you’ll have to continue this conversation elsewhere. I told you, I will not talk about Damian Skouras. That chapter’s over and done with.”
“Not quite,” Annie said, and looked at Laurel’s gently rounded belly.
Laurel flushed. “Very amusing.”
“Can we at least talk about how you’re going to raise this baby all by yourself?”
“I’ll manage.”
“There are financial implications, dammit. You said yourself you’re at the end of your career.”
“Thank you for reminding me.”
“Laurel, sweetie—”
“Don’t ‘Laurel sweetie’ me. I am a grown woman, and I made a lot of money over the years. Trust me, Annie, I saved quite a bit of it.”
“Yes, but children cost. You don’t realize—”
“Dammit,” Laurel said fiercely, “now you sound just like him!”
“Who?”
“Damian, that’s who. Well, you sound like his attorney, anyway. ‘Raising a child is an expensive proposition,’ she said in a voice that mimicked the rounded tones of John Hastings. ”‘Mr. Skouras is fully prepared to support his child property.“’
Susie and Annie exchanged looks. “You never told me that,” Susie said.
“Me, neither,” Annie added.
Laurel glared at the two women. “It doesn’t matter, does it? I’m not about to take a penny from that bastard.”
“Yes, but I thought... I mean, I just figured...” Susie cleared her throat. “Not that being willing to support his kid makes me change what I think of the man. Running off that way, going back to his mistress after a week of marriage... It makes me sick just to think about it”
Annie nodded. “You’re right. How he could want that idiotic blonde instead of my beautiful sister...”
“He didn’t.” Susie and Annie looked at Laurel, and she flushed. “I never said that, did I?”
“You said he left you, for the blonde.”
“I said he went back to New York and that I found him with her. I never said—”
“So, he didn’t want to take up where they’d left off?”
“I don’t know what he wanted.” Laurel plucked a sponge from the sink, squeezed it dry and began wiping down the counter with a vengeance. “I never gave him the chance to tell me.”
“What do you mean, you never...?”
“Look, when you find your husband with a naked blonde, it’s not hard to figure what’s going on. I just turned around and walked out. Don’t look at me like that, Annie. You would have, too.”
Annie sighed. “I suppose. What could he possibly have said that would have made things better? Besides, if he’d really wanted to explain, he’d have called you or come to see you—”
“He did come here.”
Annie and Susie looked at each other. “He did? When?”
“That same night.”
Susie looked shocked. “You see what happens when George and I take a few days off? Laurel, you never said—”
“I wouldn’t let him in. What for? We had nothing to say to each other.”
“And that was it?” Annie asked. “He gave up, that easily?”
Silence fell on the kitchen and then Laurel cleared her throat.
“He phoned. He left a message on my machine. He said what had happened—what I’d seen—hadn’t been what it appeared to be.”
“Oh, right,” Annie said, “I’ll just bet it—”
“What did he say it had been?” Susie asked, shooting Annie a warning look.
“I don’t remember,” Laurel lied. She remembered every word; she’d listened to Damian’s voice a dozen times before erasing it, not just the lying words but the huskiness, hating herself for the memories it stirred in her heart. “Some nonsense about his bimbo threatening to drag my name through the mud unless he paid her off. Oh, what does it matter? He’d have said anything, to get his own way. I told you, he was determined to take my baby.”
“Well, it’s his baby, too.” Susie swallowed hard when both women glared at her. “Well, it is,” she said defiantly. “That’s just a simple biological fact.” She frowned. “Which brings up an interesting point How come he’s backed off?”
Annie frowned, too. “Good question. He has backed off, hasn’t he?”
Laurel nodded. She pulled a chair out from the table and sank into it. “Uh-huh. He has.”
“How come? Not that I’m not delighted, but why back off now, after first all but dragging you into marriage?”
Laurel folded her hands on the tabletop.
“He—he called and left another message.”
“The telephone company’s best pal,” Susie said brightly.
“He said—he said that he had no right to force me into living with him. That he understood that I could never feel about him as I had about Kirk—”
“Kirk?” Annie’s brows arched. “How’d that piece of sewer slime get into the picture?”
“He said he’d been wrong to make me marry him in the first place, that a marriage without love could never work.”
“The plot thickens.” Susie leaned forward over the table. “I know you guys are liable to tar and feather me for this, but Damian Skouras isn’t sounding like quite the scuzzball I’d figured him for.”
Annie reached out and clasped her sister’s hand. “Maybe you should have taken one of those phone calls, hmm?”
“What for?” Laurel snatched back her hand. “Don’t be ridiculous, both of you. I called him and left him a message of my own. I said it didn’t matter what had been going on or not going on with the blonde because I agreed completely. Not only could a loveless marriage never work, a marriage in which a wife hated the husband was doomed. And I hated him, I said. I said that I always had, that he had to accept the fact that it had been nothing but sex all along... Don’t look at me that way, Annie! What was I supposed to believe? That that woman appeared at his door, uninvited, and stripped off her clothes?”
“Is that what he claimed?”
“Yes!”
Annie smiled gently. “It’s possible, isn’t it? The lady didn’t strike me as the sort given to subtle gestures.”
Laurel shot up
from her chair. “I don’t believe what’s going on here! The two of you, asking me to deny what I saw with my own eyes! My God, it was bad enough to be deceived by Kirk, a man I’d thought I loved, but to be deceived by Damian, by my own husband, the only man I’ve ever really loved, is—is...” Her voice broke. “Oh God, I do love him! I’ll never stop loving him.” She looked from Susie to Annie, and her mouth began to tremble. “Go away,” she whispered. “Just go away, and leave me alone.”
They didn’t, not until Laurel was calmer, not until she was undressed and asleep in her bed.
Then they left because, really, when you came right down to it, what else was there to do?
* * *
What else was there to do? Damian thought, as he attacked the boulder outside his house overlooking the Aegean with the sledgehammer.
Nothing. Nothing but beat at this miserable rock and work himself to exhaustion from sunup to sundown in hopes he’d fall into bed at night and not dream of Laurel.
It was a fine plan. Unfortunately it didn’t work.
