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“God, that kiss,” Olive said, looking a little swoony. “It was so romantic.”
“Could we stop talking about this now and get back to work?” Lilah asked, uncomfortable with the discussion, not sure she wanted to hear all of this.
It was everything she would have loved to hear before her marriage to Ben. She would’ve eaten it up with a spoon. Now all she could think of was how her husband didn’t love her, how his kisses may mean that he desired her, but that he wasn’t gone for her, as Ivy had put it. He was merely hot for her.
“Daaaaw, she’s all shy about her sexy husband loving the hell out of her,” Darbi squealed. The other ladies put their hands to their cheeks and all aaaaw-ed simultaneously.
Lilah laughed at their ridiculousness and turned back to her lavender and rosemary. Experience told her that if she ignored them, they would lose interest.
Sure enough, after a few more chuckles and silly comments, they all drifted back to their respective corners, and conversation went back to the occasional stupid, dirty joke.
The ladies stayed for dinner—ordering pizzas—and eating it out on the terrace by the pool. The tolerably chilly temperature dropped straight into cold once the sun went down, and they gathered around the fire pit with lap blankets, plates balanced on their knees and wine glasses clutched in hand.
“Ben!” Darbi suddenly squealed, spotting him in the kitchen through the massive windows. He froze at the sound of Darbi’s shrill voice, his hand on the fridge door. He turned, his reluctance evident in the slowness of the movement, to face them.
“Come and have some pizza,” Kes called, waving him over. The other women all chorused their agreement, but Ben didn’t move, his questioning eyes on Lilah. She grimaced apologetically and nodded.
Ben squared his shoulders and walked slowly toward the doors, looking very much like a man walking toward a firing squad.
“Thanks for the invitation, ladies, but I don’t want to intrude,” he told them with an urbane smoothness, offering a regretful smile. “It’s your ladies’ night and I have some work to catch up on.”
“You have to eat, don’t you?” Olive asked with uncharacteristic brazenness.
Ben gave Lilah another look and she scooted over on the wood and stone bench which encircled the fire pit and lifted her lap blanket, inviting him in.
He didn’t need a second invitation, climbing over the bench and sitting down beside her, immediately warming up the left side of her body with his delicious heat. She lifted her plate silently, offering him a slice, and he took it with a smile.
He remained quiet while the women continued their conversation about their asshole bosses and colleagues.
“How often does it happen?” Ivy asked Olive who was—ironically—picking the olives off her pizza. The woman shrugged miserably.
“All the time,” she mumbled. “His wife calls and I’m supposed to blatantly lie to her. Tell her he’s in a meeting, when he’s full on snogging the HR rep in his office. The frikkin’ HR rep, for fuck’s sake! His wife once called me from an emergency room, desperately trying to reach him after an accident, but he had an afternoon meeting with—let’s call her Suzie—from HR and told me to please go to the ER and sit with his wife. Oh, and to take her flowers. God, she was so damned grateful for those stupid flowers!”
“Ugh, that’s awful. Poor woman!” Kes said.
“She should leave his deadbeat ass,” Darbi said, waving a hand. “Why stay with such a piece of shit?”
“She doesn’t have a clue anything’s wrong. Because I’m covering for him, and she likes and trusts me… so I feel like I’m the one who’s cheating, if that makes sense.”
Sympathetic murmurs from everyone else.
Darbi told everybody about her creepy colleague, who kept clipping his toenails right at his desk, in the laboratory they shared—Darbi was a lab technician at a pharmaceutical company.
Ivy—the owner of an upmarket clothing boutique in Constantia—regaled them with stories of some of her most insufferable, entitled clientele.
Everybody had a story, or several, to tell. Lilah contributed with tales of some of her over-protective helicopter pet parents.
“What about you, Ben?” Ivy asked the man who’d been sitting silently in their midst. He’d been listening intently, eating his pizza and taking proffered sips of red wine from Lilah’s glass. Occasionally smiling at some of the more outlandish anecdotes.
“Please, he had the best boss, Mr. Beckett was a saint,” Darbi dismissed.
And Lilah turned to face Ben, who was staring thoughtfully into the fire pit. “Was he?”
Her voice was quietly curious. She knew Gramps had tasked him with the impossible, tedious, and likely frustrating job of keeping an eye on Lilah. And she knew it wasn’t at all what Ben would have wanted to be doing.
“Cyrus? A saint he was not,” Ben said, his eyes lighting up. “He once made me fly to Durban to pick up a chicken korma from his favorite Indian restaurant.”
