AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I clink my bottle to hers again. “You know I worked for Sharon Douglas, right?”
She clinks back, giggling. “Yeah, we’ve all heard of Sharon’s exploits. What was that like?”
Laughing to myself as I think back, I shake my head. “I’ve become a little bit jaded thanks to her, but also, quite strong-minded and wise to a lot of stuff.”
“I can imagine,” says Lila. “So, you did shag him, right?”
Her quick change of subject is designed to catch me off-guard.
“What makes you say that?”
She gulps deeply. “It’s not just Chrissy he plays around with.”
My jaw nearly falls to the floor. Lila is married with a kid, though? And has all that jewellery on her finger to prove the solidity of her marriage, right?
Shit!
“You’re Legs,” I say softly.
She raises a hand to her forehead and swallows hard, the true pain and horror of it all becoming obvious. I notice her fingers are shaking and some of her previously well-manicured nails have been bitten down, probably just today.
“You knew he was getting married, but you didn’t realise there were others?” I surmise before she can confirm.
“We all have our vices. He’s mine. My one and only vice. It’s the way he—”
I hold my hand up. “I know what you’re going to say, believe me.”
“So, he names us in his phone? Using our physical attributes.” I nod that she has that right. “What else did you see?”
“A lot,” I whisper, because it wasn’t pretty, and she ought not to press me on what I saw—or she’ll feel worse about it all.
“Tell me,” she demands, but I shake my head. “I want to know.”
From the way she looks now everyone else has left—and since we just talked about the fact I dealt with a lot of stuff like this in the past and it’s not anything I can’t keep to myself—I can tell that whatever it is between her and Miles, it’s been going on for years. She’s truly devastated.
“What really happened with Stacie?”
“Shagged her right under my nose, didn’t he?” She grimaces. “She might be just as much of a victim as the rest of us, because he made promises to her as well, but… she had to go. I’d confided in her how I was thinking of ending my marriage, not to be with Miles necessarily, but just because the sex with Miles was kind of outshining that with my husband, so, you know… I’d trusted her. I’d made the insinuation me and Miles were something special… and she fucked him right under my nose, didn’t she?”
“I’m really sorry,” I murmur, and she sees I’m genuine about that.
“The thing is,” she says, “everything changed around two months ago.”
She’s looking at me in a strange way as if I’m supposed to…
“Ah, shortly after he and I started…”
She nods her head slowly.
“I’d noticed Stacie looked sullen. And other girls, too. I brushed it off. Thought it was the season, you know? Bleak midwinter and whatever. Loads of work on. But he did it to me, too. Stopped seeing me. Well, I mean… it became much less frequent, the meeting early at work for desk antics. And no after-work shenanigans whatsoever.”
I cover my mouth because I think I know what she’s going to say.
“He told me about his wife ages ago and how he was being forced to marry her. Part of that I could understand. I came to terms with that.” She rolls her eyes. “Miles only gets his full trust fund and inheritance once married with children, plus she’s got a big trust fund, too.”
“Oh, I see,” I say, pretending to know what that’s like.
She looks pained to recall the rest. “It’s like a sickness, like any sort of small mercy… you’ll take, and I just thought, in future once he has money and it’s all blown over… you know… we could finally…”
