I rolled my eyes even though he couldn’t see them.
“So how was your day?” he asked.
Fabulous. I hired a divorce attorney and a private investigator to remove your testicles from your person and place them in the palm of my hand. “Oh, it was fine. I went to West Highland Middle School to pass out pizza to the honor-roll kids.”
Scott went to the pantry and pulled out pita chips. Funny how annoying all that crunching was when you were falling out of love with someone. I was pretty sure that’s what I was doing. I’d cried my tears, and now I was in the process of letting go, distancing myself so I could protect myself. Hey, I had taken psychology in college.
He stood over me as I measured out flour, crunching and dropping crumbs on the floor. “Always at that school, aren’t you? They should give you an award or something.”
I rolled down the top of the flour bag and placed it in the storage container, sealing it against pestilence and any ill will that might befall it in my pantry. “Yeah. Sure. I’d have to arm wrestle all the other helicopter moms to get it. So what are you doing home early?”
He did some more of the annoying smacking thing, the bag crinkling each time he fished out a chip. “I had a meeting in Natchitoches that finished early. Since I gotta take JK to tennis clinic after soccer, I thought I would come home and have an early dinner with my girl.”
I blinked.
His girl?
“Well, that’s a nice thought, but I wasn’t planning on cooking tonight,” I said.
He crackled the bag some more. So irritating. “Thought we’d grab a quick bite at El Verde before I had to go. Just catch up. Spend some time together.” He wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me to him, dropping a kiss onto my neck.
My first inclination was to lean into him. This was muscle memory craving the intimacy that I always longed for. That sweetness that had once risen between us, the feel of his skin, his lips on my pulse point, the comfort of his body against mine. But then as soon as my neurons fired that way, my brain overrode the impulse. I used my hip to send a message. “I can’t. I have to bake this cake for Janice. She had a bunion removed today.”
“Seriously? Your husband wants to take you out on the town and you’re more interested in baking Janice a cake. Have you seen her ass lately? You can skip the cake.”
Yeah, falling out of love was like cleaning a window you didn’t know was dirty. Suddenly things were so clear.
“Don’t be mean. And an early dinner at El Verde is hardly ‘out on the town.’”
Scott popped me on my own expanding bottom. “Look, I’ll grab a shower, you put the cake in, and we’ll go to dinner when it’s out of the oven. Or we can stay in and have sex on the kitchen floor. Your choice.”
I whipped my head around and stared at him. He arched a brow like he knew the answer. Hey, I loved the chips and guac at El Verde. I opened the oven and shoved the Bundt pan inside. “Dinner out sounds fine.”
“Ha, I already knew the answer.” Scott snorted good-naturedly and moved away from me, and for a teeny, tiny moment I felt a flash of guilt for pushing him away. This was why he’d taken up with the tennis slut. Even though I knew women weren’t supposed to call other women sluts because there was no shame in liking sex. But there was shame in liking sex with another woman’s husband. So . . .
“The cake will take forty-five minutes. That okay?”
“Sure. I have some calls to make,” Scott said, emerging from the pantry, crumbs dotting his sports coat. His hair had thinned on top, and the lines around his eyes were prominent, but he still looked like a well-aged Hollywood type with his flashing grin, tanned expanse of jaw, and way of carrying himself. Still handsome. Still so familiar. My heart hurt when I thought about what he’d done. How he’d ended us.
Scott was so different from the man who kept crowding my thoughts more than I wanted to admit. And I don’t know why I kept thinking about Griffin Moon. It was weird, really. Because on first sight, Ruby’s cousin had irritated the crap out of me with his whole judgy blue-collar thing. But then when we were sitting in the cab of the truck, Ruby in the middle of us like a referee, and me on the other side, still grappling with what I had discovered, Griffin had looked over at me. At that moment, I believed that if I had pushed hard enough, he would have driven his surprisingly tidy wrecker to my address and whipped my cheating husband’s butt.
The image of the rough-around-the-edges tow truck guy pounding my preppy banker husband appealed to me more than it should. Griffin had tangled hair, scruff on his chin, and tats. He wasn’t my type on a good day. And definitely not on the night I had been slapped with proof that Scott was an adulterer. Yeah, my “type” had been dumping cherry lube in forbidden places on another woman, so what did I really know about men?
Men. H’uh. What are they good for?
Absolutely nothin’. Uh-huh, uh-huh.
I bopped my head to the unsung song with the wrong lyrics as I thought about another man when I still had the problem of the current one. Still, something about the way Griffin Moon had regarded me had stuck with me. Maybe it was because I imagined he’d peeled away my facade . . . that somehow he could see the shattered woman under the bravado. It wasn’t a “like recognized like” sort of thing. No, that man hadn’t seemed vulnerable at all. But he’d probably seen his fair share of beaten-down people . . . and perhaps he assumed I was one.
And that stuck in my craw.
Because I didn’t want to be that woman.
I’d had my moments of scrabbling around on the ground looking for the pieces of myself over the past week, but I was done. Paper people are consumed by fire, dissipating into ash before scattering into the wind, never to be whole again. But others, those made of steel, used the fire to forge an edge. The heat hardened them, creating razor determination, melding them into something stronger.
My anger would create steel. So there was no need for anyone to cast sympathetic glances my way.
My phone chirruped, and I glanced down at a text.
Ruby.
How are you?
I set the timer and picked up my phone.
I’m good.
Little dots appeared.
Good.
I smiled at my phone, feeling gratified with where I was—I was beginning to accept and pivot. Then I glanced at the doorway where Scott had disappeared, picked up the phone, and clicked on the link Patrick Vitt, PI, had sent me. I had forty-five minutes until I had to go fake my date with my husband. Might as well fill out the agreement to engage Vitt’s services. It was time to catch the cheaterpants on camera.
Side-eyeing the cake that was starting to rise in the oven, I smiled again. Maybe I would bake Scott a cake on the day we divorced . . .
Nah. He wasn’t worth a Bundt.
CHAPTER SEVEN