Fool Me Once (First Wives #1)

“The quiet beauty. I will wear her down. I always do.”

A strange need to protect the recent widow pulled at his collar. “She is guarded.”

“Most are, but we have our ways to get what we want.”

Reed suddenly felt the need for a straight shot of something. The smirk and the wink sat on the wrong side of his stomach. This man was a predator, Reed would bet his next paycheck on it. “What was it you did for a living?” Reed asked as if making conversation.

“Marketing.” He muttered something in Spanish as a woman wearing a skintight black dress sauntered by.

“Interesting. For what company?”

Miguel smiled. “Many. How do you say it . . . I work with many companies.”

“Freelance?”

“Sí . . . yes. I freelance. And you? What is it that you do?”

“Data processing.” The lie came easy.

Miguel narrowed his eyes, looked at Reed’s hands. “Those look like fingers that work, not fingers that type.”

“Things are not always as they seem.”

Miguel’s drink arrived and he toasted the air. “To the mirage, then.”

“Cheers.”




“Lori!”

She turned to find Reed fighting the flow of people leaving the ship for the day.

“Hey.” He stopped in front of her. “Sorry about last night. We had a slight female emergency.”

“Oh?” Reed looked concerned.

“Yeah, we drank too much wine and had a slumber party instead of hitting the club.”

“So everything is okay?”

“Yeah.” Well, no, but she wasn’t going to gossip or talk to anyone about Trina other than the women. “Are you headed off the ship?”

He shrugged, looking a little lost. “Are you?”

The invitation to spend the day with him hung in the air. The desire to do just that was too hard to pass up.

“We’re getting a slow start.” She was going to do her best to get Trina off the ship and keep her mood light. The progress she’d made in the first few days was swept away with one phone call.

“I can wait if it means I can spend time with you.”

Thoughts of Trina fled, and the girlie part that had been attracted to the man in front of her made her feel playful. She reached her hand out. “Give me your phone.”

He reached into his back pocket and hesitated.

“I’m not going to steal it,” she teased.

Reed handed it over.

She placed her number into his contacts and typed in a name before handing it back to him.

After glancing down, he said, “Hot chick on ship?”

She giggled. “Send me a text so I have your number, and I’ll let you know when we’re leaving.” She turned to walk away. “Oh, have you seen Rogelio and Miguel? Avery was asking about them.”

Reed hesitated. “No, actually.”

Lori shrugged. “Probably for the best.”

An hour and a half later, Lori texted Reed and suggested he meet them on the dock.

Trina left the ship reluctantly with the promise of Shannon returning early with her if she couldn’t take it.

On the dock, Reed stood alongside Antonio. Miguel and Rogelio were nowhere to be found. Much as Lori wanted Trina distracted, she didn’t think an interest in a member of the opposite sex was the diversion she needed.

Antonio greeted all four of them with kisses on both cheeks. “How lucky are we, Reed, to escort these beautiful ladies around the city of love.”

Avery rolled her eyes. “I thought that was Paris.”

Antonio spat something in Italian before painting on a smile. “Paris has a tower . . . we have the Colosseum, where gladiators fought to the death.”

“He has a point,” Lori told her.

“What is more romantic than that?”

“More romantic than death?” Avery asked.

“She has a point,” Reed told Antonio.

They boarded the ship’s transportation to ride into the city. Lori smiled at a man dressed as a gladiator who escorted them onto the bus. Once inside she turned to Reed as he took the seat beside her. “You should get one of those outfits.”

“You like playing dress up?” he whispered.

Her cheeks warmed.

“That’s what I thought.”

Lori glanced over to see Trina hiding behind massive sunglasses while talking to Avery, and Shannon kept a cordial smile as Antonio attempted to charm her.

She’d been to the Colosseum before but never failed to stop and stare at the massive, decaying structure that once held fights to the death. The macabre nature of it all fascinated and repulsed . . . and now it was simply a tourist attraction. Sure, there was history to learn, but tourists forked over money for that special trinket to mount on their wall at home or place on their fridge door. And the men dressed as gladiators were happy to let you take a photo so long as you paid them for their efforts.

Trina walked ahead with Avery and played tour guide. Antonio and Shannon lagged behind, leaving Reed and Lori in the middle.

“Do you know your Roman history?” she asked him.

“I know what they did here. Barbaric.”

“Did you know there were female gladiators as well?”

Reed narrowed his eyes. “Seriously?”

“Not many, but that’s what I was told the last time I visited. Sometimes they were told to fight dwarfs, and other times each other.”

“Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like to see women fight.”

“I don’t like watching men do it either.”

She looked down at the stage of the structure, imagining it filled with screaming, bloodthirsty Romans. “I’d like to think that the human condition has grown from the times this arena was used, but I’d be lying to myself.”

“How so?” Reed asked.

“From reality television where we thirst for the fight, to watching endless loops of violence on the evening news, we’re completely desensitized to pain and suffering of other people. We turn off the TV, go to bed with our bowl of ice cream, and get up the next day, tuning out what we’ve witnessed the night before.” She shook her head. “Makes me understand a little better how the Romans allowed the fighting here for so many years.”

“You’ve given this some thought.”

She was a lawyer; she fought all the time with words as her weapons. “Everyone fights. It’s the how of the fight and how far they’ll push their moral barometer that often determines the winner.”

He leaned against the rail that kept people from walking farther down the crumbling path. “What about strength?”

“If you’re talking a physical fight, yeah, strength comes into play, but often will and determination is what takes the win.”

He stared at her for several seconds. “What do you do for a living?” he asked.

She thought of her office, shut her eyes. “I told you.”

“Yeah, I don’t see the pole dancer in you.”

“Then you’re not using your imagination.” She took his hand and dragged him toward the others, who had all moved ahead of them.




“You didn’t answer your phone!”

Hours later, Reed stood in his room in nothing more than a towel as he prepared for the evening.

“I was preoccupied.”

“And what have you found out?”

“Ms. Cumberland is Ms. Redding’s divorce attorney.”

“That isn’t news.”

“They are vacationing together.”