The Wrong Wife. Eileen Wilks
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“Too late,” she called back, flicking the nightgown up over the shower curtain rod. “Fate can’t possibly have another accident in store for me.” Not after yesterday’s head-on collision.
“It’s not too late,” Mo corrected her. “You don’t have to do this, Cassie, if it isn’t what you want.”
She met his eyes and said softly, “Maybe it was too late years ago.”
He held her gaze steadily for a long moment. “Okay,” he said at last, laying his hand on her shoulder. “No more questions, no more pressure. But you know where to come if you need anything, don’t you?”
Her eyes filled. She smiled and nodded.
“Oh, no,” Jaya said as she joined them. “Are you two getting sentimental on me?”
“Cover your eyes,” Mo said equably. “We’re almost finished.” He gave Cassie’s shoulder a last squeeze. “Since you’re determined to do this, I’ll go get that overnight case you always borrow when you visit your mom. You can load some of this stuff in it.” He turned and left.
“You could help me pack, too,” Cassie pointed out to the friend who remained, and started pulling things out of the medicine cabinet. She paused, holding up an odd-looking pile of glued-together seashells that usually sat on the vanity. It somewhat resembled an angel with chunky, gold-tipped wings.
Jaya folded her arms in front of her flat chest. “Help you screw up? I don’t think so.” She noticed what Cassie held and snorted. “I still can’t believe you bought that thing. Artists are supposed to have some sort of standards.”
“Art,” Cassie said loftily, turning the little statue over to inspect it from a different angle, “is about genuine feeling. This is as genuine a piece of cheap tourist kitsch as any I’ve seen.” And the old woman who made and sold the statues had delighted Cassie.
Jaya might have been reading her mind. “That old woman knew a pigeon when she found one.”
“She did, didn’t she?” Cassie smiled, remembering the mixture of shrewdness and humor in eyes cradled in several decades’ worth of wrinkles. But amusement drained out as she considered the present. Wistfully she said, “I can’t quite see this in any place Gideon owns, can you?”
“Cassie.” Jaya’s narrow face was earnest and worried. “Think about what you’re doing, here. Running off and marrying Gideon Wilde is one thing—an impulse, maybe a mistake, but nothing you can’t fix. Moving in with a man who doesn’t want your stuff cluttering up his place is something else entirely.”
Cassie had to smile at Jaya’s unique slant on what was important. “Living together tends to follow marriage. And... I did make promises.”
“Is that why you’re doing this?” Jaya demanded. “Because you said ‘I do’ when some preacher told you to?”
“Maybe,” Cassie admitted. There were other reasons, like the friendship between her brother and Gideon. She didn’t want to see either man lose that, but it would be especially hard on Gideon. Cassie wasn’t sure he had any other friends. “Mostly, though,” she admitted at last, “I’m doing it for me. Because I’ve got a chance at him now, and I’d be a fool to toss that aside just because I’m scared, wouldn’t I?”
“Lord, I don’t know.” Jaya ran an impatient hand through her hair, making the spiky bangs stand up straight. “I don’t—what’s that? It sounds like a truck.”
Oh, Lord. “The movers.” Still carrying the little shell angel, Cassie hurried out of the bathroom and looked out one of the windows.
Sure enough, in the driveway below, a man with a droopy mustache and a cigar was climbing down from the passenger side of a big, orange moving van. Cassie watched, paralyzed, as the door on the driver’s side swung open and a skinny man in a red shirt stepped down.
They were here. They were going to pack up her things and put them away somewhere. Her fingers dug into the edges of the shells hard enough to hurt, but she didn’t notice as she looked wildly around the room. What should she take with her? What had to be left behind?
She felt Jaya’s hand on her shoulder. “You want me to get rid of them?” her friend asked.
Cassie looked down at the awkward angel, biting her lip and thinking about Gideon’s apartment. Not his current apartment. He’d been living at an address not quite as expensive, not quite as exclusive, when she’d humiliated herself so thoroughly on the night of her twentieth birthday. But she remembered very clearly the white carpet, silvery gray couches and black lacquered tables. Just like she remembered the pale blond hair of the woman who’d been in his apartment.
That hair, the subtle shade of ripened wheat, had been the only color in the room.
Of course. Cassie’s panic fled as she realized what she needed to do. “Jaya,” she said slowly, “do me a favor and go tell those guys I won’t be needing them, okay? They can bill Gideon for an hour of their time or something.”
Jaya whooped. “I knew it,” she said, her long legs taking her to the door in a twinkling. “I knew you were too smart to do this.”
“That’s right,” Cassie said, moving briskly herself now that she’d decided. She stopped at the little breakfast bar where Mickey Mouse held the telephone receiver out. “There’s simply no reason to make all these decisions today. I’m paid up until the end of the month, so I’ll leave most of the furniture here for now. We don’t need to pay a mover for the other stuff.”
“Cassandra Danielle O’Grady.” Jaya turned, one hand on the doorknob. “What are you talking about? You aren’t still planning on moving, are you?”
“My name,” she said as she dialed, “is now Cassandra Danielle O’Grady Wilde.” And that was the key. As of last night, she was part of Gideon’s life. Even if he’d changed his mind and didn’t want her there. Even if he did try to put fences around their relationship with his stupid one-year-marriage idea. Even if he had an apartment full of grays and blacks with no color....
Especially because he lived without color. He needed Cassie, needed her and her paints and her tacky little shell angel, and she didn’t need to put half of her life in storage in order to be with him. She had to believe that, or give up hope right now.
Cassie was simply no good at giving up. “I thought I’d see if Sam and Nugget could bring a truck and some muscles,” she explained to Jaya. who glared at her from the doorway, as Cassie listened to the phone ringing at the other end. “I’m sure Mo will help, too. Even if I leave some of the furniture here, there will be a lot of lifting involved, and it’ll go faster if—oh, hi, Sam. I have a favor to ask. But first...guess what I did yesterday?”
Four
At 5:20 Gideon started clearing off his desk. He put the rolled seismic section he’d been studying into the stand behind his desk and shut down the computer. After a brief hesitation he put his working disk in his desk drawer, which he locked. He wouldn’t take any work with him today. Cassie was waiting.
When he reached for his coffee cup he noticed the framed photograph that had sat on his desk for the past six months, a token that had reassured him daily of how close he was to his goal. How close he’d thought he was. The painful bewilderment that had ridden him for the past five days, ever since Melissa’s phone call, rose again to tighten his throat.
He couldn’t very well keep the picture of his former fiancée on his desk now that he’d married another woman, could he? Gideon picked up the picture.
Six months ago, when he and Melissa had become engaged; her parents had given him this studio photograph of their daughter, framed in silver. He held it in his hands now, feeling the weight of that heavy frame, staring at the lovely, poised woman in the pale blue Chanel suit who was supposed to have become his wife.
Why