Hat Trick, page 14
She did, and saw a small folded piece of paper where a ring would be, nestled in the Tiffany blue. He sat on his heels, still naked, still with that bizarre expression on his face. The paper had a long string of numbers on it she didn’t recognize.
“Okay, I give.” She held it out to him.
He smiled and pulled her to her feet. “It’s the safe deposit box, the new one I got after…” He tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear and kissed her gently. “We’re gonna stop by there today and get something out of it.”
“Not a ring, okay? I’m not…ready for that.”
“Well, some papers I want you to see.”
“Oh, okay. I’m gonna jump in the shower. Will you text Michelle and let her know we’ll pick her up for breakfast?”
After fortifying herself with grits, eggs, and a Bloody Mary, Emily felt equipped to handle whatever surprise Marcus had in store. He used his pass key to get into the Ann Arbor branch of his bank, the very one where she’d toiled as a teller, then manager after college, figuring it for a stopgap until she figured her life out. He held open the door for her and Michelle, then led them to the vault where he had the security guard use the double-key entry to gain access to the safe deposit boxes.
He pulled out one of the long, metal containers and dropped it on the counter in front of her with a shit-eating grin. Michelle stood, gripping her hand, picking up on her nervousness. “Go on,” he said. “Open it.”
She lifted the metal lid and stared down at the contents: a manila, legal-sized folder, her engagement and wedding set of rings, and a key fob with an BMW emblem. Something held her back as she regarded everything. It was too soon. He had left her for some younger woman with barely a qualm just a year ago. How could he have had such a radical change of heart? He set everything on the counter as if impatient she hadn’t done it already and flipped open the folder.
The words “Divorce Decree” lay there, glaring up at her with their names just below it. She picked up her ring, once something she’d prided herself on—a custom-made, whopping, round, seven and a half carats of compressed coal set in God only knew how much platinum. The wedding band had a row of smaller gems and fit around both sides of the engagement diamond perfectly. Marcus flipped the divorce papers to the last page and pointed to an empty line above his name.
“Yes, but—I have a copy of these.” She stared down at the blank space.
“I know. But you never really looked at them, did you?”
“What is it, Mom?” Michelle tugged at her sleeve. Emily kept her eyes on Marcus.
“Marcus, we’ve been running around for the last eleven months still married?”
“Yes.” He tucked the folder under his arm. “And here’s your car.” He tossed her the key fob. It had been his tenth-anniversary present to her—a sleek, powerful sedan that she’d adored in a wholly selfish way, although she’d been content to drive the used Jeep she’d bought with what she’d thought was alimony.
“But—the money—”
He tugged her close and kissed her closed lips. Her mind was awash with confusion. “Baby, the money has never been anywhere but here.” He gestured around, indicating the bank. “You can quit your job or keep it, I don’t care, but I want us back.”
“Yay!” Michelle put her arms around the two of them.
“Wait a second.” Emily struggled to find words.
“It’s all right.” He gave her a squeeze, then put the lid on the now-empty box and nodded to the security guy, who let them out of the vault. Emily glanced at the ring in her palm as she followed him out into the main bank lobby. When he suddenly turned to her and dropped on one knee, taking the ring from her, she backed away, tears blurring her vision.
“Mom, what’s wrong?” Michelle prodded her forward. All the tellers and managers were clapping, even while sending jealous vibes that only a woman could pick up on. Emily stumbled, then righted herself and let Marcus take her left hand and slide both rings onto her finger. He kissed her palm, then stood and bent her backward with the sort of showoff kiss she hated. She pushed him away, glaring at him.
“Stop manipulating me. I don’t know…”
He grinned and took her hand, holding it over his heart. She tried to ignore everyone staring at her and the obnoxiously good-looking, tall, rich man she’d apparently never been divorced from, thanks to his own machinations.
“Come on, you’re gonna be late for work,” he declared, grabbing her and Michelle’s hands and pulling them out the door.
“Holy crap, girl. You’re blinding me over here.” Sophie held a hand over the reinstalled diamonds on Emily’s finger. “You must be really great in the sack.”
“Shut up,” she muttered, turning the rings around and around, nervous and wishing she hadn’t let Marcus finagle her into this uncomfortable position. “How’s Dec?”
Sophie raised an eyebrow at her then sighed. “He’s okay. Going to the therapist, he says. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks.”
“This is only getting worse,” Emily said, doing another match-day scroll through her various Twitter feeds. “Why did that—woman…” She had to stop herself from saying “bitch” or worse since she’d been in on the legal and PR decision to scratch that term from their collective lexicon when referring to Cassandra Dean. “Why did she release those photos to the press?”
“Builds sympathy. Pretty smart. If I were her legal, I’d’ve done the same.”
“Well, they’re all the hell over the internet now.”
“Yeah. Don’t acknowledge them, remember?”
“I know, I know.” Emily propped her feet up on the seat in front of her. “Tell the peanut gallery that, though. Dumbasses.”
“We are, right after the match. Now, do tell me more.” She lifted Emily’s left hand and waggled it around.
“I don’t know. He’s so…”
“Sexy as fuck, rich as God, still so madly in love with you he left the hottie and came running home to service you however you like? Are you insane?”
Emily nodded. “Certifiable.”
Sophie laughed. Then stopped when Emily didn’t join her. A commotion near the door of the viewing suite caught Emily’s eye. She frowned when she spotted a shock of red hair. “What the hell is he doing here?”
Sophie glanced over her shoulder. “He asked if he could watch. Brody said he’s going around the bend not able to be around the team at least a little. So Desmond arranged for him to sneak in today. Hey, Dec!” She waved but Emily tried to shush her.
“Ladies,” the handsome young man—her pet—said with a grin as he dropped into a seat next to Emily. “Nice rock. Got some good news to share with the class, Em?”
Halfway through the match, when it was painfully clear the Black Jacks had no chance of beating the league champions from San Francisco, Declan—who’d not left Emily’s side the entire time—leaned over and held out his beer bottle. She touched hers to it.
“What, perchance, are we celebrating? Not this display of Declan-less awfulness?” She gestured out onto the pitch, a little too fluttery over his alarming proximity. His lips were practically grazing her ear.
“No. To me, attending my first anger management therapy session.”
“Ah, right. Today?”
“Yep,” he said, taking a sip but not taking his gaze from her. He picked up her left hand again. “You have something to confess? God knows I’ve told you pretty much everything about me.”
No. You haven’t, she thought. But she smiled, loving the feel of his hand on her wrist. An alarm starting clanging in her psyche, reminding her this man she was so fully and inappropriately infatuated with had the sort of temper that had led to… She shook her head, dispelling the memory of the Cassandra-disseminated photos.
Don’t judge him. Not yet.
“Yeah.” She ran her fingers through her hair, nervous and wishing he hadn’t brought it up. “Seems as though the man I thought was my ex-husband never was—my ex, that is. He didn’t file the divorce papers. Just kept ‘em in a safe deposit box. Weird, huh?” She put the bottle to her lips before remembering it was empty.
“Pretty much, yes,” Declan said, snagging them a couple more and handing her one.
She looked away from him.
“I hate this part,” he said under his breath.
“This part of what?” She focused on the dismal game.
“The part where everybody looks at me like I’m the abusive, rapist asshole she’s saying I am.” He leaned forward on the ledge and joined her in the match perusal, groaning when the San Francisco team scored again.
She started to get up, needing some space from him and the very serious trouble she sensed herself falling into over him. He grabbed her hand. “No, sorry, sit. I won’t whine, I promise.” His sad smile made her feel like a teenager who’d been noticed by the star quarterback.
She eased into her seat, shooting Sophie a hard look when the woman shook her head and pointed to her left ring finger. Declan rested his chin on his arms and was watching the match, unhappiness clear in his eyes and body language. She echoed his stance.
After a few minutes, he turned to face her, whispering, “I also hate the part where I find somebody I really like and not only does she have to babysit me through being called an abusive rapist, she’s just reunited with Mr. Perfect.” He touched her nose, making her shiver, then looked out onto the game with a huge sigh.
Chapter Fourteen
Declan
The small room adjacent to the courtroom had become Declan’s home away from home in the past two weeks. He even had a favorite chair—one almost squashed from the weight of a much heavier person than himself, but that provided a perfect angle for contemplating the beige ceiling above him for hours at a time.
Beige was the story of his life lately. Beige walls. Beige ceiling. Beige days, filled with droning repetition of the same facts, the same lies, the old story—Erica’s—retold for the thousandth time. The same set of cameras, microphones¸ and yammering arseholes outside the courtroom, at his house, at his gym, at the Black Jacks facility, where he’d managed to sneak in a few times, just to feel a part of something again.
He gripped his phone and stared at a text from Emily:
Hey, how’re you holding up?
Declan replied, eager to converse with someone semi-normal in this house of horror he’d inhabited for weeks. I’ve been better. How’s trophy wife life?
It hurt him to even acknowledge that she’d reunited with her banker super-man spouse. So he dealt with it by teasing her.
Great. I gave him a blow job this morning. He gave me a pair of earrings. It’s a dirty job, but…
He laughed, but acknowledged that it still pissed him off. Well done, you. And might I say that you are kind of expensive. Guess it’s a good thing I missed out.
She didn’t reply to that for nearly fifteen minutes, making him think he’d gone too far. When she did, it was a subject change and not one he liked.
Emily: I heard that your therapy session ended badly.
Declan: How in the hell would you know that?
Emily: **Points to self** I know everything. Fear me.
He chuckled and ran a hand through his hair. Nervous energy made him get up and start pacing the small room. Without really thinking about it, he typed:
Do you fear me?
He waited, staring at the stupid question, blood whooshing between his ears, watching the little bubbles flash indicating she was composing a response. When it came, it made him exhale and drop into the butt-sprung chair.
Emily: I fear that you’ve been hurt and you’ve spent a lot of years pretending that it doesn’t matter.
The little typing bubbles appeared again as he stared at her words.
Emily: I also fear something else—I fear I may be falling for you for reasons known only to the cosmos and Cupid. But as we both know, I’m married. So.
He grinned and typed something before talking himself out if it. Don’t fear that. Promise? I just need a friend. I’m not in the business of breaking up marriages. He shut his eyes, picturing her, and sucking in a breath when the memory of her alarm the morning after the incident with Cassandra floated across his mind. He opened his eyes and hit send.
He pulled the pad of paper close and studied the game they’d been playing to pass the time. She’d not been part of his entourage going to and fro, home to courthouse and back again. She was too busy holding down the PR fort in Detroit, and reuniting with her silver fox of an ex-husband.
Hangman was her next message, making him grin.
Your turn, he replied, scribbling on the paper in front of him.
Emily: I need to know something first.
Declan: Okay.
Emily: Can you tell me what happened with Erica?
He blinked and his chest tightened in an alarming fashion. He tossed the phone onto the table and got up to pace the tiny room. The sounds of people filing into the courtroom after a lunch break made him stop and put his hands on the wall to steady himself. This was it. Today had been the day that Cassandra gave her testimony to the judge. There was no jury yet. If the guy in the robe thought a jury trial was warranted, that would really be the end of his career.
Maybe that was fair. Maybe you deserve this, you goddamned, fucking hothead.
When he heard Cassandra’s voice outside the door, it sent a wave of fury down his spine. He stood still, willing it away. He knew what Des had up his sleeve, thanks to the baseball bat they’d found rolling around under the couch that had to have plenty of her fingerprints on it. Declan had been assured that the lab report Desmond was prepared to pull out of his magic hat of legal tricks today would be the end of all this mess.
Well, other than the tiny, insignificant detail of her pregnancy.
She was, apparently, four and half months along. The doctors said she had so little body fat, she’d likely not had a period in years. So missing them would not be on her radar. He’d been blocked from the team’s Twitter stream and Facebook page for legal reasons, but Jason, Kago, and even Coop had sent him a constant stream of gossip, up to and including the fact that the German bastard, Max, was claiming the kid could not be his as “they” always used a rubber.
Fucking, slutty bitch, he thought for the millionth time.
“Empowered, sexually independent woman, merely seeking to gain her own pleasure amongst a group of grown male athletes who did nothing but the same within their own conveniently placed groupies,” said the Cassandra-leaning media these days. The temptation to blame her completely, to even forget for a half-second what he had done to her—that he had shoved her too hard in anger—was too great to overcome many days.
The counterattack launched by the team and the league, saying she was crying wolf and trying to ruin a perfectly nice player’s soccer career, fell on mostly deaf ears. Which was his fault too, thanks to his behavior in Scotland. Thanks to the fact that he couldn’t lie about any of that or about the fact that he had pushed her into a door that night.
He dropped his head onto the table with a groan, wishing he could just purge it, carve the monster out of himself, and toss it aside like his happy-yappy therapist seemed to think he could. When the phone buzzed, he grabbed it and saw another message from Emily:
Good luck this afternoon.
He typed out a quick Thanks and stuck it in his pocket, hoping she’d take his silence on the topic of Erica the right way. If there happened to be a right way to take something like that.
Des stuck his head in the door after a few minutes more of beige ceiling contemplation. “Let’s go.”
Declan nodded, tugged on his suit coat and straightened his tie, then followed his lawyer out toward the courtroom. The gaggle of news and pseudo-news sports blogger bullshitters started hollering at him from the cordoned-off area outside the large, wooden double doors. His hands clenched into fists deep in his pockets with the effort not to rush at them to tell them to lay the fuck off and to consider that maybe there could be two sides to this damn story.
“Hang on,” Des said, before he opened the door. “I got some new evidence this morning, Dec. I’m gonna spring it on her…and you. It won’t be pretty. But I need you to know it’s coming. And it goes with the baseball bat defense. Locks it down and in place, actually.”
“All right. Where did it come from?”
“You don’t need to know that right now, trust me.”
Declan frowned at him. Desmond just nodded and opened the door.
The room was outfitted in light, ash-colored wood and felt like something out of a midcentury modern design magazine. He blinked and let his eyes adjust from the sickly fluorescents of his favorite waiting room in this obscenely bright and cheery-looking space.
The left side of the room behind his attorney’s desk was jam-packed. He blinked again, shocked to see every single member of the Black Jacks soccer team, all in their arrival suits, all smiling at him, many giving him their thumbs-up. In front of them sat two rows full of the WAG group that he’d grown to dread and love in equal measure. They were dressed for their day in court as well, in muted, tailored suits, hair pulled back, makeup minimized. Many of them, Cassandra’s closest friends, Helena, Sam, and Traci included, stared straight ahead, lips pressed together, not meeting his eyes. Why the hell they were sitting on his side of the room, he had no idea.
He almost tripped over his own feet, goggling at the contingent of support, but he followed Desmond to the long wood table and took his seat. The doors opened again, letting in the noise. This time, the hacks were calling out, “Cassandra! Cassandra! Cassie! Over here, honey! How’re you holding up? How’s the baby?”
Declan closed his eyes, trying to will his heart to stop pounding so hard at the thought of actually laying eyes on the woman again after her damning, dramatic display this morning. Des kicked his leg. He opened his eyes, turning his head to watch her walk down between the rows.
She had her hair pulled off her face. The bruising around her eyes and cheek had gone a shocking shade of purple. She seemed, if not actually pregnant, definitely heavier. The woman could eat a Snickers bar and it would stick out either side of her, though, she was so tiny. He looked away when she met his gaze with a flat, neutral expression.
