Chapter Nine
Graham
Ex-wife?
That single word exploded in my head and everything I believed to be true about me and Lee inverted.
I fought to hold my shit together as I stared at Jena with a thousand questions in my mind that I’d never ask her. Not the least of which, how did she know this vital intel about Lee and I didn’t?
Jesus Christ, we were married. True, people couldn’t know everything about their spouse’s past, but this was a fucking big item to leave off the sharing list.
My husband had an ex-wife he never told me about. Jamie, the flamer ex-hub—yes, full-disclosure there. Layla, the twenty-four-karat-plated pussy, not one word.
I was sure of it, but I went through every second of memory debris I shared with him, hoping I was wrong and had somehow missed it. And yes, the glorious memories I carried of us were now debris. Like fine bottles of wine in a cellar set carefully to age that had been shattered by an earthquake.
Think, Graham, think. What was it he’d told me about Ella’s mother?
As a topic of conversation, it’d only come up once. It was so long ago, the first couple of days we’d spent together in that oceanfront resort in Manhattan Beach during our hookup that turned into a three-day fuckathon.
It was after he’d argued with Jamie by phone that he admitted he had a daughter and an ex, and fuck me, I’d asked him if he had an ex-wife.
The memory reel rolled with audio in my brain, and I was sucked back in time to that pricy suite with Lee.
* * *
7 years ago…
Lee crossed the room to sink down on the chair beside the bed and his expression startled me. He looked wound tight, pensive and grim.
I waited for him to speak and when he didn’t, I said, “Everything all right, Lee? Nothing’s wrong, is there?”
He clutched his hair as he let out a ragged breath. “No, everything is fine. Unpleasant intrusion. You just need to give me a few minutes to shake it off. I’m sorry that took so long.”
His reply landed in my gut like a twisting knife. Positively no intel in that disclosure, though I shouldn’t have expected differently or taken offense to it.
“You might shake it off faster if you talked about it,” I said, alertly searching his face.
“Trust me, I won’t. Can you just sit there and not prod me for a while?”
I was trying to be a friend and I didn’t like how dismissive he was being to me.
“Can you figure out how to fuck your own hole?” I snapped. Crude, but it got his attention.
His eyes opened wide and then he laughed softly in tired amusement. “Don’t try to provoke an argument with me by pretending to be a caveman. It’s not going to work to get me talking, baby. I know you better.”
“You also know me well enough to tell me what’s bothering you. What’s happening, Lee?”
He shook his head as if willing himself into a different state. “That was my ex on the phone. Don’t ever get divorced with children. Worst thing a man can do to fuck up the peace in his life.”
An avalanche of shit fell on me with a single disclosure.
Ex.
I startled from the sudden shift of my internal arrangement from him mentioning his past and was unpleasantly overwhelmed by how much I didn’t like it.
Divorced with children—fuck, he was bisexual, and that bombshell hit me like a blast of ice water because I’d started to have those foolish thoughts that this was perhaps only the start of something better.
Jesus. H. Christ. Fuck my life.
He’d finally told me something personal about himself and now I wished he hadn’t. Reality was shoved in my face unexpectedly, like being Cinderella at the stroke of midnight and having the carriage turn into a pumpkin beneath you.
Leland wasn’t a pumpkin but he might as well have been. Fuck, it made it worse that he wasn’t because he was everything I wanted but nothing that I could tolerate. There was no way in hell I was the kind of guy who could put up with his lover liking to exercise his dick in a box from time to time.
I sat up in bed, planted my fleet on the floor, and tossed off the blankets. “Divorced with children,” I replied coldly. “Nope, not ever going to happen to me. My cock swings only one way. It always has.”
His amber eyes brightened. “Did you really think you needed to tell me that?”
“Did you really think you didn’t need to tell me you were bisexual and had a wife and a child?”
“Wife?” His brows shot up and then he laughed himself red in the face. “My, you do take off in the wrong direction when your temper is up.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“That you’ve gone from zero to false conclusion in record time. No wife. I have an ex-husband. I find it brutal irony that the California courts resisted gay marriage so long and now in family court they make rulings with no basis in law.”
I didn’t know what the hell that meant. I held him in the pressure of my gaze.
He sighed. “I had the child before the marriage. Sole legal custody. Not Jamie’s, the marriage lasted only a year, and the court still granted him visitation. Frustrating and infuriating.”
I had to check the urge to say Jamie, really? I tried to assemble the pieces of what he was telling me into a clear picture. An ex-husband. No wife. Maybe no women, ever.
“You adopted?”
He crinkled his nose as if in disdain. “No. I wanted a biological child. Forty was staring me in the face, so that’s what I did with a friend and she terminated her rights and the court granted full custody to me. And before you rudely ask, not by in vitro. I wanted to make my only child the old-fashioned way and for a short while my dick played only in pussy to a result I couldn’t be more pleased about. I wouldn’t trade my daughter for a billion dollars. Don’t want another—she’s a handful—but I wouldn’t trade her.”
I sat on the edge of the bed, turning it all in my head. Not a perfect situation, but definitely not unmanageable, and worth continuing to explore.
My male territorial instinct kicked in out of nowhere. “Do you still fuck Jamie? Is that why the call from him got you so angry?”
That earned me a glare. “Enough. I’m trying not to think about it, and you are trying to force me to.”
My gaze sharpened on his. “That’s not an answer.”
He shrugged. “Well, those are all the answers you’re getting from me today. You’re exhausting me in the wrong way and I’ve had enough of it.”
He pushed up out of the chair and crossed the room, stopping between my legs. He teased his abdomen by moving the waistband of his pajamas before pushing them down to free his dick ramrod straight up close to my lips.
He ran his fingers through my hair, lightly caressing my scalp as he dangled what I ached for in front of me. “I don’t want to talk anymore. I’d rather have my head cleared by you sucking my other head.”
Pressure from his fingers commanded my face to go in. I didn’t close my mouth around him—in fact, a part of me wanted to punch him for having done that—but my lust for him betrayed me with a shudder and my short, quick breaths.
“Big guys,” he said, spreading his legs to more comfortably balance his weight. “All temper. All brawn. Every last one of you. You all melt like kittens when you’re scratched the right way.”
* * *
The present…
I shut down the memory flick before moving into the porn frames. We’d followed that argument with a hard fuck, like we always did, and Ella’s mother never came to my mind again.
I rewound the conversation and locked in on what I’d missed in the live version: “No wife. I have an ex-husband.” Mixed matched pieces of truth à la Leland and I’d believed him.
What an idiot I was.
He’d fed me a carefully crafted lie, assembling pieces of the truth so he wouldn’t forget it, betting I’d never learn the info he withheld, and it’d worked for seven years. But truth is an inescapable, relentless bitch, even for Leland.
And the big question consuming me now was what the fuck did I do about it? Leave him to his privacy on the side yard, hopefully to get rid of her?
Remain calm and assess the damage and the threat from the before-unseen ex-wife?
Forget that he lied to me and keep on being happy?
Ask why now, why here is Layla in our life? That was probably the rational start point for this what-the-fuck moment, but I wasn’t feeling rational. I was leaning toward killing him in the middle of our anniversary party.
Over Jena’s head my gaze locked on the party on the lawn and then narrowed.
The party.
This obscenely lavish…farce!
Oh fuck, he was shrewd, manipulative, and clever.
Instant comprehension over why he’d wanted this. He was setting the stage with the good moments of us, having it unavoidably shoved in my face who we were together, prepping me before his lie blew up our marriage.
Crazy though that theory sounded, it was a Lee type of move and I was positive I was right.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
I kicked my own ass for never suspecting the truth, and worse, never following up with a single question about Ella’s mother. But, fuck, I had the most pathetic reason of all not to question him. I loved him and the truth would have ended us.
Little by little, the shock started to dissipate and functioning thought returned. I needed to calm down, think this through, lure Lee in, and get the truth from him before he could figure out yet another way to lie to me about this.
And that sure as fuck wasn’t happening during a party.
With heroic control, I pulled together enough to smile at Jena. “Have a pleasant evening,” I bit off and marched back toward my guests.
I sank down in the spot I’d vacated on the couch near Dillon and Rachel, waved off the server with the tray of champagne, and asked for a double straight-up Jameson.
With a stiff smile, I listened to them talk and laugh, contributing nothing of substance to the conversation. I checked my watch. T plus twenty minutes since a bomb went off in my life and I was still on my feet—well, figuratively. My muscles felt drained even as keyed up as I was, and I doubted my legs could even carry me the fuck out of here.
I covertly scanned the lawn.
Leland still MIA.
My stomach turned.
I’d left my husband alone with his ex-wife I knew nothing about. That had to be all kinds of wrong in the marital smart moves book. And the woman was a stunner. He’d married her and they’d had a child together, which confirmed that as much as Lee loved dick he was into pussy also.
The surrogate bullshit Lee had told me that I’d swallowed in one gulp went to work on my composure. It felt like I was on the verge of hyperventilating.
Dillon frowned. “You all right, Graham?”
Where the fuck is my drink? I smiled. “Great.”
Ah, there. That single glass being carried on a tray crossing the lawn must be for me. Thank fuck.
Since fucking my husband tonight wasn’t on my agenda any longer, there was no need to stay sharp. In fact, numb would work better after the party cleared out.
The minutes ticked by in agonizing slowness.
It was T plus an hour since I’d left Jena.
I was down four Jamesons, and with what I’d drunk before switching to scotch was pretty near being a walking zombie. Yep, the living dead. That was accurate to what I felt as I exchanged banter with the group I was sitting with.
Then, without my seeing him sneak up in my peripheral, Lee dropped down on the sofa beside me and said, “There you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Sorry I got held up so long. Wilcox cornered me, and you know how he is, baby. Work, work, work, even at a party.”
And the fucker had the nerve to laugh then smile at me.
So I smiled back, but the roil inside me returned at hurricane force because I knew if I hadn’t learned the truth firsthand I would have believed that from Lee. Which led me to wonder how many other lies he’d told me that I’d not seen.
In that moment, what hadn’t broken inside me an hour ago shattered.