Grace, on the other hand, was beginning to spend what she thought of as an alarming amount of time on maintenance. At five-four, even five extra pounds seemed to go right to her butt or her belly, and she’d begun coloring her sandy-brown hair two years earlier, at the suggestion of Ruthanne, her hairdresser. Her face was heart-shaped, and only thirty minutes in the Florida sun left her round cheeks beet-colored, giving her even more of the look of a little Dutch girl when Ruthanne got carried away with the blond highlights. Ben insisted she was still as pretty as the day they’d met six years earlier, but they both knew that with Grace’s blogging career about to take off, she would have to be that much more vigilant about her appearance.
Blogging? A career?
If anybody had told her two years ago that she’d make a living out of journaling her quest for a more beautiful life, she would have laughed in their face. And if anybody told her that she would become enough of a success that Ben would quit his career to run hers? Well, she would have politely written that person off as a nutcase.
But it was all true. She and Ben were on the very verge of the big time. This house, a 6,500-square-foot Spanish colonial located in a gated golf-course community had been one of the subdivision’s model homes, and the builder, whose wife was an avid Gracenotes reader, had given them an incredible deal on it in exchange for a banner ad across the top of the blog. Most of the expensive upgrades on the property—the landscaping, the pool and spa, their amazing master bath—had also been trade-offs for advertising.
She’d always loved writing, and had tinkered with photography for years, but once the blog took off, it had somehow caught the eye of magazine editors and television producers. In addition to having their own house featured in half a dozen magazines, writing, photography, and decorating assignments had begun coming her way. She’d become a contributing regional editor for
Country Living
and
Bay Life
magazines, and next month, they were going to start working with a production company out of California to shoot a pilot television show of Gracenotes for HGTV.
All because of her silly little blog.
* * *
She couldn’t say why she awoke so suddenly. Normally, Grace fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow, and she slept so soundly Ben often reminded her of the time she’d slept through Hurricane Elise, not even stirring when the wind tore the roof totally off the screened porch of their old house in a slightly run-down Bradenton neighborhood.
That night was no exception. She’d retreated to her office after dinner, writing and rewriting her Gracenotes post and fussing over the photographs before, finally, shortly before eleven, pushing the
SEND
button and crawling into bed beside her already-slumbering husband.
For whatever reason, she sat straight up in bed now. It was after 1:00
A.M.
Her heart was racing, and her mouth was dry. A bad dream? She couldn’t say. She glanced over at Ben’s side of the bed. Empty.
She rubbed her eyes. Ben was probably downstairs, in the media room, watching a tournament on Golf TV, or maybe he was in the kitchen, looking for a late-night snack. Grace yawned and padded downstairs, already planning her own snack.
But the downstairs was dark, the media room deserted. She went out to the kitchen. No sign of him there, either. The kitchen was as spotless as she’d left it three hours earlier, after finishing up the last of the dinner dishes and packing up the faux-Tuscan pottery. Not even a cup or a spoon in the sink.
Grace frowned, and this time she didn’t bother to worry about wrinkles. She checked the downstairs powder room, but the door was open and there was no sign of her husband. She ran back upstairs and peeked inside the two guest suites, but they were empty and undisturbed. She walked slowly back to the bedroom, thinking to call Ben’s cell phone. But when she saw his cell phone on his dresser, along with his billfold, she relaxed a little. And then she noticed the keys to the Audi were missing, and her heart seemed to miss a beat. She went to the window and peered out, but saw nothing. There was only a quarter moon that night, but it was obscured by a heavy bank of clouds. The backyard was wreathed in darkness. She couldn’t even see the garage.
“It’s nothing,” she told herself, surprised to realize that she was talking out loud. She shrugged out of her nightgown, pulling on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, slipping her feet into a pair of rubber flip-flops. “He’s fine. Maybe he’s out by the pool, sneaking a midnight cigar.”
The sandals slapped noisily on the marble stairs, the sound echoing in the high-ceilinged stairway. She ditched them by the back door, carefully switching off the burglar alarm before stepping out onto the back patio. She paused, put her hand to her chest, and could have sworn it was about to jump out of her body.
“Ben?” She kept her voice low. It was pitch black, except for the pale turquoise surface of the pool and the eerie green uplights on the date-palm clusters at the back of the garden. Cicadas thrummed, and in the far distance, she heard a truck rumbling down the street. She crept forward, her hands extended, edging past the pair of chaise lounges perched at the edge of the patio, feeling the rough-textured coral rock beneath her feet.
Gradually, her eyes adjusted to the dark. There was no glowing cigar tip anywhere on the patio or the garden. She glanced toward the garage. No lights were on in J’Aimee’s upstairs apartment, and the garage doors were closed. Was Ben’s car there?
For a moment, a train of scenarios unspooled through her imagination. Ben, passed out, or even dead, at the wheel of his car, an unknown assailant lurking nearby. Should she retreat to the house, find some kind of weapon, even call the police?
“Don’t be an idiot,” she murmured to herself. “You’re a big girl. Just go look in the garage. You live in a gated community, for God’s sake. The only crime here is dogs pooping on the grass.”
She tiptoed toward the garage, skirting the electronically controlled metal doors, heading toward the side door, trying to remember whether or not it would be unlocked.
Luckily, it was. The knob turned easily in her hand, and she stepped inside the darkened space, her hand groping the wall for the light switch.
And then she heard … heavy breathing. She froze. A man’s voice. The words were unintelligible, but the voice was Ben’s. Her hand scrabbled the wall for the switch. She found it, and the garage was flooded with light.
A woman squealed.
Grace blinked in the bright lights. She saw Ben, sitting in the driver’s seat of the Audi. He was bare-chested, his right hand shielding his eyes from the light. His hair was mussed, and his cheeks were flushed bright red.
“Grace?” He looked wild-eyed.
And that’s when she realized he wasn’t alone in the car. Her first instinct was to turn and run away, but she was drawn, like a bug to a lightbulb, to the side of that gleaming black sports car. The top was retracted. She looked down and saw that distinctive mane of flame-red hair.
J’Aimee, her loyal, invaluable assistant, was cowering, naked, making a valiant effort to disappear into the floorboards of the car.
“What the hell?” Grace screeched as she yanked open the passenger-side door.
“I’m sorry, Grace, I’m so sorry,” J’Aimee blurted, her eyes the size of saucers.
J’Aimee’s clothes were scattered on the floor of the garage, and, come to think of it, that was Ben’s shirt—his expensive, pale-blue, custom-tailored, monogrammed, Egyptian cotton shirt that Grace had given him as a birthday gift—that was flung over the Audi’s windshield.
With the passenger-side door open, Grace saw, at a glance, that her husband was nearly naked, too—if you counted having your jeans puddled down around your ankles as naked.
For a moment, Grace wondered if this was some bad dream she was having. Hadn’t she just been asleep a moment earlier? This couldn’t be happening. Not Ben. Ben loved her. He would never cheat. She shook her head violently, closed her eyes, and reopened them.
But this was no nightmare. And there was no mistaking what she’d just interrupted. Suddenly, she felt a surge of boiling hot rage.
“Bitch!” Grace cried. She clamped a hand around J’Aimee’s upper arm and yanked her out of the car in one fluid, frenzied motion.
“Ow,” J’Aimee whimpered.
Grace flung her against the side of the car.
“Stop it,” J’Aimee cried. Her face was pale, with every freckle standing out in contrast to the milky whiteness of her skin. For some reason, Grace, in an insane corner of her mind, noted with satisfaction that J’Aimee’s breasts were oddly pendulous for such a young woman. Also? Not a real redhead.
“You stop it!” Grace said, drawing back her hand.
“Jesus!” J’Aimee screamed. She raised her arms to cover her face, and for a moment Grace faltered. She had never hit anybody in her life. She dropped her hand and glared at the girl.
“Now, Grace,” Ben started. He was wriggling around in his seat, trying in vain to surreptitiously pull up his pants. “Don’t get the wrong idea. Don’t…”
“Shut up, just shut up!” Grace shouted, her eyes blazing. For a moment, she forgot about J’Aimee. She flew around to his side of the car, but before she could get there, Ben had managed to slide out from under the steering wheel, zipping up his pants as he stood.
“How could you?” she cried, raining ineffective punches around his head and shoulders. She was aware that her high-pitched shrieks sounded like the howls of a lunatic, but she was helpless to stop herself. “You? And J’Aimee? My assistant? You were screwing her? Under my own roof?”
He easily caught her fists and held them tight in his own. “No!” Ben lied. “It’s not what you think. Look, if you would just calm down, let’s talk about this. Okay? I know this looks bad, but there’s a logical explanation.”
“Like what? The two of you snuck out here to the garage while I was asleep and you decided to have a business meeting in your car? A clothing-optional meeting? And suddenly, J’Aimee decided to give you mouth-to-penis resuscitation? Is that the logical explanation for this?”
“Calm down,” Ben repeated. “You’re getting yourself all worked up…”
Grace saw a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye and looked over just in time to see J’Aimee scoop up her clothing and make a run for it.
“Oh, no,” Grace said. “You’re not getting away from this.” J’Aimee darted out the door, and Grace went right after her.
“Stay away from me,” J’Aimee cried, running in the direction of the house. “I’ll call the police if you come near me … It’s aggravated assault.”
“You don’t know the meaning of aggravated,” Grace shouted. She flinched when her bare feet hit the lawn, damp from the automatic sprinklers, but ran after J’Aimee, who was surprisingly slow for a young woman unencumbered by clothing. She picked up her speed until she was only a few yards behind her former assistant. She reached out to try to snatch a handful of J’Aimee’s hair, but her prey danced out of reach.
“Don’t you touch me,” J’Aimee cried, backing away. “I mean it.”
But Grace was quicker than even she expected. She managed to grab J’Aimee’s arm, and the girl screamed like a stuck pig.
Lights snapped on at the house next door. A dog began barking from the back of the property.
“Get away,” the young woman screeched, dropping her clothing onto the grass and windmilling her arms in Grace’s general vicinity. “Get away.”
Now they heard the low hum and metallic clang of the garage door opening. Grace glanced over her shoulder to see Ben come sprinting out of the garage. “Are you insane?” he called. “For God’s sake, Grace, let her go.”
In her fury, Grace turned toward her husband, and in that moment J’Aimee slipped out of her grasp. While Grace watched, speechless, J’Aimee scampered, naked, around the patio. A moment later, she’d disappeared behind the thick hedge of hibiscus that separated the Stantons’ property from their nearest neighbor.
“Go ahead and run, bitch!” Grace screamed. “You’re fired. You hear me? Your ass is fired!”
Ben was walking slowly across the grass, his hands raised in a cautious peace gesture. “Okay, Grace,” he said, making low, soothing sounds at the back of his throat, the kind you’d make to coax a cat out of a treetop. “Oh-kay, I know. You’re upset. I get that. Can we take this inside now? You’re making a spectacle of yourself. Let’s take it inside, all right? I’ll make us some coffee and we can sort this out…”
“We are
not
going inside,” Grace snapped. “Coffee? Are you kidding me? You think a dose of Starbucks Extra Bold is going to fix this? We are going to stay right here. Do you hear me?”
“The whole neighborhood can hear you. Could you lower your voice, please? Just dial it down a little?”
“I will not!” His calmness made her even crazier than she already felt. Grace megaphoned her hands. “Hey, people. Neighbors—wake up! This is Grace Stanton. I just caught my husband, Ben Stanton, screwing my assistant!”
“Stop it,” Ben hissed. “I was
not
screwing her.”
“Correction,” Grace hollered, lifting her voice to the sky. “She was blowing him. My mistake, neighbors.”
“You’re insane,” he snapped. “I’m not staying around listening to this.” He turned and stomped off toward the house. “We’ll talk when you’ve calmed down.”
“One question, Ben,” Grace called, running after him. She grabbed him by the shoulder to stop his progress. “You owe me that.”
“What?” He spun around, rigid with anger. She noticed three small love bites on his collarbone. Hickies? Her forty-four-year-old husband had hickies? A wave of nausea swelled up from her belly. She swallowed hard.
“How long? How long have you been fucking her?”
“I’m not…” He shrugged. “Come inside. All right?”
“How long?” Grace felt hot tears springing to her eyes. “Tell me, damn it. This wasn’t the first time, was it? So tell me the truth. How long?”
“No matter what I say, you won’t believe me,” Ben said quietly.
“Tell me the truth and I’ll believe you,” Grace said.
“No,” he said softly. “Not the first time. But we can fix this, Grace.”