The Real Deal

Read The Real Deal Online

Authors: Lucy Monroe

“Simon Brant does not want to have sex with me!”
“Are you sure about that?” The words were spoken in a deep, masculine voice from behind her.
Her heart plummeting to her toes, she spun around with the cell phone stuck to the side of her head like a hi-tech earmuff. Simon lounged in the guest room doorway; the formerly closed door swung carelessly against the wall.
She opened her mouth, but the only thing that came out was air. Jill was saying something, but Amanda couldn't make any sense of it. She was too busy hyper ventilating from embarrassment.
“Simon,” she choked out.
“Yes, Simon. You're obviously interested in the man.” Jill's impatient voice in her ear had a dreamlike quality to it.
Reality was six feet, two inches of masculine perfection and a sardonic gleam in gunmmetal gray eyes.
“
Jill
,” she said, breaking into her friend's familiar tirade on Amanda's lack of a love life.
“What?”
“Simon's here. I think he wants to talk to me.”
Jillian's gasp was audible. “Simon's there?”
“Yes.”
“How much did he hear?” Her friend's whisper was too little, way too late.
“Enough.”
The Real Deal
 
 
 
Lucy Monroe
 
 
 
KENSINGTON BOOKS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
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To Lori Foster for her generosity and friendship,
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and to her Book Junkies, authors and readers
that have enriched my life
by letting me hang out with them online.
Thanks, guys! Major hugs.
Prologue
T
hunk.
Pain jarred through Amanda's shoulder as the baseball bat connected with the treadmill, but the darn thing didn't even shift. The black metal monster taunted her just as it had for the past two years. Her nemesis.
The symbol of her husband's dissatisfaction with her body.
Of her failure as a woman.
Swinging the bat in a high arc above her head, she then brought it down with all the force of the anger and despair warring inside her.
Thunk
.
This time the pain was so great her fingers flexed open in an involuntary spasm and she dropped the bat.
“No. You aren't going to win!”
For one horrifying second, she saw herself as someone else might see her—a madwoman in a Jackie-O dress and heels, attacking a piece of exercise equipment with a baseball bat and screaming at it as if it were animate.
She didn't care. She hated that pile of molded metal as much as she hated what she'd allowed herself to become. She bent over, her shoulder and arm throbbing, and grabbed the bat again. Melodious chimes, discordant with her mood, halted her mid-swing.
She spun on her heel and stomped through the perfect Southern California showplace that had never felt like a home. Sun glinted off the polished tile floor of the foyer, causing a white glare that hurt eyes gritty from crying.
She didn't want to deal with a visitor. Didn't even know if she
could
. It was probably someone for Lance. Today was Saturday, golf day. Her husband usually spent it with his tanned and toned business associates on one of the many prestigious private courses found along the Southern California coast. Only, today, Lance was otherwise occupied.
Which was something she had every intention of telling whoever was on the other side of that door, right before telling them to go away.
It would serve the lying swine right if she told his visitor just what was occupying her faithless wretch of a husband.
Red hair sticking up in a wild tangle showed through the glass semicircle insert in the door.
Jillian
.
Thank you, God
. Amanda could deal with Jillian. Jill would understand. Heck, she'd probably ask for her own bat.
Amanda yanked the door open. More sunlight glared and little black spots wavered before her eyes, obscuring the flamboyantly dressed woman in front of her. “Hey, Jill.”
“Amanda! What happened?” Jillian swept inside with her usual dramatic flair, her Day-Glo
orange dress competing with the sunlight for brightness. “I came by to talk you into some serious mall-walking, but you look like you're competing with Tammy Fay what's-her-name for the Miss Raccoon title.”
Amanda scrubbed at the hot wetness on her face with one hand. “I'm thinking more along the lines of Lorena Bobbit.”
“What did that SOB do this time?”
Amanda almost laughed. Almost, but she couldn't quite make it. Jillian was the only person in her life who considered Lance less than an ideal husband.
“You're implying that he makes a habit of screwing me over.” Which couldn't be further from the truth.
Jillian's brightly painted lips twisted in a grimace. “He's a condescending jerk who wouldn't know a truly sexy woman if she fell on her knees in front of him and offered him a blow job.”
Humiliation mixed with anger as Amanda recalled doing almost exactly that—and getting turned down. A sob tore from her already raw throat and she felt her knees buckle. Wiry but strong arms wrapped around her, stopping her descent to the floor. A string of curses that would do any movie director in Hollywood proud stung Amanda's eardrums.
“Come on, honey.” The familiar fragrance of Jillian's perfume wrapped around her, as soothing as her friend's voice. “Let's go in the kitchen and get you something to drink. You look a little shocky.”
Shock didn't begin to describe how Amanda was feeling. “He was in his office. He was naked, Jill. It's been so long since I saw him that way, I almost didn't recognize him.” Her pathetic joke fell flat as another keening wail snaked up from her battered soul. She gulped and breathed before trying to talk again. “He wasn't alone.”
“I kinda figured that, you being so upset and all. I didn't think him jacking-off to a copy of
Playboy
would have left you white-faced and shaking.”
That did make her laugh, just one small, choked giggle, but it was better than the crying that had been making her throat raw for the past two hours.
“So, who was it? The new paralegal?”
Three little words.
Who was it?
And it all came rushing back. Walking into the anteroom of his plush law office. The sounds coming from the other side of his door in an otherwise silent building. The mesmeric pull of those sounds. The long walk across deeply piled carpet, making no sound herself except for shallow breathing that seemed to grow thinner with each step. The feel of the cold doorknob under her hand. The excruciating slowness as she turned it. The door swinging inward on silent hinges and the tableau that burned like acid against her mind's eye.
“No. Not his assistant.” Amanda stopped abruptly, pulling Jillian to a standstill beside her. She leaned back against the white wall, needing the support, the connection with something solid and real. “He was with . . .”
She took a deep breath and Jillian waited for Amanda to continue, for once totally silent.
She closed her eyes, trying to block the picture swimming before them, but the image only grew more prominent against the inside of her eyelids. “He was standing there. Naked.” She'd already said that. “He wasn't alone.”
Jillian didn't remind her she'd already said that too and Amanda was grateful.
“He had his arms around a woman. She was up against the wall. H-he was inside her. Standing up. I don't know who she is.” Amanda didn't know if she could finish it. “A m-man was standing behind him, only he wasn't just standing. Lance was . . . he was . . .” She couldn't say it. Couldn't repeat the exact nature of the threesome's lewd activity, couldn't tell her best friend who the man copulating with her husband had been.
She didn't even want to think it. The double betrayal was ripping her guts out.
“Both of them? He was screwing both of them?”
Amanda's eyes flew open at Jillian's shriek and she stared into green eyes dilated by the same shock that had her trapped.
“Yes. Well, Lance was doing it to the woman and the other man was doing it to him.” Even saying it made her sick and she felt bile rise in her throat.
Jillian followed her mad dash to the bathroom, handed her a glass of water afterward and kept up a steady stream of cursing the whole time. “What did you do?” This time her friend's voice came out in a whisper.
“They were really into what they were doing. They didn't notice me. So, I snuck out.”
“He doesn't know you saw him?”
Amanda shook her head, her formerly neat French twist rubbing against the wall. She could feel hanks of her long hair coming loose and settling against her shoulders.
“What's the bat for?”
Her mouth twisted. “I was trying to beat up the treadmill, but it didn't work. The damn thing is indestructible.”
Jillian made one of the expressive sounds she was so good at. “Honey, you said the d-word. Next thing I know, you really will be sharpening the knives.”
Amanda grimaced. “I'd rather destroy the treadmill. I can't go to prison for that one.”
Jillian nodded, her red hair waving like some mad monkey on top of her head. “You've got a point.”
The next thing Amanda knew Jillian had grabbed her wrist and she was being dragged toward the garage. “Come on, I bet even Lance has a cordless screwdriver. All men have them. Even men who don't know the difference between a flathead and a Phillips. They're status symbols or something.”
“And do you know what to do with one?”
“Sure. I've been living on my own since I was seventeen. I even know how to use a snake on a backed-up toilet.”
Amanda chose not to comment on that dubious accomplishment.
Ten minutes later, she and Jillian were both armed with cordless screwdrivers. Her husband, who Jillian had guessed rightly wouldn't know how to use one, had not merely one, but three screwdrivers. All different models.
It didn't take long for Amanda to get the hang of using the tool under the competent instruction of her friend. Soon, the whirring of the battery-powered motors mixed with metal scraping against metal. Before long, the treadmill lay around them in pieces. They moved onto the Stair Master and even managed to dismantle the pneumatic weight bench.
Amanda squeezed the trigger on her screwdriver, making it whir noisily. “This is really therapeutic. I wish my aerobics tapes could be dealt with the same way.”
Jill grinned. “Hey, the baseball bat oughtta work on those.”
It did, but Amanda still felt dissatisfied. She needed more. She'd spent two years married to the food and exercise gestapo and she wanted revenge. She let the bat fall to her side and wiped the sweat from her forehead. “It's not enough.”
Jillian's eyes twinkled with a look that had been scaring those who knew her since before she could talk. “Come on.”
Amanda followed her into the entertainment room and her gaze fell on the giant screen TV that filled up half of an entire wall, Lance's newest and most prized toy. She swiveled her head and met Jillian's eyes. Their green depths reflected the same sense of purpose beating a rhythm in Amanda's breast. It took a lot longer than the treadmill and they both had to jump out of the way when the heavy screen crashed to the floor, splintering into pieces, but when they were done, she felt better than she had in months.
They both stood, staring at the remains of the exorbitantly expensive piece of equipment, and then Jillian looked up. “Anything else?”
Amanda thought about it. She could think of several things it would bother her husband to lose, but her blind desire for destruction seemed to be satisfied.
“No. I just want to pack my stuff and get out of here.”
A curious sense of relief was beginning to pervade her being as she realized she never again had to suffer the critical comments and sexual rejection that typified her marriage to Lance. She was tired of feeling like a failure.
Maybe her womanly attributes were overblown in comparison to the boyishly thin chick her husband had been boinking. Maybe she was too pale for Southern California beauty, too short, too chesty, too hippy, too pretty much everything, but who said a woman was defined by her sex appeal?
She was on the inside fast track at Extant Corporation. Investing her time, energy and emotion in her career made more sense than giving those precious resources to her jerk of a husband, or any other man for that matter.
One thing was certain—she was never going to make the mistake of giving a man the power to hurt her again.

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