Tryst (Take It Off #8)(2)
Author: Cambria Hebert

Once he was in the hall, I slammed the door and threw the locks. I sagged against the white-painted wood and expelled a breath. I felt like I just ran a marathon. My chest squeezed tight, my stomach hurt, and every single limb on my body was heavy and exhausted.

Tears threatened behind my eyes and I sniffled. I glanced at the bag full of my romance supplies.

What a big, fat freaking joke.

I shoved away from the door, lifted my chin, and dashed away the unshed tears.

I could feel sorry for myself later.

Right now, I had to pack.

1

Talie

I went to the closest bank and transferred all the money out of our joint accounts and into my personal savings.

Okay, not all of our money.

I left him a dollar.

I thought that was very generous.

After I put some cash in my wallet, I drove across town to a gated neighborhood. If it wasn’t for the permanent pass I carried, I knew the guard would never let me behind the gate. The car I drove didn’t belong in a neighborhood like this. It was a clunker.

We always planned to buy me a new one. We were saving up because Blake bought a BMW right before we got married and we didn’t want to take on another payment so early in our marriage.

He was a complete douche.

My sister opened the door to her three thousand-square-foot house in the burbs, looking like she just stepped off a runway in Paris.

Yep, she was one of those women.

The kind of woman who never had a hair out of place. The kind who woke up in the morning looking like some kind of divine angel, with perfectly tousled hair and glowing skin. She always dressed perfectly, even if it was lounge clothes. Her long, dark hair was always curled, always shining, and her face was always perfectly made up.

She was a true southern belle.

I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame next to her.

“Talie!” she said, her voice breathless (it was always breathless). “I wasn’t expecting you! Did we have a lunch date I forgot about?”

I wanted to laugh. She never forgot any date she made. “Sorry to just show up, Joanna. Is now a bad time?”

“No, come in,” she said, holding the door wide so I could step into her entryway with cherry hardwood floors and soaring ceilings. “I just finished up my work for the day.”

My sister worked from home as an accountant. She only worked part time because she had two young children, and really, they didn’t need the money. I always just thought her decision to keep a few clients even after she had children was more because she liked telling people she was an accountant.

“Where are the twins?” I asked, looking around for Ainsley and Avery. They were two-year-old twin girls, the spitting image of their mother.

“Tiffany took them to the pool.”

Tiffany was the girls’ nanny and the pool was part of the amenities that came with the neighborhood.

“Would you like something to drink?” Joanna asked as I followed her through the house and stepped into the large, open kitchen. It had cream-colored custom cabinetry, a glass-tiled backsplash, and quartz countertops.

“No thanks,” I said. What I really wanted was an entire bottle of wine. And a straw.

Joanna opened up the massive stainless-steel fridge and pulled out a glass pitcher filled with water. Floating in the water were thick slices of red apple and many cinnamon sticks. She drank that water concoction every day and claimed it helped keep her figure so trim.

I secretly wondered if she ever ate.

Yeah. That was bitter. In my own defense, I just caught my loser soon-to-be ex-husband in bed with a woman who spent time under the knife to look like Barbie.

I sighed and watched Joanna pour herself a glass of the water. I shouldn’t have come here so soon. I knew better. On a good day, I only found my sister and all her perfect glory mildly annoying. On a bad day, I wondered what the hell I did to deserve the leftovers from my parent’s gene pool. On a day like today…

On a day like today, I found myself thinking I should have just forgot to put my junker of a car in park and then got out to let it “accidentally” run me over.

Of course, I would never actually do something like that.

That was just hella dramatic.

Well, that and the fact that I would be the one person who would get run over by her scrap metal on wheels and survive… only to live with the mangled mess of my body.

“So what brings you by?” Joanna asked, perching on the edge of her upholstered chairs at the round glass table nearby.

“I need Jack’s help.”

Jack was Joanna’s husband. He was a successful lawyer here in Raleigh and had his eyes set on a partnership at one of the biggest firms in town. I had no doubt he would get it. If he wasn’t my brother-in-law, I wouldn’t be able to afford thirty minutes of his time.

Good thing for family discounts.

Joanna’s delicately shaped brows rose. “Whatever do you need a lawyer for?”

“I’m filing for divorce.” The words were practically a grenade that dropped into the center of the room and obliterated the calm, quiet atmosphere that was my sister’s kitchen.

She gasped and put a hand to her chest. “A divorce!” she said like it was some foreign term. “Why in the world would you be doing that?”

“I caught Blake in bed this afternoon. In my bed. With his secretary.”

Joanna thought for a moment. “There has to be a reasonable explanation, Talie.”

“They were naked. She was on top of him.”

Her lips formed a little O.

“He’s cheating on me. Probably has been for a long time.”

“Now, you don’t know that for sure. Perhaps it was a one-time thing. A mistake.”

Sometimes a woman didn’t have to know something to know it.

And I knew Blake had sex with lopsided boob Barbie more than once.

“Oh, it was a mistake all right,” I muttered. “A mistake that I married him.”

“Talie!” Joanna admonished. Her tone set my back teeth on edge. She set her apple cinnamon water aside and stood, placing her pink-manicured fingers on her hips. “Blake is a good man. He’s very successful; he’s good looking, comes from a strong family with roots deep in the southern soil. He’s quite the catch.”

And this is why I knew better than to come here. “Are you actually defending the fact he was sleeping with another woman. In my bed?”

She blanched like the image left a distasteful flavor in her mouth. “What I’m saying is you took vows. You can’t throw away a good marriage so rashly.”