Addicted to Love (12 page)

Rachael placed a hand against her stomach to soothe the twisting ache of anxiety. “I have six hundred and thirty-seven dollars in my savings account. How am I ever going to pay it all?”

“We’ll find a way,” Jillian said. “You interested in suing Trace for breach of contract?”

“Can I do that?” Rachael asked.

“Y’all ready to order?” April Tritt had wandered back over to their table with four glasses of ice water and set them down on the table.

Jillian frowned at the menu. “You have anything that isn’t too heavy or deep-fried?”

“Nope,” April said cheerfully. “We specialize in home-style country cooking.”

“Take my advice,” Rachael said. “At Higgy’s, stick with the blue plate special.”

“I don’t like meat loaf,” Jillian said.

“Menu surf at your own risk,” Rachael warned.

“Blue plate,” Tish ordered quickly.

“Me as well,” Delaney said. “Meat loaf sounds like a nice comfort food.”

“This fish you have on the menu . . . ” Jillian pointed.

“The fried catfish fillets?”

“Could you ask the cook to blacken it?”

“Sure.” April took their menus and sashayed off, rolling her generous hips for the benefit of the men in the diner.

“I hope,” Rachael said, “the cook knows to prepare your fish with blackened seasoning at a high heat and doesn’t literally blacken it in the deep fryer.”

Jillian looked alarmed. “Is that a possibility?”

Rachael shrugged. “Look around. This is Valentine.”

“Excuse me, miss.” Jillian hopped up and scurried after the waitress. “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll have the blue plate special.”

Tish giggled. “You were yanking her chain, right?”

Rachael smiled. “Sometimes Jillian needs to come down off her high horse a little.”

T
EN MILES OUTSIDE
of Valentine, Selina had to pull over to have a good long cry. Early that morning Jillian had called to tell her Rachael had been arrested for vandalizing the Valentine billboard. On top of everything else, it was almost more than Selina could bear.

But she was first and foremost a mom. Rachael needed her — even if she might believe she didn’t want to see her — and Selina was determined to be there for her. She’d lost her marriage; she’d be damned if she was going to lose her daughter as well.

She’d driven fifteen miles over the speed limit to make the drive from Houston to Valentine, at a personal record of four hours and forty-seven minutes. Rachael was supposed to have been arraigned at ten this morning, so she knew she was too late for that, but she wasn’t too late to help her pick up the pieces of her life.

However, now that she was within hugging range of her eldest daughter, her composure flew out the window. After a hard, five-minute cry, she wiped her face, blew her nose on a Kleenex, and reapplied her makeup.

“Stiff upper lip,” she told herself and got back on the highway.

A few minutes later, she rolled past the welcome to valentine, texas, romance capital of the usa billboard.

Seeing the lips painted startlingly black and knowing her daughter was responsible caused her to feel both shocked and irreverently amused. The child had more spunk than Selina had given her credit for.

More spunk than me.

Good. It was wonderful that Rachael was fighting back. If Selina had stood up for herself twenty-seven years ago, she wouldn’t be in this mess now.

She took a deep breath. Okay, maybe she was twenty-seven years too late, but she’d finally worked up her gumption. She was filing for divorce, moving out of Michael’s ancestral family home. She’d already rented a furnished house in town and her friend Giada Vito had already promised her a job as a teacher’s aide.

But now that she was here, where was she supposed to go? What should she do first?

Find Rachael.

She thought about calling her daughter’s cell phone, but she’d been doing that for two days. Rachael wasn’t taking her calls or returning her messages. It was eleven-thirty and she seriously doubted Rachael would still be at the courthouse, especially since her friends were in town. Selina didn’t want to go home and deal with Michael, although he was probably at the country club playing golf.

Home.

The second-biggest house in town — Mayor Kelvin Wentworth owned the biggest — was no longer her home.
Selina was going to have to get used to the idea. It shouldn’t be too hard. Not when she was feeling so betrayed. Not when she’d already rented a house in town.

Honestly, it had never really seemed like her home.

She remembered arriving there as a new bride, filled with silly ideas of happily-ever-after, awed by her wealthy young husband, slavishly in love with him, but terrified he’d married her only because of the new life growing in her womb. It had been tough, living there with his parents. After the girls were born she’d convinced him to buy a quiet modest house in the middle of town. They’d lived there ten years before Michael’s father had a stroke and they’d been forced to move back into the mansion. She couldn’t help thinking those ten years had been the best of her life.

Fresh tears hovered at the back of her eyelids, but resolutely she shoved them away. What was done was done. She couldn’t rewrite history.

“Great, now you’re giving yourself pep talks with platitudes,” she muttered. “You have lived in Valentine too long.”

What she needed was a plan. And first on her list was finding her daughter. It was almost lunchtime. The chances of her being at Higgy’s Diner were good.

As was usual for the Monday blue plate lunch special — meat loaf, garlic mashed potatoes, garden-harvested corn on the cob, buttered biscuits, sweet tea, and peach cobbler; all for just six dollars and ninety-five cents — the parking spaces up and down both sides of Main Street were filled to capacity.

Hoping someone was only running a fast errand inside the Mercantile Bank and would be pulling out soon, Selina steered the Caddy around the next block. And just happened to glance down the alley behind Higgy’s.

Two people, a man and a woman, were sneaking out the back door like illicit lovers. The woman went left, the man went right, headed in Selina’s direction.

She did a double take and slammed on the brakes.

The man was Michael.

And the woman was that hussy Vivian Cole.

Anger and hurt and the aching need for vengeance slapped her like a wet rubber glove across the face. It was one thing to suspect your husband was having an affair with his high school prom-queen ex-sweetheart.

It was quite another to have it so blatantly confirmed.

Twenty-seven years of doubts about a marriage she’d pretended was perfect coalesced into one stunning moment of utter betrayal. Her deepest, darkest fear had just come to pass.

Michael had never truly loved her. He’d just married her because she was pregnant with Rachael. And he’d spent almost three decades lying and pretending. Before she had time to fully think her actions through, Selina shoved the Caddy into reverse and stomped the accelerator. The tires squealed like mating bobcats as she whipped the car around.

Michael spotted her. He stood frozen in the middle of the alley, eyes wide, mouth falling open in disbelief.

Vivian was long gone.

Selina glowered through the windshield at her husband.

Michael raised his palms.

Twenty-seven years of loving him with all her heart, fearing, dreading that he did not love her the way she loved him, robbed her of any rational thought.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Selina gunned the engine and aimed her Cadillac straight toward her rat bastard, soon-to-be ex-husband.

T
HE FOUR FRIENDS
were deep into their meat loaf when a loud, booming impact sounded behind the diner and shook the building.

Rachael’s head jerked up, her fork halfway to her mouth.
What was that?

It sounded like a car wreck.

Immediately half the people in the diner were on their feet and headed for the rear entrance. The first one out the door was Audie Gaston.

“What’s going on?” Delaney asked.

Rachael tensed as a weird feeling of impending doom came over her. “I don’t know.”

“Hey!” Audie yelled. “Someone call 911. Selina Henderson just smacked the hell out of Higgy’s Dumpster with her Caddy and she’s bleeding all over the air bag.”

H
EART THUMPING SO
fast he thought it might pound right out of his chest, Michael yanked open the passenger-side door of his wife’s car. A minute ago, she had been aiming to run him down, but at the last second she’d swerved and demolished Higgy’s Dumpster.

The air bags had deployed and he couldn’t get to her via that route, so he pivoted and wrenched open the back door. He crawled in and leaned over the seat. “Selina, sweetheart, speak to me!”

From behind the wheel of the crunched Caddy, Selina could barely turn her head to look at him. “Fuck off, Michael.”

Startled, he drew back. Never once in twenty-seven years had he heard his wife use such language.

Okay, she was seriously mad. He could respect that but he wasn’t going to let her anger stop him from checking on her.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“That’s none of your damned business.”

She had a cut on her forehead and blood was slowly oozing down the left side of her face. People came pouring out of Higgy’s Diner, but Michael had eyes only for his wife. He reached out a hand.

“Touch me,” she said, “and the next time I try to run you down, I won’t swerve.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“You think I’m blind?” she shrieked. “I saw you with Vivian.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“That’s what you said on our wedding day. And you know what? I believe it is
exactly
what I thought it was. I think you’ve been lying to me for twenty-seven years.” She grimaced.

He didn’t know how badly she’d injured herself in the accident, but he knew her real pain was emotional. And he knew he was the cause. What in the hell was wrong with him? Why had he been having lunch with Vivian?

In public, in front of the whole town.

Well, because it was in front of the whole town. No one would think they were having an affair if they were out in broad daylight together.

We aren’t having an affair.

Maybe not yet, but his thoughts had been running along dangerous lines. Why else had he sneaked out the back door when he realized Rachael and her friends had come into the restaurant?

He’d been hiding from his daughter.

Shame flamed in Michael’s chest. What in the hell had he been thinking? He’d had a great marriage, an unbelievablely wonderful wife, and he’d pissed it all away by flirting with Vivian in those damnable e-mails she’d sent him after she’d separated from her husband. It was stupid. It was a middle-aged man looking back down the road of his life, wondering what might have been. And it had been a grave mistake.

Fool. He was an utter fool.

“Selina, honey,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “You’re bleeding.”

He tried to reach for her again, but Audie Gaston was wrenching open the driver’s-side door and diner patrons were spilling out of Higgy’s and encircling the car. The squealing sound of the siren atop what passed as an ambulance in Valentine — a refurbished old World War II Red Cross vehicle — vibrated the air.

And then he saw Rachael in the crowd, pushing forward to get to her mother.

“Let me through, let me through,” she said.

Michael backed out of the car.

“Daddy?” Rachael’s eyes widened when she spotted him. “What happened?”

“Your mother . . . ” He shook his head, unable to trust his voice.

“Tried to run down your father.” Selina finished his sentence just as the ambulance pulled into the alley behind them.

The EMT rushed forward.

“I’m okay, I’m all right. I don’t need an ambulance.” Selina struggled to get out of the car around the air bag. Audie was holding out a hand to help her up and Rachael was standing beside her, nervously shifting from foot to foot.

Michael ducked his head back into the car. “Honey, you hit your head. You need stitches.”

“You don’t get to call me honey,” Selina snapped and got to her feet.

“Mom,” Rachael cautioned. “Be careful.”

“I’m okay, I’m fine, really —”

Selina swayed and her knees buckled. The EMT caught her before she hit the ground. Michael raced around the back of the Caddy to help the man get her onto the gurney, but Audie Gaston was already there, filling in his role.

“I’m riding in the ambulance with you,” Michael said as Audie and the EMT loaded her into the back of the ambulance.

“No, you’re not,” Selina said. “You gave up your right to do that when you took up with Vivian again.”

“I didn’t take up with her, I —”

“Daddy,” Rachael said, muscling past him to get to her mother and shooting him a darkly accusing glance. “I think you’ve done enough damage for one day.”

“Me? I . . . I . . . ” he stammered, trying to think up a defense but realizing he had none.

Rachael climbed into the ambulance beside her mother and the EMT shut the doors.

Hurt and bewildered, Michael stood there watching his family drive away, and it hit him like a sucker punch to the jaw. Selina was serious. She wasn’t going to try to work things out. There would be no counseling, no couples therapy, no relationship-enhancing retreat.

Clearly, in her mind, their marriage was over.

V
ALENTINE
H
OSPITAL BOASTED
only twenty beds, fifteen full-time nurses, one under-equipped operating room, and two doctors on staff: Dr. John Edison Sr. and Dr. John Edison Jr. The ambulance pulled up outside the emergency room — such as it was — at the same time as the sheriff’s cruiser.

The minute Rachael spied Brody she felt both relieved and anxious. Her heart punched strangely against her chest. She was so happy to have him here. She didn’t know how to handle the fact that her mother had tried to run her father down.

“What are you doing here?” she asked as he came over to help the EMT unload the gurney.

“Checking on your mother.”