Exposed (4 page)

He didn't want to scare her, so he cleared his throat a couple of times, not moving closer. Her head turned at the sound and she sat upright in the seat. He could see she'd been crying and he wondered what her lousy husband had done to her.

He wanted to tell her to cry for both of them, because he couldn't. Her hand rose to block the light from glaring directly in her eyes. "Jack?" Her voice was soft, but with a very lost quality.

"Yes, Mrs. Cooper. I just happened to see your car over here." He pointed across the street. "My business is over there."

"Don't call me that," she exclaimed with some anger. "Just Nia," she finished.

He could certainly understand that, he thought, as he asked, "Nia, what are you doing out here?" Her lovely features nearly crumbled, and he added quickly, "If those TV people left you here, I will—"

"No," she exclaimed, interrupting him. "He took all the money out of our accounts. Every last penny."

Her hand fell to the open window ledge, clutching it, as he approached. Then he crouched by her car to be at eyelevel with her.

"Nia, no," he uttered, feeling the anger he'd been wrestling with all day rising again. "Rotten bastards," he swore.

He thought perhaps he shouldn't have said that, but Nia was watching his mouth with a partial smile of anticipation.

"Say it again," she whispered, glancing at his eyes, then back down at his mouth again.

He nearly smiled. "Your rotten, no-good bastard husband deserves ..." He got stuck on that and he didn't want to completely shock her.

"He deserves a disease," she offered with relish. "An awful, sexual one," she added.

Jack decided they both liked that one immensely as they looked at each other with partial smiles.

Then Nia sighed, with her smile leaving. "So Dan didn't come home for several hours, and I found out when I went to the bank to withdraw some money for a motel room that he'd used the time to withdraw all but one dollar from our bank accounts. Dan knows money," she said.

"A motel room?" Jack asked, trying to keep the anger from his voice. How could Cooper throw his pretty wife out on the streets with no money? At least he knew Sadie had a couple of credit cards. One with both their names on it, which worried him.

"Dan brought your wife home," Nia whispered, as if she was going to wound him, which she did. "To stay," she added—the final blow.

Jack stood, smashing his fingers into a fist over the deposit bag. "Those ..." He stomped one way. "Those ..." He stomped back. "How
could
they," he finally uttered. He was at a loss to find a name to call them that was vile enough for their actions.

"Bastards!" Nia exclaimed, and he knew the betrayal wasn't as fresh for her as it was for him. She'd been through a horde of emotions already about this newest ambush, while he was just freshly seething.

Of course, he'd suspected his wife was cheating. He'd been dealing with it for a while. He'd prepared himself for the encounter today. Emotions in check. However, for the first time since it all started, something had come along and blindsided him. He thought he was more enraged with the way they were treating Nia than he was angry about the infidelity.

He heard Nia’s car door open and close as he continued to pace.

"Jack, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to just blurt that out like that and upset you."

Nia's voice sounded worried and the height of his anger immediately ratcheted down before it. "Damn it, Nia." He stopped pacing and turned to her. "Don't apologize."

"I guess there’s no way not to be upset," she said, shrugging. "This is all so unreal."

Jack unclenched his fingers from the bank bag. "It's like I never knew her," he said slowly.

Nia wrapped her arms around her waist, as if she were cold. She still wore a short-sleeve white blouse over jeans, but her work apron was gone. "How could they change so much and so quickly?" she muttered.

Jack knew if they both didn't believe that idea, the alternative was they were blind idiots. He walked to stand beside her and the hood of her car, where he set down his laptop case and the bank bag. With his hands free, he shook out the leather jacket he'd been carrying.

"Here, you're cold. Wear this."

She looked about ready to say "no," but then she turned her back to him to accept the jacket, and he guided it over her slender shoulders. Of course it was too large for her petite figure, but she didn't put her arms in the sleeves.

"Thank you," she murmured, looking back and up at him with soft appreciation on her face. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt like a man around a woman. He cleared his throat, trying to regain his bearings.

"So ..." he started to say slowly as she turned to him with the parking-lot light sending shimmers through her shoulder-length dark hair. "I can't leave you out here." He was saying it for her, but he was also saying it so he realized it too.

"I'll be fine ..." she started to say.

"How?" he asked.

"I'll ..." She paused, looking at her car, the parking lot, then back to him. "Well, um, I will sleep in my car, because I cut up my credit cards over two months ago."

"No, about sleeping in that car out here ... alone," he said first with furrowed eyebrows. Then he asked, "You cut them up?"

She looked sheepish. "There was this TV show about getting out of all debt and I got excited about it." She paused, moving to lean back on the car with him. "Now that I think about it, Dan never got excited about it at all." She looked down at her brown sandals and he noticed she painted her toenails and had two silver toe rings on the dainty digits. That surprised him a bit, hinting to his way of thinking about the hidden depths of a suburban housewife.

"But one of those steps was to cut up your credit cards so you could only pay them off and not be able to charge anything more on them," she said, and then she sighed. "So, I guess I'm really stuck."

The minute he realized she was abandoned and homeless, a crazy idea popped into his head. Hell, he could easily give her the money for a room. But somehow he didn't like the idea of her being all alone in some anonymous room.

"You can stay with me." He all but blurted the crazy idea with an abandon he'd not woken up with that morning. But tonight his life was completely changed, and the moment he said it, he liked the idea even better.

"Oh, Jack," Nia exclaimed softly, and he liked the way she said his name. "I couldn't."

"Yes, you could." He smiled at her with a conspirator's smirk.

"Jack.” She drawled out his name while she tapped the top of his hand, braced on the hood of her car. "You’re thinking it might make them crazy?"

He nodded, liking the idea more and more—specifically because it would make Sadie crazy.

"Look," he said, folding into a serious tone, "my house is a damn ponderosa. There's another entire side of it with guest bedroom and bath that I haven't seen in a couple months." He paused, thinking it through. "I'm at work a lot, and the only common areas of my house are in the middle—the kitchen. You might not see me for a month."

Nia couldn't believe Jack was offering her a place to stay at his house. She barely knew him. Of course, she'd already thought of her friends, who were all married, and she couldn't bring herself to impose on their marriages that way. Besides, the time was going to come soon enough that they’d all learn her marriage had failed ... and the reason it had failed.

Frankly, she was afraid to sleep in her car. One door wouldn't lock. That was what she'd just finished crying about when Jack showed up—the awful realization she might have to go back home and stay there while Sadie was there. She could think of more horrible things, like her husband cheating—but not much.

Jack was watching her intently. His brown eyes were so dark they nearly looked black and he wore his burnished blond hair short, but long enough so it had a slight wave. She'd guessed by his overall well-built stature and appearance there was some athletics in his background.

She couldn't believe she was doing this. "If I could just get one or two paychecks, then ..."

"Done." He responded so quickly and assuredly it made her smile up at him.

"I won't be any trouble, I swear," she said. "I will clean up after myself." Then, under her breath, she said, "I can't believe I'm doing this."

"It doesn't matter what they think anymore, Nia," Jack said starkly, and she knew she had to really start believing that soon.

J
ack thought it was surreal, bringing Nia home. He wanted to ... it was his idea. The strange part was he was worried over what she'd think of his house. How clean it was, the decoration, and the appearance. He'd never realized homes were extensions of people, and he wanted Nia to like his. Of course, she'd seen it. But living there was quite different in intimate details. Such as the two explicit girlie magazines he'd forgotten he'd left on the guest bed when he went in there some months ago to relieve his complete sexual frustration with his wife.

"Ah, hell, sorry."

He dropped Nia's two suitcases and hurriedly reached for the dirty magazines on top of the black and gold bedspread. The room was otherwise neatly kept, and decorated to the hilt by his soon-to-be former wife.

"No ... leave them," Nia said, then she immediately blushed so much when his gaze hit hers that he couldn't help smiling. "I-I've never seen one," she stammered, then she said, "It's okay." As if trying to make him feel more comfortable.

For some reason he thought if she was going to test the waters and look at some nude magazines she shouldn’t start with such explicit ones. She was a housewife, for Christ's sake.

"They're, ah, explicit," he said, looking down on her.

"Okay ... I still want them," she replied, with much less embarrassment.

Jack figured there was something going on here he was missing, which was typical about men understanding women. He just wanted one of them to think he was a hero, and therefore want to lick him from head to toe, at least once a day—then he'd never need to completely understand them. Because understanding them was impossible.

"Well, where can I put your suitcases for you?" he asked, moving over the tricky subject, and he bent to grab her suitcases.

"The dresser and that chair would be good," she said, walking over to peek in the bathroom with a flip of the light on and off. "This bedroom is decorated so nicely, Jack. I've never seen any guestroom so lush before. Did a decorator do it?"

Jack stalled, wondering what it was about Nia saying the word "lush." Then he offered in a tight voice, "Sadie did it." At least he hadn't said, "My wife did it."

"Oh, heck, I shouldn't have asked that," Nia said. "You don't want to say. I don't want to know that. We don't ..." She paused with a big breath. "The room’s too dark, Jack. And, my God, what are those awful things on the dresser?"

Jack went from tightly wound into chuckling within seconds as he set her suitcases where she wanted them, and then he stopped by the offending "things."

"Decorative accents, Sadie would call them. I have always thought they look like tall pregnant monkeys, and who the hell wants that on their bureau?"

Nia laughed, and when he looked at her she had her fingers over her lips with a smile behind them. She was looking over his shoulder, and he turned. "So, Jack, is that a picture of two large black blobs on gold?"

He could tell she was trying not to laugh outright, and he stopped being uptight about whether she'd like his house, because he realized none of the stuff in it was him. It was all Sadie. “I'm afraid to know how much I paid for that thing." He looked back at her. "It’s supposed to be abstract art, Sadie said, when I asked the same thing."

Nia nodded, chuckling behind her fingers.

"Nia, you have my permission to move any of this stuff you don't want into the garage. I will be making a pile of Sadie's things out there," he told her. He realized as the last of it left his mouth that it brought a damper over any lightheartedness they’d been feeling. Nia's hand dropped from her mouth and he regretted that she wasn't smiling anymore.

“All right, Nia ... well, we both better try to get some sleep. I leave very early to open Rent-All in the morning, but I’ll leave my cell number on the kitchen counter if you need me," he said, while moving toward the open doorway. "So eat anything in the fridge you want, and I’ll get you a key tomorrow."

"I work from eight to one tomorrow," Nia said.

"If you don't mind stopping by Rent-All after work, I’ll have a key for you," he said, and she nodded her answer to him.

Then a metallic Elvis Presley song sounded in the room. "Oh, my phone," Nia called, slinging her artsy purse around to dig inside as the song "Love Me Tender" played.

"Man, it had to be Elvis with that car," Jack burst out.

Nia gave him a quick agreeing grin while she put the phone to her ear without checking to see who it was. Jack stalled halfway out of the room when he saw Nia's luminous eyes grow stark, while her elegant nose scrunched and her lips grimaced. He didn't need to hear the voice on the other end of the call to know it was her husband.

"What could you possibly want, Dan?"

Jack tried to get himself to leave ... but he didn't.

"You threw me out! Why worry where I went,
you
cheater?" Nia gasped at whatever Cooper replied, and then she hissed her answer into the phone: "You took all our money, Dan! That is so ... so low down!" With barely a pause, she added, "If it weren't for those cameras I wouldn’t have ever found out you were cheating on your vows!"

Nia cupped her hand over the bottom of the cell, and Jack guessed it was so Cooper couldn’t hear, as she whispered, "He's going on about how wrong those cameras were and how he may lose his job."

Jack lifted an exasperated eyebrow to her.

"Not one word about asking for forgiveness," Nia whispered. Then she lifted her hand, and she said into the cell, "Dan, I'm no longer your wife so
don't
call me anymore and ask where I am!" Nia flipped her cell shut with a snap of finality, saying, "I think he was alone."