Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 49259 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 246(@200wpm)___ 197(@250wpm)___ 164(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49259 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 246(@200wpm)___ 197(@250wpm)___ 164(@300wpm)
Trudy always was a dingbat with a heart of gold. She’s sweet in her own way, but the girl has never met a pill she didn’t think looked like an M&M. I kept the conversation going in that same vein while watching Jessica out the side of my eye, enjoying her discomfort.
Five minutes before she should have been leaving to go back to the office, if she didn’t want to be late, I accidentally spilled half a glass of red wine in her lap. “Oh no, how clumsy of me. Waiter, may we have some seltzer, please? You should go to the restroom and try to wipe that up. Since I was the one to make a mess, I will give you the rest of the afternoon off. You can’t go back to work like that.”
I smiled apologetically and got to my feet until she stood and walked to the restroom with the plastic cup of seltzer and a handful of napkins. Almost as soon as she left, my husband and his lunch guests came down the stairs deep in discussion.
“Mark? Funny running into you here?”
“Sweetheart, what are you doing here? Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to my wife.”
“I’m not crashing, I promise; the girls and I were here for lunch.” I pointed to the table where Melissa and Trudy were behaving for once and not sniping at each other.
“I guess I’ll see you at home; I won’t keep you.” He kissed my cheek, and I sent him on his way, watching until he disappeared from view. He was long gone by the time little Ms. Homewrecker made it back from the restroom.
CHAPTER 16
I rushed the end of lunch once Jessica left because I wanted to be home for the end of the show. It came to me that if these two are preoccupied with other things, they won’t have time to mess with other people’s lives, namely my husband’s, and I also want to keep them off kilter so they can give themselves away.
It's asinine and juvenile, but I’m not trained in espionage. I had at least reminded Trudy of Jack’s presence just in case she had forgotten, and knowing her, she’d be hounding him soon. I’d put a bug in Jessica’s ear that people were noticing the relationship between her and Jack, which should make them both panic, and best of all, I had witnesses to the fact that my husband didn’t even know she was at that restaurant on that particular day.
Of course, I paid with a credit card and would be asking for printouts of everything pertaining to my husband’s business lunches offsite, just for my records, of course. In case they were thinking of forging or photoshopping anything in the future, I was keeping records going forward.
But the best was yet to come, and that is why I rushed home to my office to enjoy the show. Of course, she had beaten me home and had been in her apartment for a few minutes by the time I switched on the camera.
I sat through her ranting and raving about me screwing up her day and destroying her suit, among other things. She was walking in and out of the bathroom as she got undressed until the moment I was waiting for came.
Now, see, Jessica has a habit of sitting on the edge of the bed to remove her heels, then dropping back with her arms spread. I guess that was her way of decompressing. Then she lays on her side to scroll through her phone and answer emails or whatever she’s doing.
Her routine hardly ever varies, and that’s what I was hoping for this time as well. True to form, she threw her shoes across the room, flung her arms out wide, and fell back across the mattress with a sigh.
I smirked when she yelped and flung the covers of the unmade bed aside, then almost broke her ass, falling on the floor to get away from the wakening snake that had been disturbed. I had to cover my ears from her screams. They were so loud.
Now, who can she call? Seeing as she was not supposed to be there. She wouldn’t want to leave a paper trail after all, and dear old Jack wouldn’t allow her to call anyone to take care of the problem. I waited for her to calm down enough to make the call before heading back out again.
When Jack showed up at the apartment building, I just so happened to be speaking to the building’s concierge about the things I’d found earlier that day that needed taking care of before the new tenants arrived. “Jack? What are you doing here? I didn’t know you lived in the area.”
He almost fell over his feet and stuttered for the first few seconds before coming up with a plausible excuse for being in the area. He dared not claim to be visiting a friend in the building because then I’d ask questions. I then introduced him to the doorman and made a point of letting it be known in a roundabout way that he had no affiliation with the building.