Tender to His Touch. Adrianne Byrd
it all came crashing to an end.
More tears leaked from Beverly’s eyes.
From a distance, a car turned into the driveway. She turned her head toward the open window and listened to the smooth rumble of a Mercedes engine as it coasted toward the house. Beverly wiped her face and reached for her satin robe draped over the foot of her bed.
Beneath the window, the engine shut off, the car door opened and then slammed shut. The familiar footfalls of expensive Ferragamo loafers slapped against the pavement and then up the front porch. Beverly stood when she heard keys rattle in the front-door lock.
Inside the house, the heavy footsteps continued through the foyer and then up the staircase. Beverly tried to mentally prepare herself for her daily battle, but on this day she found that she simply couldn’t. She just didn’t have anything left.
The knob turned and the bedroom door crept open. David poked his head inside, his attention on the empty bed.
“Glad to see that you found your way home,” Beverly said, her wintry voice chilling the room. “And here I thought buying that GPS unit was a complete waste of money.”
Unable to hide his disappointment, David released a long, frustrated sigh. “I thought you’d still be asleep.”
“I haven’t slept in years.”
He rolled his eyes and pulled his wrinkled tie from around his neck. “Maybe that’s your problem.” David headed toward the adjoining bathroom.
“My problem?” she said, her eyes narrowing on his retreating back. Beverly followed. “Maybe my problem is that my husband is out screwing his office manager at all hours of the night while I’m stuck in this suburban prison cooking dinners for one.”
“There you go again. No one’s screwing around,” he said. “And I’m not stopping you from getting out of the house. That’s your choice. In fact, I wish you would get out. Maybe the neighbors would stop looking at me as if I’ve chained you up in the basement or something.” He turned on the shower.
“No one’s screwing around,” she thundered incredulously.
“Do I look stupid to you?” she hissed. “It is six o’clock in the morning. Nearly twelve hours since the office closed yesterday. Are you going to tell me that you had some dental emergency that kept you at the office and strategically away from a phone all this time?”
His eyes rolled again as he unbuttoned and then slid out of his pants. “I went out for a few drinks with the guys. I crashed over at Curtis’s place.”
David finally stopped and looked at her. Guilt was etched in every inch of his handsome face. The same face that she’d once vowed to love for the rest of her life. She now longed to rake her nails down its gorgeous perfection. Why did it seem as if the nightmare of the last three years had not scared him the way it had her? Why was it so easy for him to just move on? If they were truly soul mates why weren’t they living in the same hell?
“What?” David asked defensively.
“If you’re going to be a playa, then learn to get your lies straight.”
“I told you—”
“Curtis called here last night looking for you. He wanted to know whether you two were still going fishing today.”
Thick clouds of steam billowed from the shower, then swirled around the fractured husband and wife. The battle of their heated gazes raged on for a few heartbreaking seconds and then finally, resignation flickered across David’s face. He’d been busted and his brain failed to come up with a plausible lie.
“Just admit it,” she urged in a thin whisper. She half convinced herself that she would feel better if he’d just confess that he’d been having an affair. Confess that the perfume clinging to his clothes right now wasn’t just her imagination.
“Beverly—”
“Say it,” she choked out.
“Bev—”
“Goddamn it, say it!” She snatched a curling iron from the vanity counter and hurled it at him. The bastard ducked and the curling iron slammed against the glass shower stall. It hit a weak spot and the whole thing shattered as if she had unloaded an AK-47 at it.
David leaped away from the shower as shards of glass launched toward him. “All right! All right! I’m having an affair. Are you happy now?” he roared.
Beverly sucked in a breath and stepped back as if he’d punched her. Her mind reeled. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to hit him, scratch him or kick him in the balls.
As he realized what he had said, regret blanketed David’s face. He reached for her. “Beverly, I—”
“Don’t touch me.” She pulled away. “I want you out. Out of this house and out of my life!”
“Look, Beverly. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s over.” She took another huge step back, shaking her head. “I want a divorce,” she said evenly.
He wouldn’t give up. “We’ve been through a lot,” he reminded her. “We can get through this.”
“No, we can’t,” she contradicted. “We can’t…because I don’t love you anymore.”
Chapter 1
Two years later
A jacketless and tieless Lucius Gray was nearing his tenth hour poring over documents and case files. He kept telling himself that he’d quit for the day—or rather, night—every ten minutes, but his determination to know this wrongful death case backward and forward prevented him from leaving. He wanted all his ducks in a row so he could squeeze Dr. E. J. Stewart and his insurance company into settling the case for a mid-eight-figure settlement.
It wasn’t one of his biggest litigation cases, but this particular case hit him hard. The similarities between Mr. Keith Johnson’s death and Lucius’s father’s were just too striking. Dr. Stewart, a cardiologist, kept finding nothing wrong with Mr. Johnson a year after he had a stint implanted and recommended he see an oncologist for his illness. Of course the oncologist found nothing wrong with him and kept referring him back to his cardiologist. All the while, Mr. Johnson’s condition grew worse and worse. When he finally passed away, the autopsy showed that he had a lot of blockages in his arteries and his poor heart just gave out. There were so many of them that it was just unexplainable how Dr. Stewart had missed the obvious.
What did it say about the state of the health-care system when doctors were just too busy to do their jobs?
The phone chirped.
Lucius glanced up, annoyed to have had his concentration broken. He punched the speakerphone button. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Gray, I have your wife on line one.”
He frowned. “You mean my ex-wife, don’t you, Maggie?”
“I’m just repeating what she said.”
Lucius drew a deep breath and pitched back into his chair. Until that moment, he hadn’t noticed how hungry he was or how tight his neck muscles had become.
“Mr. Gray?”
“Put her through,” he said and expelled a tired breath. In the next second the phone rang and he picked up. “What can I do for you, Erica?”
“You haven’t been able to do anything for me in a looooonnng time,” she answered in her usual sarcastic tone.
He rolled his eyes. “I really don’t have time to fight with you right now. So—”
“I know. I know,” Erica huffed. “You’re working on a really important case. The story of our marriage.”
“So you kept reminding me through the divorce.” Lucius’s office door crept