“Please,” Regan begged, hating the pleading in her voice, but needing to leave the party with such a sense of urgency, she was trembling from head to toe. “I have a splitting headache. I’m doing more harm than good by trying to talk to people. They’re going to think I’m rude or an idiot or both.”
Her husband took a deep breath, his teeth clenched. He was clearly trying to keep a lid on his anger. “Fine. Have the staff call you a cab.”Relief coursed through her and she gripped the clutch she had collected from their table. “Okay, thank you. I’m sorry, I am. But like I said, I’m barely stringing a sentence together—”
He cut her off, not looking at her, but scanning the room, smiling and nodding at acquaintances who glanced his way. “I heard you,” he said tightly under his breath. “Just go. And take some goddamn aspirin so I don’t have to listen to you complain when I get home.”
Heat flooded her cheeks. As if she ever complained. About anything. “Of course. But I don’t think I have enough money to take a cab.”
For the first time he actually turned and looked down at her, disbelief on his face as he shook his head. “Fucking unbelievable. You have an inheritance that rivals the state of Louisiana’s annual budget and you can’t be bothered to put ten bucks in your purse? Common sense, Regan, learn to use it.”
She said nothing. Just waited, angry, but more eager to leave than to delay a departure by protesting or defending herself. Not that she ever argued.
He sighed, reaching in his pocket for his wallet. Pulling out two twenties, he handed them to her. “You owe me for tonight.”
Of course she did. Nothing was given freely.
“I’ll see you at home.” He kissed her forehead. “Geez, you’re clammy. Get some rest.” Brushing his knuckles across her cheek, he said, “I love you.”
Regan’s stomach flipped again. Oh, God, she had to say it back ... she had to force the words out somehow. She didn’t love him, and she wasn’t even sure when she had stopped. But those feelings didn’t exist anymore, if they ever really had, and that saddened her, panicked her. “I love you, too,” she murmured, avoiding his eyes by pretending to pick lint off of his tie.
Then trying not to run, she waded through the restaurant to the front and surged right past the reservation desk. They were in the French Quarter on a weekend, surely she could find a cab without having to wait around for one to be called, and she needed the cool air outside. Sucking in deep breaths of the crisp December air to settle her stomach, she walked up St. Anne’s, carefully avoiding the sidewalk holes with her heels. She’d forgotten her coat, but she didn’t care. It was in the fifties and she had goose bumps in her sleeveless dress, but the lower temperature felt good on her flushed skin.
After a minute, she snagged a cab and settled on the seat, closing her eyes after giving her address to the driver. What a disaster of a night. How many more just like it would there be before she had the courage to leave her marriage?
What was the matter with her? Why couldn’t she just get the cojones to walk away, to hell with the consequences?
Eyes snapping open, she stared down at her wedding ring. When it had been off, she had felt... lighter. Free.
Herself.
Angry with Beau, herself, the whole situation, she yanked the ring off her finger. Tears back in her eyes, she opened her purse and tossed it to the bottom, below a used tissue. She didn’t want to wear the ring. Didn’t want to see it. So beautiful, so binding...
Regan’s stomach crawled up in her throat again. “Pull over!” she yelled to the driver.
“What?” He glanced back at her in confusion.
“Pull over, I’m going to be sick.” Regan was already opening the door as he headed to the curb, and she violently threw up the wine and the very little dinner she’d eaten.
It splashed her arm, her hair, and all over the street. Shuddering, she hung there for a minute after the heaving stopped, then wiped her mouth and shut the door. “Okay, you can drive.”
The sooner she got home the sooner she could pack her bags and move out.
Chapter Two
“I’m totally moving in with you.”
Regan Henry thrust up the latch to unlock the French doors leading to her bedroom balcony and shot her best friend Chris Davidson an amused look over her shoulder. She was 98 percent certain he was joking, but even after a decade of friendship sometimes the other 2 percent of randomness he exhibited threw her. “You’re moving into my bedroom?”“Yes, and you can’t stop me.” Chris spun in a circle in the middle of the almost empty master bedroom of her newly purchased nineteenth-century house, his shoes squeaking on the wood floor. “This is the biggest bedroom I’ve ever seen in my life. A whole football team could shack up in here with us, and think how much fun that would be.”
His eyebrows went up and down suggestively and Regan laughed as she shoved open the glass doors and felt the warm spring breeze sweep over her. She set down the bottle of wine and plastic cups they had brought and flicked the switches by the doors, trying to find one that turned the outside lights on so they wouldn’t be sitting in the dark. “Neither one of us could date a football player. So not our type.”
Not that she was ready to date, but she would be someday, and it wouldn’t be a professional athlete, she could pretty much guarantee.
“True. I prefer men who can read.”
“You’re disparaging an entire sport, you know.” Regan closed her eyes and breathed deep the night air. The scent of flowers from the neighbor’s hanging baskets filled her nostrils, and God, she felt good. The deep satisfaction at having a big, expansive house, a gallery that oversaw the narrow streets of the French Quarter, a space that was just hers and no one else’s, was intoxicating.
Freedom.
Giddy, overwhelming, exhilarating freedom. It was hers again. All choices, good and bad, were hers alone to make since she had left her husband Beau that night of the law firm’s Christmas party. It had been an ugly three months, filled with daily communications from him that had vacillated between coaxing, pleading, charming vows of love, and pure venomous anger. She had caught him off guard by moving out that night, but it hadn’t taken him long to regroup, and he had used every weapon in his arsenal from the emotional to the financial to get her to come back to him.
She hadn’t, and she was more proud of that than anything else she had accomplished in her life. Not that he was resigned to their divorce or cooperating one iota, but she was through the worst of the paperwork and details of separating her life from his. She was moving into this house in the morning, and she was a cocktail of emotions, nervous and excited all at once.