Fool Me Once (First Wives Series Book 1)

by Catherine Bybee

“Blame the asshole.”

  Reed glanced up to see Avery tipping her cocktail back. She reached for the pitcher they’d ordered, and he stopped her. “Uh, how about some water?”

  She scowled but reached for the water instead.

  He pretended to go back to his book.

  “You’re dropping me off in New York?” Trina asked.

  “Yep. Your bodyguards are picking you up while we refuel.”

  Reed looked over the edge of his book. “Bodyguards?”

  “Hey, maybe I should have one of them.”

  “Don’t wish that on yourself,” Shannon told Avery. “I always had guys around when I was married to Paul. It’s overrated.”

  “I don’t want to hear that,” Trina said. “I like my privacy.”

  Lori set her drink down. “It’s not that bad. Neil’s team is the best. Discreet. You’ll be fine.”

  “Hey?” Reed caught their attention all at once. “Why do you need a bodyguard?”

  For a moment they all just stared at him like he was an idiot.

  “Should we even be talking about this?” Avery, the drunkest of them all, asked the logical question.

  Trina rolled her eyes. “I came into a little bit of money. And clearly there are people out there who think nothing of taking what isn’t theirs.”

  “A little bit of money?”

  Avery spread her hands wide and mouthed the words a lot.

  “Huh . . . so maybe it’s a good thing you cut Miguel off,” Reed said.

  Again, the women were all silent as they contemplated his words.

  Avery broke the silence.

  “I can’t believe I fell for that asshole.”

  Then came the chorus.

  Reed found himself joining in. “All men are assholes.”

  And he was one of the worst of them all.

  He met Lori and the others after they cleared customs the next day.

  Avery and Trina were huddled under the dark shades of their sunglasses, shielding their eyes as if the clouded sky burned their retinas. Shannon appeared slightly better, and Lori looked almost normal.

  “I see you’re all alive,” he addressed them while a valet gathered their bags and put them in the back of a massive SUV.

  “I probably have you to thank for that,” Avery told him.

  He grinned. “You’re welcome, then.”

  She waved a hand in the air and moved toward the car. “I need to sit down.”

  Trina offered him a quick hug. “Thanks for watching over us.”

  Guilt sucker punched him. “Take care of yourself.”

  Shannon said her good-bye next. “Thanks for not bringing up the obvious.”

  He hugged her. “I didn’t vote for him, if that makes you feel any better.”

  She sighed and got into the car.

  Then there was Lori.

  “I don’t envy their flight home,” he said.

  “They’ll be okay. Probably sleep most of the day.”

  He placed a hand on her shoulder. “And you?”

  “I have a lot of work to catch up on.”

  “Back to business?”

  “Yeah.”

  He took up position in her personal space and placed both hands on her cheeks. “I want to see you again.” Which was true. They hadn’t shared five carefree minutes alone since Italy.

  “Do you think we can work back in LA?”

  “Not sure, but it’s worth trying.”

  She pressed her frame next to his. “You have my number.”

  He leaned in and kissed her, felt his chest tighten with guilt or pleasure, he wasn’t sure. Probably a little of both.

  He heard the trunk of the SUV shut and ended their kiss.

  “Safe flight home, Counselor.”

  “Good-bye, Reed.”

  He waved as the car pulled away.

  He turned back toward Barcelona . . . where he planned on finding out more about Miguel and Rogelio . . . the amateur thieving assholes who gave all men a bad name.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jet lag was a combination of the hangover of a lifetime and receiving an injectable dose of caffeine at two in the morning.

  Lori looked at her bedside clock as two in the morning turned into two thirty. She’d punched her pillow, turned it a few times to see if cooling her face would lure her to sleep.

  Nothing worked. She had an early morning meeting followed by lunch with Sam to go over all the details of her trip, and at this point Lori was fairly certain she’d be dozing off in her soup.

  Giving up, she switched on the dim bedroom lamp and grabbed her cell phone.

  Was he thinking about her?

  Did Reed toss and turn in his bed, close his eyes, and sense her beside him?

  On the ship, she’d been inundated with responsibility and still managed a little romance. Now that she was home in bed . . . without the swaying of a ship reminding her that she had a job to do, her mind kept flashing back to Reed and his smile, the way he held her, kissed her.

  The problem with the thoughts milling about in her head wasn’t the lift she felt in her chest, or the schoolgirl excitement that made her smile, it was the possibility that she was alone in her joy. Was Reed a weeklong fling?

  Would he call?

  The clock slipped closer to three.

  She opened up her text messages and found Reed’s name. She reread his texts from the ship several times. Then, before she could talk herself out of it, she started typing.

  I can’t sleep. My body is still in the Mediterranean.

  She pressed “Send” and tapped her thumb against the side of her phone for ten minutes, willing Reed to respond with her mind.

  Nothing.

  At 3:10, she set her phone aside, turned off the light, and forced her eyes to close.

  With one ear open to catch the buzz of a response from her phone, Lori finally fell asleep thirty minutes before she needed to get up to go to the office.

  Reed timed it so he left his apartment after the morning traffic was done clogging up everything. Although, in LA it was always a crapshoot when you aimed your car toward a freeway, even at two in the morning.

  He’d spent two days painting profiles of four women.

  Shannon Redding-Wentworth, just about to turn thirty-two, had met and married the governor before his run for office. Then a year and a half into his four-year term, they filed for a divorce. Shannon walked away without fanfare, a tidy sum, and a house in Southern California. The divorced couple were still seen at the same functions at times, no bad publicity circulated in the gossip magazines that didn’t appear completely fabricated. After meeting the woman and spending the better part of a week with her, he didn’t believe for a minute that she’d been found with twenty-one-year-old twins at a seedy Hollywood club. The tabloids had a way of making a story where there wasn’t one. So did politicians, like the one who hired him to find dirt. Any other case, Reed would have reported to his client that there wasn’t anything there. Except he had the nagging feeling that something wasn’t completely right. Then there was Sasha . . . who didn’t seem to be following Shannon at all. No, she was watching Trina and Lori. Why?

  The retired police officer in him had surfaced sometime between when he climbed into a crowded plane for a free trip to Europe and now.

  And that hadn’t happened in years. He’d reinvented himself as a PI void of emotion. He had gone through the motions of investigating, spying, gathering dirt for his clients, delivering it, and walking away with enough money to pay his rent and have a few nice things. No emotion, no involvement . . .

  Until Lori.

  He found her text when he forced his eyes open at eight in the morning. The irony was he’d been up thirty minutes before she’d sent her message, and desired to send one himself.

  He didn’t, not wanting to wake her . . . and more, not wanting to come off as an infatuated lover.

  Even though that was exactly what he was.

  Instead, he sent her a text
after nine, made a crack about her inability to sleep because of him.

  Lori flirted back with a crack about his ego.

  He shook his thoughts about her aside and thought about the case he was forming in his head.

  Avery Grant, just turned thirty, newly divorced from a man nearly twice her age. It took some searching, but he found enough information about her divorce to know she’d also walked away with a tidy sum from her rich, hedge funding husband. No nasty tabloid bits about their marriage, but keeping with the theme he’d seen on the ship, Avery didn’t wait to cut loose. He didn’t know divorce parties were a thing, but someone managed to take pictures that were printed in a tabloid the week after her divorce was final.

  Trina Petrov . . . now there was a woman with some seriously bad mojo. He found pictures of her late husband and her . . . they didn’t match. She was stunning, and he had been less than mediocre. Then again, that happened sometimes, like the supertall woman with the man scratching at five four with a two-inch boot. Still, they’d been married for just under a year when hubby offed himself. The financials of what was left to her weren’t disclosed, but he was still digging. Follow the money and you’ll have a case . . . or so he had learned when he was on the force. He could only imagine the kind of wealth the man had. He was a grandson to a prominent oil family, a businessman with his own multimillion-dollar company.

  Trina’s face was in plenty of tabloids with the death of her husband and mother-in-law all in the same month.

  She was a woman torn. He’d seen her with barely a smile on her face, and he’d seen her stumbling drunk and dancing. Sure, there was a high probability of someone drugging her, but still. Would a widow who loved her late husband even be on that ship in the first place? There was something missing in this link.

  And then there was Lori. The divorce attorney who said they were all friends simply traveling together.

  Avery and Shannon’s divorces were highly publicized, and Lori was mentioned both times. Trina didn’t count, since her husband was dead.

  Or did she? There was something he was missing, yet he knew it was right there if he just looked close enough to see it.

  Lori’s office was a posh little affair sitting in ambiguous office space in one of the many high-rises in Los Angeles. She didn’t work for a firm and didn’t have several partners of her own. Which told him that she didn’t need their financial help in keeping office space or staff. That didn’t mean she had a tiny footprint, however. Her office screamed money nearly as much as the clientele that walked through the door.

  A little over a week after he’d left her in Spain, Reed walked through the thick wooden door of Lori Cumberland, Attorney at Law, and into a reception area large enough to keep two feuding parties far enough apart to avoid Armageddon.

  He stepped up to the empty reception desk and looked around.

  Lori’s business card, along with one for her paralegal, sat in a small basket. He picked up Lori’s and ran his thumb over the silver embossed lettering.

  “Can I help you?”

  The voice belonged to a woman in her late forties.

  “Is Lori in?”

  “Do you have an appointment, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Barlow, and no, I don’t. If you can tell Lori that Reed is here.”

  “Ms. Cumberland isn’t back from lunch yet.” The secretary took a seat in one of those ergonomic chairs and placed a set of reading glasses on the bridge of her nose. “She’s extremely busy this afternoon. I can schedule an appointment.”

  Reed leaned against the high reception desk, offered a smile reserved for charming answers out of women.

  “I’m not in need of a divorce.”

  The secretary smiled, her eyes questioning him before she asked, “Are you writing up a prenuptial agreement?”

  “No, I am not.”

  “Then what is it that you need Ms. Cumberland’s service for?”

  He couldn’t stop the image of Lori’s face as he kissed her from taking firm hold in his head.

  “It’s personal.”

  “I’m sure it is, Mr. Barlow, but I’d still need to make an appointment in Ms. Cumberland’s schedule to accommodate you.”

  The office door opened from behind.

  Business Lori wore a tight pencil skirt, heels that weren’t too tall. Her silk blouse covered the creamy skin of her chest but accentuated the curve of her breasts. Her hair was partially held back in a loose bun that probably took her way too long to put up.

  She made it two steps into the office with an auburn haired petite woman at her side before she recognized him.

  “Reed?”

  “Hello, Lori.” He dropped his voice.

  She blushed.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood.” Via a few freeways and with no other destination in mind.

  “I was encouraging Mr. Barlow to make an appointment,” Lori’s secretary said from behind the desk.

  “It’s okay, Liana. Reed’s a friend.”

  The redhead cleared her throat with an amused smile.

  “I’m sorry. Sam Harrison, this is Reed Barlow.”

  Ah, yes . . . the woman from the papers.

  He held out his hand.

  “Lori and I met in Barcelona.”

  Sam shook with the grip of a woman in business and not one only used to entertaining guests from her country club. “Is that right? How come you didn’t tell me about him?” she asked Lori.

  Lori opened her mouth, closed it, and turned to Reed. “I wanted to keep him to myself.”

  Sam choked on a laugh.

  “I guess I messed that up,” he said, grinning.

  Lori rolled her eyes and stepped close. He took her advance as an opportunity to kiss her cheek in greeting.

  “It looks like we will have more to talk about at dinner on Sunday,” Samantha told Lori.

  “Should I be worried?” Reed teased.

  “Probably,” Sam said. “Lori’s always welcome to bring a plus one . . .”

  Reed wanted to jump at the invitation; instead, he looked to Lori for direction.

  She wasn’t jumping.

  “Maybe next time,” he told Lori’s friend.

  “Perhaps. Lori?” Sam turned to her friend. “I’ll see you this weekend. Call me after New York.”

  The two women hugged briefly before Sam turned and left.

  “Liana, when is my next client?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  Lori gave a quick nod into the depths of the office. “That’s all the time I have,” she told him.

  “I’ll take it.”

  He followed her down a short hall, past a conference room, around a small kitchen, and past an open office. From there, she welcomed him into her office space.

  It wasn’t cluttered with papers all over a desk or useless knickknacks. It was clean lines and professional decor mixed with just enough elegance to say the space was occupied by a woman.

  She closed the door behind them and walked around her desk.

  He followed her.

  “What are you—”

  He didn’t let her finish her question before he grasped her slim hips, turned her around to face him, and lifted her until her butt was on her desk.

  Lori sucked in a breath but didn’t push him away.

  “I missed you.”

  She bit her lower lip, and he replaced her teeth with his kiss.

  He tasted her surprise, followed quickly by acceptance.

  Lori kissed back with a fevered pitch. Her hand traveled down his back and over his ass before she dug her fingertips in.

  All his brain cells traveled down in a mad rush to fill his cock with heat.

  Danger zone, Reed.

  He attempted to pull back, but she didn’t let him. Lips open, tongue demanding, Lori moaned until she started to squirm.

  Reed gently grasped her groping hands and weaved his fingers together with hers. “Greedy woman,” he whispered when he forced
their kiss to end.

  “You started it.”

  He took one of their clasped hands and rubbed the back of hers against his erection.

  “Have an itch?” she asked, teasing.

  “Yes. And only a high-powered divorce attorney by the name of Lori can scratch it.”

  She licked her lips. “I have to work.”

  “Tonight . . . for dinner.”

  “Can’t. Dinner meeting with a client.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Tomorrow?”

  She gripped his hands tighter. “I have a late appointment. But maybe.”

  “Seven?”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  He rubbed himself with her hand again.

  She smiled. “Fine. My place, but you can’t stay the night. I have an early flight to New York.”

  “You just got home.”

  “Can’t be helped. Trina needs me.”

  Yep, yep . . . more to the Trina story.

  “Okay. I’ll leave by midnight.”

  “Eleven.”

  Was this a negotiation?

  “Eleven thirty, and I’ll bring wine.”

  She smiled. “Deal.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lori counted the hours until her date with Reed.

  Okay, maybe it wasn’t a date so much as a prescheduled booty call. But hey, she bought a few things to go with the wine he was bringing, so it could double as an actual dinner date.

  With her hands loaded with bags from the store, Lori exited the elevator to her condo and fished her keys out of her purse.

  She fiddled with the door twice before managing to unlock the thing. Two steps inside she heard someone in her kitchen.

  Her first thought was Reed . . . not that he could have gotten in or that they’d gotten to the point where he would just appear without invitation.

  Lori hesitated when she saw Avery ducking into her wine fridge.

  “You don’t have chardonnay.”

  She dropped her bags on the counter.

  “Ah, hello, Avery.”

  “You don’t like white? I can do red, if that’s all you have.”

  Lori dropped her purse, looked at the clock on the wall.

  “There are a few pinot grigios in there.”

  Avery ducked back in, pulled out a white. She moved to a drawer, pulled it open . . . didn’t find what she wanted and moved to another. After obtaining a corkscrew, she found two glasses and continued opening the bottle. “You’re home kinda late.”