The Outlaw's Wife

by Cindy Gerard

  His gaze drifted with interest over her body, lingering on her breasts, unencumbered beneath the revealing fabric, before it shifted slowly to her long chestnut hair, shining and loose and falling seductively over one eye.

  He arched a dark brow, took in the dining room table, set with candles and crystal and a deep burgundy wine already poured and brought to room temperature the way he liked it.

  “You’ve been busy.” He set a briefcase full of paper on the floor. “School let out early today?”

  She made herself hold on to a smile—it was a trick she’d perfected during her six years as a teacher. Third graders could try the patience of a saint. She wasn’t feeling saintly now. She was feeling wronged. She was feeling raw.

  “Broken water main,” she said, her voice lapsing into what Garrett called her Mississippi memory. She’d lost most of her drawl over the years. Only when she was upset did it make an appearance these days. Hoping he hadn’t noticed, she concentrated on keeping it under wraps. “Classes were canceled. I worked on tomorrow’s lesson plans at home most of the day.”

  “Looks like you worked on something else, too.” His gaze, glittering and sparked with interest, danced to the table then back to her. “Are we celebrating something?”

  Yes, she thought, We’re celebrating. We’re celebrating the demise of my stupidity.

  She tried and failed to push from her mind the picture of Garrett and his lover cozied up together. They’d been so full of secret smiles as they’d leaned across the table at the sidewalk café, eyes only for each other.

  With a controlling swallow, she blinked back the image of the woman’s long, elegant fingers. Tipped with perfectly manicured scarlet nails, those fingers, she knew, had stroked through Garrett’s thick, luxuriant hair with intimate and possessive familiarity.

  Emma had always loved his hair. Black. Lush. Hers. Ten years ago she’d made him promise that once they were married, he wouldn’t let anyone but her and his barber ever touch his hair again.

  It had been a young lover’s promise. Playful. Silly. Romantic. A metaphor for the faith they’d placed in each other. Today she’d watched him break that promise. It was the thought of all the other promises he’d broken that she couldn’t bear.

  She made herself respond to the question in his eyes.

  “When you called to say you’d be late, I figured you’d had another tough day.” It was a struggle to keep her voice calm, her eyes inviting instead of accusatory. “I thought an intimate dinner for two would be in order.”

  He smiled. A crooked, full-of-himself smile. It was the same smile that had drawn her to him in the beginning. The same smile that had made her heart trip, her pulse race, and prompted a fervent, passionate yes when he’d asked her to marry him ten years ago.

  It was the same smile he’d given to the blonde today.

  The pain clutched hard and twisted.

  “Sounds nice,” he murmured, and tugged at the knot on his tie. “Where’s Pea?”

  The mention of eight-year-old Sara Jane—Sweet Pea to her daddy—sliced sharp and cutting on Emma’s heart. Sara was going to be another casualty of this little war Garrett had started. For that alone, she could never forgive him,

  “I took her to Maddie’s for the night.”

  Maddie Brannigan was Emma’s best friend. Garrett understood the implication. His eyes flickered with expectant pleasure. “Overnight?”

  She nodded, affecting a sultry look.

  She closed her eyes as he folded her into his arms, fighting hurt, remembering love, quelling the biting sting of his betrayal.

  “Drink your wine,” she whispered, pulling away from his nuzzling mouth to snag his wineglass and press it to his lips.

  He tasted, swallowed, smiled. “Good.”

  “Indulge,” she prompted as he tipped the glass yet again. “You’ve got time for a shower before dinner if you’d like.”

  He set his glass on the table and touched a finger to her cheek. “I’d like. Be right back.”

  She watched in a numb silence as he climbed the stairs. It wasn’t until she heard the bathroom door close and the sound of his shower that she slowly turned and walked on wooden legs to the kitchen.

  Feeling humiliated and used, she blinked back tears, gathered her composure and let her anger work to outdistance the hurt. Taking special care, she took her time arranging a standing rib roast on a silver platter, then carried it into the dining room.

  It was with a detached, leaden interest that she saw he’d finished his shower and his wine and was in the process of refilling his glass and pouring one for her.

  His hair was still wet, shining almost blue-black by candlelight. His eyes danced as he turned and saw her standing there. He extended the shimmering burgundy.

  “To us,” she murmured, and lifted the glass to her lips in toast.

  It was an invitation he couldn’t refuse. “To us,” he echoed softly.

  Over the rim of her glass, Emma watched him tip the wine to his lips and swallow. Without touching her own, she invited him to sit down.

  Then she drew a deep breath and waited for the mix of Valium and alcohol to do its work.

  It didn’t take long. And by the time he felt the effect, she was too numbed by grief to be horrified by what she’d done.

  “This is...won...der...ful.” The words stumbled out, the chemicals undercutting his attempt at enthusiasm.

  He blinked twice. Shook his head, slow and woozy.

  She thought of Sara Jane, of his callous disregard for ten years of marriage and watched him through hard eyes. “Is there a problem?” she asked, her voice sounding as hollow as her heart had become.

  “No...yeah...I don’t...know. Feeling kind...of... light...head...ed.”

  Unfocused, bleary eyes searched her face with disconnected confusion before they rolled back in his sockets and his eyelids fluttered shut. His fork clattered to his plate, then in slow, suspended motion, he tipped forward, passed-out cold.

  Emma watched for a long, vacuous moment before she rose wearily and walked around the table to stand beside him.

  Filling her hand with his hair, she tipped his head back and studied his face.

  He was so beautiful. Too beautiful. And too hard, it seemed, for a woman to resist. His jaw was strong and wide. Deep grooves ran the length of his cheeks, defining and showcasing the rugged masculinity of his mouth, the sensual curve of his lips. She ran a trembling finger down the length of his face, then threaded and rethreaded her fingers through his hair.

  Finally she let the tears fall.

  “You cheating bastard,” she whispered into a room full of the sumptuous aroma of the meal she’d prepared and the sour scent of heartbreak. “How could you do this to me? How could you do this to us? You had no right. You had no right to let another woman—” she choked back a sob “—to let another woman touch our marriage.”

  Or your hair, she thought with an aching sadness for the innocent promises of youth as she lovingly fingered his coarse blue-black strands for the last time.

  On leaden legs she climbed the stairs and walked to the master bathroom. With trembling hands she opened the medicine cabinet.

  The weight of his razor felt deceptively light as she slid it from the shelf and held it in her hand.

  The blade was new. Excessively sharp. She stared at it, then at her tear-streaked face in the mirror—and tried not to think about what she was going to do.

  Garrett crawled into consciousness like a drunk clawing his way out of a gutter. He squeezed his eyes tight then willed them apart.

  Mistake. Big mistake.

  Pain speared like a rusty nail through his skull. It felt like someone had poured hot sand under his eyelids, then sealed them shut with superglue. His heads—all ten of them—pounded as if a team of snare drummers had taken up residence there. And his mouth—he swallowed with caution then grimaced—his mouth tasted like an animal had crawled inside and died.

  He rocked slowly forward in the
chair. Propping his elbows on the dining room table, he buried his face in his hands, trying to clear the mucky net of cobwebs.

  “What the hell happened...?” His voice, sounding like a gear, long rusted and way past the need of oil, broke off as he ran a hand across his face then skated it up through his hair.

  His heart dived to his stomach like a bungee jumper on a free fall when his hand reached the top of his head.

  Oblivious, suddenly, to the pain and the grit in his eyes, he shot out of the chair. In a stumbling, drunken lurch, he raced to the mirror in the hall—then groaned in horror and disbelief at what he saw there.

  It was gone! His hair was gone. All of it. Not a single, solitary strand was left. He’d been skinned as smooth as a cue ball.

  With a half moan, half sob, he stared at his sorry reflection. Shock paralyzed him. Shock and wild bewilderment. He closed his eyes, shook his head and prayed that when he opened them again, his hair would be exactly where it was supposed to be.

  Muttering a short, crude expletive when it wasn’t, he studied his hairless head and discovered something else that sent his heart rate off the RPM dial. Not only was he bald—he was bleeding.

  Wild-eyed, he looked closer then breathed a small sigh of relief. It wasn’t blood, streaked across his naked scalp. In fact, it looked like...lipstick? He took a closer look. It was lipstick. The same color of lipstick Emma wore.

  Brows furrowed in confusion and pain, he finally realized that the lines of crimson scrawled across skin as bare and pink as a baby’s bottom were actually letters. He squinted to make them out, struggling to read them backward in the mirror. Giving up, he stumbled to the desk, grabbed a note pad and pen and raced back to the mirror.

  Even before he’d scribbled the last decoded letter onto the paper, he knew what it spelled out. Shoulders sagging, he stared at the message in numb shock, more stunned by the words than by the loss of his hair.

  I WANT A DIVORCE glared back at him with the impact of a gut punch.

  He slumped wearily against the wall, ran a hand through his nonexistent hair and closed his eyes.

  “I came home to dinner,” he muttered, lost in this maze of a living nightmare, and tried to retrace his steps. “My wife was slowly seducing me.” He ticked off event number two on his finger.

  That was as far as he got. Pushing away from the wall, he braced his palms on the hall table and hung his head. He didn’t remember a thing past that point. Not one damn thing.

  Slowly he raised his head. In a daze, he stared at his sorry self in the mirror again, then let go of a near-hysterical snort of laughter.

  “There’s a bright side, here, James,” he advised his reflection, while humor as black as his lost hours brought a twisted smile to his lips. “You won’t be having any bad-hair days in your immediate future.”

  “What did you do to your hair?”

  Garrett waited patiently on his mother-in-law’s front porch for the color to bleed back into her face.

  “Viola,” he said calmly, working past her wide-eyed stare, “is Emma here?”

  Viola DuPree studied her son-in-law’s bald head. Narrowing her pale brown eyes in accusation, she crossed her arms dramatically beneath the small shelf of her breasts. “I knew it would happen someday. You went off the deep end, didn’t you? You just got too busy working all those hours, making all that money, and you snapped. You joined one of those cults, didn’t you, dear?”

  For as long as he’d known her, Viola had lived in her own little world, with her own skewed take on life. She was sweet and harmless, and until today her perceptions had rarely affected him. Today, however, he needed her to be lucid. Even rational. Struggling to keep a rein on his impatience, he measured his words to encourage that result. “Please, Vi, I need to find Emma. Just tell me if she’s here.”

  His mother-in-law eyed him with a delicacy born of her Southern breeding but with unmistakable disdain. “You cult people always want money. I know about these things. I do read. For shame, Garrett. Don’t think that just because you’re my son-in-law that you can bilk me out of my money because it’s not going to happen. I tithe to my church and I don’t believe in any of—”

  “Viola,” he interrupted sternly, before she went off so far afield of his question that he’d never get her back on track. “I did not join a cult. I do not want your money. I just want to find Emma. Do you know where she is?”

  “A swim team,” she suggested, after a long pause that told him there was little hope of making a connection. “Is that it? You joined a swim team? I see pictures of those boys all the time, and they always shave their heads. But thirty-three’s a little old, don’t you think, to get into competitive swimming? I know you’re in good shape and all, but really, Garrett, you’ve got to be a bit more practical. It’s just like that fancy black foreign car you bought last spring. Not practical—”

  Garrett gripped her by her shoulders, his patience at its end. Aware of the fragility of her sparrowlike bones beneath his strong hands, he kept his hold gentle. “Viola. Please. Just listen to me. Really listen now, okay? I did not join a cult. I did not join a swim team. I did not shave my head. Emma did this to me. She tried to seduce me, then she must have drugged me....” He paused to collect himself. It was hard to think the words, let alone say them, but it was the only scenario he could come up with. “And then she shaved my head,” he continued, as Viola’s eyes took on a glazed look. “I need to find her, Viola, so I can figure out what’s going on.”

  Viola removed herself carefully from his grip and backed a cautious step away. “I...I think I need my medication.” Her eyes darted uneasily past him to the street, then back to him again.

  She smiled with care. “Why don’t you go sit in your car and wait for a moment,” she suggested with the slow and deliberate patience of a wise and compassionate zookeeper soothing a rabid rabbit. “I’ll take my medicine and then I’ll just go call 911 and they can come and help you find her. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A nice ride in a big white van? It has a siren. Boys always like sirens.”

  He smothered an oath, forced a weary breath and collected his control. In the most calm voice he could manage, he tried one last time. “Viola. Look. I know this sounds crazy, but believe me, I’m not. And I’m beginning to worry that Emma might be having a... I don’t know...she’s seemed unhappy lately. Not herself. Maybe...maybe she’s having a breakdown or something.

  “Look, I know it’s hard to believe, but Emma did do this to me. And now she’s gone and I don’t know where she is or where Pea is. I’m worried sick. I need to find them.”

  Viola stared, her eyes cautious, considering.

  “I swear to God, Viola. I’m as sane as you are.” He winced the moment the words were out. Pitting his mental state against his mother-in-law’s was not a viable comparison. “Please, Viola. Just tell me. Have you seen her?”

  Evidently enough of his concern bled through that she finally decided to believe him. “No, dear. I haven’t. And I don’t know where she is, either. But one thing I do know. If my Emma did this to you, she must have had one exceedingly good reason.”

  Leveling him with that nonnegotiable indictment, she slammed the door in his face.

  “Great,” he muttered as he turned and walked to his car. “Just great.”

  With a grind of gears and a squeal of tires, he headed for Maddie’s, hoping to find his answers there.

  “Let’s get this straight up front. I don’t need any of your lip,” Garrett warned Maddie Brannigan, when Emma’s best friend opened her apartment door, stared long and hard, then burst into a spasm of giggles.

  At five foot two, with a muppet’s mop of dusky blond curls and wearing a long paisley skirt and oversize pink, cotton sweater, Maddie looked as harmless and as displaced as a flower child from the sixties. He reminded himself that jellyfish also looked harmless and that Maddie also had a mouth that could cut like a buzz saw.

  “I mean it, Maddie. I’ve just about reached my limit
and I do not—I repeat—do not want to hear one word from you about my hair.”

  “What hair?” she asked, deadpan, fought to hold her straight face but dissolved again into a fit of snorts that she tried to cover with her hands. She failed miserably.

  “Do you know where Emma is?” He enunciated each word through clenched teeth.

  The giggling ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Maddie’s face hardened with the forbearance of a bodyguard protecting her charge. “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  The contempt in her voice told Garrett he’d hit pay dirt. He planted the flat of his hand on the door frame and with belligerent tolerance made his position clear.

  “I want to see her.”

  “Yeah, well, she doesn’t want to see you, chrome dome.”

  There was enough acid in her tone to eat the paint off a battleship.

  It took everything he had to curb his temper. “Maddie... I don’t have a clue what prompted her to leave me. I came home from work. I sat down to a meal. The next thing I knew, I was slumped over the table, my hair lying in piles around my feet and a message in lipstick scrawled across my head telling she wants a divorce.”

  “Yeah, well, she could have said it with flowers,” Maddie countered with all the sweetness of alum, “but somehow, I think this way had much more impact.”

  “What the hell is going on!” he exploded, and shoved his foot in the door when she tried to slam it in his face. “I’m her husband, dammit! I have a right to know.”

  “You lost your rights when you decided to romance your blond bimbo in broad daylight, buddy.” She poked a blunt-nailed finger into his chest. “If I was a man, I’d punch you out good, you low-life, philandering jackass!”

  One word in the midst of her diatribe struck out and slapped him in the face. “Philandering? Wait a minute—”

  “No, you wait a minute. You made a mistake, Mr. Big Shot Contractor. Mr. Lady-Killer. Mr. Two-Timing Double-Dealer. Mr. Fill In The Blank With Any Ugly, Derogatory Adjective You Can Think Of. You hurt my best friend. And if you think for one minute—”