They had history, everyday life kind of memories; they had gotten on perfectly; she had been his best friend, his partner—the one person in the entire world he thought knew him well.
If only they could go back…but they couldn't. Did they have even a little bit more to fight for? Could he live with knowing what Chelsea had done? He tightened his hand on the steering wheel. Could he?
That was the determining factor in all of this. Did he love Chelsea enough to confront her, demand that they work on the marriage?
A car drew up beside him and the front window wound down slowly.
Ricky grinned at him. "Troy Scarlett. How are ya?"
"Fine," Troy murmured.
"You coming for a visit? Want to know what a five star experience is like at Villa Ingles?"
"No." Troy sighed. "I think I am going home."
He started the car.
"No. Wait," Ricky said. "Come on in. I am sure you are here to see Chelsea."
"No. I think I'll pass." Troy shook his head. "I am sure you must know that my marriage is over."
Ricky appeared shocked. "What? I had no idea."
He did the shocked look so convincingly that Troy almost paused. Maybe Yuri was a bit paranoid about him and he hadn't sent the pictures, but who else would?
And though he was acting innocent right now, this was the same Ricky who had imprisoned Marla for five years.
"At least come and have a drink," Ricky said, still playing the sympathetic Judas.
Troy sighed. He had come this far; maybe Yuri was right and he should have that conversation with Chelsea.
"If I am going to see Chelsea," he said to Ricky, "I don't think I'll have time for a drink."
"Good." Ricky nodded. "Fine. I genuinely hope you can work out whatever it is that is going on with you and Chelsea. A happy employee is a productive employee."
Troy resisted the urge to roll his eyes in disgust.
Chapter Fourteen
Chelsea sat staring at her computer, her mind in a blank haze. Ever since Saturday night she was uncomfortable with Kadeem in her office. She wondered how much longer his auditing would take. Even his very breathing was becoming offensive to her. She had taken a complete 360-degree turn in her outlook.
Saturday night was an indictment on just how crazed she had become, and now she was wading in a stagnant pool of guilt and recriminations.
Several times since Saturday night she wanted to call Troy and tell him that she was sorry for this whole messy year.
Ironically, it was only after Saturday night that she realized how much she loved her husband and how erratic her reactions had been. She could have handled the whole situation with Troy better.
She inhaled shakily. A well-thinking person would have come to some form of acceptance by now and maybe demonstrated some form of compassion toward the motherless boy who was also her husband's child.
But she had not been well-thinking. She still wasn't if she were, to be honest. The thought of Erin and Troy still made her grit her teeth in seething jealousy, but going on a date with Kadeem Virgo had been beyond the pale, a kind of madness where she had suppressed her conscience. To go into his suite at the villa was even crazier. She wasn't a naive teenager, and even naive teenagers knew better than she did.
"Everything okay, Chels?" Kadeem asked her, looking over at her with a new familiarity in his eyes, which was cringe-worthy.
This was all her fault.
Chelsea nodded. "Yes, sure. Fine."
She hated when he called her Chels. Troy was the only person who shortened her name, and she had no problem with it. It annoyed her when anyone else did it. Especially him. Who gave him the right to this kind familiarity?
She had.
She was about to tell him to stop calling her Chels when her phone rang. It was Ricky.
"Chelsea, emergency meeting now in my office. Now, this very minute."
She got up. "Okay."
Ricky sounded like it was serious. She wondered what she had done. He sounded solemn. She hurried out of her office and walked the length of the hallway to his.
Kadeem's phone ran shortly after Chelsea closed the door. He knew it was Ricky.
"Why did you get her out of the office so fast?" Kadeem asked curiously.
"Because her husband is on his way. I sent him pictures." Ricky laughed. "But I can't have him confronting her today, not until you really give me something to show him. I must admit, Kadeem, that I had overestimated how charming you are. Why is it taking so long to seduce a stressed out woman on the verge of a divorce? You allowed her to slip through your fingers Saturday night. What's wrong with you, man?"
Kadeem grimaced. "I don't see what else I could have done. Force her?"
"Maybe it will need to come to that," Ricky said dispassionately. "Anyway, Troy is coming up now. He is in the hallway. You need to send him on his way. I will keep Chelsea busy for as long as it takes.
"Okay." Kadeem hung up.
He didn't have long to wait. There was a knock on the office door. He settled down in his chair and adopted a lazy expression.
"Come in."
*****
Troy pushed the door to Chelsea's office open. It was a spacious space with a wide desk at one end. The chair behind it was empty. To the right was a conference table. The man in the pictures was sitting at the top of the table, a welcoming grin on his face.
"Hey, it’s Troy, isn't it? Chelsea's ex-husband."
Troy nodded, not correcting him about the ex-husband bit. "You came to the house last Friday. Forgive me, I don't quite remember your name."
"Kadeem Virgo."
"Yes." Troy inhaled. "And this is Chelsea's office?"
"Oh yes." Kadeem nodded. "I am temporarily visiting. I am auditing."
"Where is she?" Troy took a moment to assess himself. His voice was as calm as possible. His hands were steady. He was acting admirably normal for a man who was staring at his wife's lover.
"She is in a meeting," Kadeem said lazily. "You can wait for her here, no problem."
"Are you sleeping with her?" Troy asked the question as if he were asking about the weather.
"Pardon me?" Kadeem sputtered.
"You heard me," Troy said, still absurdly calm.
"Well, it’s not something I would likely admit to the lady's husband, now would it?" Kadeem said watching Troy keenly.
Troy appeared relaxed. He wasn't a big guy, but he was tall and had hard muscles. This wasn't some couch potato guy. He was lean and well-toned.
He had long known that he couldn't underestimate slimmer guys after being thoroughly whopped by one in the boxing ring at his gym. They could be quick, and they had speed on their side.
This guy was acting calm but surely he couldn't be that calm.
He decided to test the waters a bit. "Chelsea is a very attractive woman."
Troy didn't move a muscle.
That emboldened Kadeem. "And she's very good in bed."
Troy reached in his pocket for a pen.
Kadeem jumped up. He held up his hands. "Listen dude, I was just..."
He saw that Troy had a pen in hand and he exhaled quickly. For a moment he had thought Troy would probably be pulling a gun from his pocket or something.
"You were just what?" Troy asked in that cold, calm voice.
"She's the one who came on to me, okay?" Kadeem improvised. "I am not proud of this whole thing."
"And you shouldn't be," Troy said, picking up one of Chelsea's note pads. "Adultery is ugly and hurtful, isn't it?"
He scrawled across it ‘Happy Anniversary, Chelsea. This was one very surprising year.’
He tucked it under a mug with Villa Ingles painted across it. "I don't think I am going to wait around after all," Troy said to Kadeem.
He left without any fanfare.
Kadeem ran his hands across his face, a pang of remorse hitting him as he thought of the shattered expression on the guy's face, but he remembered that Ricky was more than likely wa
tching.
He owed Ricky more than he could pay back. He couldn't afford to be sentimental about Chelsea and her relationship issues.
*****
Chelsea left Ricky's office feeling perplexed. The emergency meeting was about a matter that could have been dealt with without her. She was trying to decipher if Ricky had lost it.
First, he had called her into the office and then he had looked at her blankly as if he had forgotten what the emergency was and then he had spent the longest time staring at his computer and then he had asked her about a minor dispute that the head of security had solved months ago.
Today was a strange day.
Chelsea walked to the office and sat down at her desk. She realized that her mug had been moved. She looked over at Kadeem. He was on the phone discussing some figures.
She lifted the mug to put it back and saw the note.
She swung around and looked at Kadeem again, interrupting him mid-conversation.
"Was my husband here?"
Kadeem looked up and cupped the mouth of the phone. "Yes, he left you a note."
"Is that all?" Her heart started to hammer uncomfortably.
"We had a little polite chat and then he left. Nice guy." Kadeem went back to his phone call and Chelsea was left even more confused than ever.
Why didn't Troy wait to talk to her if it was important?
She wondered if Kadeem had said anything to him about Saturday night. It was something that she would prefer to forget forever. Never to be repeated.
Chapter Fifteen
Chelsea went home in the evening and found her mother in the living room dancing with Dahlia. They were listening to Walking On Sunshine.
"I’m walking on sunshine," Dahlia was singing at the top of her voice and her mother was joining in, the two of them happily dancing around.
"What are you two so happy about?" she asked tiredly after the song ended. Her mother collapsed on the settee.
"This girl is going to wear me out. "
"Let’s go again, Grandma Katrina."
"No," Katrina panted. "Go find your grandfather. He needs help packing."
"Okay." Dahlia ran off toward the master bedroom.
Chelsea looked at her mother and shook her head. "This eagerness to leave is nauseating."
"And we have good news!" Katrina grinned. "Abel Tallmadge—remember him, the property developer who bought up quite a hunk of Calabash Bay? Well, he offered us forty million cash for the house. He said he'd pay for it lock, stock and barrel. Wants us out by next month. Which is convenient because we will be gone by then."
"But you weren't thinking of selling!" Chelsea squealed. "I live here. How can you sell?"
"Chelsea honey, we are moving permanently to the States. Sooner or later you are going to sort out your life and move back in with your extremely patient husband. What are we supposed to do with the house in the meantime?"
"It's prime real estate, Mom!" Chelsea protested. "You can't just sell out!"
"He said cash, Chelsea. Cash versus holding onto this place for years and paying property tax and keeping up with the cleaning and stuff." Katrina looked at her daughter and shook her head. "You protested the same way when we left from Malvern. You hated it down here on the flats."
"But where am I going to live?" Chelsea wailed.
"With Troy." Katrina sighed. "Come on, Chelsea, you have belabored this outside son thing to death. It’s time you let it go. You have sufficiently punished Troy for his college indiscretion. Let it go now, sugar."
"Mom really, you are saying that to me? You have always taken my side on this. You said you saw things my way."
"And that was about four months ago," Katrina said stubbornly. "I thought you would sulk for a while but honey, you are working at a job that you admitted is frazzling you out. You are dating another man while you are married. I can't see things from your way anymore. I think you are now in the wrong."
"I am not dating him," Chelsea gritted out. "We just went out together on Saturday night. It was a one-time thing. I made the phenomenal mistake of kissing him. I regret it. Now can we never talk about this again?"
"Sure, whatever you say, honey." Katrina got up and hugged her daughter. "But you might want to look into housing solutions in the meanwhile, if you are staying on here at Treasure Beach. Better yet, call your husband. The way Dahlia describes it, he more than has room for you at his new home."
Chelsea slunk down into the settee as her mother moved away and started humming Walking on Sunshine.
She couldn't even tell her mother that Troy had stopped by to see her and she had no idea why. She was burning up with curiosity but there was a little tingle of fear that she had left the communication for too late.
What if he had stopped by to hand her divorce papers? What if Troy had already moved on with that woman, Faye?
She had to know. She would be driving Dahlia to her father on Friday and this time it would be different.
*****
Chelsea had no idea why she was so nervous. Troy was her husband. He was the cause for their current rift, not her. The circumstances had not changed.
She glanced at her reflection in the rearview mirror. Well, he was. Obviously now she didn't have the lofty heights of her moral high ground to sit on anymore since her little lapse on Saturday night, but Troy didn't know that.
And he had come to see her. She still didn't know for what; he was not answering his phone.
"Mommy, when can we go and live with Daddy and Todd?"
Chelsea made a face before answering. "I don't know, dear." These days it was feeling more like a possibility. She didn't dare say that to Dahlia, though. She didn't want to give her false hope.
"Daddy said he is going to take us to Uncle Yuri's place for Todd's birthday."
Chelsea swallowed. "When is his birthday?"
"Next week Wednesday but Daddy said we won’t be celebrating till the weekend."
Todd was born the day before their wedding anniversary. Chelsea groaned. What irony. On the eve of her wedding, her nemesis had given birth.
Bet if Erin had known that it was Todd's child, she would have done anything to stop the wedding from happening.
Chelsea climbed the winding, hilly roads of the familiar route to Mount Faith and allowed herself to remember Erin without the cloud of bitterness she always associated when thinking of her.
In hindsight, she realized that Erin had liked Troy from the very moment she met him at orientation but Troy had not returned the feelings. He had liked her instead.
And she had not paid much attention to Erin, though they had taken most of the intro courses together, and then second year Erin had stepped it up a notch, befriending her with a determination that was as insincere as she was persistent. Feeding her information about Troy.
Chelsea realized now that she was mad with herself for falling for Erin’s attempts to break them up, almost as much as she was with Erin.
When Erin had stopped playing nice and had showed her true colors, spreading rumors about her, Chelsea had been livid. Of course, Erin had always denied that she was behind the character assaults.
That day when Erin had reported her as cheating on their Business Statistics exams it almost cost her her place in university. That had been the last straw. She had realized that Erin wanted to get rid of her by ruining her reputation. Nothing hurt as much as a ruined reputation. Chelsea realized that she was sneering and exhaled.
She was doing better with the Erin memories. Much better. Maybe she had mellowed out somewhat these past couple of months.
When she drove up to Troy's house and stopped under the eaves, it started to rain again.
He did not come to the door to greet her this time. Instead, his housekeeper was there.
She smiled at Chelsea coldly, gave her a clipped greeting and then gave the exuberant Dahlia a warm hug.
"Where is Troy?" Chelsea forced herself to ask.
"He is inside," Faye said coolly. "You didn
't stay last week, so he did not see the sense of coming out now."
Chelsea inhaled and straightened her spine. "I want to see him."
Faye stood at the door like a security guard, only shifting when Dahlia squeezed past her and started squealing, "Daddy, Daddy!"
"Excuse me," Chelsea said, adding some steel to her tones. "I want to see my husband."
"He doesn't want to see you." Faye's voice was just as steely. "You did something to that man, Mrs. Scarlett. He is a good man; he doesn't deserve whatever you did."
"Me?" Chelsea found that she couldn't meet Faye's hard stare. "What did I do?"
"I don't know." Faye shrugged. "How should I know? I am just the housekeeper. He just walks around here like a grumpy bear and snaps everybody's head off these days. I know he went to see you, though, and when he returned it was like you killed him."
Chelsea swallowed. "Let me in. I want to talk to him."
Faye unfurled her arms and stepped back.
Chelsea stepped past her into the foyer and looked up. The house had high ceilings all around. She could see up to the second floor from where she stood. Troy was standing at the landing and looking down at her.
"Hi," Chelsea smiled, feeling self-conscious.
"Hello Chelsea." His voice was stiff. "I did not expect you to come inside."
He started downstairs and Chelsea got the chance to fully take him in after so many months. He was dressed all in black—sweater, jeans, socks. His face was the same handsome face she was used to but he was clean–shaven. He looked fleetingly sad around the eyes, which was chased away by the scowl lighting his face.
He came closer to her.
"I heard you came to my office looking for me." Her voice was not quite steady. Why had she forgotten that Troy was so delicious looking and that he was so quietly sexy? He may not be a hulking hunk but he was slim, lithe, and had a smile that could make her sizzle when directed just at her.
Today it was absent, his mouth grim.
It was as if she was seeing him for the first time.
Scarlett Sinner (The Scarletts Page 10
