Best Kept Secrets(75)
on Alex. "And I still have to stand by and watch him move
from woman to woman, all the time searching for what I can
and want to give him. I had to watch him dance and flirt with
you tonight. You! My God," she sobbed, tilting her face
toward the ceiling and pressing her fist to her forehead, eyes
squeezed shut. "You want to ruin him, and he still can't see
beyond your pretty face and body."
She lowered her hand and glared at Alex. "You are poison,
Miss Gaither. I feel the same way about you tonight as I did
twenty-five years ago." Closing the distance between them
and putting her narrow, angular face close to Alex's site
hissed, "I wish you'd never been born."
Alex's attempts to compose herself after Stacey's departure
had been in vain. Her face was pale and she was trembling
as she walked out of the powder room.
"I was about to come in and get you." Junior was waiting
for Alex in the hallway. At first he didn't notice her troubled
expression. When he did, he was instantly concerned. "Alex?
What's the matter?"
"I'd like to leave now."
"Are you sick? What's--"
"Please. We'll talk on the way."
Without further argument, Junior took her arm and steered
her toward the cloakroom, where he asked the attendant for
their coats. "Wait here." Alex watched him reenter the club,
skirt the dance floor, and move to the table where they had
eaten dinner. After a brief exchange with Angus and Sarah
Jo, he returned in time to claim their coats.
He hustled her outside and into the red Jaguar. He waited
until they were a good distance from the club and the car's
heater was pumping warm air before he addressed her across
the plush interior. "All right, what gives?"
"Why didn't you tell me that you were married to Stacey
Wallace?"
He stared at her until it became a driving hazard, then
turned his head and fixed his eyes on the road ahead. "You
didn't ask."
"How glib."
She laid her head against the cold passenger window, feeling
like she'd just sustained a beating with a chain and was
due to enter the ring for round two. Just when she thought
she had finished sorting through all the pieces of the various
liaisons of Purcell, another intricate twist emerged.
"Is it important?" Junior asked.
"I don't know." She turned her shoulders toward him and
rested the back of her head on the window. "You tell me. Is it?"
"No. The marriage lasted less than a year. We parted
friends."
"You parted friends. She's still in love with you."He winced. "That was one of our problems. Stacey's love is obsessive and possessive. She shackled me. I couldn't breathe. We--"
"Junior, you screwed around," she interrupted impatiently. "Spare me the banal explanations. I really don't
care."
"Then why'd you bring it up?"
"Because she confronted me in the powder room and accused
me of ruining her father's life with this investigation."
"For crissake, Alex, Joe Wallace is a big crybaby. Stacey
mothers him. I don't doubt for a minute that he's whined and
carried on about you something awful in front of her. It's a
ploy to get her sympathy. They feed each other's neuroses.
Don't worry about it."
Alex didn't like Junior Minton very much at that moment.
His cavalier attitude toward a woman's--any woman's--
love reduced him in Alex's eyes. She'd watched him tonight,
doing just as Stacey had described, moving from woman to
woman. The young and old, attractive and homely, married
and unattached, all seemed to be fair game. He was charming
with each, like a mall Easter bunny working the crowd, doling
out treats to greedy children who didn't realize they'd be
better off without them.
He seemed to take their fawning as his due. Alex had never
found that kind of conceit commendable or appealing. Junior
took for granted that he would elicit a response from every
woman he spoke to. Ruling was an involuntary action to
him, as natural as breathing. It would never occur to him that
someone might misinterpret his intentions and suffer emotional
pain.
Perhaps if she hadn't had the conversation with Stacey,
Alex would have smiled indulgently, as all the other women
and accepted his suaveness as part of his personality,
instead, she now felt irritable toward him and wanted
to know she couldn't be so blithely dismissed. "It wasn't just the judge Stacey took issue with. She said I was stirring
up memories of her marriage to you, airing her dirty linen.
I get the impression that being your ex has been a real trial
for her."