Faking Forever (First Wives #4)(80)

“Happy drinking or sad drinking?” Lori asked for clarification.

“Both. Victor had to go to China for a week.”

Lori led her inside and straight to the kitchen. Her high-rise condominium was only a couple of floors below Avery and Liam’s, but the two of them were at his parents’ for a Sunday dinner.

“Where is Reed?”

“Out on an assignment.”

“How very secret service that sounded.”

“Yeah, I don’t know all the details, but Blake asked for extra security at one of his meetings.”

“On a Sunday?”

“It’s at a golf course,” Lori explained.

“Ahh.”

Lori popped the cork and splashed wine into two glasses.

“So, China?”

“Yeah.”

The wine left a smoky aftertaste on her tongue.

“You’re falling for him.”

Shannon sighed. “I think I already fell.”

She shared several details with Lori over takeout and Chianti, and they both laughed and sighed at all the parts that girls loved.

Lori invited her to a party that Friday to distract her. Reed was working, and it would help her out, or so Lori told Shannon. She jumped on it, not wanting to be alone.

Funny how for years she’d spent much of her time in solitude, and now, after Victor, she didn’t want that life any longer.

With their plans made, Shannon said goodbye and made her way home.

Fall was making its way into Southern California, which meant some days were the hottest they’d see all year, but the nights were often cool.

She pulled into her garage and closed the door behind her. Inside the house, she switched on the lights and rubbed her arms.

She kicked off her shoes, leaving them by the door leading into the garage. The house was unusually cold, so she immediately went to her thermostat and turned on the heater.

She heard the ducts working and smelled the summer dust being burned out of the system. She considered another glass of wine by her fireplace. Maybe curl up to a good book.

A breeze tickled the hair on her arms when she moved into her living room to turn on her gas fireplace. The curtains on one side of the room blew inward. She didn’t remember leaving a window open. But that explained the artic temps inside.

She moved to the window to close it and something sharp cut the bottom of her foot.

“Ouch,” she cried out, looking down.

The carpet covering her tile floor was covered in glass. The foot she’d unknowingly stepped into the glass started to bleed.

Shannon stepped back on impulse, into another shard with her other heel. From there, she hobbled on the uncut parts of both feet until she sat on her sofa. Both of her feet were bleeding, the right had a decent shard sticking out of the arch. She removed the glass with her fingertips, wincing at the pain. She needed to cover it quickly or ruin the rug she stood on.

On tiptoes, she carefully made her way into the kitchen, where she grabbed the paper towels to sop up the mess.

Shannon paused and looked into the living room. Her midcentury home had many of the original windows from when it was built, hence why there were shards of glass instead of chunks that didn’t cause as much damage when stepped on. That thought was followed with a more obvious one.

How had the window broken in the first place?

Wadding the paper towels on her feet, she slid back into her shoes, ignoring the pain it caused, and walked back into her living room. She pushed back the curtain to see a hole with lots of jagged pieces sticking out.

Her first thought was a ball . . . maybe the neighborhood kids had been playing outside during the day.

She turned a full circle, searching the room for what she was sure would be a white leather ball hiding under a chair or table.

It wasn’t.

Instead of an innocent ball, she found one of the decorative rocks from her front yard resting against the wall in the back of the room.

Someone had broken the window on purpose.

She looked at the hole again. It was too small for someone to have crawled through.

But that didn’t stop Shannon from looking around the house.

Satisfied that no one was inside and that nothing had been taken, Shannon returned to her living room and considered her options. Instead of the police, where a report would be filed, a squad car would show up at her door, and the media would return, Shannon called Lori.

“You made it home?” Lori said when she answered.

“I did. To an unwelcome surprise. Is Reed home yet?”

“He just walked in the door. Is everything all right?”

She glanced at her foot, knew she’d need a couple of stitches before the night was over.

“Not really.”



“Definitely not an accident,” Reed declared after doing a complete search inside and outside her house.

Lori sat next to Shannon on the couch, her arm over her shoulders. Now that the adrenaline was starting to drop, the pain in her foot was getting worse.

“I didn’t think so.”

“A side window suggests whoever did this was hiding from the street view. Your neighbor’s house doesn’t have a direct line of sight. And you’ve obviously stopped setting your alarm when you leave.”

Shannon had been lax on the security system in the past year. That would change after this.