Passion on Park Avenue (Central Park Pact #1)(19)

“Wait, huh?” Audrey asked, looking between them. “Who’s Gilbert Blythe?”

“Movie night, my house,” Claire said. “You’ll just die from the romance of it. But sorry, Naomi. Continue. You and the non-Gilbert tormenter were at the park . . .”

“Right,” Naomi said, lost in thought as she went back to that long-ago day. “I don’t think either of us realized that they were just trying to get us out of the house, so when our instructions to ‘go kick the soccer ball around’ only got as far as me throwing it at his head and him throwing it right back and breaking my glasses, I went home in tears that I’d tried desperately to hide. He followed me, because even after all of that, he couldn’t let me have my dignity.”

“Or maybe he felt guilty,” Claire supplied.

Naomi gave her a glare.

“Or not,” Claire muttered into her mug.

“And you guys walked in on your parents doing it,” Audrey said in a slightly awed tone.

“Bingo,” Naomi said, shooting her temple with a finger pistol. “Scarred for life.”

“What’d they do?” Claire asked. “Your mom and his dad?”

“There was a lot of profanity from him. I vaguely remember screaming, while my mom hurriedly tucked her tits back into her shirt and dragged me into the bedroom begging me not to tell anyone.”

“Did you?”

“No! I was too embarrassed. I’d seen my mom’s boobs and her boss’s thing. That was about as far as my thoughts on it went. Doesn’t matter though. His wife somehow figured it out anyway a few days after that.”

“Oh, sweetie.”

“That’s not even the worst part,” Naomi said, gripping the mug so hard she was surprised it didn’t shatter. “This woman, his wife, was screaming her suspicions at her husband and my mother, which, you know, I guess that was to be expected. But instead of handling it like a man and telling his wife what really happened, the asshole denied the whole thing.”

“No,” Audrey said, wide-eyed.

Naomi nodded. “Yup. He claimed that my mother was a whore—that was his precise word—who’d tried her hardest to seduce him, but that he’d never touch trash.”

“The liar!” Audrey breathed in outrage. “That jerk!”

“Yeah,” Naomi replied, voice flat. “That’s what I said. But I was the only one in the room who spoke the truth. Even my mom didn’t say a single word in her defense. She just stood there, staring at him, and it was like . . . it was like she’d died inside at that very moment. I think she loved the guy.” Naomi shuddered. “I begged the son to tell his mom what we’d seen, but he just stood there and said he didn’t know what I was talking about.”

Naomi shrugged. “Needless to say, we were out on the street the next day.”

“That’s appalling. Why would you want to come back?” Claire said.

Naomi let out a laugh. “I don’t know that I did. But my mom never let it go. Those people blacklisted her, which meant she could never get another housekeeping job. Not that she was that good at it to begin with, but after that she just sort of quit trying at everything.”

She took a sip of her wine and continued. “I knew she held on to her bitterness, but I didn’t realize how much until the building called me about my application to live here.”

“Which I’m guessing you didn’t fill out,” Audrey said.

Naomi shook her head. “My mom did before she died. She always said she wanted them to see what I’d become. I never intended to see the application through, but next thing I know, I made it through interviews, and then I was signing the paperwork . . .”

She wasn’t sure which was more of a mystery: that Oliver Cunningham had passed her on to the next round after their disastrous meeting, or that she’d pursued the process.

“You wanted closure,” Claire said softly. “It’s understandable.”

Naomi met her friend’s eyes and saw what Claire wasn’t saying. That she understood because she too wanted closure. Though judging from the still-present shadows under her friend’s pretty hazel eyes, Claire was a long way off from making peace with Brayden’s betrayal and death.

“I guess so.” Naomi shrugged in agreement. “I know it’s stupid to be hung up on something that happened twenty years ago, but it’s always haunted me. Not as much as my mom, but people shouldn’t get to act like that.”

There was a long moment of silence, interrupted by a knock at the door that had all three women jumping slightly. Audrey hopped up. “Ooh. There’s our cheese!”

Audrey went to the door, Louboutins clicking on the hardwood as she opened the front door. You had to admire a woman who wore four-inch heels on moving day and got a composed cheese plate delivered.

“Oh. Hello there! You’re not cheese.”

A masculine chuckle came from the other side of the door, then a low voice irritatingly familiar. “No, ma’am. And if that’s what you were expecting, this champagne might be a disappointment.”

“It’s Dom,” Audrey told the man cheerfully, with a quick look at the bottle. “That’s never a disappointment. You must be here to see Naomi?”

Naomi stood up as Oliver Cunningham stepped into her living room, looking obscenely expensive in a sleek gray suit, a two-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne in hand.