A Grand Seduction (6 page)

Dominique raised both hands. “Calm down. He’s going to have an affair with Ridelle because we’re going to set him up to think so.”

“
Set him up?” Twyla gave Dominique a look as if her lettuce wrap had just regurgitated a potato beetle. “That’s cheating.”

“
No, cheating is what Bruce has done to Fran more than once already. We’re just going to schedule his next episode for our Kodak convenience.”

Twyla shook her head. “I don’t like it. It smells like entrapment. Fraud.”

Dominique gave a dramatic sigh. “Twyla, dear oh-so-in-love Twyla, it’s not entrapment. It’s opportunity. Think of it this way. If Bruce were a faithful husband, surely he wouldn’t stray just because we dangle Ridelle in front of him? I mean, your Andy would never fall for that.”

“
Of course he wouldn’t.”

The woman’s voice exuded endless patience. “But Bruce isn’t Andy. Bruce will, in fact, pursue Ridelle, because he’s a rotten bastard who’s cheated before. In which case, he deserves to get caught and Frannie deserves that prenup to be overturned. Right?”

Twyla stared for a moment longer, than her jaw relaxed. “When you put it that way, maybe. But if he doesn’t cheat, then that’s something to consider, too.”

Now it was Fran’s turn to look pale. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I hope to God he does. I can’t take the thought of him getting me on my knees on the marble floor again.”

Quizzical faces failed to ask the question before Dominique interjected a warning. “You can’t think that way. Not yet. You have to keep things exactly the way they are, for the time being. Otherwise you could tip him off to something being amiss.”

Ridelle tossed her napkin on the table. “Wait, just wait. Why do I have to be his squeeze toy? What the hell did I do to deserve the Scarlet Letter?”

“
One shrimp Pesto.” Ronald’s cheery voice caused Ridelle to jump, her arm knocking against a salad plate which in turn dominoed into her water glass, sending liquid across a remaining lettuce wrap already soggy from neglect. She grabbed for her napkin as Ronald whipped out with a towel and reached across her.

“
I’ve got it.” His smile showed small, even teeth, like corn kernels bleached white in the sun.

His tuxedo shirt and apron wafted kitchen smells and a faint hint of something familiar. Hi Karate? Ridelle’s brother bathed in the stuff during college. Her nose wrinkled at the memory.

The smile faded at her expression, and Ronald pulled back from attending the spill. “Anything else I can get for you?”

The question would be normal to anyone else hearing it, except the quartet of women who’d heard his usual inflection almost every week for a year. To their trained ear, the question carried the unmistakable hint of disappointment.

When he’d gone, Ridelle turned back to Dominique, who was stabbing at shrimp like a tribesman spearing fish in a river. “And again I say, why me?”

“
I know why.” Fran’s voice held a sardonic edge. “Bruce’s primary brain has been twitching for you for years.”

“
Ugh, thanks a lot. That sentence ought to be good for three, four months’ worth of nightmares.” Ridelle shook her head. “No offense, but Bruce is so beyond not my type. Hell, I don’t even
have
a type. But if I did, he’d be the polar opposite.”

“
That’s perfect,” Dominique said. “Don’t you see? You can operate without misgivings, or worse, the fear of falling for the ass. That would be disastrous, to say the least.”

Ridelle sighed. “So what exactly would I have to do?”

Dominique threw her a look. “Your parents did give you the birds and bees talk, right?”

Ridelle’s eyes widened into brown jawbreakers. “You’re not telling me I’m going to have to sleep with this guy?”

Fran shook her head. “No, I’m sure Dom doesn’t mean anything like that. You just fake it for the camera, right?”

She turned to Dominique, whose stoic expression answered the question before her mouth did. “We can’t just pose Ridelle like a Barbie doll, snap a photo, and yell ‘Gotcha!’ on our way out the door. He’ll know it was a setup. It has to look genuine.” She turned to Ridelle. “
You
have to be genuine. On the outside, anyway. He can never suspect the truth.”

Dominique looked around the table to meet silent stares. “Come on, we’re all adults in the modern world, right? It’s not like casual sex has never happened to any of us.”

Ridelle slumped down in her seat, staring up at the brass light fixture dangling over their table. “I take back what I said earlier, Dom. I prefer the kill-him-for-the-insurance scheme.”

Fran shook her head. “No. I don’t expect her to do something like that. It’s too much to ask.”

Ridelle sighed. “We’ve been friends for almost ten years. I’d do anything for you—you know I would. I’m just not sure I can pull this off. I’m no actress, and we all know how spellbinding my love life is.”

“
I believe in you, Ridelle. But I wouldn’t ask something like that of a friend.” Her eyes turned glassy, voice broken into breathless, quivering pieces. “I appreciate the thought, Dom, but I can just go back to the original plan. Either he hurts me enough to leave evidence, or someday I might catch him cheating.”

Twyla, who’d thus far been frozen in a just-saw-a-train-wreck pose, managed to find her voice. “Wait until he hurts you bad enough? Do you even hear yourself? Surely the money isn’t worth waiting around to get battered or cheated on. Why don’t you just leave?”

Tears spilled over onto a faint dusting of freckles Frannie always spackled over with makeup. “It’s not about being rich. It’s about not being destitute. My parents left the estate in shambles when they died. They never said a word to me about their financial troubles—not one. Slowly eating through the accounts, properties, investments. Losing their possessions and household staff. I could never understand why they didn’t come to me; Bruce and I would have helped. But I do now. They felt safe knowing my future was secure, and they didn’t want me to worry.”

She shifted her gaze to Dominique, whose face was unreadable. “So how would they feel now, knowing I wound up homeless because my husband pulled that future out from under me after the remains of my childhood were sold off in probate?”

Dominique gazed into her lap, smoothing her napkin. “Probably that life has been unfair enough to you, and that it’s time for the man who is largely responsible for that gets on the cross to pay for it.” She tossed a sharp glance at the other two women in turn. “I would do this myself, Fran, but you know Bruce and I never clicked. Ridelle’s been in the crosshairs of his wandering trouser target for some time, so she seems the logical choice. But if she can’t—”

“
I’ll do it.” Ridelle stared at her coffee cup as she ran her forefinger around the top, as though it were crystal and she could elicit a pleasant ringing from it. The rest of the group stared.

“
The jackass has it coming, and I want to help be the one to bring him to his knees.” She straightened in her chair and caught Fran’s gaze. “Painfully. You know, like kneeling on a marble floor.”

The needling pulse of the shower’s massage head drummed against Ridelle’s back, urging knotted muscles to release their stress-induced stranglehold. Pushing wet hair away from her face, she looked around for the Paul Mitchell. Grasping the white bottle, she ad-libbed the label aloud. “Thickens and replenishes. Strengthens your love life, protects you from reprehensible morons, and shines up even the nastiest after-sex hair.”

Sighing, she squeezed shampoo into her palm. She could use something to shield her from herself about now—a miracle elixir to thicken her skin against the evening ahead. Of course, most people felt that her emotional epidermal layer already resembled elephant hide. No doubt a by-product of life as the only girl in a house with three brothers. What a joke.

The swirl of designer scent rising from her scalp as she massaged the lather lacked its usual satisfying vigor. For the hundredth time she considered changing her mind. She could stay home, plead a headache. Isn’t that what women always did when they didn’t want sex? Except Fran, of course; she didn’t believe she had the option of refusal.

Squeezing her eyes shut tight, she stuck her head under the spray. The past week of planning had been a ride of Coney Island proportions. Every time she worked herself into a hyped-up lather of confidence, self doubt came and rinsed it away. Dipping her head back a bit too far, water streamed over her face and into slightly parted lips. Leaning forward, she spewed the water back out. “Relax. It’s not like he’s going to jump you on the table in the middle of dinner. This is just the qualifying heat.”

She took a second squirt of Paul Mitchell to task, rubbing her scalp harder than was necessary. The four women—not Twyla so much, as she hadn’t the stomach for it—had crafted a plan and gone over it a hundred times. Fran herself paved the way for Ridelle’s sluttish re-entry to Bruce’s life by asking him to allow Twyla and Ridelle to assist her with a Memorial Day dinner party he’d commanded Fran to throw. Luckily—or not, depending on her mood at the moment, he’d agreed.

She shook her head as she scrubbed. Fire the cook, throw a party and threaten a non-domestic wife that it better be a success. Oh, and for a fun little twist, tack on an extra ten people at the last minute. What an asshole.

Twyla was the real kitchen whiz, which is why she was riding along on this Wild Kingdom adventure. Bruce had no way of knowing that Ridelle was as inept as his beloved when it came to fine cuisine, but it had been decided that her role would be as serving maid, anyway. That would provide ample opportunity to chat up the man of her nightmares while Fran was busy playing dutiful wife.

Tonight’s real dish on the menu would be Ridelle, served hot enough to hopefully renew Bruce’s interest without causing suspicion. A lot hinged on her ability to succeed tonight. Too bad that when it came to being around men, she felt about as seductive and charming as a snail turned inside out.

“
You just have to get your head into the role,” she told herself aloud. “Like Dom said. It’s not you. Just make believe.”

Get into the role.

Banishing thoughts of hairy ears and hard marble floors, Ridelle closed her eyes and imagined prowling the dinner party, sexy and self-assured in her role as experienced seductress. Hands full of slippery shampoo lather stroked down from the hollow of her throat, over pert breasts, pausing to circle around the slight upturn where her nipples rode high. Oblivious to her other concerns, they rose hard and unafraid against the soft slick of soapy lather. Tipping her head back to indulge the sensation without rivulets of soap finding liquid brown eyes, her right hand slid down her stomach in search of the pulsing warmth that the exploration of her breasts had awakened. A soft moan caught in her throat as her fingers dipped into the join between her thighs, where a practiced circular motion soon set the trapped moan free.

The sound of her enjoyment startled her reverie, and nervous energy broke the moment. Her hands fell away from their survey of nearby erogenous zones. Oh well. A bit of unrelieved tension might boost her efforts tonight. Not that she was suffering a critical shortage of tension.

Rinsing, conditioning, and a careful double shave took an additional fifteen minutes, the last five conducted in decreasing temperatures as hot water exhausted itself. When at last she stepped from the tub shower, the mirror had all but vanished and her bathroom looked like the sauna room at the country club.

Wrapping her head in a cocoa brown towel turban, she threw open the bathroom door to shoo out excess steam. Funny she should think about the club in the Poconos. In a way, that’s where this all began—at the club where she and Andy Franks’ parents had dragged their respective broods once a week. Andy was older by a few years, but had waltzed Ridelle around the parquet floor when they were still kids. Nothing sexy. It was like having a kinder version of her brothers turning her around the dance floor. When Andy’s new girlfriend arrived, Ridelle immediately liked Twyla’s polite and unpretentious demeanor. She was nothing like the trampy twits who put on airs as obnoxious as their layers of jewelry. The Twit Team, Ridelle called them when in a more forgiving state of mind. Otherwise, the nickname involved a change of vowel that was more R-rated. They in turn shunned Ridelle as a poor cousin outsider—an ousting she was quite happy to uphold.

An up and comer in New York finance joined the club as well—Bruce Myers. An invitation to his employer’s posh Manhattan penthouse for a “casual” cocktail party changed the face of Ridelle’s social life. It was there that she and Twyla, sequestered in a formal dining room between gold-veined walls and a spread of caviar on toast points, met Dominique Trudeaux. Though a diamond cocktail ring resembling the ice cluster in her vodka and a black cloud of shoulder-to-toe jet beads might have automatically sorted her in with the other snooty, back-patting guests who swirled brandy in snifters and spoke with exaggerated importance, their hostess blew the girls right out of their silk nylons.

Ridelle crossed the burnt orange and brown bedroom to the walk-in closet, pulling off the towel wrapped around her midsection as she laughed at the memory. She and Twyla had been watching a woman’s mini Schnauzer repeatedly poke his head out of her lame handbag to steal oysters and bacon-wrapped scallops right off her plate, which she continued eating from as well.