Cover to Covers (8 page)

Monique clucked with disapproval. “What about your current wife, Hadley? Did you cheat on her, too?”

“Ex-wife. As soon as she signs the papers, she’ll be my ex.” He waved her into the car.

“You didn’t answer my question, Ty?” She
entered the gold and teak elevator.

He followed her
in and pressed the button for the lobby. “Yes, I did, but only after I caught her in bed with another man.” He came alongside her. “After that, our marriage was just a technicality.”

She shook her head as the elevator doors closed.
“You and Mat would have had a lot in common.”

Tyler was taken aback.
“He cheated on you?”

The car
started its slow decent to the lobby. “About three years in. There was a medical assistant in his office named Lou Ann.”

He rested his shoulder against the side of the elevator
car. “What did you do?”

“I wr
ote books. I figured success was my best revenge. If he didn’t want me as a housewife, then maybe he would want me as a successful writer.” 

“Your manager told me he remarried and has a kid.”

A momentary jolt of tension pulled her shoulders back. “He has two kids now, and he’s still married to his medical assistant.”

“He was a fool, Moe
.” 

She turned her eyes to him. “Was he?”

The elevator stopped on the third floor and a younger couple entered, holding hands. They did not seem to register Tyler and Monique standing next to them on the ride down to the lobby. When the elevator doors opened, Tyler took Monique’s hand and pulled her toward the front entrance of the hotel.

“I’ve got a car coming to take us to the restaurant,” he told her as they
quickly crossed the onyx marble floor.

“Why can’t we walk?”

He scowled at the suggestion. “It’s a hundred degrees out there. And the car is more convenient.”

Wh
ile passing before the front desk, Tyler purposefully kept his eyes focused on the ornate glass entrance, wanting to avoid seeing Missy. 

“Ty?” Monique spoke up as she tugged
on his hand. “What’s the rush?”

“I’m just hungry
,” he grumpily complained.

When they stepped outside of the glass doors that led to the street, the stifling hot air hit
them.

“It’s after sunset and it’s still sweltering,” Monique commented as he escorted her to a waiting black Town
Car.

“Now, aren’t you glad I got the car?” Tyler ribbed as the driver opened the rear passenger door.

“All right.” Monique slid into the backseat. “I’ll admit it. You were right about the car. Just don’t let it go to your head.”

***

Coal Vines was a casual neighborhood restaurant a few minutes by car from the hotel. Stepping through the exterior patio set with dark walnut chairs covered in bright red cushions, they entered a cozy dining room. Decorated with racks of wine bottles and a light amber-bricked wall rising up behind an oak bar, the rich aroma of garlic, thyme, and oregano tempted their noses. A pretty hostess in a clingy black dress showed them to a table in the corner.

“This isn’t where you usually take your women, is it?” Monique
probed as he held out a chair for her.

“Very funny
. I like to come here for lunch when I’m alone. My offices are not too far from here, and the food is good.” He unbuttoned his gray suit jacket and had a seat.

“Do you like to eat alone?”

He sat back in his chair. “Sometimes. I get real tired of the predictability of people, and when I need a break from that, I like to go somewhere alone.”

“The predictability of all people, or are we talking about only women
?” She folded her arms over the table. “By the way, I saw the blonde at the front desk.”

“What blond
e?”

“The one that was staring at you as
you dragged me across the lobby. What did you promise her?”

He casually waved his hand in the air. “She was very friendly when I checked in, and she has helped me out here and there.
Nothing else happened.” He clapped his hands together and rested them on the smooth surface of the table.

“My God, you haven’t changed a bit.” She sat back in her chair with a look of complete dismay on her delicate features. “It must be so hard for you, being such an asshole all the time.
No wonder you need to get away.”

“I am not an asshole,” he
indignantly refuted.

“Oh, come on, Ty. Look at you.” She waved her hand down his lean figure. “You’re good-looking, CEO of a
n oil company, and probably sleep with every women you meet. Of course you’re an asshole.”

He
put his hand over his mouth, hiding his smug grin. “You always did have a nasty habit of telling me exactly what you thought.”

“I told you the truth.”

He gave her a weak smile. “You were the only one who ever did.”

“Even in that big company you run, there’s no one to tell you the truth?”

“Employees never tell you the truth, Moe.” He shook his head while fighting off a disgusted frown. “They are too worried about keeping their jobs.”

“
Well then, what about ex-wives? Surely, they told you the truth.”

The
insistent frown worked its way across his thin lips. “The women I married were more like employees than wives. They said whatever it took to keep me happy and paying their credit card bills.”

“I don’t buy that, Ty. What made Hadley and Serena so different
from all the other women you went out with?”

“Nothing.
” He flashed back to his previous evening with Hadley. “They turned out to be exactly what I expected. I just hoped they would be different, that’s all.”

A young woman with
small black eyes and dark hair pulled back in a ponytail came to the table. Dressed in black pants and a long-sleeved white shirt, she held a white pad of paper in her hand and had two black menus wedged under her right arm. “Welcome to Coal Vines. What can I get you two to drink tonight?”

“Just soda water for me.” Tyler motioned to Monique. “I believe the lady would like a glass of chardonnay.”

Monique nodded for the waitress. “That sounds great, thank you.”

The young woman placed
the vinyl-covered, black menus on the table. “I’ll get your drinks while you look over the menu. Our specials tonight are a grilled salmon with crabmeat dressing and a beef tips rigatoni.”

“Thank you
.” Tyler handed her his menu. “But I think tonight we’re going to have a large white special pizza with some of your extra marinara sauce on the side.”

The waitress
jotted their order on her pad and then took their menus. “I’ll get right on that.” She quickly made her way to a black door cut into the amber-bricked wall behind the bar.

Monique rested her arms on the table. “You remembered I liked chardonnay and pizza?”

“How many times did we eat at Rick’s Pizza Place? You always had pizza and chardonnay.”

Appearing intrigued, s
he shifted closer to the table. “What else do you remember?”

He
cocked his head to the right. “That you hate pepperoni; have an aversion to anchovies—”

She made a face.
“Who doesn’t?”

“You hated the opera, too.”

“I still don’t know why you wanted to bring me to the opening night of the season. It was so boring, Ty.”

“It was the biggest social event of the year, Moe. My mother insisted I go, and I said I would only go with you. I thought it would be a chance for you two to get to know each other.”

She sat back stiffly in her chair at the mention of his mother. “How is Barbara? Is she still milking the social scene for every bit of attention?”

Tyler slid his jacket from around his shoulders. “She and Gary moved to Austin to be with Gary’s daughter, Helen, after he
retired from Propel. I speak to her every now and then, but I haven’t been down to see her in a while.”

“I remember your mother was always obsessed with
your social standing. Inviting you to all those parties, making you attend numerous charity benefits, and then there was the time she even tried to get you on the board of some museum. You remember that?”

“Yes, the Dallas Museum of Art. But, thankfully, it never worked out.”

“You and Barbara never saw eye-to-eye on anything…including me.” Monique fiddled with the knife on her place setting. “I swear that woman always hated me.”

“She didn’t hate you.
” He fixed his jacket around the back of his chair. “She just didn’t understand why I chose to be with you and not the socially prominent misfits she always pushed on me.”

“She hated me, Ty. I knew it the first time you introduced us at that company picnic your stepfather hosted. She looked me up and down, and I knew she had already made her mind up about me. What did she always call me, ‘That New Orleans girl’?”

Tyler directed his eyes to a crowded table at the side of the room. “She didn’t understand you.”

“She didn’t want to understand me
. I remember all the fights you two had about me. She kept asking you to dump me, and you kept telling her to mind her business.” 

He d
rew his finger along the smooth edge of their walnut table. “After you left, she told me that she regretted trying to push us apart.”

Monique’s eyes
became shadowed by doubt. “What changed after I left?”

“She
knew how unhappy I was.”

F
olding her arms across her chest, she pressed her lips together, appearing unconvinced. “But I bet she still blamed me for your drinking.”

“After you left, I
quit drinking. I think she knew then that she had been wrong about you.”

Her
skeptical demeanor evaporated. “You’ve been sober since I left?”

He nodded.
“Twenty years.”

“Wow
, I’m impressed. I never thought…I’m glad to hear it. Your drinking was…a real problem. When you were sober, you were wonderful to be around, but when you drank you were—”

“An even bigger asshole than I am now?”
he injected. Monique opened her mouth to speak, but he held up his hand. “I know I wasn’t the best boyfriend at the time, but I want to thank you for sticking by me for as long as you did. Without you, I might have chosen a different path. You made me see that I needed to walk away from the booze in order to get my life together.”

“I can’t take credit for that. You made the decision to stop, not me.”

“You gave me the strength to make that decision, Moe.”

She
stroked the edge of the white plate in front of her. “You know the drinking had a lot to do with why I went back to New Orleans.”

Dropp
ing back in his chair, Tyler digested what she had just told him. He had suspected that his excessive drinking had pushed her away, but until that moment he had never truly accepted that as a reason for why their relationship had ended.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She put on a happy smile. “Everything turned out for the best. You have your company, and I have my writing career.”

He
placed his elbows on the table. “But if you had stayed, things might have been different for us.”

“If I hadn
’t left, you might never have stopped drinking. You would never have taken over your stepfather’s company and become the successful man you are.”

“I would have stopped for you, Moe.”

“We both know that’s not true,” she responded with a dismissive shake of her head.

Their waitress re
appeared, and after placing their beverages on the table, she darted away.

Monique reached for her wine glass.
“Besides, if I had not gone back to New Orleans, I might never have met Mat and become a writer.”

Ty
ler ran his fingers along the rim of his glass of soda water. “Was he…the first?”

Monique’s gray eyes searched his, and then she
took a quick sip of her pale yellow wine. “No. My brother, Jake, set me up with one of his friends. I think he got sick of listening to me talk about you. I can’t even remember his name. Randy, Raymond…something like that.”

“Obviously, you didn’t care for him.”

“No, I didn’t.” She tossed back another gulp of the liquor. “He was just someone who was there. It happened about three months after I came home. I was lonely and I figured what the hell.”

Lifting
his beverage, that nagging burn for a shot of alcohol rose from his gut. “You should have called me.”

“Called you for what? Sex?
” Monique fidgeted in her chair. “Sleeping with you wouldn’t have changed anything between us.”