Rent A Husband (5 page)

He hits the lights and recoils as the harsh glare shows him a room as white and sterile as a laboratory.

How can she cook in here?

Or is she some calorie counter who subsists on smoothies and sprouts?

He has the cupboard open, rooting through bowls and cups and saucers when a voice says, “May I help you Mr. Forbes?”

11

When Forrest Forbes turns to Darcy he reveals the lean, muscular torso she dreamed of, but her eyes widen in horror rather than admiration when she sees bruises the color of burst fruit—purples and yellows and mauves—that pattern his stomach and back.  

Before she can stop herself she says, “My God, what happened to you?”

He shrugs, and she sees his attempt at nonchalance causes him to wince.

Darcy holds up a hand.

 “I don’t want to know.”

“Smart girl.”

“I suppose you’re looking for painkillers?”

“Unless you have some morphine lying around?”

“Wait here,” she says and goes upstairs to where Porter’s stash of prescription painkillers is still in her en-suite bathroom.

When she sees herself in the mirror, her hair mussed, her face shining, her eyes still swollen from her pathetic little crying jag, she is tempted to do a little repair work before she goes back down to him.

Then she thinks,
what the hell?

Why would she want to primp and preen for a man who is clearly a degenerate?

Those bruises came from a boot applied long and deliberately.

Darcy can only imagine what he did to deserve that.

She curses Eric for bringing this man into her house.

Darcy has to swallow her anger and resist the impulse to call a cab right now and send Forrest Forbes packing.

All that prevents her is a flashback of Porter with his hand on the bimbo’s belly bulge.

So, she runs fingers through her hair (damn this female programming) and goes back down, wearing her PJs, her bare feet and her shiny nose like a badge of pride, a rumble in her stomach reminding her of what had drawn to the kitchen in the first place: comfort food.

A slice of bread and cheese and some hefty scoops of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy.

Forrest Forbes sits at the kitchen table when she returns.

She pours him a glass of water and dumps a couple of yellow and black bombs on the table.

“Those look like fun he says,” but his smile is weak and he glugs two of the pills immediately.

“I was married to an ex-jock. Old football wounds.”

Darcy crosses to the fridge and gets out some cheese and finds a loaf of bread.

“I’m going to make a sandwich. Want one?”

“No, I prefer to take my drugs on an empty stomach. They metabolize faster.”

She shrugs and slices bread, avocado, tomatoes, brie and lettuce.

Forrest says, “Eric filled me in a little about your ex-husband and his pregnant paramour.”

“Good.”

“So what you’re doing is all about saving face?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Hell, is he worth it?”

Darcy looks up from her preparation, wiping a strand of hair from her cheek.

“No, I guess not.”

“Then why do it?”

Darcy says, “Mr. Forbes, let’s keep this professional, okay?”

“Sure.”

She sits opposite him and takes a bite of her sandwich.

“So, talking professionally,” he says, “what’s our backstory?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where did we meet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, definitely not here in this town.”

“No. But I was away, recently, at a spa.”

“Men like me don’t go to spas.”

“I don’t suppose you do . . .”

“Where was this spa?”

“Up in Napa.”

“Okay, that I can work with. Let’s say I was up there buying a vineyard and you were playing hooky from the spa and we met at a bistro and one thing led to another.”

“A little farfetched.”

“But serviceable?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

“My family once owned a vineyard up there, actually.”

“Really?”

She wipes a smear of avocado from her chin.

“Long ago.” He waves a dismissive hand. “Okay, so we met and I swept you off your feet and here I am to take you to the gala event of the year.”

Darcy stares at him.

“You think I’m really boring and small town, don’t you?”

“Not at all.”

“It’s okay, I don’t mind. I just don’t want you to show it tomorrow night. This Ball is everything you’re going to hate.”

“How do you know?”

“Realtors and used car salesmen and dentists in badly fitting tuxedos, their wives squeezed into gowns from hell? The Hamptons it is not.”

“I’ll contain my distaste.”

“We raise a lot of money every year. There’s a children’s shelter that’s pretty much dependant on us for its existence. I know I’m a pathetic joke right now, but those kids aren’t. I want the Ball to go well. I want to look good and feel good, so I can skin those jumped-up bumpkins of their cash. That’s my mission tomorrow night. Can I count on you?”

“Yes,” Forrest Forbes says.

She wipes her face on a napkin and leaves him sitting there and doesn’t look back.

12

Poor Billy Bigelow knows he really owns his name this morning.

He has barely slept, his humiliation at Darcy Pringle’s house looping in his mind.

How could he have done that?

How could he have made a fool of himself in front of Darcy and smarmy Eric Royce and that guy who looked like he had stepped out of a Chivas Regal commercial?

Idiot.

Billy Bigelow is no stranger to bad days, but today is one of the worst he can remember in a very long while.

A day when he has to face the death of a twenty-year-old dream.

Darcy Pringle will never be his.

Sweet, kind, Darcy Pringle, the only person who had showed any real sympathy back when he did the unspeakable thing that he did.

Darcy Jennings, as she was then, with her blonde hair and her freckles and the neat bulges in her letter sweater that even in mourning he’d had a tough time keeping his eyes off.

And he can’t stop it now, the old memories are flooding in: Billy Bigelow at sixteen, just back from getting his drivers license, excited, insisting he take his mother and sister for a spin; his father going off to do what he did best, drink and stare morosely at his team of perennial losers whacking at a hockey puck.

Billy drove away with his mother beside him and his little sister in the rear, and what happened—even though it was tragic—had all the properties of a farce.

As they turned off the main road, heading toward the ocean, they found themselves at the foot of the only hill in Santa Sofia, and found themselves directly in the path of a runaway ice cream truck, its speakers blaring a tinny, distorted version of the theme from that old movie
The Sting
.

The driver of the truck, dressed in clown make-up with an orange wig, had been battling to control the runaway truck from the top of the hill, and had his hand on the horn.

If Billy had been a more experienced driver he would have swung his car out of the way and the ice cream truck would have sailed by harmlessly and come to a halt in the sand of Long Beach.

But Billy was a greenhorn and he panicked and stalled the car.

It was like something out of a silent movie: a car trapped on the tracks, a train thundering on.

 Billy pumping the gas and turning the key and only succeeding in flooding the engine.

His mother and his sister screaming.

The horn and the distorted music growing louder and then the truck hit and there was a massive explosion and when Billy woke up in hospital with minor burns, concussion and a broken arm, his father leaned into him and said:

“Well done you little bastard, you’ve gone and killed your mama and your sister.”

And that’s how it was everyday for the next twenty years, until Big Ben was felled by heart cancer.

Never missing an opportunity to blame Billy for what he had done.

And to this day, Poor Billy can’t eat a snow cone or hear ragtime music or go near a circus without shaking uncontrollably.

Billy drags himself into the shower and down the stairs and opens the store.

His cell phone rings and, expecting more humiliation, he checks caller ID.

He is relieved when he sees that it’s Darlene, his waitress from the coffee shop.

“Yes, Darlene.”

“Just phoning to tell you I’m quitting.”

“Why?”

“Got a better offer is why. I’ll be in later to fetch what you owe me.”

And she’s gone before Poor Billy can even think of demanding she work a notice period.

He scribbles on a piece of paper and sticks it on the glass door of the bookstore:
HELP WANTED
.

Was that ever the truth?

13

Eric Royce loves Darcy Pringle.

Loves her with all his heart and none of lower organs, which makes it the perfect friendship.

But love her he does.

Fiercely and protectively.

Ever since he became her next door neighbor four years ago—exiled from the absurd excesses of Los Angeles—they have been friends.

Their friendship started about a month after Eric moved in, when, as he was taking a little tour through his garden (admiring less the hibiscus and the palms than the oiled limbs of the dusky young man—Raul? Ramon?—wandering around aimlessly with a pool scoop wearing the most adorable denim cutoffs and nothing else) a hedgerow parted and a blonde woman, pretty in a suburban way he’d thought at the time, popped her head through and said, “Hi, I’m Darcy Pringle.”

“Eric Royce,” he’d said in best drawl, extending a languid hand, feeling oh-so-superior to this little matron.

“Mr. Royce,” Darcy said.

“Eric, please.”

“Eric, may I ask you a question?”

“Ask away, my dear.”

“Why do you have a pool man when you don’t have a pool?”

This had been delivered all wide eyed and deadpan (with a ghost of Marilyn Monroe swishing around in the mix) and then Darcy had laughed her surprisingly full laugh and shoved a flute of fairly decent champagne at him, clinked his glass with hers and said, “Welcome to Santa Sofia.”

So, of course, they became friends.

And Darcy had helped him chart the surprisingly shark-infested waters of Santa Sofia’s society.

The first fin she’d pointed out was the jagged dorsal belonging to their neighbor, Carlotta McCourt.

Not surprising, really, that they all lived cheek-to-jowl, like some silly sitcom.

Santa Sofia had one street of large houses, all built in the faux hacienda style that was
de rigueur
, and here the wealthy realtors and dentists and car retailers sported with their wives and their SUVs and their Webers.

Eric’s friends in LA—the very few he stayed in touch with—had been aghast at this move into the depths of stucco suburbia.

But for him it was a quite literally a do-or-die decision.

Fleeing New York fifteen years before, he’d invented a new life and a new name and Los Angeles had welcomed Eric Royce.

He was young.

He was witty.

Within a year he was writing soaps.

Not art, but good, solid money.

Money that bought him an apartment in West Hollywood and nights of partying at the bars on Santa Monica Boulevard.

By the time he was twenty-five he had created
Startup
, the steamy, sexy, Machiavellian story of love, loss and betrayal in the dot.com era.

It was a goldmine.

And soon Eric had a house in the Hollywood Hills and a platinum-plated drug habit.

Until he woke up one morning after a week of sad sex and chemical excess, drove north and found Santa Sofia.

Saw a house for sale and bought it on the spot.

And now he ran
Startup
by remote.

His company in Los Angeles,
helmed by
a pit-bull of a lesbian who had a healthy profit share, churned out the series, and he wrote the character bibles and the story arcs and the odd episode, and oversaw the scripts via email.

Life was good.

Life was golden.

But he felt for his neighbor and dearest friend.

He had, of course, been very pleased to see the back of Porter Pringle, but unlike many of the members of Santa Sofia’s excuse for a society he hadn’t rejoiced in Darcy’s heartache.

He simply believed that Porter Pringle wasn’t good enough to lick the pair of Manolo Blahnik’s Eric had taken Darcy down to LA to buy for the ball—along with a
very
fetching
little Valentino number.

Porter, though he had a cute smile and a pert ass, was a Neanderthal.

A boring man who had kept his wife trapped inside his lowbrow world.

Eric saw something in Darcy: she had potential.

Real potential.

Potential to soar far beyond the suburban cage Porter Pringle had fashioned for her.

But Darcy didn’t see it herself.

Or not yet.

As Porter takes his daily stroll on Long Beach, the Pacific stretching blue and limpid, surfer boys jogging by with their boards, he remembers walking along here with Darcy shortly after Porter left her, their arms entwined, Darcy’s hair tugged and teased by a chill little wind coming in off the ocean.

“Do you believe in pair-bonding, Eric?”

“No, darling, I don’t.”

“I do. Look at swans. They pair for life.”

“Darce, where are you going with this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your cob has flown.”

She stopped and blinked, wiping a tendril of her from her eyes.

Eric said, “A male swan is called a cob, darling.”

“Oh, okay.”

“And if you’re trying to write some silly fairy story using a swan analogy, forget it. He’s gone. He’s not coming back. Good riddance.”