The Red Hat Society's Domestic Goddess (2 page)

One half of Steven’s mouth lifted in a half-hearted smile. “So now
you’re
Dirty Harriet.”

“I do feel pretty dirty,” she admitted, letting him stall for time.

Unlike Mitchell, Steven had always confessed his misdeeds to her. She’d only had to wait until his conscience got the better
of him and then he would spill all. He’d been the one to tell her what had really caused the welts on his and Mitchell’s skin.
BBs.

“I just finished cleaning your brother’s apartment,” she explained her dirtiness, hoping there were no more cobwebs in her
hair.

Steven’s face twisted into a disgusted grimace. “I don’t know how he lives like that.”

Millie knew that if it weren’t for Steven’s wife, Audrey, his house would look the same way. “I love it when you drop by,
but I’m surprised…”

“It’s so early,” he finished for her, his voice thick with emotion, “and that I’ve brought luggage.”

She hated to ask, afraid of what he might answer, so she just nodded.

“Audrey made me come home for lunch today. I thought…” He sighed, a ragged gust of air full of resignation. “It doesn’t matter
what I thought. I came home to my bags packed. She threw me out.”

“Audrey threw you out?” Millie couldn’t digest it; like the half-eaten pieces of pizza left in the boxes on Mitchell’s coffee
table, the thought made her queasy.

Steven and Audrey had met in college. While he’d finished, she’d dropped out to marry him. They’d been together seventeen
years, married almost fifteen; they had Brigitte, who was just starting her teen years.

“No…”

He nodded, his brown eyes filling with tears. “I don’t understand it, Mom,” he said, blinking furiously before lifting a box
from his trunk and heading into the house with it. In the foyer, at the top of the stairs, which led to Pop’s old apartment
in the walk-out basement, he turned back and said, “And really I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But you and Audrey… you need to talk,” she protested. “The
last
thing you should do is move out.”

“It’s what
she
wants, Mom. She doesn’t want me around anymore.”

Panic pressed heavily against Millie’s heart, stealing her breath away much more than any of Kim’s outrageous exercises ever
did. Steven, Audrey, and Brigitte were the perfect family. Well, maybe not perfect. They had their arguments, but that was
normal.

Except that things hadn’t seemed normal for them lately. They’d been strained. But Millie knew from experience that marriage
was like a rubber band; it could get stretched to the limits but snap back tightly, not even showing any traces of how far
it’d been stretched. Unless… it broke. The divorce rate proved how many times that happened.

“Steven,” she said, reaching for his arm as he started down the stairs. “You’re not giving up, not like this, not after so
many years together.”

He sighed and bowed his head, refusing to turn toward her. “Mom, it’s not that simple anymore.”

“Marriage isn’t.” Not that she could complain about hers. All her memories of Bruce were happy ones; at least the ones she’d
kept alive were. Maybe there’d been others, but so few and far between that they weren’t worth remembering.

“But it shouldn’t be this difficult, either,” Steven said, running a slightly shaking hand over his hair yet again.

“What’s difficult?” Millie asked, desperately wanting to understand. Despite noticing the strain, she hadn’t wanted to ask
about it. From the minute her sons had been born, she’d vowed not to become one of
those
mothers, the kind who interfered in their children’s lives. She’d trusted them enough to let them live their own lives. “What’s
changed? You were happy together.”

“Until…” he started, his voice thick with emotion, “she went back to school.”

Audrey had recently gone back to college to finish up the nursing degree she’d started so many years ago. Millie had applauded
her determination and been so inspired by it that she’d gotten serious about retiring her own tiara. Now a horrible thought
occurred to Millie, turning her stomach as if she had eaten Mitchell’s leftovers. “Oh, no, she met someone else.”

He laughed, a short bitter sound. “No, but I almost wish she had.”

“Steven!” She fought the temptation to whack him with the duster; her son was already hurting.

He jerked his hand through his thin hair again. His whole body was shaking now… with frustration and
shock. While Millie had noticed the strain in their marriage, she wondered if
he
had. His next words confirmed that he hadn’t. “If she’d found someone else, then I could actually understand why she threw
me
out.”

“You need to talk,” she maintained. “We’ll go back to your house. Brigitte can come stay with me while you and Audrey work
things out.”

He shook his head and squeezed his dark eyes shut, probably trying to hold in the tears she saw glistening in them. “No, Mom,
it’s too late. Or it’s too soon. I’m not sure what it is anymore.”

It was not fair to him or to Audrey but most especially not to Brigitte.
That poor girl
…

“Oh, Steven…” She squeezed his arm, trying to express her love, support, and willingness to help any way she could. The phrase
too little, too late
taunted her. She refused to accept that it was too late. “You have to try.”

He nodded. “I know. But not now. It…” One tear fell, sliding down the hard line of his taut jaw. “… hurts too much, Mom.”

The shock, the pain, it was too fresh. She understood that. “But you will.”

“After we’ve given it some time. But I have to ask you something, Mom.”

“Of course you can stay here.” But it was a little late to ask that since he’d apparently already brought some stuff down
to Pop’s old apartment. It consisted of a bedroom, a bathroom, and a family room, with a little kitchenette in one corner.

Steven blinked, surprised again. “Well, that, too. I didn’t think…”

“It’s okay.” That he hadn’t asked her first. “Don’t worry about it.”

Obviously he didn’t think she had a life. But she did and she actually needed more time for it. She’d thought she’d only had
Mitchell left to marry off before she could retire her tiara and take that time for herself.

There was someone else she’d flirted with the idea of making time for, though, but it was definitely too soon for him. And
Millie was so old-fashioned, she’d never actually learned to flirt. Was it as easy as getting a dye job?

“Mom? Are you okay?”

She nodded, pushing the crazy thought from her mind. She didn’t really need anyone or anything else in her life. Even with
Pop married and moved out, it was too full now for her to fit in all the things she wanted to do, like shopping and gambling
excursions with her Red Hat Society chapter, The Red Hot Hatters of Hilltop. She’d always wanted to travel, but Bruce had
been such a homebody, and they’d had Pop and the boys to take care of then, too. She really wanted to take a cruise like several
members of her Red Hot Hatters often did. She blew out a resigned sigh before assuring Steven, “I’m fine, just tired.”

He snorted. “From cleaning Mitchell’s place. I would have moved in with him, but I couldn’t stand his mess.”

Which multiplied by Steven’s would have given Millie nightmares. She would have had to beg Mitchell to hire a maid.

“I’m happy to have you here,” she insisted. But she hoped it wouldn’t be for long. While she wouldn’t mind his company, Steven
belonged home with his family. The
connection between a mother and child as strong as ever, she could
feel
his heart breaking, and hers ached, too.

He let out another ragged sigh. “Thanks, Mom. I need to ask you for another favor, though.”

“Anything.”

“I need you to go…” he drew in a quick breath, “to my house.”

He couldn’t call it home. He’d only been gone a few hours, but he couldn’t call it that anymore. Panic pressed on Millie’s
heart. She refused to believe it was too late, though. Maybe she could still help.

But how could she, who had never interfered before, interject herself into the middle of a battle between a husband and wife
when she had no real idea what their problems were?

“Steven, I don’t think it’s my place…”

“I just need you to pick up my briefcase. I’ve looked through the boxes I brought downstairs.”

Boxes? He’d already moved
boxes
of his stuff from his home to the basement?

“And I checked the trunk again. I can’t find it. I brought it home with me to do some work this afternoon. Can you go get
it for me? I can’t go back there.”

“Steven, you’re going to have to… for Brigitte.”

“I can’t go back
because
of Brigitte. It’s too soon. We all need time to adjust.”

Millie worried that he was adjusting pretty quickly, then she saw his eyes and the tears he couldn’t blink away. He was hurting,
and he didn’t want his daughter to see him in that kind of pain.

Millie
hated seeing him in that kind of pain.

“Of course.” She blinked fast, pushing back her own tears. “I’ll go right now.” And give him a chance to pull himself together.
She
needed one, too.

She’d conveniently left the car running for a quick getaway. Hands trembling, she opened the door, then tossed the duster
into the backseat. She rammed the Taurus into reverse, then glanced into the rearview mirror
after
she’d already started moving. Too late.

A man stood behind the car, his outstretched arm clutching a leash. But she couldn’t see the dog he usually walked at the
end of it. She slammed on the brakes, the seatbelt biting into her sore muscles, but she didn’t care about that. She cared
about him. He couldn’t lose his dog, too. He’d just buried his wife not that long ago.

She threw open her door. “I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”

She couldn’t look down. She was too afraid to see whether or not a furry, gray body lay beneath the tire of her car.

Chapter Two

“I only like two kinds of men:
domestic
and foreign.”

—
Mae West

M
illie held her breath until she heard an indignant yip. Then she let it out in a relieved sigh, glancing down at the small,
bearded dog. “Oh, thank goodness. I thought I hit him.”

“No, you didn’t,” a deep voice assured her though it didn’t sound particularly relieved. Actually, it sounded a little disappointed.
“You seem to be in a hurry, though, so I can hang onto this….”

She forced herself to meet Charles Moelker’s amazing blue gaze. Instead of feeling relief that she hadn’t harmed the dog,
her heart rate accelerated more. It was silly, this giddy little rush she experienced whenever she saw her handsome neighbor.
She wasn’t a teenager anymore, hadn’t been one for a long, long time. Though now, with her new hair color, she didn’t
look
like it had been that long. She reached up, patting her hair to surreptitiously
check for more cobwebs, then she looked down at her yellow velour sweatsuit, which was smeared with streaks of dirt.

Charles, even in faded jeans and a gray sweatshirt, looked like he’d stepped off the cover of
GQ.
His bright eyes made her think of the carefree summer days of her youth and Pierce Brosnan, her personal favorite, although
Charles’ slightly graying beard made him look more like Sean Connery. While Kim had teased that he was starting to look like
his dog, a miniature Schnauzer, Millie understood why he’d grown it. He didn’t care about his appearance right now… or much
of anything else.

She’d gone through a rough patch after Bruce’s death. But with the support of her friends, and the comfort of her memories,
she’d never really felt as if she’d lost him. They’d been too close for too long for him to ever completely leave her. From
that first night Pop had brought him home from the office, they had been inseparable, marrying the summer right after Millie
graduated high school. That was old-fashioned, getting married that young, but she didn’t regret a minute of their time together.

Realizing she had been silently staring at Charles for some time, probably with her mouth hanging open, she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Your hair—I mean, your bowl.” He lifted an orange casserole bowl in his leash-free hand. “I was returning it.”

When she had nearly run him and his little dog over. “I’m sorry,” she said again, inwardly grimacing about sounding like an
idiot.

Oh, she hoped Kim wasn’t anywhere around, lurking behind the trees and shrubbery, watching and laughing about this; Millie
would never live it down, as Kim would be sure to share it at their next Red Hat Society chapter get-together. Millie peered
around, but as short as she was, she could barely see across the evergreen shrubs lining her drive to the next door unit,
let alone to Kim’s, which was another building down and across the street. The complex fit its name; all the buildings were
carved into a woodsy hilltop with the dark brick walls and green slate roofs blending into the surroundings.

Millie reached out, taking the bowl from Charles’s hand, nearly dropping it when their fingers brushed and a funny little
current traveled up her arm. Probably just another muscle twinge courtesy of Kim’s class. She hoped.