My Cheating Husband's Dad (Betrayal and Revenge Romances #5)

Chapter One

The potato salad was mine.

Everything else at Chris Duke's Fourth of July barbecue arrived in refrigerated vans with a catering company's name on the side, but the potato salad came out of my kitchen in a dented Tupperware I'd owned since college, because six years ago my father-in-law had tried a forkful at my first Duke family event and declared, in front of forty people, that it was the only honest food on the table.

He'd asked for it every summer since and I’d made it every summer since.

It was a small thing, but I'd learned that in this world small things were the only ones anyone meant.

I carried it across the lawn toward the long tables under the oaks, and the grass was so perfect it felt like walking on carpet.

Chris's place sat on four acres above the water in Greenwich, all white stone and old trees, and even after seven years with the Dukes I still felt the same flicker I'd felt the first time.

Not envy. More like the feeling of visiting a museum where you happened to know the curator.

"Lily Duke, as I live and breathe." Penny caught my elbow before I made it ten feet, a glass of rosé in her other hand, sunglasses pushed up into her blonde hair. "Tell me you made the potato salad. Oliver's been talking about it in the car for an hour. Actual hour."

"I made the potato salad."

"Thank God. He'd have turned the car around.

" She kissed my cheek. She smelled like she always did, gardenia and money, and I felt the usual warmth at the sight of her.

Penny Wexford had been my best friend for seven years, since the week Mark first brought me into this circle and every other wife looked at my dress and priced it to the dollar.

Penny hadn't priced anything. She'd handed me a drink, told me which of the women were snakes, and sat with me at dinner. You don't forget that.

"Where's your husband?" she asked.

"Somewhere being charming. Where's yours?"

"Following the smell of brisket." She rolled her eyes toward the terrace, where Oliver's laugh boomed out over the crowd. "Come on. Chris put the good champagne out early this year. I think he's finally accepted that we're all animals."

The afternoon went the way these afternoons went.

I set down my Tupperware between the catered lobster rolls and a raw bar the size of a piano, and nobody found it strange, because Chris had made it not strange years ago.

The wives and I talked summer plans and schools and one contentious kitchen renovation.

I kept half an eye on Mark the way I always did at these things, not out of suspicion but out of habit, because managing my husband's rooms was half my job even if nobody paid me for it.

Watch the investors' wives. Remember the names of children.

Laugh at Oliver's jokes at the right volume.

I was good at it. I'd had five years of marriage to practice.

Mark worked the lawn like he owned it, which in a way he assumed he someday would. My husband was thirty-four and handsome in the specific way of men who have never once worried about money. Tan and easy, teeth like a commercial. Watching him hold court by the pool with three of his investors.

"Your father-in-law is showing off," Penny said beside me.

Chris stood at the enormous grill on the terrace, jacket off, sleeves rolled, turning ribs with a pair of tongs and ignoring the caterers hovering behind him like anxious seagulls.

He was fifty-eight and built like he still did something physical with his days, which he did, because Chris Duke was the kind of rich that came from thirty years of putting up buildings rather than inheriting them.

He caught me looking and lifted the tongs in a salute.

"Potato salad's on the table," I called.

"Then the party can start," he called back.

Penny laughed. "He loves you more than he loves Mark."

"He loves my potato salad more than he loves Mark."

"Same thing." She drained her rosé. "I need a refill. Don't move, I want to hear about the Hamptons thing."

I did move, though. That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward, that if I'd stood where she left me I'd have seen nothing, and my whole life would have kept running on its old track for who knows how long.

Instead I went to find a bathroom, took the long way around the side terrace to avoid getting caught by Lisa Wells and her opinions about the club's new membership policy, and came out by the bar table under the pergola at the exact moment my husband was refilling my best friend's glass.

There was nothing wrong with the picture. That's what I want to be clear about. A man pouring wine for a woman at a party, thirty other people on the lawn, sun everywhere. Nothing wrong with it at all, except that when he finished pouring, Penny put her fingers on his wrist.

Not a tap. Not a thanks-darling touch, the kind we all traded a hundred times a summer. Her fingers settled on his wrist and stayed, and his thumb moved against the base of her hand, one small stroke, automatic, and the two of them looked at each other for a second and a half too long intently.

That was it. That was everything. No kiss, no whisper, nothing a photograph could convict them with. Just two people being careful in a way you only need to be careful when there's something to lose.

My stomach dropped out of me and kept going, somewhere down through the flagstones.

I didn't gasp. I didn't drop a glass. Some deep, cold part of my brain took the wheel before the rest of me could make a sound, and I stepped back half a pace into the shade of the pergola post and made myself breathe.

Once. Twice. My heart was slamming and my face, I knew, was doing nothing at all, because I'd spent five years training my face for rooms like this and apparently the training held even now.

Seven years, I thought. She handed me a drink and told me which women were snakes. She never mentioned herself.

Mark said something. Penny took her hand back and laughed, the laugh she used on husbands, and turned toward the lawn, and the whole thing dissolved back into an ordinary party in under three seconds. He topped off his own glass. She walked away without hurrying. Careful people.

I stood in the shade lining up things I didn't want to line up.

The weekend in March he'd flown back a day late from Miami.

The charity gala where I'd lost them both for forty minutes.

Penny asking me twice this spring, casually, over lunch, whether Mark and I were trying for kids yet, and something in her voice I'd read as concern.

The list kept growing whether I wanted it to or not. Reality rewrote itself and my brain felt like a train out of control.

I made myself look away from the bar, and that was when I saw Chris.

He was still at the grill, tongs down, a rack of ribs dying behind him.

His eyes weren't on me. He was looking at the pergola, at the spot where his son and my best friend had just been standing, and his face had gone to stone.

Not confused. Not surprised, which was its own piece of information.

He had the flat, held expression of a man watching something he already suspected get confirmed, and he didn't like it, and he wasn't performing not liking it for anyone, because he didn't know anyone was watching him either.

Then his eyes moved and found mine.

We looked at each other across thirty feet of perfect lawn, my father-in-law and I, and neither of us smiled, and neither of us looked away, and in that long second something passed between us that I couldn't have put words to yet.

He knew. I knew. Each of us now knew the other knew, and nobody else at the party knew anything at all.

Oliver's laugh rolled across the grass. Somebody's kid shrieked in the pool. The band Chris hired every year started tuning up under the far oaks, and the whole golden machine of the afternoon ground on without us.

Chris broke first. He picked his tongs back up, turned to the grill, and became a man cooking ribs again. I watched his shoulders and understood that he'd made a decision, and that the decision was to wait, and I stood in the pergola shade with my heart still hammering and made the same one.

Because here's what I knew about myself, standing there while my marriage quietly changed category behind me.

I wasn't going to scream on this lawn. I wasn't going to throw wine, or cry in a bathroom, or grab Penny's arm and demand answers she'd only lie about.

Every cell in my body wanted to. It took everything I had to stand still.

But I'd come into this world with nothing except the ability to pay attention, and I'd spent seven years learning how these people worked, and if the two of them were careful, well.

I could be careful too.

I smoothed my dress, picked up a fresh glass of champagne from the bar where my husband had just stood, and walked back out into the sun to go find him. He saw me coming and lit up, handsome and easy and mine on paper, and slid an arm around my waist and kissed my temple in front of his investors.

"There she is," Mark said. "Best thing I ever did, gentlemen."

I smiled and let them all laugh, and against my husband's shoulder I started counting what I actually knew, which was almost nothing.

That was fine.

I knew how to find things out.