She lowered her voice, but still looked at him like he was crazy. “Your next-door neighbor? And here I thought you were an idiot for hooking up with that chick who made you talk dirty in a Scottish accent. How is this not going to be awkward when it ends?”
Ford dismissed this with a wave. “Don’t worry. It won’t be.”
Brooke rolled her eyes. “You are so thinking with your penis right now.”
That part of him definitely had been all in favor of sleeping with Victoria the other night, but his head also had zero regrets. “If you knew her, you’d understand. She’s different from . . . I don’t know, any other woman I’ve met, really.”
“How so?”
He took a bite of his French fries. “She’s this high-powered divorce lawyer. Runs her own firm. Smart, confident, and totally snarky. The first time we had dinner together she gave me this big speech about not wanting to get married, and how she’s ‘self-selected out of the happily-ever-after rat race.’ And it’s not just a speech—the woman is truly cynical when it comes to relationships. And snarky. Did I mention that?”
“Twice.”
Right. Ford ate another French fry. “Although I suppose when you get past all the sarcasm and the saucy comments, she’s actually kind of . . . funny. And it is pretty cute how she’s so determined to hide the fact that there’s this softer side to her.” He grinned slyly. “Fucking hot as hell in the bedroom. And on my dining table.”
Brooke gave him an amused look. “You do realize that’s the most you’ve ever told me about any woman you’ve hooked up with?”
He scoffed at that. “Get out of here. I always talk to you about the women I go out with.”
“That last woman you dated? Hailey? I don’t even know what she did for a living.”
Ford sipped his beer, remaining silent.
“Trying to remember?” Brooke asked.
“It’ll come to me.”
She smiled, her point made. “I’m just saying, it sounds like you like this Victoria the Divorce Lawyer.”
Christ, not this conversation. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you? You’re married now. And that means, like every other married person we know, you want all your single friends to get married, too, so that you can have couples’ dinner parties, or couples’ Scrabble nights, or go on little couples’ weekend trips to bed-and-breakfasts in Door County, or—”
“All right, I get the picture. And that’s not what this is about.” Brooke paused. “Although Cade and I were just talking about going up to Door County with Vaughn and Sidney and Huxley and Addison.”
“Of course you were.”
“But that doesn’t change the fact that I’d hate to see you pass up the chance to have something good because you’re too busy being a typical male bonehead about these things.”
“You know, if you were a guy, and I’d just told you that I’d had fantastic, no-strings-attached sex with a hot woman, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. You’d simply high-five me and ask if she has any single friends.”
She flashed him a grin. “Sorry, babe. But when they handed out best friends, you drew the straw that came with boobs and occasionally likes to talk about feelings.”
Great. “I was ten years old at the time. Of course I picked the straw that came with boobs.”
She laughed, and then looked at him for a moment. “Just tell me you know what you’re doing.”
“Don’t I always? Trust me.” With a confident wink, he took a sip of his beer. “So what’s going on with Cade these days? Any more crampon shopping?”
* * *
OUTSIDE THE BAY window of the kitchen, a sailboat floated by on the lake. It was an idyllic scene—a beautiful summer day, not a cloud in the sky, and the water a calm, deep blue.
Inside the house, however, the scene was anything but idyllic or calm.
“Maybe if you’d paid half as much attention to me as you did to all the crap you collected, we wouldn’t be here,” the soon-to-be ex–Mrs. Hall shouted.
“If it’s such crap, then you shouldn’t give a crap about getting half of it,” her husband shot back. He turned to Victoria. “Does she really have to be here for this?”
They were all gathered in the gourmet kitchen of the Halls’ six-million-dollar North Shore lakefront estate: Victoria and her client, Brad Hall, standing at one end of the massive granite island; Lisa Hall and her lawyer on the other. The appraiser the parties had hired hovered awkwardly by the refrigerator, trying to stay out of the fray.
The Halls, both in their fifties—him, a technology entrepreneur, her, a cardiovascular surgeon—had mutually filed for divorce after nearly thirty years of marriage, for the simple reason that they couldn’t stand each other anymore. Thankfully, their two children were grown, which meant custody wasn’t an issue, because the divorce proceedings had been bitter and contentious at every step.
This meeting, the purpose of which was to determine the value of Mr. Hall’s sizable rare notes, coins, and stamps collection, wasn’t shaping up to be any different.
Before Victoria had a chance to answer her client, Mrs. Hall jumped in.
“Oh, sure. Turn away, talk to her instead of me,” she said, pointing to Victoria. “That pretty much sums up our marriage. Only before, you would talk to me through the kids. Then they left home, and we didn’t talk at all.”
“Can we go back to that?” Mr. Hall asked sarcastically. “Because this conversation is reminding me exactly why we didn’t talk: because you bitch about everything. It’s like you don’t know how to have a fucking conversation if you’re not complaining about something.”
“Oh, sorry if I don’t get all excited about some stupid dollar bill printed in 1861.” Mrs. Hall pointed to the collection of rare notes that lay out on the counter. “Because for the last ten years, that’s about the only thing that seemed to get your motor running.”
“Gee, another complaint. Imagine that,” Mr. Hall said in mock surprise. “You know, you used to think I was cute for being so interested in U.S. history.”
“I also used to think you were cute when you were a size thirty-four in pants.” She smiled sweetly, gesturing to his stomach. “Things change, baby.”