Rachel Gibson: True Love and Other Disasters

Unlike Faith, Landon had more interest in the games and had been counting down the days until he could get his hands on the team. Owning a professional sports team was a sign of extreme wealth. A membership in an exclusive club that Landon had wanted badly. A membership his father had now denied him.

Landon might have been Virgil’s only son, but they’d despised each other. Landon had never attempted to conceal his disapproval of Virgil’s life or his hatred for Virgil’s fifth wife, Faith.

She moved down the long carpeting in the upstairs hall and into the bedroom suite she’d shared with Virgil. Several men from a moving company were packing her clothes into boxes while one of Landon’s lawyers hovered in the background, making sure Faith didn’t take anything that they didn’t feel belonged to her. She ignored the movers and brushed her hand across the back of Virgil’s worn leather chair. The seat was indented from years of use and Virgil’s reading glasses sat on the table on top of the book he’d been reading the night he’d died. Dickens, because Virgil had an affinity to David Copperfield.

That night, five days ago, she’d been lounging in the chair next to her husband and watching a rerun of Top Chef . On the television, as Padma judged the best amuse-bouche , Virgil had sucked in a sharp breath. She’d looked over at him. “Are you okay?” she’d asked.

“I’m not feeling well.” He’d set his glasses and book aside and raised a hand to his sternum. “I think I’ll go to bed.”

Faith put down the remote, but before she could rise to help him, he slumped forward and gasped, his age-spotted hand falling to his lap.

The rest of the night was a blur. She remembered yelling his name and cradling his head in her lap while she talked to the 911 operator. She couldn’t recall how he came to lie on the floor, only looking down into his face as his soul slipped from his body. She remembered crying and telling him not to die. She’d pleaded with him to hang on, but he hadn’t been able to.

It had all happened so fast. By the time the paramedics had arrived, Virgil was gone. And instead of his family being grateful that he hadn’t died alone, they hated her even more for being there at the end.

Faith walked into the bedroom and grabbed the Louis Vuitton suitcase she’d packed with a few changes of clothes and the jewelry Virgil had bought her throughout their five years of marriage.

“I’ll need to search that,” Landon’s lawyer said as he stepped into the room.

Faith had a few lawyers of her own. “You’ll need a warrant,” she said as she brushed past him, and he didn’t try to stop her. Faith had been around too many truly scary men to be intimidated by one of Landon’s bullies. On her way out of the sitting room, she grabbed her black Valentino coat. She slipped Virgil’s copy of David Copperfield into her Hermès bag and headed toward the front of the house. She could have left by the back entrance, the servants’ stairs, and save herself from running into Virgil’s family, but she wasn’t about to do that. She wasn’t about to sneak away like she’d done something wrong. At the top of the stairs, she shoved her arms through the sleeves of her coat and smiled as she remembered her continual argument with Virgil. He’d always wanted her to wear mink or silver fox, but she’d never felt comfortable wearing fur. Not even after he’d pointed out that she was a hypocrite because she wore leather. Which was true. She loved leather. Although these days, she exercised taste and moderation. Something her mother had yet to discover.

As she moved down the long, winding staircase, she forced a smile in place. She said goodbye to a few of Virgil’s friends who’d been kind to her, and then slipped out the front door.

Her future was wide open. She was thirty years old and could do anything she wanted. She could go to school or take a year off to lie around on a warm beach somewhere.

She looked back at the three-story brick mansion where she’d lived with Virgil for the five years of their marriage. She’d had a good life with Virgil. He’d taken care of her, and for the first time in her life, she hadn’t had to take care of herself. She’d been able to relax. To breathe and have fun and not worry about survival.

“Good-bye,” she whispered, and pointed the toes of her red leather pumps toward her future. The heels of her shoes clicked down the steps and toward the garage around the back as she made her way to her Bentley Continental GT. Virgil had given her the car for her thirtieth birthday last September. She tossed the suitcase in the trunk then hopped inside and drove from the estate. If she hurried, she could just make the six-thirty ferry to Seattle.

As she drove through the gates, she again wondered what she was going to do with her life. Other than the few charities she helped chair, there was no one who needed her. While it was true that Virgil had taken care of her, she’d taken care of him, too.

She took her sunglasses from her purse and slid them onto the bridge of her nose.

And what in the heck was she going to do with his hockey team and all those tough, brutal players? She’d met some of them at the yearly Christmas party she always attended with Virgil. She especially remembered meeting the big Russian, Vlad, the young Swede, Daniel, and the guy with the perpetually bruised face, Sam, but she didn’t know them. To her, they were just members of the twenty-some-odd men who, as far as she could tell, liked to fight and spit a lot.

It was best that she sell the team. Really, it was. She knew what they thought of her. She wasn’t a fool. They thought she was a bimbo. A trophy wife. Virgil’s arm candy. They’d probably passed around her Playboy layout. Not that she cared about that. She wasn’t ashamed of the pictures. She’d been twenty-four years old and had needed the money. It had beat the hell out of stripping, introduced her to new people, and provided new options. One of those options had been Virgil.

She slowed the Bentley at a stop sign, looked both ways, then blew through the intersection.

Faith was used to men staring at her. She was used to men judging her by the size of her breasts and assuming she was dumb or easy or both. She was used to people judging her by her profession or because she’d married a man fifty-one years older than herself. And really, she didn’t care what the world thought. She’d stopped caring a long time ago, when the world had walked past her as she’d sat outside the Lucky Lady or the Kit Kat Topless Lounge waiting for her mama to get off work.

The only thing she’d been born into this world with was her face and body, and she’d used them. Caring what people thought about that gave them the power to hurt her. And Faith never gave anyone that kind of power. No one except Virgil. For all his faults, he’d never treated her like a bimbo. Never treated her as if she were nothing. Sure, she’d been his trophy wife. There was no denying that. He’d used her to prop up his enormous ego. Like Virgil’s hockey team, she was something he owned to make the world envious. She hadn’t minded. Not at all. He’d treated her with kindness and respect, and he’d provided her with what she wanted most. Security. The kind she’d never known, and for five years she’d lived in a nice, safe bubble. And even though her bubble had burst and it felt like she was free-falling, Virgil had made sure she would have as soft a landing as possible.

She thought of Ty Savage, with his deep, rich voice and his slight accent. “I enjoyed our long talks aboat hockey,” he’d said, referring to Virgil.

Faith had been around a lot of good-looking men in her life. She’d dated a lot of them too. Men like Ty whose looks could steal your breath, hit you like a club, and turn your head completely around. His dark blue eyes were lighter blue in the center, like tiny bursts of color. A lock of his dark hair touched his forehead, while fine strands curled about the tops of his ears and the back of his neck. He was tall and built like a Hummer, but he was a little too volatile for Faith’s tastes. Perhaps it was the hetero-juices pounding through the man’s system and rolling off him like toxic vapors. Perhaps it was the scar on his chin that made him look a little dangerous. Little more than a thin, silvery line, the scar looked scarier than Sam’s black eye.