Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
“It’s an affluent suburban neighborhood. It’s built through the ingenuity of man, which is another of God’s creations. It’s one of innumerable of its kind in the world. It’s hardly Dante’s Inferno,” I said.
“I fear we’ve hit the first level, or perhaps the third, or there’s a tenth even Dante feared to explore, and this is it,” Nora retorted.
She was also in a bad mood because she was a woman from the Upper West Side currently being driven through a suburb in Scottsdale, Arizona.
She was further the woman who, only under duress, would go to the Latin Quarter in Paris because, “The farther you get from la Rue St. Honoré, darling, the more beastly things become,” and this “farther” was pretty much just across the Seine.
I should have known Scottsdale would be too much for her.
She was also, like me, in a bad mood because Tom had begged off for dinner that night and postponed showing Cadence how to feed the kittens for today, Saturday.
He did this ostensibly so I could see Clay, Priscilla and Brayton again (though, the dinner thing he’d said had something to do with a family matter).
Upon hearing this change in plan, Nora had poured my eighteen-year-old daughter a gin and tonic, taught her how to get a perfect curl in a lemon twist, and they sat in my courtyard and dissected this dire news, probably correctly reading from it that Tom was limiting our time together.
He was, I was painfully aware (as were they), seeing another woman (Nora had shared with Cadence, they’d formed an unholy alliance—as her mother, I should have intervened, but I’d learned early intervening with Nora was nigh on impossible).
They then decided, while eating lobster mac and cheese and crab swirls (the first delivered direct from Boston, the second from Maryland, both from Goldbelly, acquisitions Nora had ordered before she’d even left New York, “Because, dearest, you don’t expect Mother to eat tacos for weeks, do you?”—needless to say, these deliveries weren’t the first or last and Nora had put Cadence on the case, and while I was working, they’d gone in to visit AJ’s Fine Foods to “stock up” and “Mom! It was rad! Aunt Nora spent eleven hundred dollars. I thought the cashier was going to faint!” Needless to say, my daughter wasn’t writing many papers).
I wasn’t sure Phoenix was ready for Nora Eugenie Elizabeth Ellington.
Sadly, they had her.
I digress.
Over gin, lobster and crab, they decided Tom was putting obstacles in the way of us due to his extreme, almost pathological attraction to me, and his fear of commitment due to his failed marriage.
And they didn’t like it.
On my part, I suspected he was in a relationship, his last ended decisively because he’d had an affair, and as such, he was not going to put another woman through what he’d put his wife through, not even a hint of it.
We were friends, it wasn’t going there (ugh).
That said, not many women liked their men hanging with single women.
Tom hadn’t even mentioned Paloma to me.
But Tom and I had spent precisely five and three-quarter hours together (I’d counted), and for two of those hours, we’d been watching a movie.
Maybe there wasn’t time to share about his girlfriend.
Maybe it wasn’t my business.
Definitely he was being ultra-cautious because he’d hurt one woman, and he was never going to do it again.
And that wasn’t guesswork. He’d said it to me directly.
Much better to have me there with Cadence, Nora, Clay, Priscilla and Brayton to nurse a few kittens, and not be going back and forth between houses, sharing dinners, watching movies, getting to know daughters and tempting the fates.
I drove into Tom’s drive with relief because we were there, we’d soon have company, and neither female in my car could complain anymore.
“I don’t hate it,” Nora decided while surveying Tom’s house.
“I like it,” Cadence decreed. “It seems very…him.”
My girl was right about that.
I glanced at Nora as I got out, catching her now studying me with a gentle expression on her face that belied everything out of her mouth since we hit Scottsdale Road.
She knew me too well.
“We’re just friends,” I said for what felt like the millionth time.
She didn’t deign to respond.
She turned away and elegantly alighted from the Tesla.
I did the same, though perhaps not as elegantly.
There was another car in the drive.
The Davises were already there.
Tom didn’t come out this time to open doors and ooze sex appeal.
I was both grateful for it, and I missed it.
We made our way up the walk, Cadence going faster than Nora and me, mostly because I was dragging my feet and I’d clamped on to my friend’s hand so she had no choice but to drag hers with me.
“I’d like you to be more careful with my daughter,” I said under my breath. “She likes Tom. She’s never been like this with a man and me. But no matter what you want, he’s with Paloma. And considering history, I suspect he’s going to guard that. We really are just friends, only becoming reacquainted very recently. So how about you take it down a notch?”