Page 14 of Croc Food

“Buddy, I know you aren’t about to say shit about our house.”

“Of course not! I’m always just surprised by it,” I backpedaled like an idiot, because I realized this must have been Bitsy’s doing.

Fuck. I was just digging myself in deeper.

“Well, get out. Let’s see if you can plead your miserable case to our sweet Bitsy.”

I had just stumbled out when I heard my wife’s lovely, lilting voice. Only it sounded pissed.

“Chadley? What are you doing here?”

CHAPTER 6

Bitsy

Istared down at the tall man plastered in mud from foot to tie, and staggering in front of me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked again.

“I got your note,” he gasped, crawling up the stairs toward me.

My husband looked more like a swamp creature than anything else.

“What note?”

“The note saying you were leaving me, and I had to come down here to talk you out of it! Please, baby, please don’t leave me.”

I stared some more. This was not like Chad at all. Since when was he this panicked about me? Usually this level of worry he reserved only for work stuff.

And whereas before I would have been anxious to smooth everything over, now I was feeling so unappreciated I didn’t care.

“Did you forget I was going home for a few days for Granny’s birthday?” I asked, my shoe going tap-tap-tap on the wooden steps as he collapsed in front of me.

“I—er—yes, yes of course.”

“So why are you here looking like you drove like a bat out of hell all night? Why do you look and smell like you’ve been driving for 18 hours in a row?”

“Well—I—maybe I didn’t remember the party.”

Why did this not surprise me? Chad had been “forgetting” a lot of things lately. Pretty much anything to do with me. Now everything to do with work, he remembered, like that dinner party with his boss he was absolutely obsessed with.

“I asked you to go and you said you couldn’t,” I pointed out.

He cringed.

“I’m sorry, I’ve been kind of distracted at work lately. You know, with the promotion and everything.”

“Right. The promotion and everything.”

“Actually, uh, I guess I thought you had left me. Because of—what I said.”

“Go on?” I said coldly.

My dad and brothers had suggested burying him alive at first, then scaled back to promising me all the help I would need for a quickie divorce.

But divorce? Oh, no, that would be too easy for Chad. Oh no, he wasn’t going to be getting a divorce just yet.

I’d fallen head-over-heels in love at first sight with Chadley Parker-Bowles. When he first came over to buy one of my apple pies, I thought it must be a joke. How could a guy who looked like that want me?