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“He had a message for you, too.”
“I’ll, um, get that from you later.” Because she had an idea of where Phil was going with this, she would love to slam the door in his face. But Dean was on the other side of it, too, and she had to finish things with him. “I’m—we’re kind of busy here,” she said, trying to send him a “get along little doggie” message with her eyes.
“It won’t take but a second. It’s about that story tip you passed along to him.”
Dense, dumb, thick-headed Phil. The only thing he was good for was a quick lay, no questions asked. “All right. Got it. See you later, Phil.”
“He said to tell you that the Juliet-and-the-general’s-aide thing was pure gold. November was turning into a real turkey—pun intended—in the gossip business until you dropped the juicy nugget.” With that, he was loping back down the driveway.
Before now, she’d never experienced a deafening silence. But there it was, as loud as a jetliner’s engines, roaring in her head with enough decibels to pop her eardrums.
Still, she could hear Dean’s voice over the inferno. “You didn’t.”
“Of course I did.” She swung her gaze toward him, defiant. “Just like I arranged for you to find me postcoital with some other man.”
Wasn’t that worse? But from the repulsion on his face, it looked like her little whisper to Phil’s brother had been what triggered Dean’s true ire.
His eyes glittered, his jaw was tense. “There were other ugly rumors, Noah told me. They called Juliet the Deal—”
“I had nothing to do with that,” Marlys interrupted, but then remembered she wanted him to reject her. She folded her arms across her chest. “But maybe it was me who called my friend last year and told him that the general’s widow had been getting a Finnish mudbath while he took his final breath.”
“Jesus, Marlys.” Dean shoved a hand through his hair. “Jesus.”
She looked away. “I told you I was no angel.”
“But this!” He made an impatient gesture that she caught from the corner of her eye. “I thought…I thought you were like a friend of my younger sister’s. In her teens, she used to cut herself—they said she did it to release the pent-up feelings inside of her. I thought that’s what you’d done with that asshole this afternoon—that you’d turned self-destructive as a way of releasing your grief about your father and your fears about us.”
What was she supposed to say to that? She only stood there, mute, trembling a little beneath her robe because there was an icy frost in the air that had nothing to do with the evening temperature.
“But hell, Marlys. I was wrong. It’s not yourself that you injure. It’s other people that you use to take out your pain. You hurt other people so you don’t have to feel a goddamned thing.”
With that, he swung around and started off, then he stopped. Without turning around, he asked, “Jesus, Marlys, how could you?”
The answer was so simple. “You said it yourself, Dean. All’s fair in love and war.”
Outside the door of Malibu & Ewe, Juliet glimpsed her reflection in the plateglass door and tugged on the jacket hem of her champagne-colored suit. The silk shell she wore underneath it was the same color and her only jewelry was the pearl choker that Wayne had given her for their first anniversary. It was an exquisite outfit and one of her husband’s favorites. She’d worn it to his memorial service.
It had felt right to wear tonight at the book launch party.
But she didn’t look right in it, she thought, frowning at herself in the glass.
Maybe it was too fussy for Malibu.
Maybe it was too formal for what was supposed to be a celebration.
But there wasn’t time to drive home and restart the wardrobe selection process. With a deep breath, she pushed open the door.
Cassandra and Nikki immediately looked over, but it was her youngest sister’s disapproving expression that tripped her pulse. “What? What’s gone wrong?”
Nikki shook her head. “It’s just that you’re so, uh…one-color.”
Oh, damn, Juliet thought, looking down. Beige.
“Maybe that’s good,” she said, tugging at the jacket’s hem again. “You know, ‘Move along, nothing scandalous to see here.’ ”
“Your face is pale, too, though. Somehow the corpse bride thing isn’t working for me.”
Juliet groaned. “All right. I’ll have to speed back and—”
“Relax.” Cassandra came forward, a delicate confection of blue and green knitted yarn in her hands. “We can liven things up with this,” she said, arranging the scarf over Juliet’s shoulders. “There. That’s better.”
