His father snorted. “Good luck on that! But do give Jeanne a try.”
“I’ll give her anything I can, but it’s Amy who won’t listen to anyone.”
“Sometimes, son, you just need to be the man of the house.”
Stephen looked at the phone and grimaced. “Sure, Dad, I’ll club her over the head and drag her around by her hair.”
“The good ol’ days are gone, son, and all of us men have to face that.”
His father said the words so seriously that Stephen laughed. “Okay, point made. I’ll listen to the woman and do whatever she wants us to do. I just hope we don’t have to sit in a candlelit circle with a bunch of strangers and tell our innermost fears.”
His father chuckled. “From what I’ve seen of Jeanne that would be her worst nightmare. She’s pretty down-to-earth and she tells it like she sees it.”
“Oh great,” Stephen groaned. “Dr. Phil on hormones.”
“I’m glad to see that you haven’t made up your mind about her.”
Stephen started to reply but his secretary tapped on the glass wall of his office to let him know that the meeting was starting in three minutes. “I have to go, but I’ll see her. It can’t hurt to talk to her.”
“At this point, nothing can hurt.”
Stephen put down the phone, slipped on his suit jacket, and went to his meeting. The next day, he met with Jeanne Hightower at a restaurant near his office. Later, he was ashamed to admit to himself that he’d gone to the lunch with a certainty that it was going to fail. He knew that Amy would refuse to go to a stranger and talk about her problems. She’d think that going to a therapist meant she was one step away from being committed to an insane asylum. But then, Amy loved historical novels and often tended to think in nineteenth-century terms.
Stephen had been startled at the look of the woman. She was quite a bit overweight and looked like someone’s grandmother, not a therapist who dealt with “celebrities,” as his father had told him in a second conversation.
Stephen braced himself for a long, nerve-racking luncheon in which he’d be asked all about the state of his marriage and whether he and Amy were faithful to each other. Instead, as soon as he sat down, Jeanne pushed a folded piece of paper toward him.
“I think we should get business out of the way first. Your father told me about your wife and I think she should spend a few days at my house in Maine.”
“What?” was all Stephen could manage to say.
“Your father told me that you and your sons go on a camping trip every year and that Amy usually stays home and works on the house.”
Stephen’s back stiffened. The woman was making it sound like Amy had to fix the plumbing on a shack. “She usually does some decorating, yes,” he said.
Jeanne smiled at him. “While you and your kids go camping, get your wife to go to this place on those dates. I have a couple of other women who’ll be there and I think the three of them will mesh.”
Stephen opened the paper, saw the address in faraway Maine and the d
ates of his camping trip. He smiled at her in a patronizing way. “Amy has a mind of her own and she would never agree to spend time alone with strangers. For that matter, I’m not sure I like the idea either.”
“Okay,” Jeanne said and picked up her menu. “What’s good to eat here?”
Stephen frowned. “Is that it? You’re just going to drop it?”
Jeanne looked up at him with twinkling eyes. “You could always tell me about your wildest sex experience. Unless it’s boring, that is. But if it’s a good one, I’d like to hear about it.”
All the stiffness left him and he smiled. He realized that she had seen and felt his reluctance, and she’d quickly managed to relax him. “You are good, aren’t you?”
“The best. In fact, I’m so good that if you tell me you’ll use all of your gorgeous six feet to persuade your wife to go to my house in Maine, I’ll not mention another word about it and you and I can have a nice lunch together. You don’t happen to like baseball, do you?”
“Love it,” Stephen said as he slipped the note into his shirt pocket and picked up his menu. With his head down, he said, “By the way, it’s two.”
She blinked at him for a moment, then smiled. “Right. Six feet two. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to tell me about your sex fantasies?”
“Fantasies?” he said, his eyes on the menu. “You mean like the one where I wear tall black boots and ride a black horse and Amy is—?”
“Your wife?” Jeanne said, her eyes wide. “Your sex fantasies involve your wife?”