The General (Professionals 4)

“I think we both know that you don’t fit that trope. That this lifestyle has cost you dearly. I don’t envy you having to deal with these people. But one visit where they get nothing will be enough to discourage them from coming back again. They will just walk away with a ‘Poor Jenny’ story and move on to the next scandal. I can’t imagine they are hard to find from the amount of business we get from this town. What?”

“You don’t think any of these women will be contacts you’ve worked with before, do you? People who might know what Quinton Baird & Associates really does?”

His uncertain face didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

“To be safe, when the bell rings, I will make myself scarce, but keep an eye. If no faces are familiar, if you want, I can show myself. Or if you want to handle this all yourself, that is fine too. I will just stay within earshot in case anyone won’t take a hint. I can always invent some kind of emergency. Just don’t drop our name. Say you hired a Mr. Smith and be done with it. I doubt they’d press beyond that.”

That was true.

As a whole, the women in my circle would never be called the brightest bulbs. They were sly, gossipy, and vapid, pretending their charitable works were anything other than social gatherings to promote themselves as such good people.

There were maybe two women in the whole of Navesink Bank’s upper crust that I thought were genuine. One was somewhat shunned by everyone else because while she was very successful, she married a tattoo artist. The other was single. And, for some reason, that was a problem for the rest of the women.

Maybe they thought she’d steal their husbands. Of all the ridiculous notions. If she had a fortune of her own, why on Earth would she try to steal someone else’s husband? That was what destitute, desperate women did. Hell, there were rumors going around that at least two of the ladies got their husbands that very way.

Young and pretty was a commodity.

Young, pretty, and independent, that didn’t compute.

I wondered if I would be viewed differently because of my singleness. Or were widows different? Was I not young enough to be a threat anymore?

Ugh, why did it even matter?

I had no plans on ever marrying again, ever giving even a small chunk of my life over to anyone else ever again.

I just wanted a nice, quiet life of my own.

“So, are you going to show me?”

“To your room? I’m a terrible host,” I said, knee-jerk, ingrained.

“Jenny, no,” he said, shaking his head almost sadly. “I know where the guest room is. And you don’t need to act like a host around me. I can find my way around, make my own coffee. I’m staff, for all intents and purposes. I meant are you going to show me the clay jewelry?”

“You don’t have to pretend to be interested. I really appreciate you doing it, but…”

“I wouldn’t bring it up if I wasn’t interested, sweetheart. I’m curious.”

“Okay. Then, yeah,” I said, smiling because it meant more than maybe it should have that he was interested at all. In this tiny little thing that was mine and mine alone. “Let’s go then.”

“Bring it,” he said when I went to put down the bag of chips and Coke I had just reached for.

I didn’t, tea aside, eat in the other rooms of the house. I had this former-poor-girl-guilt about making anyone do any extra clean up because of me.

But just this once, I guess I could make an exception. I grabbed the sour cream & onion and coke and led him upstairs, down the hall opposite the one that would lead to the master suite, and into the little, girly guest room with a full-size bed covered in all white, a delicate, gently curved white nightstand, and a coral pink armchair where I would often sit in the room with walls that were barely, just barely pink. If you pulled back the comforter, you’d find that the white sheets had a sweet little pink peony pattern on it.

“How do you do crafts in here?” he asked, looking at the plush off-white carpet, the lack of empty surfaces.

I walked over to the closet, sliding the doors open, revealing a mostly empty space save for the two plastic containers in one corner, a small row of decorative pink boxes on a top shelf, and an oversized fold-up table meant for doing puzzles.

“So, every time you want to work on something, you have to drag everything out? In a house this big, you couldn’t just have one room all to yourself to have a few worktables and organization?”

“It sounds reasonable to ask that, but I wasn’t even allowed to keep an African Violet I picked up at a store. How would he explain to his friends that his wife enjoyed making silly little clay earrings?” I asked, taking out one of the decorative boxes. All of them were almost full of finished products. The plastic containers were for supplies.