Fatal Affair: 1 (Courthouse Connections) Read Free Page A

you told JD about your childhood. You
deliberately failed to mention you came from a long line of poor white trash
and you certainly didn’t explain how you managed to save up for a third year of
college before Wayne came along to rescue you.
    She’d come a long way from that tumbledown
shack where she’d grown up. She’d scratched and clawed and finally got herself
in a position where she didn’t have to be ashamed anymore.
    I’m not helpless. I can hurt Bert and
Wayne just as much as they can hurt me. But she
knew deep down that she didn’t have that sort of power.
    Lanie looked first at Bert, then at Wayne.
“Wayne, you don’t want to hurt me, do you?”
    Wayne refused to meet her gaze, but then
she’d often noticed how rarely he looked anybody directly in the eye. “Of
course not,” he said. “I just told Bert I want out of this farce as much as you
do. Maybe more.”
    “Wayne, you can’t just tell the folks who
keep you in office to fuck off and rub their faces in who—what sort of
pervert—you really are.” Bert shook a fist in the air and his fat face turned
purplish-red—almost a match for his ugly checkered tie. “Lanie, you gotta talk
some sense into him. Give up on this crazy notion of gettin’ divorced. You know
damn well you never had it so good as you’ve got it as the senator’s wife.”
    That was true, as far as material things went.
She hadn’t missed what she’d never really had in the way of affection until
she’d started observing the easy relationships enjoyed by her office mates, her
clients, even strangers she saw on the streets and at the courthouse.
    She hadn’t missed sex, either, because what
little she’d had before marrying Wayne hadn’t been good enough to make her
yearn for more. If she’d had any idea eight years ago what great sex could be
like, she never would have agreed to this arrangement.
    She couldn’t keep on the same lonesome
path, not now that JD had given her a glimpse of passion. Of lust. Of desire
that was real, not faked.
    Lanie looked straight at Bert, trying hard
not to let him see how scared he made her. “I appreciate everything Wayne has
done for me. But things change. He and I agree that it’s time for us to go our
separate ways.”
    “He and you? Ha! What about good old Bert?
What happens to me when Wayne throws away the political career I built for
him?”
    “Times are different now.” Lanie doubted
her argument would change anything but she had to try. “Wayne’s no pervert.
There’s nothing shameful about being gay. For more than eight years now he’s
tried to act the devoted husband, just as I’ve tried to play the loving wife.
He met someone, though—a person he loves—and he’s tired of pretending to be who
he’s not. Let us be ourselves. Who’s to say the voters won’t respect him more
if he comes out?”
    Bert laughed out loud but it wasn’t a
humorous sound. “I say it. Maybe if he was representing some bleeding heart
liberal district like Miami’s Gold Coast, he could flit about with his
boyfriend all he wanted and nobody would think anything of it. But his fucking
district is rural Hillsborough County, where some folks still think queers
should be tarred and feathered and most of the rest of them would gladly run ’em
out of town on a rail—that is if the trains were still running. Forget it.”
    Bert riddled Lanie with a malevolent stare,
as if he could see through her conservative slacks and sweater all the way
through to her skin and didn’t much like what he saw. “You damn well think
about what it would do to your fine reputation as an up-and-coming lawyer if it
got out that you spent one summer making your living in a strip joint out on
I-4, conning hard-earned bucks out of truckers every night.”
    “You wouldn’t do that, would you? If you
did, wouldn’t you also have to let folks know just how you and Wayne found out
I was working in that strip club? How you brokered this arrangement between us
for