Husband Stay (Husband #2) Read Free

the music of their
teenage years, imagining they were just as cool as they’d always been.
    I’d suffered more
than my fair share of ham-fisted flirting over the years, and it sometimes took
all of my self-control to smile and be gracious as Bertie expected, when I really
wanted to say Why on earth would I go out with a pretentious twit like you
when I have a perfectly good husband at home?
    I hadn’t known
then that Danny was far from ‘perfectly good’. I’d accepted the fact that he’d always
been a flirt, which had alternately embarrassed and annoyed me. I’d smiled
through most of it, sometimes with gritted teeth, but I hadn’t liked it.
    Now that it was
over, however, the worst thing was not-knowing when flirting had tipped over to
infidelity. That really sucked. And every time I thought of how gullible I’d
been, believing all his late-home-lies, I felt sick with disgust. But I had to
stop doing that to myself. Self-recrimination only made life harder to wade
through, and the last thing I wanted was to feel like a victim.
    So I sighed and
closed my eyes, wishing I could somehow go back in time to when Jill, Fritha, Louella
and I had been schoolgirls together and Tommy Smout had sent me love letters. I
hadn’t been attracted to Tommy in the slightest, but his adoration had
impressed me.
    Of course, I
hadn’t been attracted to Danny either, but the difference between the two men
was that Tommy had grown into a lovely man, a faithful and steadfast husband
and a doting father. At least that’s what my mother told me while recounting
news of Dakaroo, the little country town where we girls had grown up before
we’d all fled the outback for adventures in the city.
    If I’d married
Tommy Smout instead of Danny, I’d be a happy mother now—albeit to mixed race
children—instead of a lonely woman with no shoes riding an ambulance to
hospital in a city where nobody cared about you.
    I sighed again, and
that’s when Sally interrupted my thoughts. “He’s a looker, that’s for sure.”
    I blinked my eyes
open, confused for a second about her ability to read my mind. Then I twigged
that I was still turned toward the drunk. Without realizing what I’d been
doing, I’d twisted sideways in the seat to face Sally, resting my cheek against
the head-rest so I could stare at the man on the stretcher behind her.
    “No wedding ring.”
She winked at me and hauled us around a corner, her thin arms like spindles as
they turned the steering wheel.
    “He’s a creep,” I
said categorically, but when I glanced back at him, I couldn’t help feeling as
if the description didn’t fit anymore. With monitors all over his chest, and
his face gentle with sleep—or unconsciousness—he looked like a big kid. A big
stupid kid, granted. But not a creep.
    Annoying .
    But not scary.
    I twisted around
to face the front again, protecting my wrist with my good hand. “I’m married,”
I said. My standard defense. May as well use it until the divorce was official.
    She shrugged.
“Fair enough, but there’s no law against looking.”
    The other
paramedic’s voice cut over us from the back. “ASAP, Sal.”
    She flipped on the
siren and that was the end of our conversation as she focused on the road,
swerving between cars, running red lights, worse than a Sydney taxi driver.
    I could see
movement behind me in my peripheral vision, and I desperately wanted to turn
back and stare, but some ingrained decency forced me to avert my head. Every
bad thing I’d thought about the man on the stretcher slowly drained out of my
mind. He wasn’t even the drunk anymore. He was someone’s son, clearly
fighting for his life.
    In a straight
stretch with a clear freeway in front of us, Sally grabbed the radio and
rattled off codes. I had no idea what they meant. But I heard cardiac among it. Then she slapped the microphone back down and said over her shoulder,
“Do you need me in the back?”
    “No.”
    I stopped cradling
my wrist and let it