The Taking Read Free Page A

October. “Why didn’t you wear your hair up? I like it best that way.”
    It was nothing, something a thousand husbands might say to their wives as mere flirtation or playful pouting, but to Regan it was the latest in a litany of disappointments, accusatory glares, and criticisms veiled as suggestions from the man she was supposed to recognize was so much wiser than her. Patronizing words he dropped one by one, like stones of Puritan punishment, letting them settle onto her chest, robbing her of breath, crushing her slowly and painfully. Word after word had pressed, piling on top of one another, paralyzing in their heaviness, rendering her incapable of speech or protest, unable to defend herself, until she knew it was time to leave or lose her voice in her marriage forever.
    Shifting her hair out of his touch, she masked her shudder as his fingers fell from her skin. Every touch, every invasion of her personal space, had grown more difficult to endure with each passing day, and it was hard to remember why she had married him, how she could have ever thought herself happy. There was no affection left for him, only the keening and urgent need to flee before she cracked, and lost control.
    She was perilously close to it at this goddamn cocktail party.
    He rendered a long-suffering sigh next to her. “Fine. Don’t talk to me. Don’t wear your hair up because I like it. Just be a bitch, I don’t care.”
    Regan said nothing, digging her fingernails into her palms. She hoped they bled. She hoped breaking open her own flesh and feeling the sharp sting of pain would keep her from screaming, would hold the persistent tears at bay.
    “But before you prance over to the bar and get another glass of wine, which I have no doubt you’re about to do, could you put yourself out long enough to do your duty as a hostess at this party?”
    Turning her head to stare at her husband, taking in his good-looking and proportionate features, his tidy and stylish blond hair, his elegant and expensive suit, she waited for him to finish. He would tell her which VIP he wanted her to chat with, which pet project of which partner’s wife she was supposed to volunteer to assist with, what invitation for which party she was to extend.
    Then she was going to go home to their fabulously trendy condo off Magazine Street and she was somehow going to find the nerve to pack her bags and leave.
    He would fight her on it. Dirty. He would twist and bend the truth, manipulate, and threaten with whatever weapons he had at his disposal.
    But she had to find the courage to know that no longer mattered.
    “You know John’s wife is into all that metaphysical crap and she has that guy here doing voodoo readings as some kind of entertainment. Only no one is getting readings because no one wants to appear to believe in that bullshit. It will make John’s wife, and therefore John, happy if you go and have a reading.”
    Regan relaxed her shoulders a fraction. “Sure, I can do that.” It would get her away from her husband and all the mindless chatter of the corporate gathering. “Where is he?”
    Retreating into a corner and letting someone tell her she had a financial windfall coming very soon was the perfect way to hide from the party, to regroup and gather herself to get through the rest of the night.
    “He’s in the interior courtyard. Don’t worry, you have to pass the bar to get there.”
    With that, he dismissed her by turning around and walking away, a smile on his face and his hand out to shake, but not before he put that hand on the small of her back, thumb pressing into her flesh. To anyone watching, a sweet gesture of intimacy, to her, a stamp of his ownership, a tactile reminder that she had let her fear drag this out too long. He expected to touch her, and she cringed at it.
    Forgoing the bar out of a childish and pointless defiance, Regan crossed the elegant room, a former residence in the French Quarter turned restaurant and caterer. Her heels,