True Love and Other Disasters Read Free Page A

her continual argument with Virgil. He’d always wanted her to wear mink or silver fox, but she’d never felt comfortable wearing fur. Not even after he’d pointed out that she was a hypocrite because she wore leather. Which was true. She loved leather. Although these days, she exercised taste and moderation. Something her mother had yet to discover.
    As she moved down the long, winding staircase, she forced a smile in place. She said goodbye to a few of Virgil’s friends who’d been kind to her, and then slipped out the front door.
    Her future was wide open. She was thirty years old and could do anything she wanted. She couldgo to school or take a year off to lie around on a warm beach somewhere.
    She looked back at the three-story brick mansion where she’d lived with Virgil for the five years of their marriage. She’d had a good life with Virgil. He’d taken care of her, and for the first time in her life, she hadn’t had to take care of herself. She’d been able to relax. To breathe and have fun and not worry about survival.
    “Good-bye,” she whispered, and pointed the toes of her red leather pumps toward her future. The heels of her shoes clicked down the steps and toward the garage around the back as she made her way to her Bentley Continental GT. Virgil had given her the car for her thirtieth birthday last September. She tossed the suitcase in the trunk then hopped inside and drove from the estate. If she hurried, she could just make the six-thirty ferry to Seattle.
    As she drove through the gates, she again wondered what she was going to do with her life. Other than the few charities she helped chair, there was no one who needed her. While it was true that Virgil had taken care of her, she’d taken care of him, too.
    She took her sunglasses from her purse and slid them onto the bridge of her nose.
    And what in the heck was she going to do with his hockey team and all those tough, brutal players? She’d met some of them at the yearly Christmas party she always attended with Virgil. She especially remembered meeting the big Russian, Vlad, the young Swede, Daniel, and the guy with the perpetually bruised face, Sam, but she didn’t know them. To her, they were just members of the twenty-some-odd men who, as far as she could tell, liked to fight and spit a lot.
    It was best that she sell the team. Really, it was. She knew what they thought of her. She wasn’t a fool. They thought she was a bimbo. A trophy wife. Virgil’s arm candy. They’d probably passed around her Playboy layout. Not that she cared about that. She wasn’t ashamed of the pictures. She’d been twenty-four years old and had needed the money. It had beat the hell out of stripping, introduced her to new people, and provided new options. One of those options had been Virgil.
    She slowed the Bentley at a stop sign, looked both ways, then blew through the intersection.
    Faith was used to men staring at her. She was used to men judging her by the size of her breasts and assuming she was dumb or easy or both. She was used to people judging her by her profession or because she’d married a man fifty-one years older than herself. And really, she didn’t care what the world thought. She’d stopped caring a long time ago, when the world had walked past her as she’d sat outside the Lucky Lady or the KitKat Topless Lounge waiting for her mama to get off work.
    The only thing she’d been born into this world with was her face and body, and she’d used them. Caring what people thought about that gave them the power to hurt her. And Faith never gave anyone that kind of power. No one except Virgil. For all his faults, he’d never treated her like a bimbo. Never treated her as if she were nothing. Sure, she’d been his trophy wife. There was no denying that. He’d used her to prop up his enormous ego. Like Virgil’s hockey team, she was something he owned to make the world envious. She hadn’t minded. Not at all. He’d treated her with