Waltz This Way (v1.1) Read Free Page B

here, Ms. Mel. I’ll get Mama. She’ll bring you home, okay?”
    Mel nodded mutely, letting her head fall back on her shoulders while she fought to catch her breath. Her toe throbbed with a hot ache, but it didn’t match the throb of humiliation or the sharp stabs of pain to her heart.
    “Wait right here, Ms. Mel. I’ll make sure they don’t find you.”
    Tito’s words, so sweet and reassuring, brought her reality into focus.
    Stan was schtupping Yelena.
    In Wisconsin.
    During a cheese fest.
    The bastard would pay.
    Then a thought hit her. No. He wouldn’t pay. Not in houses and diamonds anyway.
    A tear slipped down her cheek. She swiped at it in an angry gesture when it fell into a patch of sunshine pushing its way through the two buildings.
    It was such a nice day. Wow. It truly sucked to find out your husband was banging some hard-bodied choreographer on such a nice day.
    News like that should only come on rainy days.
     
    “Daddy?” Mel sobbed into her dying cell phone almost ten hours and a hair-raising escape with Tito’s mother from the alleyway later. Hating how weak she sounded, she stiffened her spine and clenched her teeth.
    “Ah, pork chop, I thought you’d never call back.”
    The gruffly gentle, sympathetic tone of her father’s voice made a fresh batch of tears fight to seep from her eyes. “I think I need to come home now. Do you have room for me and Weezer?”
    “I always have room for you, Grape-Nuts. You come on home and we’ll make everything all right. Together. Just like we used to.”
    Like they used to. As if a banana-split sundae could make this better. Well, maybe it could. If it had sprinkles. The chocolate ones.
    She shook her head at the memory. Her breath shuddered on its way out of her throat, her pride shattered. “I think I need to borrow money to … buy a ticket …”
    There was a grunt on the other end, a familiar one of angry discontent. “That sonofabitch!”
    Oh, if he only knew the half of the sonofabitch Stan was, Mel thought, taking one last look at her house in the Hills, her locked house in the Hills, before getting into her friend Jackie’s SUV, giving Weezer, her Saint Bernard a nudge into the backseat. “I …” She couldn’t speak.
    “You just get to LAX, Mel. I’ll make sure a ticket’s waiting for you and Weez. A ticket and a big hug from your old pop when you get here.”
    Mel choked on her gratitude. Jackie grabbed the phone from her.
    “Mr. Hodge? It’s Jackie Bellows, Mel’s friend here in L.A. I’ll make sure she gets to the airport, and I’ll have what that asshole left her, which wasn’t much, by the way, shipped to your house. Don’t you worry about anything but catching her at the other end.” Jackie nodded at the phone, then ended the call with a short goodbye.
    Mel curled up in the passenger seat, pressing the side of her face to the window while she watched her house turn to a tiny dot among hundreds and simmered.
    Jackie reached a hand over the console, squeezing her knee.
    “Stan’s a fuckhead-fuckwad.”
    Mel nodded. He certainly had the “fuck” part covered— in all contexts of the word.
    Jackie shook her head of spiky, platinum blond hair. “You need a good lawyer.”
    That got a reaction out of her. “For?”
    “He locked you out of your house, Mel, and took the studio away. How can he do that shit? No warning. No nothin’? He just blindsided you. Not okay. Not legal by California law, either. This is a community property state. You need a lawyer to straighten this out.”
    Mel let her head sink to her hands. Where had this come from?
    Stan might not have been the most supportive, loving husband in the world, but he’d never been cruel.
    Jackie slapped her hand against the steering wheel. “But it is legal— if you signed a prenup, that is. You didn’t …”
    Oh, but she had. “I did. At the beginning of our marriage. I thought you knew that.”
    “Then we got trouble.”
    Mel’s smile was watery and grim.