Temptation Read Online Free Page A

expert in subterfuge – to the point where Lucy never once questioned me about my whereabouts on a night when I was ‘working late’. In fact, she couldn’t have been more affectionate, more supportive during this time. No doubt our improved material circumstances had enhanced her affection for me (or, at least, that was my interpretation). But once I delivered the final drafts of my episodes, and began editing the four other scripts that had been written for the new series, Sally began to make increasingly loud noises about ‘regularizing’ our situation, and moving in together.
    ‘This clandestine situation has to end,’ she told me. ‘I want you for myself . . . if you still want me.’
    ‘Of course I want you. You know that.’
    But I also wanted to postpone the final day of reckoning – the moment when I sat down with Lucy and broke her heart. So I kept stalling. And Sally started getting im patient. And I kept saying: ‘Just give me another month.’
    Then, one evening, I got home around midnight – after a long pre-production dinner with Brad Bruce. When I walked in, I found Lucy sitting in the living room. My suitcase was by her armchair.
    ‘Let me ask you something,’ she said. ‘And it’s a question I’ve wanted to know for the past eight months: Is she a moaner, or is she one of those ice-maiden types who, despite the drop-dead looks, really hates the idea of anyone touching her?’
    ‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, trying to sound bemused.
    ‘You mean, you honestly don’t know the name of the woman you’ve been fucking for the last seven – or is it eight – months?’
    ‘Lucy, there is no one.’
    ‘So, Sally Birmingham is no one?’
    I sat down.
    ‘That certainly gave you pause for thought,’ she said, her voice even-tempered.
    I finally spoke. ‘How do you know her name?’
    ‘I had someone find out for me.’
    ‘You what?’
    ‘I hired a private investigator.’
    ‘You spied on me?’
    ‘Don’t play the moral outrage card, asshole. You were obviously seeing someone else . . . ’
    How did she know that? I had been so careful, so circumspect.
    ‘. . . and when it was clear from your constant absences that this was something more than just a little ego-enhancing fling, I hired a private eye . . . ’
    ‘Wasn’t that expensive?’
    ‘Thirty-eight hundred dollars . . . which I will reclaim, one way or another, in the divorce settlement.’
    I heard myself saying: ‘Lucy, I don’t want a divorce.’
    Her voice remained steady, strangely calm. ‘I don’t care what you want, David. I am divorcing you. This marriage is finished.’
    I suddenly felt a desperate fear – even though she was doing the dirty work for me, and instigating the beginning of the end. I was getting exactly what I wanted . . . and it scared the hell out of me. I said, ‘If you had only come to me at the outset . . . ’
    Her face tightened. ‘And what?’ she said, the anger now showing. ‘Tried to remind you that we had eleven years’ history, and a daughter, and that, despite all the crap of the last decade, we’d actually come through and were finally living well.’
    She broke off, on the verge of tears. I reached for her. She immediately pulled away.
    ‘You’re never touching me again,’ she said.
    Silence. Then she said, ‘When I found out the name of your squeeze, do you know what I first thought? “He’s really trading upwards, isn’t he? The senior head of comedy at Fox Television.
Magna cum laude
from Princeton. And a babe to boot.” The private investigator was a very thorough guy. He even supplied pictures of Ms Birmingham. She’s very photogenic, isn’t she?’
    ‘We could have talked this out . . . ’
    ‘No, there was nothing to talk out. I certainly wasn’t going to play the poor little woman in some country-and-western song, begging her faithless husband to come on home.’
    ‘So why did you stay silent all this