Four Wives Read Online Free Page A

down the hall. The youngest of the four Kirk children was beginning to stir. Not ready to face what she might be feeling, or not feeling, she jumped from the bed without looking at her husband. In the bathroom, she checked for evidence. Clothes were in the hamper, a place with which Daniel would not concern himself. The contents of her purse were put away’compact, lipstick, comb, breath mints’the purse was back on the rack in her closet. She retraced her steps as she quickly brushed her teeth and pulled back her hair. The novel from the book-club meeting she’d ducked out of was on the kitchen counter. The remote for the garage door was in the basket by the kitchen door where such things were kept. Forgetting it there would be her reason for not pulling in the car. What else? There was nothing else, except the contents of her mind, which she knew from experience would not be detected by anyone living in this house.
    She looked in the mirror, checking her neck, her breastbone. There was no trace of his lips there. Dressed in clingy cotton pj’s, no makeup on her face, hair uncombed, she would easily pass as the
mommy
and the
honey
they expected each morning’the embodiment of suburban perfection. Long hair, perfectly highlighted in shades of blond. Sculpted legs, firm ass, flattened stomach, new construction breasts’perky size Cs. And a face that was both provocative and subtle. Despite her forty-two years and four pregnancies, she looked damned close to herself twenty years ago. In fact, if she didn’t occasionally dress them up and parade them through town, there would be no visible evidence of the four children that she’d borne. And that was how Daniel liked things’just as they had always been.
    It was ironic, really, that the things she’d done to herself to please her husband had opened the door to her infidelity. She was reality on hold’no saggy tits from years of breastfeeding, no loose, floppy skin that had been stretched to oblivion again and again. What man wouldn’t want the very things he’d once had but could never have again? It was all possible now with the surgical erasing of time. Janie had no illusions as to why she’d found herself the object of pursuit.
    She thought about it now, how all of this had transpired in a few short weeks. First, the typical Hunting Ridge cocktail party. Elaborate catered nibbles passed around by waiters, all dressed in white. Tendered bars set up in every room. Rented policemen parking the cars and ignoring the smell of alcohol on the guests when they returned to drive home. She’d gone to the small bar in the back of the kitchen to find a decent bottle of wine. These were friends, and she felt at home in spite of the formality surrounding her. The good stuff would be in the wine fridge, which had been her destination. But the short walk in search of a drink would only be the beginning.
    “Check the bottom rack.”
    The man’s voice was familiar, and she’d thought nothing of it as she turned from the fridge with a smile. She’d known him for years.
    “I had my eye on a Kistler Chardonnay,” she’d said.
    “Let’s break out the red.”
    Stepping around her, he’d allowed his body to come closer to hers than it should have. And as they knelt next to one another to examine the bottles on the last three racks, she’d felt the jolt of a subtle, and surprising, seduction. The second step on her path to betrayal.
    “Here we go,” he’d said, pulling a pinot noir from its slot. They moved back to the kitchen. He opened the bottle, poured two glasses, then handed one to her. His hand brushed against hers, and she smiled in a way that, upon reflection, was reflexively sultry. After years of nothing but benign interaction with members of the opposite sex’a suburban mandate’it had taken very little to sense the flirtation, and her body had responded as though it had been secretly training for this very moment. This was surely not the first time they had