Read the book: «The Wrong Wife»

CHAPTER ONE

“YOU’VE SUCCESSFULLY avoided falling in love for years,” Elizabeth Jackson said to her son. “That’s not a good thing.”

“For me, it is.” Ben Jackson leaned back on the turquoise corduroy Victorian love seat and smiled sardonically at his mother. “Even Cupid couldn’t shoot an arrow through all the scar tissue on this particular heart.” Ben poked a finger at his chest. “I’ve had one love, remember. I neither need nor want another. Too painful.”

“Ben, you loved Judy, but that was in high school. And her death wasn’t your fault.”

“It was partly my fault. Although some of the blame must go to dear old Dad.”

Elizabeth frowned at her son. “Stop being so sarcastic. All I’m saying is that it’s better to feel pain than nothing at all.”

“You taught me not to stick my hand on a hot stove, but you want me to hold out my heart and say, ‘Hey, somebody come and stomp on this’?”

Elizabeth laid the piece of ecru lace she’d been working with onto the coffee table and gave her son a critical glance. “I’d rather have you bleeding all over my carpet than turning into a robot.”

“Whoa! I’m no robot.” He leaned forward. “I care a hell of a lot about putting the crooks away.”

“That is what you do. Is it not who you are. Or it shouldn’t be.”

“If Dad hadn’t gotten Elmer Bazemore acquitted of rape and attempted murder he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to kill Judy, and you’d probably have those grandchildren you keep talking about.”

She leaned across to put her arms around him for a moment. He held himself stiffly away from her. She released him. “Get an emotional life.”

“I’m trying, Mom. Within limits.”

“Not much chance with the women you date.” Elizabeth picked up the lace, adjusted her pince-nez and began to check it for tiny rips. “Everything between you and your girlfriends is so cool and rational. What kind of a marriage would that make?”

“The perfect kind. A partnership that will get me elected to my first full term as district attorney.”

“With two point five perfect children to round out the picture?”

“I’m not certain I’ll ever have children. I wouldn’t want to be an absentee father.”

“Your father wasn’t exactly an absentee.”

“He never attended a PTA meeting or soccer game. He never saw me pitch or Steve catch. He got home in time for maybe two family dinners a month if we were lucky, plus Thanksgiving and Christmas, unless one of his clients popped Santa Claus on Christmas Eve and had to be bailed out Christmas morning.”

“His clients needed him.”

“So did we. Then he bailed out on us. On you.”

“I’ve long since forgiven him for that. In fact, he did me a favor. If he hadn’t left, I’d never have started Elizabeth Lace and become a successful business woman.”

Ben slid off the sofa, shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his chinos and strode over to stare out the front window of the big parlor. He knew his mother worried about him, but the still-attractive, slim woman with soft brown hair was busy with her own business, her friends, her suitor—who just happened to be Ben’s boss. She was there when Ben needed her, but she seldom intruded as she was doing today.

He watched for Brittany’s car. She was invariably early. In his mother’s big front yard a dozen different hues of azalea rioted around the aged oak trees while the early April breeze tousled the shaggy heads of Dutch iris.

Ben only felt truly at home in this house where he had spent his childhood. The Garden District, with its aging Georgian houses, was his favorite place in Memphis, particularly now, before summer heat drove everyone inside to air conditioning.

“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “I can’t forgive Dad for turning the law into a parlor game he played without regard for right or wrong.”

“And for Judy’s death.”

“How many other people died because of Dad and his courtroom antics?”

“He always said if the prosecution did its job properly, they won. His job was to defend his clients as best he could.”

Ben leaned back. “Too bad he was so good at it.”

“He did get off some people who might have been wrongly convicted, ever think of that?”

“If he did, it was sheer dumb luck that they were innocent. He didn’t care about that either. Just the way he didn’t care about us.”

Elizabeth laid the fragile piece of lace gently on the coffee table again and smoothed it as though it were skin. “We had some wonderful times, Ben. In the early years when we were struggling, your father and I had passion even when we fought. You aren’t passionate about anything except getting the felons off the streets.”

“I see nothing wrong with that. Besides, I do have passion.”

“I’m not only talking about making love.” Elizabeth looked him square in the eye. “I’m talking about fighting and demanding and making wild love and driving one another nuts. Your ice princesses don’t incite that kind of passion, do they?”

“God, I hope not!” Ben laughed. “If my ice princess and I both know the score going in, we’ll never drive each other crazy.”

“Boring!”

“I know it’s not the life you want for me, Mother, but it’s all I’m capable of. Something broke inside me when Judy was killed. So now I intend to marry a woman who fits into my life-style, has the same goals, the same ambitions, the same views of life. Someone who doesn’t need the part of me that isn’t there any longer. In short, a partner and a friend.”

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “Job description—one suitable wife. Must be tall, thin, blond, rich, socially adept and completely self-sufficient. Applicants must apply in person.”

“If you like.”

“I don’t like, darling, but it’s your life.” She waved an elegantly manicured hand toward the front door at the end of the marble entry hall. “Are you making a job offer to the one I’m about to meet?”

“Maybe. She fits your description. Plus Brittany is Phi Beta Kappa, has a career she enjoys and is very good at, and would make an excellent public servant’s wife.”

“She sounds like a gorgon.”

“She’s a wonderful girl.”

“So why haven’t I met her before now?”

“Because I didn’t want to put pressure on either one of you. That’s why she’s coming over this afternoon. She really does need a dress for the Steamboat Ball, and she loves your antique lace.”

“Does she know how much one of my dresses costs? Particularly one designed to look like an 1880 riverboat costume. And I assume she wants it to look modern enough for her to wear after the costume ball.”

“Money’s no problem. Although I did hope you’d cut her a deal because your poor starving son is only a lowly assistant district attorney.”

“Of course Mommy will be nice to the gorgon, darling. After all, I don’t have to live with her. Nor with you, thank God.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’d hit you over the head with an ice hammer to try to break through to the fallible human being.”

“I will probably be the next D.A. when Phil’s judgeship comes through next month. I have to be above reproach if I’m going to win the election on my own at the end of this term.”

“So your wife must be above reproach too. Have you sicced a private detective on her to see whether there are any skeletons in her closet?”

“Of course not.”

The bell on the front door bonged. Elizabeth stood and smoothed both her skirt and her face and pasted on her professional smile. As Ben followed her to the door, she said quietly, “You’re tempting fate, darling. One of these days, love is going to jump up and bite you. You can’t hide away forever.” She opened the door. “Brittany, how nice to meet you,” She held out her hand. “I’m Elizabeth Jackson. Ben has told me so much about you.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Ben wandered around the big living room that his mother had converted to a showroom for her antique lace dresses. His mother and Brittany sat side by side on the love seat. All he could see was the backs of their heads. They twittered and turned the pages of Elizabeth’s display books, while she made quick sketches on the artist’s pad in her lap.

He knew both women were making an effort to like one another because of him.

But nothing could alleviate the boredom of listening to the endless snatches of clothes conversation. He drove his hands deeper into the pockets of his chinos and sighed deeply.

“That’s enough,” Elizabeth said, looking up. “Go away, Ben. You’re driving us both nuts.”

Brittany flashed him a radiant smile. “Sweetie, I know this is boring for you. Why don’t you go to the club and have a drink. I’ll call you from the car when I leave.”

“Better yet,” Elizabeth said, “go talk to Marian in the workroom.” She flicked a hand toward the back of the house. “Everybody else has already gone home, but she hasn’t seen you in months, and I’ve got a new chef d’atelier straight from an upscale Seventh Avenue house in New York. At the moment, she’s helping with everything from ordering materials to sewing, but if I could keep her, I’d turn her into a designer. She’s very good. Introduce yourself if she’s there. Think of it as practice for vote gathering.”

“Well…”

“Go. Shoo.”

He’d spent many afternoons after school studying upstairs in the workroom, when his mother was just starting to turn a profit with her antique-lace creations and before his life shut down.

Marian Wadsworth was more like an aunt than his mother’s employee. She’d even tried unsuccessfully to teach him the fundamentals of sewing. His hands were too big and too clumsy. But she’d been endlessly patient.

And he had been remiss not to keep in closer touch.

He took the back stairs two at a time. The rubber matting deadened his footsteps. He would surprise her.

He tiptoed across the landing to the baize-covered door to the attics, long since converted to work space for his mother’s designs. He took a deep breath, grasped the knob, turned it silently, flung open the door, spread his arms and shouted, “Maid Marian, it’s Robin Hood returned from the Crusades. Come and kiss me!”

“Are you nuts?”

Ben only had time to glimpse an infuriated female face before the woman dropped to the floor.

“Damn and blast! You’ve made me spill the paillettes!”

At that point, all he could see was a well-rounded upturned bottom in black leggings.

“Don’t just stand there, get down here and help me dig these things out of the cracks in the floor.”

“I-I’m sorry,” Ben stammered. “I thought Marian was here.”

“Well, she’s not. I am. She’s gone to get some more blue paillettes.” The woman at his feet was picking up small flat disks of what looked like blue glass. “Ah, gotcha!” she said, and held up one of the shards. “Are you going to help or not?”

Ben dropped onto his haunches. A completely unruly mass of chocolate curls fell over the woman’s face. Her fingers were workmanlike with short, unvarnished nails. He slid one of the fragments of blue from a crack and handed it to her. “Here.”

“Lovely. That only leaves about fifty more. We’ll never find them all.”

She sat back on her heels, pushed her hair off her face and turned to frown at him. She peered over horn-rim half glasses and said, “Ben. Of course it would be you.”

Her eyes were the color of dark Barbados rum.

He sucked in his breath and felt suddenly as though he were Butch Cassidy in the last scene of the movie. Everything had turned golden. The world tilted into slow motion.

“Close your mouth, Ben Jackson. You look like a dead carp.”

He tried to snap his mouth shut, but only succeeded in gulping. “Uh…wha…who?”

“You don’t even recognize me. Par for the course.”

He wanted to say, “You look edible, luscious, wild and sexy and dangerous and crazy and I want you.”

“Uh, familiar” is what he said. He controlled his libido—it didn’t control him. Or never had, until now. Then the penny dropped. “Annabelle? Annabelle Langley?”

He heard the door open behind him. “Ben! Belle! Why are you two crawling around on the floor?”

He tore his eyes away, and reached a hand back to Marian as though she were offering him a lifeline.

“Get up, Ben, you’ll get filthy,” Marian Wadsworth said.

He stood easily and realized he was smiling stupidly at the woman on the floor.

“You going to leave me down here?” The woman held out her hand.

Ben took it automatically and felt the same jolt he’d experienced once when he’d plugged his electric razor into a bad socket. The hair on his arms stood up.

She pulled against him, and a moment later came up against his chest.

The hair on his arms wasn’t the only thing that came to attention.

“Sorry, Marian,” Annabelle said, and stepped back. She kept looking at him warily. Why not? He must look as fatuous as Bottom after he turned into a jackass in Midsummer Night’s Dream. How appropriate.

“Ben surprised me. I dropped the paillettes. You think we’ll have enough if I don’t find them all?”

Marian held out a small cardboard box, perhaps five inches by seven. “Plenty. You have to stop squirreling things away in your apartment, Belle. Or at least develop a decent filing system.”

“Sorry. Next time, I’ll go do the hunting.” She glanced at Ben. “It’s safer.” She picked up a fragile length of white Belgian lace off the worktable, and took a three-inch glass-headed dressmaker’s pin from a large pincushion on her wrist.

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you at first.” Ben said. “You were in my brother, Steve’s grade. Right?”

“It’s been a long time. High school.” Annabelle stuck out her hand. “I was a lowly freshman when you were a senior, but everybody knew the president of the senior class. I’m your mother’s new chef d’atelier.”

Ben closed his eyes and whispered, “I am going to kill my mother.”

“Ben!” Marian said.

“Oh, God.” Ben opened his eyes. “I didn’t mean—I’d never…”

“Get out now, please,” Annabelle said. “Before I toss you out.”

“It’s just an expression.”

“Now!” She crunched up the lace in her hand. “Ow!” She held up her hand. The pin had embedded itself in her left index finger. She yanked out the object and raised her finger to her lips to suck the drop of blood, but didn’t manage to catch it before it fell on the lace she held in her other hand. “Now look what you’ve made me do.”

“Ben,” Marian said quietly. “Go downstairs. I’ll handle this.”

“But…”

“She knows you didn’t mean anything by your remark. Go.”

Confused, embarrassed, and feeling like the biggest klutz in this or any other universe, Ben went. He took the stairs fast and turned not toward the living room, where he could still hear Brittany’s voice, but toward the kitchen, and then out the back door into the yard.

Without a conscious thought he grabbed the branch of the oak tree, planted his foot in the crotch and swung up and into the leaves. His hands and feet remembered as though he were still a boy of ten who hid out in his tree whenever he wanted to avoid chores or wanted to read a book. Then when he was 18—the summer after Judy died—he’d practically lived up here for a couple of months.

He covered his face with his hands and braced his back against the big limb twenty feet up. Thank God the tree had grown enough to support his weight. He hadn’t given that a thought.

He did not dare see Annabelle Langley again, that was for sure.

How could he go back in and charm Brittany when, as of ten minutes earlier, she had ceased to be an important part of his world? It wasn’t her fault. It was his mother’s.

Cupid must be laughing his head off, the sadistic little bastard. How could Ben Jackson, the rational, left-brain, goal-oriented young law-and-order assistant district attorney on the rise, fall head over heels in love at first sight? And with a woman who had killed her mother?

BEN WAS STILL PROPPED along the branch of the tree fifteen minutes later when the back door burst open and Annabelle Langley, her face as cheerful as an executioner’s, stalked down the back steps and stood staring out at the backyard.

The effect she had on him hadn’t changed.

He tried to look at her critically, compare her to Brittany in hopes that his rational mind would kick in before it was too late. Hadn’t his mother accused him of being a robot? Robots didn’t fall in love.

Yet something in Annabelle ripped through his defenses.

He did not like it, didn’t want it, didn’t approve of it. Passion hurt, feeling hurt. Love meant loss. Hideous, horrible loss that came with pictures that exploded inside his brain without warning, even now.

He couldn’t afford empathy. He could not be open to emotion and do his job properly. He owed his entire focus to the people he was sworn to protect. One less criminal on the street meant one less victim—one less Judy.

Annabelle couldn’t see him, didn’t know he was there. He might have said something the instant she came out that door, but the opportunity had already passed.

So he studied her dispassionately. What was the big deal?

She was at least three inches shorter than Brittany. Brittany was model slim. Annabelle had curves; she wouldn’t fit into chic clothes nearly as well, assuming she ever wore anything more chic than the leggings and baggy shirt she had on at the moment. He didn’t care. Naked she’d be gorgeous, and naked was how he wanted her.

Brittany’s straight, blond hair fell with flawless precision around her face.

Annabelle’s hair looked as though it had escaped from an unclipped standard poodle, taken root on her head, and kept growing until it reached her shoulder blades. He longed to run his fingers into it and feel it curl, bury his face in all that extravagance.

This wasn’t love. It was lust. Lust he could handle.

Annabelle didn’t seem to care much about her looks. At the moment she’d eaten off her lipstick, her nose was shiny, and she had a smudge of blue pattern pencil along her jaw. But then, she’d been working all day. Hard, physical labor. Ben remembered that much. Sewing might look easy, but it knotted the shoulders and wounded the hands. As he had wounded her hand—and more. God, how could he have been so stupid and clumsy! His remark must have cut her deeply.

Now, Brittany was something else. She was in public relations. She never met a stranger. She smiled easily. She could schmooze anyone.

So how come Brittany suddenly seemed to him as unformed as a lump of Play-Doh? How come her blond good looks now seemed as bland as cornstarch? And this wild woman made him want to leap on her out of his tree and drag her off to his lair to be his mate for life?

He groaned, threw up his hand to hit himself in the forehead, and overbalanced.

“Hey!” he yelped as his feet lost their purchase. He grabbed for the limb over his head just as the one he sat on gave way under his weight.

He fell. He grabbed at a couple of branches to slow his progress, wrenched his shoulder, and managed to catch himself eight feet from the ground, where he hung for a moment before he dropped ingloriously onto the grass.

Annabelle stared at him openmouthed.

“I can explain.” He stood up and held his hands in front of him, palms up.

She took a deep breath. “Are you all right? You look a mess.”

“I’m fine.”

“What on earth were you doing in that tree?”

She took a few steps toward him, and reached out to brush the lapel of his jacket.

“I can explain,” he said again.

It took all his willpower not to grab her wrist and drag her into his arms. The touch of her fingertips raised the hair at the nape of his neck, and several other portions of his anatomy that hadn’t been this out of control since he’d turned thirteen.

“So?” she said with her eyes on the shoulder of his jacket where she brushed off leaves and twigs.

“So what?” He stared down at her. That blue smudge was adorable.

“You said you could explain.”

“Oh.”

He closed his eyes as she continued her progress around his body, brushing him off lightly. She grabbed the shoulders of his jacket and wrenched it back into place, then walked around in front of him again with her eyes just above his belt buckle.

“You can take care of the rest of you.”

Thank God. If she’d tried to brush off his chinos, she’d have been in for one hell of a surprise.

“And your hair. You’re wearing a crown of leaves like Pan.”

He swept his hair back from his forehead and brushed down the front of his trousers.

“Well? I’m waiting.” She stepped away from him with her hands on his hips. Now, finally, she looked into his eyes.

“I, uh. Look, come sit in the gazebo a minute.”

She shook her head. “I’ve still got an hour’s work to do cleaning up the mess upstairs.”

“You came outside.”

“To keep from screaming in frustration, actually. And then you fall out of the skies practically on top of me.”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his chinos. “Okay. I made such a jackass of myself in there, I came out here and climbed into the tree to calm down and think up some way to apologize. Then, when you came out, I lost my balance.”

“You could have announced your presence.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“Spies do not thrill me.”

“I was not spying on you, Annabelle,” he lied. “I was thinking that I am not usually a social nitwit. I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” She turned to go back into the house.

Suddenly the day seemed dark. “Wait!” He reached for her forearm. “How about dinner?”

“What?”

“Dinner. Me, you, tonight.”

“Now I know you’re crazy.” She pointed toward the house. “I think you already have a date, Mr. District Attorney. And I suspect she’s wondering where the heck you’ve gotten to.”

He let her go, and leaned back against the trunk of the tree. This could not be happening. Not to Ben Jackson. His mother had slipped a love potion into his tea while they were waiting for Brittany.

He had a brain tumor, or an aneurysm that had burst suddenly. There had to be some rational explanation.

He closed his eyes. Whatever had occurred, he had to fix it, exorcise it, reverse the spell, before it devoured him, his career plans, his goals and the rest of his life in a hapless, fruitless pursuit of a woman who not only was unsuitable in every respect, but who obviously didn’t even like him.

“WHAT HAVE YOU been up to?” Elizabeth Langley said to her son. “You’re a mess.”

“I—uh—I tripped on the patio. The bricks were slick.”

“Really.” His mother accepted the explanation readily enough, or so it seemed to Ben. “Brittany and I have designed her dress for the ball. Period enough to work for the Steamboat’s 1880 theme, but modern enough to wear to the symphony or one of the secret-society parties during carnival.”

“Can I see the design?”

Brittany laughed. The sound, which had enchanted him only hours before, now sounded as raucous as a crow’s. “No, you cannot, you naughty thing. It’s bad luck!” She stretched back on the couch as his mother picked up her sketch pad and notebooks and went to put them back into the armoire in the corner.

“Actually, that only applies to wedding dresses,” his mother said.

Brittany giggled. Ben decided he must have been drugged to be able to change his opinion about a woman this beautiful so quickly and so totally.

He blinked, opened his eyes and hoped against hope that the Brittany he had liked would be back.

No such luck. He could still appreciate her beauty, but she no longer moved him any more than if she’d been carved out of marble.

“Now, children, off to dinner you go,” Elizabeth said. “I have my own plans.”

Ben tried desperately to think of some way to get out of his date, but he’d been raised better than that, and Brittany hadn’t done one thing wrong. The responsibility was his alone, his and his witch mother, who had set him up and cast a spell on him.

Maybe it was like the twenty-four-hour flu. He’d wake up tomorrow morning cured of Annabelle Langley.

He heard the two women making leaving sounds without registering the words. He followed them to the door, and held it while they air kissed.

“Coming, sweetie?” Brittany said.

“I’ll send him along in a minute,” Elizabeth said. “You did come in two cars, didn’t you?”

For a moment Brittany’s good nature slipped, but the flash of annoyance that crossed her face came and went so swiftly that Ben wasn’t certain he’d seen it.

“Of course. See you at the club,” she said, and ran her hand down his cheek. He stood on the step beside his mother and watched Brittany glide to her car and drive away with a wave.

“She is a lovely woman,” Elizabeth said.

“Uh-huh.”

“And very, very clever.”

That didn’t sound like a compliment.

“She will look extraordinary in the dress we designed. Daddy, I take it, has money?”

“Pots of it, according to the grapevine.”

“Do I need to start designing her wedding dress?”

“Uh—I’d hold off on that.”

“Ah.” His mother narrowed her eyes at him. “You can’t have cooled off so quickly.”

He ignored her remark. “If I don’t get out of here, I’m going to miss our reservations at the club.” He kissed his mother perfunctorily and started down the concrete stairs to the front yard.

“Are you going to bring her to my regular Thursday-night dinner party?” Elizabeth called after him.

Damn! His mother’s legendary Thursday nights. “I don’t know. I’ll call you.”

“Fine. It doesn’t have to be Brittany, you know. Any girl will do so long as she’s not an airhead.”

“Right.” He climbed into his car and drove away much too fast for the narrow street. He scared a small woman who was walking a large bull mastiff. He knew he should have stopped to apologize. She was probably one of his mother’s neighbors, although he didn’t recognize her. She would be one of his constituents, if he ever became district attorney. He needed to remember he was a lawyer first, a man second.

The hell he was.