Page 111 of The Woman By the Lake

Slightly sweaty, dirty from work and smelling of the outdoors, he was all over me, and I didn’t mind, because he was Riggs, and he was good at being all over me.

It also meant I got to be all over him.

Eventually, we came up for air, but he didn’t move away.

“Called Stormy this morning,” he announced.

“Oh boy,” I breathed (what could I say? again, he was all over me).

“Asked if I could have some time to talk privately about something heavy. Seeing as I asked that, he made time right away. He owns the tire shop on the east side of town. Asked me to his office. I went. Gave him the news about Angelica and Bubbles, and we can just say, it rocked my world, but it was worse telling him. Not only giving a man that information, but also seeing my reaction through him. Though, when I learned, I wasn’t holding a coffee cup I threw so hard it shattered against the wall and drenched everything around it because it was full.”

I winced. “Were you around it?”

“No.”

“So I can deduce he’s ticked.”

“You can deduce that, yeah.”

“Is this going to come back on you with Angelica?”

“Gave her the heads up it would happen, if she was smart, she would have done it before me.”

“I sense Angelica’s intelligence is more the devious sort,” I remarked.

“You’d sense right,” he agreed. “Still, thought about it before I did it, including that. Wondered if it was better if I didn’t know, and I could give him that. Then I thought, I’m glad I know. I gotta understand what I’ve got on my hands with her. What she’s capable of. Also, if the tables were turned, how I’d feel if he found out, and didn’t tell me. Bottom line, he shares a kid with her too. So he had to know.”

“This is true.”

“And don’t worry. She doesn’t have a leg to stand on to make any trouble for him or me. What she does have is a history. A history of jacking both of us around. And it isn’t illegal to trick a man into getting you pregnant, we had a hand in that, we made choices, and condoms do actually break. But that shit is shady. Fortunately, she’s not a woman who takes her shit out on her kids. Not sure what she could do to us, since the only thing either of us got with her that matters is our kids.”

“Well, silver lining for you both, it’s clear your swimmers are powerful if one go gets a woman pregnant.”

“Her campaign with Storm was more persistent. Not sure which time it happened, but he told me he was with her three times. And yeah, the first night, his wallet had gone missing. And yeah, it did this at The Hole. The other two, she had the chance to see to things herself.”

“So it’s just your swimmers that are super powerful.”

He shot me another smile and squeezed my behind besides.

Totally riding this out.

“Have you heard from her?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.

“Good,” I muttered. Then I shared something with him that had also occurred to me in all my driving. “So, I had occasion to casually chat with Brenda about the Whitaker family situation, and she shared with me that Roosevelt had an assistant. And she still lives in town.”

“Honey,” he said in a tone I wasn’t sure about.

“What?”

He hooked an arm around my waist, shifted us down the counter, then I tensed as he reached out and touched my digital photo screen.

He scrolled forward until he hit the photo of me and Trevor on a cliff in Cornwall, a pirate’s cove and the stormy sea behind us, wind ruffling our hair, smiles on our faces.

“Now,” he said quietly, “we can scheme a way to go interrogate Roosevelt’s assistant without letting her know we’re interrogating her, when neither of us know the woman, or you can tell me about your husband.”

“Riggs,” I whispered.

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