The Husband Lesson

Charles got out, noticing the sleek gray Jaguar that looked out of place in a parking lot separated only by a security wall and evergreens from the loading docks of Bluestone Mountain’s only Walmart Supercenter.

He didn’t bother pulling on the Jeep’s cover. There wasn’t a hint of uncertain weather in the summer sky. Besides, he wouldn’t be here that long, and only had to touch base with his codirector about some volunteer scheduling decisions that couldn’t wait until Monday.

He’d already had a long day in surgery, having arrived at the hospital way before the sun had come up this morning. Five surgeries later then rounds and he’d earned the right to this weekend’s fishing trip.

Charles had made it to the flagstone path when the security gate ground open again. A familiar white Toyota Camry appeared, slipping into the space on the opposite side of the Jaguar and coming to a sharp stop.

Rhonda Camden, Ph.D., New Hope’s codirector and his partner in crime. Running late as usual.

The door swung open and she hopped out, dragging a briefcase that overflowed with papers. She looked as windblown and hurried as she always did, and after eight months of working together, Charles knew why—she juggled more balls in the air than most people between her job as director of the town’s crisis center and her private practice. Add volunteer endeavors such as New Hope…

Smiling broadly, Rhonda gestured to the house and all they’d accomplished together in the past eight months.

“Matthew impressed yet?” she asked, referring to the chief at St. Joseph’s Hospital where Charles was on staff.

“You’d think. I’m either in surgery or I’m here. But the man is a hard sell. Maybe you should put in a good word for me.”

Not that he thought anything would impress St. Joseph’s chief. Matthew West was going to make Charles sweat out an invitation to join the Catskill Center for Cardiothoracic Surgery, the most professional and highly regarded team in the area, and projects like New Hope were a part of the process. He’d already reconciled himself to running the gauntlet until the chief was satisfied. Or until he found another candidate to join the coveted team. Whichever came first.

She rolled her eyes. “Right. Your boss has even less of a regard for my field than you do if that’s possible.”

Charles thought it might be, and he couldn’t deny her claim, either. He hadn’t known much about, or had much use for, clinical psychology before seeing Rhonda in action. He was a surgeon. His interest was all about what was happening inside the body, not speculation about why.

“I told you I’ve revised my opinion of your field.”

She passed him and headed up the steps. “You mentioned it. I’m not convinced I should believe you.”

“You read minds for a living. You should know if I’m lying.”

She didn’t take the bait, only laughed, and he launched himself up two steps at a time to reach the entrance before she did. After inputting his security code, he held the door for her.

“Thank you, Dr. Steinberg.”

“My pleasure, Dr. Camden.” He stepped inside. “So what’s this new program that needs immediate attention?”

Turning around, she peered pointedly over the rim of her glasses. “See that showy Jag parked between our cars?”

“I do.”

“I suspect that belongs to our court-ordered volunteer.”

Charles came to a stop with the door still half-open. “Court ordered? I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Some folks need a little help recognizing the merits of helping others.”

“You’re killing me with suspense.” Actually, the suspense wasn’t killing him, but the need to get home, pack a bag and get the hell out of Dodge was.

This was Rhonda’s expertise, and after working beside her, Charles had the utmost of confidence in her decisions. If she said they should take on a court-ordered volunteer program, then Charles accepted her word.

“No felons or pedophiles, I promise,” she assured him.

“Never even crossed my mind.” He pulled the door shut until the lock clicked tight. Another thing about Rhonda—she was crazy invested in helping women. So much so that he’d wondered more than once whom she knew or what might have happened in her life to make her such a passionate advocate.

“Hey, Deputy Doug,” she greeted the sheriff as they passed the room that had been transformed into the on-site Sheriff’s Department substation.

The deputy, spit-polished in a uniform that lent an air of authority and safety to New Hope, glanced up from the desk where he monitored video surveillance of the property with the phone cradled against his ear. He waved.

Charles inclined his head as he passed. “Our resident deputy is okay with you inviting criminals onto the property?”

“Not criminals.” Rhonda huffed over her shoulder and headed down the hallway toward the administrative offices. “They’re women the court feels have something to offer and deserve a chance to get back on more productive paths.”

“That’s very…politically correct.”

“I couldn’t say no, Charles. It’s a worthy cause and we need the help. Our volunteer base is a third of what it needs to be, and with the screenings, orientations and training, that won’t change for some time.”

Charles was personally acquainted with the duties around here and wondered what these formerly upstanding women might have to offer. He didn’t bother asking since they had arrived in the office and the administrative volunteer sitting at the desk said, “Your appointment is here, Dr. Camden.”

“Thanks.” She motioned Charles into their shared office. “Close the door.”

He did as she asked, surprised when she dropped her things on the desk and went straight for the observation panel on the wall. Sliding the shutter open, she peered through the viewing glass into the reception area.

“Nicely dressed felon,” Rhonda said drily.

The observation panel had been established as a security measure in a place filled with them. They’d modeled New Hope after other domestic violence programs around the country. The unfortunate truth was that domestic violence could erupt anywhere and often followed its victims.

Precisely why New Hope’s security measures were top-notch. Not only was there a fully-staffed sheriff substation, but the facility was hardwired to the Bluestone Mountain Police. A silent alarm would dispatch officer backup and SWAT resources within minutes. From state-of-the-art internet security to detailed precautionary procedures that involved other domestic violence agencies around the state, New Hope, for its remote location in Bluestone Mountain, was a cutting-edge facility.

Rhonda motioned him over. Charles honestly could not have cared less, but the path of the least resistance was the fastest way to get out the door and up to the river. Crossing the room, he peered through the glass at the woman standing in the reception area, idly thumbing through a magazine.

A tall, slim woman with sleek blond hair and delicate features that would be right at home on the cover of the magazine she held. Nicely dressed was an understatement. This woman’s wardrobe could feed a developing nation.

“Jesus.” He staggered back, nearly tripping over Rhonda.

She jumped out of his way, steadying herself on the desk. “What’s wrong?”

For a moment he could only stare. The words were in his head but wouldn’t come out. He blinked. He took a deep breath. He tried again. “You invited my ex-wife to volunteer here?”

“Excuse me. What are you talking about?” Rhonda was clearly confused.

Charles wasn’t talking about anything because he was still too busy trying to reason through why one all too familiar and very unwelcome blonde was standing inside this facility.

Court-ordered community service?

Rhonda stepped around the desk and thumbed through the folders that had slid half out of her jam-packed briefcase. “Here it is. Her name is Reece.”

Sure enough, the folder tab had Reece printed in bold black letters.

“Karan Kowalski Steinberg-Reece.”

Rhonda’s frown melted and she glanced at the folder again. “Guess that will teach me to read what’s inside. Gosh, I’m really sorry, Charles. The program sounded like such a great deal when Chief Sloan mentioned it.”

“Chief Sloan?”

She nodded.

A freaking setup if ever there was one. “He obviously suggested it because he didn’t want to deal with her himself.”

Rhonda sank onto the edge of the desk with the closed folder neatly in her lap. She looked at him with an inviting, psychoanalyzing expression on her face. “Chief Sloan knows your ex-wife, too?”

It took Charles another speechless moment to reason that through. Rhonda wasn’t from Bluestone Mountain. Like himself, she’d come to the area to attend Van Cortlandt College, an elite private university in the valley. She’d wound up settling here after completing grad school. Unlike him, or Chief Sloan for that matter, she’d managed to avoid running into Karan.

“They have a history,” he said.

“I see. And you think Chief Sloan sent her our way because he’d rather we dealt with her?”

“Jack sits on the board of directors. He was involved with this project long before I was, and he didn’t ask me to let her volunteer here because he knew I’d say no damn way.”

Rhonda conceded the point with a nod then flipped open the folder and scanned the documents inside. “Okay, I’m reading. Not seeing what the big deal is about her. I also don’t see… What does she do for a living?”

“Professional social climber.”

Rhonda frowned. “Come on, Charles, you married her. How bad can she possibly be?”

He had no words. Just a knot in his stomach.

Rhonda tossed the folder onto the desk and returned to the security panel. “Hmm. I’d say she’s getting impatient because I’m running late. But she is very beautiful. I guess you must have been blinded by her beauty.”

He had been. No question. Charles could still remember the first time he’d ever set eyes on Karan. He was in med school in the midst of a particularly brutal stretch. He hadn’t slept in over forty-eight hours. The autumn sun seared his eyeballs after being holed up in the medical library for he couldn’t even remember how long. The quad was packed with booths and students, and he wished like hell he was headed home for a few hours of shut-eye. No such luck.

The Feminization of Poverty event beckoned.

Dr. Nan Bryson was a popular anthropology professor from Harvard who toured the country speaking on an alarming trend gaining speed in academic circles. The fact that she was coming to Van Cortlandt was a big deal, particularly as one of the undergrads had managed to do what the deans of the anthropology and sociology departments combined hadn’t been able to do—get Dr. Bryson to speak while traveling through the Catskills. To honor this visiting professor, the faculty had pulled out all the stops to ensure the talk was well attended.

Charles had zero interest in sociology, anthropology or women’s issues but after bombing an exam, he’d appealed to the professor for mercy. Charles hadn’t had time to study because he’d been invited to observe surgeries at St. Joseph’s Hospital—no way could he pass up the opportunity. The professor had offered an opportunity for some extra credit.

Charles wouldn’t have missed the event if he’d had to be carried here on a gurney. He needed every dime of his scholarship money so he didn’t have to spend the rest of his life paying off student loans. That meant keeping up his GPA.

He was assigned to work the book booth and did nothing but try to keep his foggy brain functioning. While using hands that were learning to perform delicate maneuvers on organs and arteries to count out ones, fives and tens, he saw her.

Hot. The hottest. Details didn’t register. The punch to his gut did. Suddenly, all the tired vanished and his pulse pumped at warp speed. Blurry vision instantly saw with clarity as if he'd sharpened his sight on the edge of a scalpel. Only after he could breathe again did he notice details.

Blonde. Lean. Tall. She barely looked real with that pale silky hair blowing around her face. A face as exquisitely feminine as the rest of her. He couldn’t see the color of her eyes, but they were lighter. Blue or gray, maybe.

Then she smiled.

That full pink mouth made him think about kissing.

He had no idea who she was but even sleep deprived, he knew she was someone important. She walked with the college president, several of the deans and a woman he recognized from the jacket of the book he was selling—Dr. Nan Bryson. Then she disappeared backstage with her group and was gone.

But not from Charles’s thoughts.

He couldn’t get the image of her out of his head. He sold books, made change, but his brain replayed every detail he could remember, ached with trying to remember more. And the most important detail of all: who was she?

He intended to find out.

Once Dr. Bryson’s talk started, the book booth would quiet down and he could slip away to grab coffee. No one would miss him for ten minutes and he’d make a few calls on the way.

When the president took the stage and announced the beginning of the program, the noise level on the quad dropped. Charles tucked the cash box under his arm and timed his exit. While listening to the president welcome their guest to Van Cortlandt, he slipped the cell phone from his pocket. Then the president introduced the person responsible for Dr. Bryson’s visit, the person privileged with introducing their speaker.

The blonde walked onto the stage.

She wore a blinding smile, seemed completely at ease in front of the crowd as she began the introduction in a honeyed voice that matched up with every sleek inch of her.

Charles set the cash box on the table. He slipped the phone into his pocket.

Karan Kowalski.

Now, here she was again, two husbands later. Standing in New Hope’s reception area, which was exactly the last place on the planet she should be.

And he had that same knot in his stomach. Only the years had turned anticipation into dread.

“Charles?” Rhonda’s voice penetrated his brain. “Charles, are you all right?”

Was she joking?

He dragged his gaze from the observation panel, and found Rhonda watching him, seeing way too much with her trained psychotherapist gaze.

“Are you going to be able to handle this?” she asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“You always have a choice.”

“One that doesn’t involve abandoning my post and losing my shot to join the Catskill Center?”

She shrugged, and he could tell she was fighting a smile. “We’ll have to figure that part out. I’m curious, though. Does your ex-wife know you’re affiliated with this program?”

“I have no idea. I never see her.” He stopped short. “Correct that. I run into her at the hospital on occasion.”

“Hmm. I just wondered. From what I understood from Chief Sloan, she had to agree to the alternative sentencing. I’m interested to know if she knew you’d be here.”

Interested? There was only thing Charles wanted to know. “What are you planning to do with her?”

“I have no idea until we talk and figure out what she can do.”

“Good luck with that. We didn’t install a tanning bed, so I can’t imagine—”

Rhonda stopped him with a raised hand. “No opinions please. I’m intrigued enough. I’d rather form my own impressions without yours coloring my professionalism. Your ex-wife has been ordered into counseling. I thought it made sense for me to treat her since she’s our trial run with alternative sentencing.”

He nodded, still struggling to pull the pieces together to decide what he was going to do with this. Running into Karan each and every time he walked through the door wasn’t going to work. That much he did know.

“Why is she in court-ordered community service and counseling?” he asked. “What in hell did she do?”

“DUI? DWAI? One of them.” Rhonda twisted around and flipped open the folder on her desk. “Driving while ability impaired.”

“Drugs?”

She shook her head. “Alcohol.”

“That’s about the last thing I would have expected.”

Rhonda waved him off again. “Shh.”

Karan didn’t drink. Never had. When other college students had been getting plowed during rush week, she’d made it her life’s quest to find other ways of unwinding and having fun. Picnics. Boating. Trips into the city for gallery showings.

He remembered how much he’d once liked that about her.

Karan’s dislike of alcohol was deep-rooted, physical and psychological, the result of a low blood sugar condition and an alcoholic mother. Throughout their marriage, she wouldn’t pick up the phone at night without screening the call. She’d never said why, but Charles had known she was avoiding her mother, who normally started drinking after the sun set.

DWAI. That didn’t make sense for the woman he’d known. Then again, he hadn’t known Karan in a long time. He had heard she’d gotten divorced again, which was probably why she was back in Bluestone Mountain. Maybe the divorce had driven her to drink.

Had she cared that much for husband number two?

Charles couldn’t reconcile that with the woman he’d known. Karan didn’t care about anyone but herself. She used men then jettisoned them. Charles had come home from the hospital one day to find a key in an envelope and a storage facility filled with everything he owned. Jack Sloan hadn’t fared much better—only he’d been smart enough not to marry her, so he hadn’t had to retain an attorney and sign papers.

But DWAI? Was it possible, by some miracle, Karan had actually cared for husband number two?

The way she hadn’t cared for him.

“So how does this work in your field, Rhonda?” He did not want to be thinking about Karan, feelings he didn’t know he still had being dredged up without permission. So what if she cared for her second husband? “Do we have conflict of interest?”

With any luck they could get out of this whole alternative sentence thing. Let Jack handle Karan and her grief instead of dumping the problem onto New Hope. Charles had done his time. He’d earned a break from Karan and her drama. For the rest of his life.

“I don’t see conflict, but there’s only one ethical thing to do.” Depressing a button on the intercom, Rhonda said, “Lori, you can show my appointment in now.”

“Damn it.” He couldn’t get away without running into Karan in the outer office.

Rhonda shrugged. “Nothing left to do but deal with her.”

Deal with Karan…wasn’t he supposed to be fishing?

CHAPTER THREE

KARAN FLIPPED PAGE AFTER PAGE of the celebrity magazine, trying to interest herself in the current state of high-profile marriages and who had or hadn’t been invited to the latest A-list playgroup outing. But she couldn’t seem to get past the fact that she was inside the childhood home of the woman who’d managed to get Jack down the aisle.

Frankie Cesarini. Ugh. The very thought of her was enough to make Karan twitch. Fortunately, they’d had only limited contact since Frankie had come back to town.

Of course, Karan could have gotten Jack down the aisle years ago, if she’d wanted to be a cop’s wife. No, thank you. Still, to her knowledge, Jack hadn’t even come close to marriage in all the years since Karan had dumped him. The man obviously had never gotten over losing her. Who could blame him? They’d been so good together. With her by his side, he could have been running for senate himself by now.

What admittedly surprised her was who had finally gotten a ring on his finger—a woman who’d once been the antithesis of everything Karan considered relevant. No family. No money. No friends. No chic whatsoever.

Nowadays Susanna worked for Jack’s new wife and swore the woman resembled nothing of the girl who’d once been nothing more than bad hair and a smart mouth. Karan had trouble believing that and would have dismissed the possibility as nonsense from any other source. But she couldn’t dismiss the reality of this house. Or the fact that she was inside it and would be for another three hundred and fifty-nine hours and forty-six minutes.

From what she understood, the entire structure had been extensively renovated, which meant she couldn’t blame the generic furnishings on Jack’s new wife. The outside wasn’t bad. The house itself was a three-story Victorian with lots of windows and gingerbread trim. Fresh paint, new windows and proper landscaping had only brought out the character. Karan did wonder if there had been conflict involved with the hamlet of Bluestone Mountain purchasing the police chief’s wife’s childhood home.

Wouldn’t surprise her in the least. Also wouldn’t surprise her to learn there hadn’t been a cop in town willing to drag the police chief before a judge. As if that would have done any good with a judge like Wannabe Jenny. She, like the rest of the girls at Ashokan High, had thought the sun rose and set on the former football star.

How could Karan have forgotten how much she hated this town?

A door cracked open and a woman close to her age appeared. “Dr. Camden will see you now if you’ll follow me.”

Only fifteen minutes late. Any other doctor and Karan would have waited closer to an hour, so no complaints here. She cautioned herself to start finding reasons to smile through this nightmare, no matter how small. Guaranteed there would be precious few in the weeks ahead.

Tossing the magazine onto a table, she started her trek into hell bravely, glancing at the woman’s name badge.

“You’re a volunteer,” she said. “Is your job greeting the visitors?” Playing hostess for the duration of her sentence might not be too terrible. She could deal with people.

The woman smiled. “That among other things. Switch board detail and lots of administrative duties for the counselors.”

“I see.” Karan wasn’t interested.

They entered a smaller reception area and the woman went straight to the door marked Director, tapped lightly and pushed it open. “Here you go.”

“Thanks.” Karan smiled. Then, taking a deep breath, she moved past the woman and into the office, ready to deal with this situation head-on.

The sooner she started the sooner she’d finish.

Karan noticed the blonde woman standing behind the desk, but it was the man in front of the desk who stopped her cold.

“Charles?”

He looked the way he always did. So handsome that the very sight of him startled her. There was just something about his chiseled features, the way his dark eyes contrasted with his lighter hair. Not blond, but not quite brown, either. A sandy in between. His closely trimmed beard and mustache only emphasized the maleness of his face.

His expression was the same, too. So arrogant that she crashed right back to reality.

Dr. Disdain, she’d once called him. At least that had been his attitude toward her.

“Karan.” He didn’t even have the grace to utter any social niceties. No “Pleased to see you.” No “You look well.”

Of course not. The man stood there looking as if he was above everyone and everything and wished he was anywhere in the world rather than facing her.

Karan’s feelings might have been hurt had she not been so surprised to see him. And had she cared what he thought about her. She didn’t.

Of course, she wasn’t rude. “I’m surprised to see you. What are you doing here?”

“I’m Dr. Camden, Karan. Please call me Rhonda.” The blonde behind the desk extended her hand. “Turns out we have an unexpected situation.”

She shook the doctor’s hand. Rhonda wasn’t a natural blonde like Karan herself, but Karan did approve of the highlighting job. Skillfully done to look natural. Not like so many of the streaky chicken-yellow horrors on the streets nowadays.

“I’m bracing myself.” Karan meant it. Bracing herself for the shock of yet another unexpected situation. Bracing herself to be standing two feet away from this man.

And darned if her heartbeat hadn’t already kicked up a few notches. He’d always had that effect on her. He was too attractive. Tall with that baseball player’s body. A perfect blend of athletic and muscular. And darned, too, if she didn’t remember exactly what the terrain beneath his lightweight black sweater and gray pants looked like.