Burning Down the Spouse (15 page)
Read Burning Down the Spouse Online
Authors: Dakota Cassidy
Tags: #Separated Women, #Greek Americans, #Humorous, #Contemporary, #Women Cooks, #General, #Romance, #Humorous Fiction, #Fiction, #Cultural Heritage, #Love Stories
Nikos yanked the schedule from his back pocket, holding it up so she could indeed see it said ten.
Which was a bitch of a conundrum, but still it wasn’t the same schedule she saw yesterday.
Stomping to the far end of the kitchen, she tore her apron off its hook. “I don’t care what that says. I know what I saw yesterday.” Frankie pulled a gleaming knife from the block and held it up, cornering him and his damned schedule. “And you’d better lay off the snide remarks about pedicures and facials. I couldn’t afford a facial right now if I sold my soul to the devil, and you know it—which is why I’m working here with a beast like you for a boss. To remind me of those luxuries, and my lack thereof, is petty and preschool-ish. Now bring me a ten-pound bag of onions to chop. Nay, bring me two so I can make up for my spur-of-the-moment morning shopping spree!”
Nikos caught her by surprise when he laughed with total abandon, the cords of sinew along his neck strained. “Wow. That was nice.”
The anger she’d spewed evaporated at his smile. Damn him and his smile. And his brawny body. Oh, and his stupidly sick rippling thighs. “Did it make you feel bad?”
“Not until you hit ‘preschool-ish.’ ” He gave his chest a light-fisted punch. “That cut deep.”
Now Frankie grinned up at him. “Good. You deserved it. You could have given me the benefit of the doubt, you know. I’ve been on time every day for two weeks, and I do all your dirty work for eight, sometimes ten solid hours six days a week. I really did read the schedule and it really did say one thirty—
yesterday
.”
yesterday
.”
His eyes caught hers, pinning her. “You’re right. I should have asked before I jumped down your throat. Sometimes we Antonakases forget the word ‘communication’ exists for a reason. We get excited first and ask questions later. Apology accepted?”
Her breathing slowed as he hovered over her. She caught her breath when Nikos lifted a thumb to swipe at the corner of her mouth. “Toothpaste,” he muttered, but his finger didn’t move when he was done wiping. Instead, it lingered in all its deliciousness.
“I didn’t have time to rinse, you tyrant,” she muttered back, hoping to hold on to her grudge, yet caught up in a strange trance they both couldn’t look away from. Her heart began an erratic pattern of starting and stopping in jolts to her chest.
Nikos’s chest rose and fell, too, in choppy breaths. “I did apologize,” he said without a trace of antagonism. Though his reminder was slow, measured, and said with distinct distraction as his eyes followed her darting tongue gliding over her lips in nervousness.
Frankie swallowed on a hard gulp, using all her will to suppress the urge to capture Nikos’s finger between her lips. “You did.”
“Now you accept and we move forward. It’s nice workplace etiquette,” he muttered, the spot where his thumb rested burning beneath his finger.
Frankie found she didn’t want him to remove his thumb—
ever
. “But you were pretty mean. I don’t know if I can forgive and forget. I am known for my awesome ability to lose control. If I were you, I’d tread lightly,” she teased with a flirtatious edge to her tone.
ever
. “But you were pretty mean. I don’t know if I can forgive and forget. I am known for my awesome ability to lose control. If I were you, I’d tread lightly,” she teased with a flirtatious edge to her tone.
Whoa.
Frankie Bennett was flirting. Better still, it felt good.
Heh.
Nikos let his other arm rest on the wall above her head when he leaned toward her, amusement streaking his olive black eyes. “I’m not afraid of you and your wooden spoon of doom.”
Frankie giggled. “I hear it was pretty psych-ward worthy.”
Nikos wiggled his eyebrows. “You mean you haven’t seen it?”
“Not the whole thing—no. Just the stills the tabloids splashed all over the front pages, and a snippet or two on TV. I don’t remember much of it either. It was like I was possessed.”
“All you needed was a good pea-soup spew. It was probably the best beat down I’ve ever seen, bar none.”
His approval made her want to bask in the glory of his sun, even if she was basking for all the wrong, totally inappropriate reasons. “No one would have ever expected that kind of reaction to anything by quiet-as-a-church-mouse Frankie Bennett. I surprised even me. I don’t know where that came from.”
“From a place I imagine was a little sick and tired. Cheating’s a crappy thing to do. It makes people do things they didn’t think they were capable of.”
Was that understanding from one cheated upon to the other? At the mention of Mitch’s infidelity, the spell Nikos held her under was broken. Frankie sobered. The painful reminder that she wasn’t enough for Mitch, despite the fact that in hindsight, he hadn’t been enough for her for a long time, was still raw. “Yes. It was a crappy thing to do. Something I decidedly plan to avoid for, like, ever.”
Yet Nikos didn’t seem to be suffering the same effects of the moment’s end she was. “Do you still love Mitch, Frankie?”
When he said her name like that, all interested and with a tender hint to it, she wanted to give in to her foolish impulses and melt against him. But his question was one she was still sorting through. What had she loved about Mitch to begin with? His physical presence never made her heart skip a beat the way Nikos’s did. Looking back, there wasn’t a particular time she could remember feeling cherished by him or needed for anything other than her ability to manage him to within an inch of his disorganized life. “I haven’t given it much thought . . . But if forced to answer, no—I . . .”
“You’re still sorting it all out. I get it.”
How could he possibly understand her relationship with Mitch and the kind of heartbreak he’d created? Who’d ever dump Nikos so heinously that he’d know the sort of pain Mitch’s infidelity wrought from deep within her? “Do you?”
He smiled, a smile that reached his warm eyes. “I do.”
“Hey!” Cosmos stuck his head between the two of them. “Uh, I hate to interrupt, but Frankie? You got a phone call while you were catching up on your beauty sleep.”
Frankie narrowed her eyes at Cosmos, ducking out from under Nikos’s arm. “I was not, I repeat, I was not sleeping in like some diva!” she yelped, pointing the knife she still held in Cosmos’s direction.
Nikos cleared his throat. “Lay off her, Cos. It was just a mistake.” He winked when Frankie shot him a grateful smile, leaving her insides slushy.
Cosmos raised an eyebrow with a cynical lift to it. “Right. Whatever. Anyway, like I said. You got a phone call.”
Who’d call her at the diner? Who even cared she was alive besides Aunt Gail? The tabloids had turned into a bunch of slackers the moment a new ass to chew had appeared. She hadn’t had a call from anyone in, at last count, two months. “Who called?”
Cosmos didn’t look her directly in the eye. Instead, his gaze strayed to Nikos.
“Well?” she almost demanded, her stomach finding that old familiar discomfort it’d grown so content with. It was something bad. It was always something bad as of late.
Cosmos’s sigh was reluctant, his words short. “Mitch called, Frankie. It was Mitch.”
Superfly.
CHAPTER SIX
From the “maybe even a little less reluctant than I was last entry” journal of ex-trophy wife Frankie Bennett: Maxine says it’s crucial to create your own new life from the inside out. After your divorce, you’re supposed to make it a point to experience new things, create new routines, get out and see the world, and let the world see you and your brand-new attitude. I went. I saw—the world, that is. I think my world is far better viewed from the confines of my cave. But no one, especially that hippy-skippy Maxine, can say I didn’t try.
“If I was you, brother, I’d walk away now,” Cosmos advised with a slap of his hand to Nikos’s back.
“What am I walking away from?” he asked, keeping his head buried in the possible menu changes to avoid a glimpse of Cosmos.
“Don’t bullshit me, Nik. I saw the way you were looking at Frankie today when you had her cornered—but what you didn’t see, because you’re as blind as the proverbial bat, was the way she looked when I told her her ex-husband called. You know why you didn’t see it? Because you’re not paying attention to the signs. Instead, you’re making a checklist of things to do to save her. Do I really need to remind you of Anita?”
Nikos’s shoulders bunched. No one needed to remind him he was the biggest ass where Anita was concerned. “I don’t need to be reminded.” He wasn’t in the mood for the speech from Cosmos tonight. He’d rather be pissed off about Frankie’s reaction to Mitch’s phone call. A reaction he never expected after she’d just told him she didn’t love the prick anymore. A reaction he shouldn’t give a world of crap about, but found himself angry over nonetheless.
“Let it go, Cos.”
“Fine. Just remember, I was the one who reminded you about your love of a chick who’s hard up.”
“Who is hard?” Voula asked, wiping her hands on her apron.
Nikos shot Cos a glare. “No one, Mama.”
Voula pinched Cosmos’s cheeks. “I hear that bad Mitch call today for our Frankie. You didn’t tell her, did you?”
Cosmos let his head hang to his chest. “I did, Mama.”
Voula scowled. “Next time you give Mama the phone. She will take care of the Mitch and his kitchen. Frankie looks better since she is here. She eats my meatloaf almost every day for lunch, and she smiles sometimes. I like this. That bad Mitch will only make her sad again. We don’t want her to landslide, do we?”
“Backslide, Mama. And no, we don’t want her to backslide,” Nikos reassured her.
“Then if he calls again, Cosmos, you tell him we don’t have no Frankies here, okay?”
Cosmos nodded with a sidelong glance at Nikos. “Done.”
“Nikos? Did you tell Frankie about Marco and his bad wife?”
Nikos winced. No. He hadn’t told Frankie about Marco. “Doesn’t she have enough on her plate, Mama?”
“Her plate will break if she is caught with the surprise, Nikos.”
“You don’t really think Carrie will show up here ever again, do you? I don’t think we should worry about it, and we definitely shouldn’t add anything else to Frankie’s troubles.”
Voula wagged a finger at him. “I don’t like the secrets, Nikos. And what about Marco? When he comes back from his trip, he will meet our Frankie. I don’t want to see him sad again, Nikos.”
A stab of guilt for his best friend and the heartbreak he’d suffered when his marriage went to shit made Nikos’s gut twist. “How about we talk about this another time, Mama. You go home and have dinner with Papa.”
Cosmos intercepted Voula, saving his brother. “C’mon, Mama, I’ll take you home. You’ve been on your feet too long today.”
Voula frowned when she removed her apron. “I like tired feet better than I like your cranky Papa.”
Both brothers laughed. “It’ll pass, Mama. He just needs to find other interests,” Nikos said, planting a kiss on her forehead.
Cosmos threw his jacket on, giving Nikos one last pointed look. “Mark my words, brother,” he warned.
Nikos waved him off, turning back to the menu changes. He wasn’t interested in Frankie Bennett.
Not interested in her luscious, bare lips. Not in her flushed cheeks when she was tweaked. Not in her warm amber eyes when she smiled. Not in the comfortable groove they’d found working together. Not in the ridiculous smile he experienced when she consumed something he’d cooked for her. Not in the weird rush of something he couldn’t explain that shot to his chest when he saw her flipping through endless magazines, searching for this hobby she hoped would motivate her to want to get out of bed every day.
Not.
“Why in Sam Hill are you fancying up?”
Frankie smiled into the bathroom mirror at Gail’s image behind her before blotting her lips with a tissue to soften the lipstick she’d found in the vanity drawer. “I have a date.”
Gail’s lips split into a grin. She gave Kiki, who sat on the vanity top, a scruff to the head. “I knew it was just a matter of time before all my prayers were answered.” She mouthed a “thank you” to the ceiling.
“And what did you pray for, Aunt Gail? What do you suppose Auntie Gail prayed for, Kik?”
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