They Thought I Was Just Her Husband

CHAPTER 2

The first thing Theo’s brain registered as he woke up was the unfamiliar sheets wrapped around his body.

Even half-conscious, even with his skull feeling like it had been used as a gong, some old instinct clocked the sheets against his skin— heavy, cool, expensive—and told him he was not in his own bed.

The second thing he noticed was that he was completely naked!

He lay still for a moment, doing the math a man does when he wakes up somewhere he doesn't remember arriving. There was the drinking, yes he remembered that, the bar…the country song that pissed him off…After that, his memory simply ended, like a road that ran straight into fog.

Did I bring a woman back?

The thought landed in his gut like a dropped stone. He almost laughed at the ridiculous timing of it—one night after learning his wife had betrayed him for fifteen years, and here he was, possibly guilty of the very same thing.

Then, just as fast, something in him pushed back sharply and he frowned.

No! It's not the same.

He'd already buried the marriage in his own mind sometime around the second glass of whiskey. Whatever he'd done last night, with whoever, he'd done it as a free man in every way that mattered, even if the paperwork hadn't caught up yet.

He tried to sit up to test that theory. The headache had other plans, driving a spike clean through his temple and dropping him flat again with a groan.

“Ugh, fuck…” he winced hard, then suddenly stopped when he heard something.

Water from a tap was running somewhere and suddenly, a door opened.

Tracey Teague Hanks walked out of the bathroom in a hotel robe, toweling her hair, looking like she'd stepped out of a skincare commercial rather than a bender.

Theo Hanks's whole body stiffened and his eyes bulged out.

She found me!

He felt a strange sensation of anger and disbelief for how life had treated him—fifteen years of not knowing his wife had been cheating, and the one night he slips, she catches him with the sheets still warm.

But Tracey wasn't looking at him like a woman who'd caught her husband cheating. She was looking at him like a woman checking on a man with the flu.

"You're finally up." She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the mattress, brushing his hair back from his forehead with an ease that only made the moment stranger. "You drank far too much last night. And then you didn't let me sleep until almost sunrise." A small, scolding smile crossed her beautiful face. "You're forty, Theo. Your body isn't twenty-five anymore. I had broth sent up — sit up and drink some before you say a word."

He stared at her, utterly confused.

There was no fury in her face, no wounded pride. Just the easy warmth of a wife tending to her husband's hangover.

"How did I get here?" His voice came out rougher than he meant it to. "How did you get here?"

Because none of this made any sense. His vague thoughts ran through his head, he was in an underground garage, a woman's shoulder under his arm, his own drunken voice accusing someone of hiding a love nest. That wasn't a five-star hotel suite. That was somewhere else entirely.

"You texted me." Tracey's mouth curved, equal parts amused and pleased with herself. "Told me to come. I'll admit, I didn't expect you'd be that far gone." She let the pause stretch, color rising faintly in her cheeks. "Once I got here, though…you were like a different man. You didn't hold back at all in bed and honestly, you scared me a little."

She leaned in, voice dropping in a seductive whisper that sent goosebumps over his naked flesh. "Next time you want to be that thorough, give me some warning first. A girl needs to prepare."

The satisfaction in her eyes wasn't performance. It was the unmistakable, sated glow of a woman who'd had a very good night.

Theo grabbed his phone off the nightstand like it might explain itself, but it didn't help. In fact, it made things worse.

There, in his own outgoing messages, sent at 11:47 the previous night: ‘I've been drinking. Don't want to go home. Been forever since we did a hotel, can you come over? Let's relive the old days.’

He read it three times. His name was on it and it was his number that sent it.

He had absolutely no memory of typing a single word of it, and by the time he'd been that drunk, he could barely remember his own address, let alone compose an invitation like that.

Fine, he told himself, jaw tight. Whatever happened, happened. It's the last time they’d ever spend the night as husband and wife either way.

He dressed in silence, splashed water on his face, and checked out. At the front desk, a small detail caught his attention and made him squint. The room had been booked and paid in cash, under his own ID, hours before he could remember doing anything of the sort.

He leaned over the front desk and cleared his throat, “Uhm, excuse me…can I see the security footage from last night?”

The clerk shook her head and said, “I am sorry sir, but that will disrupt the guest privacy policy,” she looked at the confusion on his face and added, “but you walked in here with a woman who had short, dyed-blond hair.”

Theo’s body froze.

Tracey's hair fell black and glossy past her shoulders. It always had.

That wasn't her.

But before the thought could finish forming, Tracey's hand was already at his elbow, steering him toward the door. “Breakfast was lovely, wasn’t it?” she commented.

Theo simply nodded absentmindedly, his mind still unresolved over what the clerk had said.

They ended up in a private dining room an hour later, a table crowded with delicate dishes he had no appetite for and, at the center, a heaping platter of oysters Tracey had ordered specifically for him.

"Eat," she said, sliding the plate closer. "You gave quite a performance last night. You'll want the energy back."

He picked at his food and said nothing, the phone screen still burning behind his eyes. I would never have sent that message. Not after what he'd learned that afternoon—-not in a hundred lifetimes.

He studied her across the table calmly, the same face that had captivated him at twenty-four, still doing it now at forty, infuriatingly unchanged by time or, apparently, by guilt.

"Tracey."

"Hm?"

"You're beautiful and you’re very famous. Men must throw themselves at you constantly."

"They do." She said it without vanity, the way she'd note the weather.

His chest tightened until it hurt. "Have you ever cheated on me?" he blurted out.

Her chopsticks paused a fraction of a second. Then she looked up, faintly amused, faintly wounded on his behalf. "Where is this coming from? Since when are you the insecure type?" She shook her head. "You're underselling yourself. And me too, Theo. That hurts."

Theo didn't answer.

He reached into his bag, pulled out the folded paper, and set it on the white tablecloth between them, turning it so she could read every word.

His heart was pounding furiously as he watched her reaction keenly,

"Then explain this, Tracey."