Sweet Deception

Zabrina got into her late-model Lincoln sedan and maneuvered out of the restaurant parking lot. She hadn’t realized her hands were shaking until she stopped for a red light. She closed her eyes, inhaling a lungful of cool air flowing from the automobile’s air conditioner. When she opened her eyes the light had changed and she was back in control.

Myles Eaton pretended to be interested in the menu on the table in front of him to avoid staring at the table where Zabrina Mixon and his sister had been. A wry smile touched his mouth. He’d forgotten. She was no longer a Mixon. She was now Zabrina Cooper.

As an attorney and professor of constitutional law, he’d memorized countless Supreme Court decisions, yet he had not, could not, did not want to remember the dozen words that had turned his world upside down.

His fiancée, the woman to whom he’d pledged his life and his future had waited until two weeks before they were to be married to call and tell him she couldn’t marry him because she was in love with another man. And when he’d discovered the “other man” was none other than Thomas Cooper, his rage had escalated until he realized he had to leave Philadelphia or spend the rest of his life obsessing about the woman who’d broken his heart.

Thomas Cooper used every opportunity to parade and flaunt his much younger wife. Myles could still recall the photographs of a very pregnant Zabrina with the councilman’s hand splayed over her swollen belly at a fundraiser. Then there was the official family photograph with the haunted look in Zabrina’s eyes when she’d stared directly into the camera lens. There were rumors that she’d been afflicted with chronic postpartum depression, while others hinted that marital problems had beset the Coopers and they were seeing a marriage counselor.

All of the rumors ended for Myles when he requested and was granted a transfer to work out of the law firm’s New York office. Adjusting to the faster pace of New York had been the balm he needed to start over. The cramped studio apartment was a far cry from his spacious condo. But that hadn’t been important, because most nights when he came home after putting in a fourteen-hour day he’d shower and fall into bed, then get up and do it all over again.

He’d given New York City eight years of his life before he decided he didn’t want to practice law, but teach it. He contacted a former professor who told him of an opening at his law-school alma mater. He applied for the position, went through the interview process and when he received the letter of appointment to teach constitutional law at Duquesne’s law school in Pittsburgh, he finally found peace.

“What are you having, Myles?”

His head jerked up and he smiled at the woman who’d become his law-school mentor. Judge Stacey Greer-Monroe had graduated from high school at fifteen, college at eighteen and law school two months after her twenty-first birthday. Myles thought Stacey was one of the most brilliant legal minds he’d ever encountered, including his professors.

“I think I’m going to order the crab cakes.”

“What’s the matter, Professor Eaton? You can’t get good crab cakes in Steel City?” Stacey joked.

His smile grew wider. “I get the best Maryland-style crab cakes west of the Alleghenies at a little restaurant owned by a woman who moved from Baltimore. Sadie G’s has become my favorite eating place.”

Stacey lowered her gaze rather than stare openly at the man she’d tried unsuccessfully to get to think of her as more than a friend. But their every encounter ended with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. After he was jilted by his fiancée Myles continued to regard Stacey as friend and peer. Their relationship remained the same after he’d moved to New York and then Pittsburgh when they communicated with each other online.

Stacey’s hopes of becoming Mrs. Myles Eaton ended when her biological clock began winding down and she married a neurosurgeon she’d dated off and on for years. She was now the mother of a two-year-old daughter.

“So, you’re really serious about putting down roots in Pittsburgh?”

Myles’s dark eyebrows framed his eyes in a lean mahogany-brown angular face that once seen wasn’t easily forgotten. “I’ve been house-hunting,” he admitted. The one-year lease on his rental would expire at the end of August. “And I’ve seen a few places I happen to like.”

Stacey angled her head. “I thought you’d prefer a condo or co-op.”

“I’d thought so, too. But after living in apartments the past nine years I’m looking to spread out. I don’t like entertaining only a few feet from where I have to sleep.”

“You could buy a duplex.”

Myles studied Stacey’s face, one of the youngest jurists elected to Philadelphia’s Supreme Court. Stacey Greer-Monroe had always reminded him of a fragile doll. But under the soft, delicate exterior was a tough but fair judge. Her grandfather was a judge, as was her father. And Stacey had continued the tradition when she was elected to the bench.

“I miss waking up to the smell of freshly cut grass and firing up the grill during the warm weather.”

Stacey smiled. “It sounds as if you’re ready to settle down and become a family man.”

Myles wanted to tell her he’d been ready to settle down ten years before. Then he’d looked forward to marrying Zabrina and raising a family, but that changed when she’d married Thomas Cooper and gave him the son that should’ve been theirs.

“Excuse me, Judge Monroe, but are you ready to order a cocktail?”

Frowning slightly, Stacey shifted her attention from Myles to their waiter. Talk about bad timing. She was just about to ask him whether he was seeing a woman, and, if he was, was it serious? “Yes.” She smiled at Myles. “Do you mind if I order a bottle of champagne to celebrate your return to Philly?”

“Not at all, Judge.”

He’d come back to Philadelphia to spend the summer and reconnect with his family. He’d checked into a hotel downtown for the week. After the wedding he would move into Belinda’s house for the summer. His sister hadn’t decided whether she wanted to sell or rent her house. It was to be the first time in a decade that he’d spend more than a few days with his parents, siblings and nieces.

Waiting until the man walked away, Stacey said to Myles, “I told you never to call me that!”

“Aren’t you a judge, Stacey?”

“Yes, but only in the courtroom.”

“I’ve never known you to be self-deprecating. When we met for the first time all you talked about was becoming a judge.”

“I was all of twenty-six and I wanted to impress my very bright protégé. You had to know that I liked you.”

“And I told you I was in love with someone else,” Myles countered.

A beat passed. “Are you still in love with her, Myles?”

His eyebrows flickered before settling back into place. “Yes,” he admitted truthfully. “A part of me will always love her.”

Stacey curbed the urge to reach across the table to grasp Myles’s hand. “I’m glad I married when I did, because I’d still be waiting for you to notice me.”

He angled his head and stared directly at his dining partner. “I noticed you, Stacey, only because you were trying too hard. The flirtatious looks, the indiscriminate touching and the occasional kiss on the lips instead of the cheek were obvious.”

Stacey’s lashes fluttered as she tried to bring her emotions under control. She’d always thought she’d been subtle in her attempts to seduce Myles Eaton, but evidently she had been anything but. “You knew?”

He nodded. “I knew, and I promise I won’t tell your husband.”

“You must have thought me a real idiot.”

Reaching across the table, Myles covered her hand with his. “No, Stacey. We weren’t that different. We both wanted someone we couldn’t have.”

He’d wanted Zabrina at eighteen, and at thirty-eight he still wanted her.

Chapter 4

It was a picture-perfect day in late June when two ushers opened the French doors and Dr. Dwight Eaton escorted his daughter over a pink runner monogrammed in green with the couple’s initials. Light and dark pink rose petals littering the runner had been placed there by the bride’s nieces wearing pink-and-green dresses and headbands with green button mums and pink nerines, the colors representing Belinda’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.

The one hundred and twenty guests, welcomed with champagne and caviar into a Bucks County château built on a rise that overlooked the Delaware River, stood as the intro to the Wedding March filled the room where the ceremony was to take place. The restored castle and all of the estate’s thirty-two rooms were filled with out-of-town guests and those who didn’t want to make the hour-long drive back to Philadelphia after a night of frivolity.

Zabrina felt her heart lurch when she saw Belinda. Her childhood friend and sorority sister was ravishing in an ivory Chantilly lace empire gown with a floral appliqué-and-satin bodice. Embroidered petals flowed around the sweeping hem and train of the ethereal garment. She’d forgone a veil in lieu of tiny white rosebuds pinned into the elegant chignon on the nape of her long, graceful neck.

At that moment Zabrina was reliving her past—she should have walked down the aisle on her father’s arm as Myles waited to make her his wife. Blinking back tears, she stared at his distinctive profile as he stood on Griffin Rice’s right.

She noticed changes she hadn’t been able to discern the week before. His face was thinner, there were flecks of gray in his close-cropped hair and there was a stubborn set to his lean jaw that made him appear as if he’d been carved from a piece of smooth, dark mahogany. Her gaze dropped to his left hand. She smiled. He wasn’t wearing a ring.

Zabrina had searched her memory for days until she matched the face of the woman clinging to Myles’s arm with a name. The woman was Judge Stacey Greer-Monroe.

She smiled when the rich, deep voice of the black-robed judge punctuated the silence. Griffin Rice, devastatingly handsome in formal attire, stared directly into the eyes of his bride as he repeated his vows. There was a twitter of laughter when the judge pronounced them husband and wife and Griffin pumped his fist in the air. It was over. Belinda was now Mrs. Belinda Rice.