Chapter 12

It was a four-hour flight from San Antonio to Los Angeles and with a two-hour time difference Pete’s flight was due at LAX at 4:05. While waiting for his baggage he called Lydia at the cell phone lot. After picking up his baggage he was waiting at the curb when Lydia pulled up in her dark blue Porsche Cayan. After Pete put his luggage in the trunk and then got into the car Lydia met him with a broad grin and a wet, open-mouthed welcoming kiss.

With his epiphany earlier in the day the desperate drive that enabled him to shake off some of his trauma, including his parting interlude with Dotty, and the introspective four-hour flight during which he had come to grips with his wife’s infidelity with Clint Murdock. Before the ‘Committee to Overthrow the Chairman’ filled him in on the lengths Grover McClintock had gone to bring convince him to join Texas Affiliates. With the proposed merger of Texas Affiliates and Pacific Technologies, Grover had offered him the top vice presidency that included a fabulous salary, exceptional perks, along with a huge signing bonus. He was planning on flying home to tell Lydia of the fabulous offer he had been given and convince her to move with him to Rio Branca. Now, he was flying home to save his marriage as well as to alert The CEO of Pacific Technologies to the dirt and deception that went into what appeared to be an honorable transaction.

It was only that morning when he learned of Lydia’s deception and how it was engineered that caused him to exit the scene in a rage. Taking a two round-trip drive that allowed him to organize his feelings he returned to Dotty’s house where he spent enough time with her to put his feelings into more acceptable alignment. When he returned to Dotty’s he was thankful that he had time with her to process his feelings for her and his wife. Her advice to act as if nothing had happened was vital in how he was conducting himself now.

In light of the discussions, they had been having about their rocky marriage caused by his constant absence, Lydia seemed as if she was putting a positive face on his return. She did not know his carrying on with Dotty and Silk. Letting that cat out of the bag wouldn’t have been part of Grover’s plan. With the bomb that had been dropped in his lap earlier in the day by the “Committee,” he had to feel his way with her before exposing his knowledge of her infidelity. As importantly he had to meet with Branson Hadley the next morning to inform him of Grover’s double-dealing. Hadley had to be told of Grover’s deception before the “due diligence” phase was completed. Before that, though he had to confront Lydia about her involvement with Clint Murdock and then confess his infidelity. Once those issues had been brought into the open they could discuss whether their marriage was salvageable or not.

“Shall we go right home, Pete,” Lydia said when Pete buckled his seatbelt.

“Let’s have an early dinner,” Pete said. “And since we have been through so much over the past year Let’s go to a nice place. Have you ever heard of Elegance? It’s at the McClintock Suites in Santa Monica. Grover raved about it.”

The shock of hearing the name of Elegance made chills run down Lydia’s back as her unsteady foot kept pumping the accelerator making the Cayman as she drove. Clint had taken her there before she spent the first night in his room. Shit, I wanted to ease into this. Perhaps we can see our way clear to patch up our marriage (I want to. At least we should) She sensed that something might be up, but she didn’t want to act guilty and said, “I’d love to go there Pete (he had rarely taken her to such a nice restaurant), but we’re not dressed for it.” She remembered saying the same thing to Clint when he first asked her to go there.

Pete’s reply was almost identical to Clint’s when he said, “Your bank uniform will look as formal as many women you will see there.”

“But...”

“And casual dress is accepted anywhere these days.” He could tell that he had hit a sensitive spot. The ‘Committee,’ had given him a heads up of where Clint Murdock had first seduced Lydia. So Elegance it is.”

From the time Pete mentioned Elegance he could see that while Lydia was trying to appear sunny there was an uncharacteristic stiffness about her that wasn’t there when she greeted him when he had gotten into the car. When they approached the entry desk the lady said to Lydia, “Welcome back. Nice to see you again.”

Lydia merely gave a stiff smile and nodded. It was a defining “aha moment” for Pete who merely said, “We have no reservations but would like a table for two.” There was no problem—most people came in after seven. They were seated by the window.

After they had been seated and ordered drinks Pete said, “I owe you an apology for not taking you here before. You may be surprised, Lydia, but this Rio Branca experience has caused me to realize how much I have neglected our relationship. I’m such a dipshit, this is a nice restaurant. We could have had so many romantic evenings here.”

It was a two-edged sword, her regretting not having come here first with Pete and wondering what he was up to by bringing her here. Or is it just a coincidence? He can’t know that I have been here with Clint. Despite what she had been going through with Clint while he was away, she had genuinely been glad to see Pete when she had picked him up. Maybe we can put back together what we had before all this Texas Affiliates stuff started. She had no idea that Pete had been making contingency plans to move to Texas. But with her infatuation with Clint Murdock, she had been toying with contingency plans of her own, if Pete might be considering plans that might have included moving to Texas.

After they were halfway through dinner Pete said, “I have a confession to make to you Lydia.” Having reconsidered the strategy of his confession he figured that a man being out of town would be more likely to stray than a woman left at home and confessed his affair with Dotty. While he had been confessing he closely observed Lydia’s reactions. He could see that his news hurt her. At the same time, he could see she was struggling. If she indeed had been getting it on with Murdock as the “Committee” had reported, he knew she would be torn. And, if Clint were the Don Juan the Committee made him out to be he would understand that Lydia was the kind of woman who would have been reluctant to go along. But his treatment of her before he left before and while he was in Rio Branca would have made such a decision easier if it had indeed happened. He felt a bit sleazy exerting the upper hand. But was still angry about finding out he and Lydia had been set up.

Realizing that Pete’s infidelity preceded hers Lydia couldn’t stifle her anger at his infidelity. Feeling this Elegance thing with Pete tonight was a coincidence she felt sure that he did not know about what she had done with Clint. Since he had indulged the fact that he had strayed she knew that she eventually had to divulge her affair but there was hurt and anger to be worked through. “And you tell me how NICE she is, Pete. What an INSULT.” As she sniffled and dabbed at her eyes she wasn’t acting. But she was thinking, What a mess this is turning out to be. “You leave me here and barely communicating what was going on down there hurt me badly Pete. I know the excuse that extracurricular sex is just something a woman can expect from her husband. Yet, I was just as horny as you. So it’s okay for you to be playing around and I’m just supposed to be little miss prim and cool my heels at home?”

Unable to restrain his bitterness, Pete said, “Well, we both know what you’ve been up to with Clint Murdock. So, maybe you should come down from your high horse on that one, kiddo.”

Reeling in her chair as if he had hit her in the head with a sledgehammer she said, “I ... I ... how long have you known?”

“Dotty told me about it this morning. We’ve both been set up, Lydia, me with Dotty and you by Murdock. The difference is that Dotty is enough of a human being to let us know so we might have a chance to see if we can repair the damage.”

“I ... I don’t understand.”

Having captured her attention he told her the entire story, leaving out his sexual involvement with Silk. “Dotty, who is Grover’s daughter, and her erstwhile lover has been farmed out for sexual involvements for years. Her mother is Marnie Nixon, Grover’s original lover who became, the madam of River Ranch Brothel and a major stockholder in Texas Affiliates. Clint Murdock is his bastard son whose sole purpose is cuckolding women for purposes of manipulation and extortion. “The Committee,” a name I have given to the triumvirate of Dotty McCord, Clay Burnet, and Marnie Nixon, have, for reasons of their own, blown the whistle on Grover when they found out that Murdock was seducing you to instill your interest in moving to Texas with me ... to be near him, and possible extortion possibilities as well. The Committee moved into action because of their concern that I might upset the applecart at TA and displace Thornton Brockmeyer, Marnie, and Grover’s legitimate son. That story of his being adopted out to another family is even more convoluted. He adopted him out as a child to some other family for reasons I could not understand.

“Clay Burnett was Grover’s original partner when Grover took over the River Ranch Hotel and Brothel when Grover won it in a poker game. Since that time Clay has been Grover’s partner, the second largest stockholder of Texas Affiliates to Grover. He is Grover’s righthand man, his henchman, his lackey carrying out whatever Grover commands: including taking sexual care of Grover’s stable: Marnie, Dotty, and Silk, Grover’s first wife, and daughters.”

Initially pissed about Pete’s infidelity Lydia found herself in a place of which she had never conceived. Pete’s roaming was tempered by her culpability in Her cavorting with Clint Murdock which she rationalized she would have done regardless, tempered Pete’s roaming, causing a rise in contrition that made her hypocrisy in judging her unfaithful husband to seem silly. After her last tumble with Clint, when her infatuation with him was at its pinnacle she pondered the possibility of leaving Pete. But a few days before Pete’s return the familiar feeling she had whenever he returned from a business trip began expanding until, when she greeted him at the airport, she felt like going down on him in the car in front of all those returning passengers.

While Pete’s explanation of the people in Texas, got stranger and stranger, she said, “Wait a minute. You mean that Grover was having sex with his ex-wife, his daughter, and his GRANDDAUGHTER?”

“Yep,” Pete said.

“And this Clay Bartlett...”

“Burnet.”

“His business partner was having sex with the daughter and granddaughter as well?”

“Yep.”

“And you were planning to go to work for that man?”

“Right, the same man who sent his bastard son to cuckold me to make you want to move to Texas, so my decision to move to Rio Branca would be easier for me to make.”

Pink with the embarrassment of Pete’s statement about “cheating” her question was as much in wonder as disgust, “What kind of man IS he?”

“The kind that gets what he wants because he is so ruthless in going after it with a morality that has no limits. He is a maniacal tyrant who can bend people in ways they could never conceive.”

“Well, he certainly seems to have fooled YOU.”

“Yes. Until this morning when I found out what he was doing to an honest woman who lives in Santa Monica. What I did with Dotty was inexcusable, Lydia. And to tell the truth I probably wouldn’t have told you about her had I not found out about what Murdock has been doing to you. You did say when we got married that if I ever cheated you didn’t want to know. Regardless I was a pure cheat.”

Some of Lydia’s girlfriends had said that it was more likely that men would cheat than women. But she had been convinced that Pete would never cheat on her. Her cheating on him was inconceivable. But she remembered saying that to Pete. And here I am in the same situation. “How could you let a creep like that talk you into agreeing to go to work from him?”

“I didn’t see him as a creep, Lydia. I saw him as a man’s man, an incredibly motivated businessman who could advance my career in ways I couldn’t achieve at Pacific Technologies. I saw a man to help make me a mover and shaker in a big business world. In my mind, I was doing it for you as well. I hoped that my success at TA could make us matter more to each other and the world in general. Before I found out what he was really like he appealed to my ego in a way that Branson Hadley never has. He even told me that Branson Hadley didn’t appreciate what he had in me. He even told me that his decision to buy Pacific Technologies was to get me ‘one way or the other.’”

“I never saw myself as the wife of a rich man Peter. I saw myself as your wife who would do anything to help you become happy in what you were doing. This merger you’re talking about, can’t be a done deal yet, can it? Doesn’t a deal like this take a long time? And Branson Hadley loves you. He told me once that he expected to go a long way in the company.”

“You’re right about that. It’s in due diligence now which could take a few weeks. That’s why I have to get to Branson and let him know the kind of shenanigans that have been going on. Yeah, he’s an honorable man which is more than I can say for Grover. But he’s never said anything to me that indicated that I might be going places at Pacific Technologies.”

Her face became a mask of remorse. “I can’t believe what I have done, Pete.”

“You didn’t know what Murdock was ... a rogue who is extremely good at it. How were you to know that he was born in a whorehouse and taught the ways of sex by prostitutes? He learned to appeal to every woman’s fantasy. He has learned to treat women the way a concert violinist treats his Stradivarius. You were ripe for his manipulation. And my actions made it possible for him to succeed.”

The way Pete was agonizing over the situation eased Lydia’s anger. She was beginning to understand the magnitude of Grover McClintock’s plot and how effectively he had been carrying it on two fronts. How could I have been so stupid?

Recognizing how hard Lydia was struggling with the scale of the ruse Pete said, “Would you agree that this time last year our marriage was solid?”

“Solid? YES. And EXCITING? Even though we had lost some of the glitters of what we had known two years ago, Pete. You allowed your obsession with your work to erase a lot of the fun we were having. Even the way you made love to me had become so routine that I wasn’t being fulfilled.”

“Funny,” he said, “I thought you were getting bored with me.”

“Bored with you? I was frustrated, not bored Pete. You weren’t paying attention to me. I married a partner, but I haven’t been a partner for years.”

“But you were working on your career at the bank, Lydia. So, let’s say we were growing apart because we had both lost our focus on what was making us happy.”

Jesus, she thought, I can’t believe we’re negotiating. But we’ve both cheated on each other. This is SICKENING. We had an ideal marriage! But the fact was, though pissed off at him she was far from bored with her returned husband. From the time he opened the car door, it was as if she had been sprayed with aphrodisiac and wanted to attack him. True, she had been majorly set back by his confession of infidelity and the guilty concern of her own. But in the confession and accusation, it was as if it had brought forth a tickling feather of excitement that seemed to be grooming her clitoris into a euphoric need for attention.

Seeing the desire that lit Lydia’s eyes Pete became awash in a flash of his female partners of the past year: Lydia, Dotty, Silk, and now the prospect of tunneling in the cavern of his wife’s vagina again he said, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

Dumbstruck, Lydia wonders what the urgency is as she watches him get up, leave the restaurant, and walk into the opening elevator doors.

The doors open to the lobby and Pete walks to the registration desk. “Can I rent a room for just a few hours? My wife and I have been having dinner in the restaurant and we’ve gotten a bit romantic.”

The attractive middle-aged woman whose cheeks turned red grinned and said, “I don’t believe I’ve ever been asked the question that before. “But you’ll have to pay in advance and be out by (she looked at her watch) nine-thirty. Why don’t just spend the night?”

“I just got back from being away for quite a while. It would have been more fun, maybe, if I had come in earlier and it was a matinee. But this is the best I could think of for spur-of-the-moment romance. And it seems like both of us are hot to trot If you’ll excuse me for saying so.”