Flushed by Sally Felt Read Free Book Online

liar.
    “Isabelle?”
    “Don’t call me again.” She hung up.
    Her tread was heavy enough to shake the flowers in their
vase as she stomped past the living room coffee table on her way to the
bedroom. The stupid heart-shaped ring sat on her dresser, exactly as she’d left
it last night. In its box.
    Oh, sorry. Steven’s box. The box with her name on it.
    Had he bought it for one of the sluts he’d cheated with?
    Or maybe he’d thought a gift of jewelry would soothe
Isabelle’s suspicions? A little bauble to keep his meal ticket happy?
    She tore the thing from its box. It hadn’t gotten any less
ugly since last night. The candy-red stone had to be a carat and a half at
least, framed with tiny diamonds and perched atop a gold-filigreed setting. If
this was an heirloom, bad taste ran in Steven’s family.
    She slid it onto her ring finger. It choked at her knuckle.
Clearly, it wasn’t intended for her hand.
    Bastard. Two-timing, womanizing, unfaithful, untrustworthy,
oversexed bastard.
    She opened the toilet lid and threw the thing in. She
snarled at it. “You’re the one, Isabelle. I love you, Isabelle.” It winked at
her, red as a cheap whore’s nail polish.
    Perhaps the whore Steven had bought it for.
    Isabelle flushed. Water sucked the ring out of the bowl with
a satisfying whoosh. Gone. Vanished, same as any tender feelings she’d ever had
for the jerk who’d hidden it in her walls.
    Be ready for me , she thought darkly. You know how
I get.
    She tore through the house, wishing she had something else
of Steven’s to destroy. But she’d taken care of that months ago. Everything
from his brand of beer in the fridge to the mingling of their music
collections, to the awful Viking warrior poster he’d framed in their
bedroom—her bedroom. It was all gone. All except that hideous, huge heresy of a
ring. And now that was gone too. Down the toilet. How appropriate.
    She spent her frustration shredding the cardboard box she’d
found it in and stomping on the pieces. Childish, perhaps, but effective.
    Finally calm, Isabelle remembered Stacey had asked her to
call. She smoothed her hair and dialed her friend from the bedroom phone, her
favorite in the house—a replica of a style popular in the late 1920s. Stacey
picked up with, “Bob is incredible. I think I’m in love.”
    “Hello, Stacey, it’s Isabelle. I take it you are well?”
Caller ID was so uncivilized.
    “Well?” Her friend laughed. “Well, well, well…hmm, the only
words that come to mind are ones that make you flinch. Let’s just say I barely
made it out of bed in time to get to work.”
    Isabelle laughed. “I meant to warn you, barbequed wings can
be a powerful aphrodisiac.” It was a joke, though it would explain a lot about
her night.
    “We’re really busy at the Barn,” Stacey said, and Isabelle
immediately noticed the telltale sounds of Stacey’s store in the
background—customer voices, concrete-floor, soaring-ceiling roar,
paint-can-agitator clanging. “I can’t talk, but I need a huge favor.”
    “Anything. You know that.”
    “Double date with Bob and me tonight.”
    Not even close to what she’d expected. “What? Why?”
    “As long as you and Kim are there, we won’t get naked.”
    “That’s a relief, but I don’t see your problem.”
    “I think Bob’s special. He might even be ‘The One’. But to
find out, we need to stay out of bed long enough to have a real conversation.
If you guys are there, we might stand a chance. Especially since you and Kim
aren’t sleeping together yet.”
    Stacey hadn’t even bothered to frame that last lob as a
question, which irked Isabelle. She might discourage her friends from using the
f-word, but if anyone should know how much Isabelle enjoyed sex, it was her
similarly afflicted friend. Evidently, Isabelle’s months of celibacy since
she’d tossed out a certain ring-hiding swine had Stacey thinking she’d turned
prude.
    “Please, Isabelle. Please?”
    Bob was Steven’s