Jack with a Twist by Brenda Janowitz Read Free Book Online Page B

City. “And I’ll count on you to be the same.”
    “Of course,” I say as an assistant comes over to us and tells Monique in a whisper that Robin Kaplan is ready to see her. Monique bows her head as she follows the assistant back to Ms. Kaplan’s office.
    First the dissolution of partnership and now a divorce. The tabloids will have a field day with this. Monique and her husband are a New York City institution, and have been since they first got together back in the seventies. I consider, for a moment, telling Vanessa about seeing Monique. Maybe it would make her feel better. After all, if a couple like Monique and Jean Luc can’t make it, who can? But then I consider that perhaps this conversation would fall under the attorney-client privilege that Monique enjoys with me, since I am representing her in her dissolution of partnership from said perfect husband. Who, after all these years, can’t seem to make it work. What if Jack and I can’t make it work?
    I begin stuffing mini cupcakes into my mouth.
    Vanessa and Stephanie walk out of Stephanie’s office just as I’m licking some frosting from my fingers.
    “Thank you for everything,” Vanessa says, giving Stephanie a hug. I wipe my hands on a napkin just in time for Vanessa to introduce me to Stephanie.
    “Did that guy hit on you?” Stephanie whispers as she shakes my hand, nodding her head in the direction of the tall, dark and handsome stranger who spoke to me earlier. “My assistant said that he came over and hit on you.”
    My goodness, I am so on fire that even Vanessa’s divorce attorney’s assistant noticed! My hotness simply cannot be concealed. Even a trained eye like that of a divorce attorney can tell that I am so fab that I get hit on left and right even with my engagement ring on!
    “Well, I might be taken,” I say as I flip my hair off my shoulders, “but I’ve still got it.”
    “That guy hits on everyone,” she whispers, “that’s why he’s getting a divorce.”
    Or not.
    I immediately reach for another mini cupcake.

5
     
    I half expect to hear the theme song to Dynasty ring out every time I pull up to Jack’s parents’ house. Just twenty minutes outside of Philly, it is an enormous home that sits on seven acres of immaculately maintained landscaping, complete with its own double tennis court, Olympic-sized swimming pool and accompanying pool house that is larger than the house I grew up in.
    Seeing it tonight, now through my parents’ eyes, it’s like I’m here for the first time again. I remember when Jack took me home to meet his parents, how that ever-growing feeling of surprise grew like a pit in my tummy as we drove down the tree-lined block, houses getting bigger and grander by the second.
    I knew the house would be elegant—after all, Jack’s father is a federal judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and his mother is a socialite, so, of course their home would look like something out of an Aaron Spelling nighttime soap. It’s just that I hadn’t expected it to be quite so, well, large. Jack is totally down to earth, and on the few occasions when I’d met his parents, they seemed very unassuming as well. Although maybe I should have known that the house would look something like this from the places we’d have dinner whenever Jack’s parents met us in the city. It’s a veritable Zagat’s Top Ten whenever Jack and I dine with the Solomons: Le Bernadin, Per Se, Danube…the more extensive the wine list, the better. Usually, when my parents come into the city to take Jack and me for dinner they drive us out to Don Peppe’s in Queens, an amazing Italian joint just a stone’s throw away from JFK airport where the owner’s grandmother is the head chef and they only serve homemade red wine.
    We stop at the tiny guardhouse at the foot of the driveway to announce ourselves, and as the tremendous wrought-iron gates open for us and we drive up the winding driveway, my father announces,