been hurt. She hadn’t understood what it had cost him to do that. Did he appreciate the gesture? Of course. The Testarossa was his dream car. He’d drooled over the damn thing. He’d practically wanted to lick it. But he couldn’t accept it. He had his pride.
But his mindset was a lot more complex than simple pride, whatever she thought. He couldn’t explain it, not even to his own satisfaction.
When his father had lost all his money, he’d relinquished some part of himself as well as his wife and family. He’d become vulnerable and somehow…weak, which was unacceptable to Ben.
He didn’t want to be weak, suck on Marina’s money like a niño at the breast. He recoiled from the idea, even as her words came back to him. You want to live a lonely life with your pride, that’s your problem.
Ben picked up the nail gun he’d been using and tried to block out the look on her face, bitter and hurt, so hurt.
Why don’t you take up kicking puppies, man? Mugging little old ladies? Tripping kids on tricycles?
He began driving nails into wooden studs so savagely that the men around him exchanged glances and moved away.
The noise of a circular saw behind him would normally have grated on his nerves. But right now it came as a relief, drowning out the sound of Marina’s voice in his head.
Did he owe her an apology for breaking up with her in a letter? Could she be right—was he a coward? She didn’t mean physically. She meant emotionally.
But that didn’t matter—he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Delgados weren’t cowards of any sort.
Shit. Shit! Ben misfired with the nail gun, narrowly avoiding his own thumb. He drew back his booted foot and kicked a bag of concrete mix nearby.
He’d thought a letter would be simpler. Cleaner. More final. Right there in black-and-white.
It had never occurred to him that it might be cowardly. That it might upset Marina even more.
I deserved better than to be told you can’t afford me… I deserved a face-to-face conversation.
He realized now that he’d given her the equivalent of a pink slip, with no discussion. She had a right to be angry about it. Ben threw down the nail gun and stripped off his work gloves.
Oh, hell. He did owe her an apology.
4
MARINA ALTERNATED between sipping a glass of cabernet and booking various beauty treatments to make herself feel better. Ben Delgado is a pig. Ben Delgado is not worthy of me. Ben Delgado dumped me again, and this time while I was sprawled naked in a double-wide!
She switched from sipping to gulping the sixty-dollar-a-bottle wine. Grapes: They did a body good. Wine was full of antioxidants, it was great for the heart and it contained fewer calories and carbs than chocolate. Wine is a veritable health food. She knocked back another gulp.
Why was Ben being so unreasonable?
Perhaps he had seen signs of cellulite on her thighs? She hit a number on speed dial and arranged for three sessions of endermologie, beginning tomorrow. It was a new process involving a machine that somehow broke up fatty deposits under the skin—rather like steamrolling one’s butt back to an acceptable flatness.
Or maybe her lips weren’t plump enough. She dialed Dr. Davinsky’s office, stat, and arranged for a collagen injection, even though she’d never had one and didn’t at all like the thought of being injected with a big needle right on the kisser. But Angelina Jolie had enslaved another woman’s husband with her pucker. Surely, Marina could take a little pain so as to enslave her own husband to be?
She peered into her mirror in the bathroom and inspected the pale down on her upper lip. Her lighted, magnified looking glass made it appear that she had a mustache to rival Errol Flynn’s. What good were bodacious lips if you had fur above them?
She hit another button on speed dial and signed up for a laser treatment to remove the offending hairs. She wondered if she should take care of the hair under her arms with laser treatment, too. And what about her legs, or maybe her whole pubic area? Hmm.
She’d heard that it really hurt. And one day she might be in a nursing home and didn’t want the staff there to check out her permanent, gray Brazilian and assume she’d been a pole dancer in her youth… On the other hand, she’d never have to get a bikini wax again.
The phone rang as Marina tried to make up her mind. “Hello?”
Her best friend, Chloe’s, nasal New York accent boomed into her ear. “Hi, doll. How ya doin’?”
“Ugh,” said Marina. “That about sums it up.”
“Okay so what are you doin’?”
“Nothing. Drinking a glass of wine. Through a hot pink crazy-straw.”
“At two o’clock in the afternoon. Uh-oh. I take it things did not go well with Ben. Tell me you’re not scheduling forty weird-ass cosmetic procedures, or obsessing over whether one of your kneecaps is rounder than the other.”
“I—”
“Oh, God. You are. Listen to me, Marina—this is a psychotic condition of yours. You do this every time you get depressed. And you don’t need anything done!”
Marina gathered the shreds of her dignity around her—she’d left most of it back at the construction site with Ben. “I am not,” she stated, “mentally ill. And we can all use a little improvement here and there.”
“Uh-huh. How many appointments have you made this afternoon?”
Time for a subject change. “Did you see that there’s a sale at Saks?”
Chloe didn’t bite. “How many?”
Damn. Marina sighed. “Five.”
“Oh, my God!” Chloe bellowed into her ear. “No. I am coming over and we are going to cancel them.”
“Chloe, leave me alone—”
“I’m bringing ice cream. Normal women eat a quart of ice cream when they’re depressed. They don’t have their entire bodies resurfaced, like some kind of molting reptile. Are you going to dye your hair blond, too? Get a third breast?”
Marina jumped up from her mink-covered stool. “I can’t eat ice cream. Are you crazy? It will go straight to my hips and Ben will never look at me again.”
“Not only am I bringing ice cream—four different flavors—but you and I are going to have a serious talk about what Ben really loves about you, and it’s not your bony hips!” Chloe hung up on her, and Marina stared at the receiver.
“Jeez. No need to get hostile.”
Thirty minutes later, her friend was knocking on her door with an entire grocery sack full of pints of Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs. Marina squinted at her. “You’re
