The Ex-Girlfriends' Club. Rhonda Nelson

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СКАЧАТЬ herself. She swallowed.

      True, he’d broken her heart in high school. But three years ago, when he’d walked away for the second time, he’d obliterated it.

      She had no one to blame but herself, of course. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But knowing that certainly didn’t lessen the hurt. It only served to make her feel more stupid. In retrospect, giving him the second chance—the “by,” as Kate had called it—hadn’t been the wisest move she’d made, but per tradition, she hadn’t been able to resist and…she’d still believed in him.

      In them, specifically.

      And she’d been wrong.

      The Web page had been her bitter brainchild, her way of injecting a little retribution toward Bennett, even if it had been conducted through the somewhat passive-aggressive venue of cyberspace. It had made her feel better—all of them, as a matter of fact. Just because she’d been the most recent casualty didn’t mean that the others’ heartbreak had been any less.

      “Eden?”

      She started. “Er…do you really think it’s that serious?” she asked Kate. “Serious enough to contact him?”

      “Don’t you?”

      “I don’t know,” Eden said, knowing as the words left her mouth that they were a lie. Kate was right. Something about Artemis525’s post stirred her instincts, and those instincts told her that the woman—whoever she was—didn’t appear to be wired correctly.

      But did they need to call him? Warn him? Honestly, so long as he wasn’t in town she didn’t see any reason to alert him to the threat. Between the psycho’s local ISP address—meaning she was using a local Internet service provider—and Bennett’s reputation, she felt as if this chick was a hometown girl. She shared her opinion with Kate.

      “What do you think?” she asked, hoping against hope that her friend wouldn’t call her on being a coward, an agonizing label which set her teeth on edge.

      Aside from Bennett, she’d never been afraid of anything in her life.

      Kate paused, then let go a breath. “I guess you’re right. But I’m going to let the other nurses know to call me if I’m not on shift the next time he visits Grady.” A significant chuckle drifted over the line. “I’ll let him know about her.”

      Eden chewed the smile lurking at the corner of her lip. “So you’re going to tell him about the club?”

      “I’ll have to, won’t I?” Kate replied, sounding particularly pleased with the idea. Though Kate hadn’t been a Bennett casualty per se, she’d been there to nurse Eden through her heartbreak. At an even five feet, with short dark hair and pale blue eyes, Kate was small but fierce. Like Tinkerbell, Eden had often thought.

      Eden grinned, somewhat heartened by the idea that Bennett—whom she was relatively certain didn’t know the site existed because she hadn’t felt the wrath of his anger pinging her from Savannah—was going to find out what she and the other girls had done. A perverse thrill whipped through her imagining his handsome outraged face.

      “Think he’ll ever move back here?” Kate asked conversationally, a question that had been widely speculated, debated, otherwise mulled over and betted on since his swift to-hell-with-all-of-you departure.

      Ha, Eden thought as her lips slid into a rueful smile. “Maybe when Hell freezes over.”

      And considering how quickly she and her brain and various items of clothing tended to part company anytime he came around, that was soon enough for her.

      2

      WELCOME TO HELL.

      Population 7,958 and growing. The only thing hotter than our hospitality is our barbecue sauce!

      A broken laugh erupted from Bennett Wilder’s throat as he read the sign heralding his hometown’s city limits. Now that was apt, he thought darkly. It might not be the literal eternal hereafter for the damned, but it might as well be the equivalent to him. His fingers involuntarily tightened on the steering wheel and he bit back a blistering curse.

      He still couldn’t believe he was coming back here. Couldn’t believe that he’d finally found his place in the world, made his mark and now…Bennett expelled a weary breath.

      As though the devil himself had a hand in his fate, he’d been lured back to Hell, Georgia, the last place on the globe he wished to visit, much less live. In all truth, nothing short of a hot poker applied to his ass could have brought him back, either—and even then it would have been a hell of a fight—but one call for help from his grandfather had been all it had taken to make a liar out of him.

      I’m sorry, but he has to go, Bennett, Eva Kilgore, the director at the Golden Gate Retirement Home, had told him two weeks ago. He’s a pip, I’ll give you that. But he’s simply too…disruptive. Relatives who encourage their loved ones to live here expect what our brochures advertise. Peace, harmony and well-being. Since your grandfather moved in, we’ve had none of those. He’s organizing protests against the menu. He’s fleecing everyone out of their pocket money at the card tables when we’ve repeatedly told him that gambling for cash—or change— she’d emphasized sternly —is forbidden. And that’s only the minor infractions. She’d blown out a disgusted breath and shaken her head. Frankly it’s the womanizing that’s turned this home into a circus. We can’t have the women getting into catfights over your philandering grandfather during movie hour, Bennett, she’d said. It’s not good for them. Not good for anybody.

      No amount of pleading, flattery or even bribery had convinced Eva that she shouldn’t kick Grady Wilder out of the retirement home. Since Golden Gate was the only facility in the county, it had left Bennett with no options. Even if Grady would have been willing to move into nearby Willis County, Bennett wouldn’t have had the heart to make him.

      Hell, for better or worse, was his home.

      So here Bennett was, moving back after three blissful years away from the poisonous gossip and grueling grind of being the bastard son of two of Hell’s most notorious citizens. Kathie Petri, his mother, had been a teenage drifter who’d migrated from southern Louisiana to Hell without parents, without money and without morals. His father, Kirk Wilder—whose own mother had died during child-birth—had been a local boy, but a bad seed. So the two of them hooking up had been as disastrous as it had been inevitable.

      Bennett had learned the hard way that no matter how much effort he put into being an upstanding member of the community, he’d never successfully shirk the weight of his parents’ mistakes. He’d always be “that Wilder boy.”

      Could he help it that he’d been born to a couple of low-life misfits who hadn’t been fit to own a pet, much less raise a child? Was it his fault that his mother had been a shameless whore the other women had shunned? His father a mean, shiftless, jealous drunk? A perpetual embarrassment to the community?

      No.

      But that didn’t matter because here in Hell his parents’ drinking-whoring-fighting legacy would always be a shadow he couldn’t shake. Thanks to an unpleasant and ultimately life-altering chat with Giselle Rutherford—the mayor’s wife and the mother of the only girl he’d ever cared about—Bennett had realized that at eighteen, but hadn’t had sense enough to accept it until he was twenty-five. That’s СКАЧАТЬ