The Quickie

by James Patterson, Michael Ledwidge

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

James Patterson's steamiest summer thriller yet starts with a one-night stand gone terribly wrong. . . .

When she sees her husband with another woman, Lauren Stillwell's heart nearly stops beating. Their marriage is perfect, she has a great job, she loves her life. But his betrayal turns her into someone she never imagined she could be - a woman lusting for revenge.

It was supposed to be a quickie, a way to even the score. But Lauren's night of passion takes a shocking turn when she witnesses an unexpected, unbelievable, deadly crime. Her horrifying secret threatens to tear her life apart, pitting her need to uncover the truth against her fear that the truth may be too horrible to bear. And whichever choice she makes could cost her dearly - her job, her marriage, even her life.

From the man USA Today has called the "master of the genre" comes his steamiest, scariest novel since the #1 bestseller Honeymoon. THE QUICKIE is a twisting story of desires, secrets, and consequences that will have your heart pounding until the very last moment.

Release date: July 2, 2007

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 368

Sample

One

I KNEW THIS WAS a really terrific idea, if I didn’t say so myself, surprising Paul for lunch at his office down on Pearl Street.

I’d made a special trip into Manhattan and had put on my favorite “little black dress.” I looked moderately ravishing. Nothing that would be out of place at the Mark Joseph Steakhouse, and one of Paul’s favorite outfits, too, the one he usually chose if I asked him, “What should I wear to this thing, Paul?”

Anyway, I was excited, and I’d already spoken to his assistant, Jean, to make sure that he was there — though I hadn’t alerted her about the surprise. Jean was Paul’s assistant after all, not mine.

And then, there was Paul.

As I rounded the corner in my Mini Cooper, I saw him leaving his office building, walking with a twenty-something blonde woman.

Paul was leaning in very close to her, chatting, laughing in a way that instantly made me feel very ill.

She was one of those bright, shiny beauties you’re more likely to see in Chicago or Iowa City. Tall, hair like platinum silk. Cream-colored skin that looked just about perfect from this distance. Not a wrinkle or blemish.

She wasn’t completely perfect, though. She tripped a Manolo on a street plate as she and Paul were getting into a taxi, and as I watched Paul gallantly catch hold of the pink cashmere on her anorexic elbow, I felt like someone had hammered a cold chisel right into the center of my chest.

I followed them. Well, I guess followed is too polite. I stalked them.

All the way up to Midtown, I stayed on that taxi’s bumper like we were connected by a tow hook. When the cab suddenly pulled up in front of the entrance to the St. Regis Hotel, on East 55th Street, and Paul and the woman stepped out smiling, I felt an impulse rush from the lizard part of my brain to my right foot, which was hovering over the accelerator. Then Paul took her arm. A picture of both of them sandwiched between the storied hotel’s front steps and the hood of my baby-blue Mini flashed through my mind.

Then it was gone, and so were they, and I was left sitting there crying to the sound of the honking taxis lined up behind me.

Chapter 1

THERE WAS HEAVY TRAFFIC on the Major Deegan south and more on the approach to the Triborough that night, that crazy, crazy night.

I couldn’t decide which was making my eye twitch more as we crawled across the span — the horns from the cars logjammed in both directions around us, or the ones honking from our driver’s Spanish music station.

I was heading to Virginia for a job-sponsored seminar.

Paul was going to apply some face time to one of his firm’s biggest clients in Boston.

The only trip we modern, professional, go-getting Stillwells were going to share this week was the ride to LaGuardia Airport.

At least I had one of the great views of Manhattan outside my window. The Big Apple seemed even more majestic than usual with its glass-and-steel towers glowing against the approaching black thunderheads of a storm.

Gazing out, I remembered the cute apartment Paul and I once had on the Upper West Side. Saturdays at the Guggenheim or MOMA; the cheap hole-in-the-wall French bistro in NoHo; cold chardonnay in the “backyard,” our fourth-floor studio’s fire escape. All the romantic things we did before we got married, when our lives had been unpredictable and fun.

“Paul,” I said urgently, almost mournfully. “Paul?”

If Paul had been a “guy guy,” I might have been tempted to chalk up what was happening between us to the inevitable. You grow a little bit older, maybe more cynical, and the honeymoon finally ends. But Paul and me? We’d been different.

We’d been one of those sickening, best-friend married couples. The let’s-die-at-the-exact-same-moment Romeo-and-Juliet soul mates. Paul and I had been so much in love — and that’s not just selective memory talking. That was us.

We’d met in freshman year at Fordham Law. We were in the same study and social group but hadn’t really talked. I’d noticed Paul because he was very handsome. He was a few years older than most of us, a little more studious, more serious. I actually couldn’t believe it when he agreed to head down to Cancún for spring break with the gang.

On the night before our flight home, I got into a fight with my boyfriend at the time and accidentally fell through one of the hotel’s glass doors, cutting my arm. While my supposed boyfriend announced he “just couldn’t deal with it,” Paul arrived out of nowhere and took over.

He took me to the hospital and stayed at my bedside. This, while everyone else promptly hopped on the flight home to avoid missing any classes.

As Paul walked through the doorway of my Mexican hospital room with our breakfast of milkshakes and magazines, I was reminded of how cute he was, how deep blue his eyes were, and that he had fantastic dimples and a killer smile.

Dimples and milkshakes, and my heart.

What had happened since then? I wasn’t entirely sure. I guess we’d fallen into the rut of a lot of modern marriages. Neck-deep into our two demanding, separate careers, we’d become so adept at meeting our individual needs and wants that we’d forgotten the point: that we were supposed to be putting each other first.

I still hadn’t confronted Paul about the blonde woman I’d seen him with in Manhattan. Maybe that was because I wasn’t ready to have it out with Paul once and for all. And, of course, I didn’t know for sure if he was having an affair. Maybe I was afraid about the end of us. Paul had loved me; I know he had. And I had loved Paul with everything I had in me.

Maybe I still did. Maybe.

“Paul,” I called again.

Across the seat of the taxi, he turned at the sound of my voice. I felt like he was noticing me for the first time in weeks. An apologetic, almost sad expression formed on his face. His mouth started to open.

Then his blasted cell phone trilled. I remembered setting his ring tone to “Tainted Love” as a prank. Ironically, a silly song we’d once danced to drunk and happy had turned out to aptly describe our marriage.

Glaring at the phone, I seriously considered snatching it from his hand and flinging it out the window through the bridge cables into the East River.

A familiar glaze came across Paul’s eyes after he glanced down at the number.

“I have to take this,” he said, thumbing open the phone.

I don’t, Paul, I thought as Manhattan slid away from us through the coiled steel.

This was it, I thought. The final straw. He’d wrecked everything between us, hadn’t he?

And sitting there in that cab, I figured out the exact point when you call it quits.

When you can’t even share a sunset together.

Chapter 2

OMINOUS THUNDER CRACKED in the distance as we pulled off the Grand Central Parkway into the airport. The late-summer sky was graying rapidly, bad weather was approaching with speed.

Paul was jabbering something about book values as we pulled up to my stop at the Continental terminal. I didn’t expect him to do something as effort-filled as kiss me good-bye. When Paul had his low “business voice” going on the phone, a bomb couldn’t make him stop.

I reached quickly for the door when the driver switched the radio from the Spanish station to the financial news. If I didn’t escape, I feared the insectile buzz of investo-speak in stereo was going to make me scream.

Until my throat bled.

Until I lost consciousness.

Paul waved from the back window without looking at me as the cab pulled away.

I was tempted to wave back with one finger as I rolled my suitcase through the sliding doors. But I didn’t wave to Paul.

A few minutes later, I sat in the bar, waiting for my flight to be called, thinking very heavy thoughts. I took out the ticket as I sipped my cosmopolitan.

From the overhead speakers, a Muzak version of the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” was playing. How do you like that? The folks at Muzak had discovered my childhood.

It was good that I was feeling so manic and upbeat, because normally that realization might make me feel old and depressed.

I tapped the ticket against my lip, then very dramatically tore it in half before I finished my drink in one shot.

Next, I used the bar napkin to dry the tears in my eyes.

I was going to move on to Plan B.

It was going to be trouble, for sure. Big troubles, no bubbles.

I didn’t care. Paul had ignored me too many times.

I made the phone call that I’d been putting off.

Then I rolled my suitcase back outside, climbed into the rear of the next available taxi, and gave the driver my home address.

The first drops of rain hit the windows as we pulled out, and I suddenly envisioned something huge slipping under dark water and beginning to slide, something monumental, slowly, irretrievably sinking. Down, down, down.

Or maybe not — just maybe, I was heading up for the first time in a long while.

Chapter 4

AT THIS POINT, my heart was starting to race. Dinner for two — and neither of them was Paul.

After I finished my glass of wine, I went downstairs and did the only sensible thing under the circumstances. I found the bottle and took it back upstairs with me.

After I had filled my third glass, I carried it and my wedding picture onto my bed.

I sat and drank, and stared at Paul.

At first, I’d been pretty resigned to Paul’s change in behavior after his latest and most pressure-filled promotion at work. I definitely thought it was unhealthy for him to be so stressed out all the time, but I also knew that investment finance was what he did. It was what he was good at, he’d told me many times. How he defined himself.

So I let it slide. His distance from me. The way he’d suddenly begun to ignore me at meals, and in the bedroom. He needed every ounce of concentration and energy for the office. And it was temporary, I told myself. Once he got up to speed, he would ease back. Or, at the very least, he would fail. I’d lick his wounds, and we’d be back to normal. I’d get to see those dimples again, that smile. We’d be back to being best friends.

I opened the night table drawer and took out my charm bracelet.

On my first birthday after we were married, Paul had bought it for me from, of all places, the preteen store Limited Too. So far I had six charms, the first, and my favorite, being a rhinestone heart, “for my love,” he’d said.

I don’t know why, but every year, each chintzy, puppy-love charm meant a million times more to me than the meal in the fancy restaurant he always took me to.

This year, Paul had gotten us into Per Se, the new white-hot spot in the Time Warner Center. But even after the crème brûlée, there was no gift.

He’d forgotten to get me a charm for the bracelet. Forgotten, or decided not to.

That had been the first sign of real trouble.

The Times Square neon billboard for trouble came in the form of the twenty-something blonde outside his office on Pearl Street — the one he’d taken into the St. Regis.

The one Paul had lied to my face about.

Chapter 5

I WAS DOWNSTAIRS IN THE KITCHEN, laying the pink chops down into sizzling butter, when there was a hard rap on the window of the back door. The butterflies swirling in my stomach surged, changed formation. I looked at the clock on the microwave.

Eleven on the dot.

Here it was, here he was, I thought, dabbing the sweat from my forehead with a kitchen towel as I crossed to the door. It was actually happening.

Right here.

Right now.

I took a deep, deep breath and slipped open the dead bolt.

“Hi, Lauren.”

“Hi back at you. You look nice. Great.”

“For somebody who’s soaking wet, right?”

The rain that swung in with the door spattered a constellation of dark, wet stars on the kitchen’s pale stone tile.

And then he stepped in. Quite the entrance, I might add.

His tapered, six-two frame seemed to fill the room. In the candlelight, I could see that his dark hair was freshly cut, the color of wet white sand where it was shaved close to his skull.

Wind roared in, and the scent of him, cologne and rain and leather from the motorcycle jacket he wore, hit me head-on.

Oprah has probably devoted a couple of hours to how you get to this point, I thought as I struggled for something to say. Harmless workplace flirting that leads to infatuation that leads to a furtive friendship that leads to . . . I still wasn’t sure what to call this.

I knew some married female co-workers who took part in harmless flirting, but I’d always put up a wall when I was dealing with men professionally, especially the handsome, funny ones like Scott. It just didn’t feel right, going there.

But Scott had gotten over my wall somehow, gotten inside my defenses. Maybe it was the fact that, for all his size and good looks, there was an innocence about him. Or maybe it was how he was almost formal with me. Old-fashioned in the best sense of the word. Or how his presence in my life seemed to have increased in perfect ratio to Paul’s pulling away.

And as if that weren’t enough, there was something nicely mysterious about him, something subtle under the surface that pulled at me.

“So, you’re actually here,” Scott said, breaking the silence between us. “Wait, I almost forgot.”

For the first time, I noticed the wet, tattered brown bag he was holding. He blushed as he took a little stuffed animal out of it. It was a Beanie Baby, one I’d never seen before, a little tan puppy. I looked at the name tag, “Badges.” Then I looked at the birthdate, December 1.

I put a hand to my open mouth.

My birthday.

I’d been looking for one with my birthday only forever. Scott knew, and he had found it.

I looked at the puppy. Then I remembered how Paul had forgotten the charm for my bracelet. That’s when I felt something break like thin ice inside me, and I was crying.

“Lauren, no,” Scott said, panicked. He raised his arms to embrace me, then stopped as if he’d run into some invisible wall.

“Listen,” he said. “The last thing in the world I want to do is hurt you. This is all too much. I can see that now. I . . . I’ll just go, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow as usual. I’ll bring the Box O’ Joe, you bring the cinnamon Munchkins, and this never happened. Okay?”

Then my back door opened . . .