Thaddeus (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 2) Read online

  Thaddeus

  Hope Hitchens

  Copyright © 2018 by Hope Hitchens

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events & incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, incidents or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Author’s Note

  Thank you so much for checking out the latest (as I type!) novel in my new romance series Heartbreakers & Troublemakers. As with all my books, this story was a labor of love for me. I’ve poured my heart and soul into polishing it to perfection. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it!

  - Hope xx

  Contents

  1. Veronica

  2. Veronica

  3. Thaddeus

  4. Veronica

  5. Thaddeus

  6. Veronica

  7. Thaddeus

  8. Veronica

  9. Thaddeus

  10. Veronica

  11. Thaddeus

  12. Veronica

  13. Thaddeus

  14. Veronica

  15. Thaddeus

  16. Veronica

  17. Veronica

  18. Thaddeus

  19. Veronica

  20. Thaddeus

  21. Veronica

  22. Thaddeus

  23. Veronica

  24. Thaddeus

  Epilogue

  Newsletter

  Introducing… Alex

  About the Author

  1

  Veronica

  “Tell me, Benjamin, in days, how long will it take before I am single again,” I said.

  My phone was sitting on the edge of the bathroom sink, and the voice of my lawyer had been imploring me for the last few minutes to go back home. He was on speaker, so it sounded like he was in the room with me. I couldn’t see him, but I could imagine him at his desk, with his tie loosened and eyes wild from dealing with a belligerent client who wouldn’t listen to him. Benjamin Morenstein, family law. The man who was going to get me a divorce.

  “Veronica, I understand that you might not want to be under the same roof as your husband right now, but as your lawyer, I really cannot approve of what you’re doing,” he said down the line. I had just told him that it was now nearly two days that I had been hiding out in a hotel in San Francisco, ignoring phone calls from Michael. Nearly two days. Not a whole two days. I wasn’t going to let it get to the full two days because that would have been grounds to file a missing person’s report with the cops and I wasn’t missing. Maybe I was, a little bit, but I didn’t want to be found. It wasn’t like he’d be that pressed to find me, anyway. If anything, he’d file it just to make sure someone found me, so he could yell at me in person for embarrassing him.

  “You two were married for six years, that means you are entitled to spousal support for at least three,” Benjamin continued. “You guys lived in Atherton. He has to legally give you enough money to support you at the level of life that you had become accustomed. There’s inventory to take, joint assets to appraise, Veronica, you have to go back.”

  “If he gets the papers today, you think we could be done in two weeks?” I asked. I heard him sigh. I frowned at my reflection in the mirror. I grabbed a clump of my hair and positioned the scissors at my chin, slicing through the strands. I wondered whether my lawyer could hear it too. The hair fell into the sink.

  “If not go back, you have to at least let him know where the hell you are.”

  “I’ll send him a text when we’re done,” I said. That would do it. ‘Hey, Mikey, I’m at my parent’s house, they say hi,’ with a couple of smiley faces, and I’d be good.

  “Veronica. You’re making a mistake. If you don’t go back, you’re letting this guy basically rob you.”

  “I told you already; I don’t want anything but the car. All I want is to legally change my name back and stop being married. Tell me, how long will it take?” I sliced through another clump of hair, reducing the length by about half. Veronica Mansfield was dying before my very eyes. I couldn’t wait until the day I got to stop calling myself that. Long and blonde had been my look for the length of my married life and since that life was coming to an end, the hair was out. I hated it long anyway. I heard Ben sigh loudly.

  “The fastest you could get a divorce is thirty days, of course depending on the cooperation of the other party—your husband who you have been avoiding. Veronica, you don’t have to run. If you press charges, we can get him if he hurt you.”

  I cut the hair nearest my face on the other side.

  “He didn’t hit me. I just want a divorce. Tell me when I can sign the papers, so you can have him served.”

  “Come to the firm this evening, and we can talk about it,” he said, defeated.

  I thanked him and ended the call. Getting the hair at the back was sort of hard, but I could always just say it was a look. A long, choppy bob like the one Buffy had during season three, achieved using the kitchen scissors that room service brought me after asking about five times whether I was sure that I wanted scissors. He probably thought he’d find me dead or something.

  I ran my fingers through my hair, newly freed from the six inches of length it had gained while Michael and I were together. He liked it long. The man had a Rapunzel fetish or something. I physically looked like the old me, now all I had to do was stop being married. The wedding band and engagement ring I used to wear would have ended up in the San Francisco Bay, but that was too… dramatic. Much too jilted wife who was trying to punish her husband by literally throwing away tens of thousands of dollars he had spent on her away. Really, the jewelry didn’t do anything to me, and it was a hell of a lot more prudent to see whether I could get anything for them instead of doom some poor fish or seabird to a painful choking death.

  I had gotten about eight thousand five hundred for the pair of them at a pawn shop. Nothing close to what they retailed for, but it was paying for this hotel room. It was also going to help put a dent in my legal fees once the divorce went through.

  I took the hair from the sink and stuffed it in the trash can. Flopping onto the bed, I lay out on my back.

  Now what?

  I was out of the house with all the clothes I could carry. I had hired a lawyer, and I was getting a divorce. That was the easy part. I didn’t have a house. I didn’t have any friends that I felt comfortable asking whether I could stay with them until I found a place. I did have a mom and dad though. My parents lived in Berkeley which from here was about half an hour away, and unlike this place, they would not charge me per night.

  It was no use. I couldn’t go back home.

  I had burned that bridge when I had decided to marry Michael; the day I’d become Veronica Mansfield. God, I hated that girl. What an idiot. For some people, it was a good—or at least, not a bad idea—to get married when they were eighteen. For me, it was a terrible idea. Awful, but I did it anyway. Michael Mansfield was on every count a piece of shit. Poor Veronica Mansfield however, she had only wised up just short of two days ago. It had been a long time coming too, what the fuck had taken her so long?

  It had been four days since the miscarriage, and I had not noticed any bleeding, spotting or cramping. This was good. It meant that the miscarriage had been ‘complete.’ It had been my body’s mission
to get rid of the unborn fetus, and it had gotten all of it. That also meant that the fact that this hotel had a pool meant nothing to me because I couldn’t use it. Babies changed everything and the arrival, or rather the continued existence of this one would have placed me anywhere but a San Francisco hotel hatching the demise of my marriage.

  If I was still pregnant, I would be at home hating Michael and not at a hotel doing it. Maybe I wouldn’t even hate him, or at least we would get along for the sake of the baby until a number of years passed and we couldn’t stand each other anymore. Really, if we weren’t breaking up now, we would just be doing it later, under potentially messier circumstances and years of unexpressed passive-aggression.

  What’s that thing they say about everything happening for a reason, even if that thing is the death of your unborn baby? We weren’t going to survive this one. The fucked-up thing about miscarriage was it happened even when you did everything right. It could also happen more than once.

  The latest miscarriage was really the straw that broke my shitty marriage’s back, but it had been generally bad for a long time. Michael and I had been pregnant before, and when that baby was lost, that was basically the end of our marriage. We had spent so much time trying to get pregnant. I had had my fertility checked and checked again by multiple doctors. I had had surgery to make sure I wasn’t ‘obstructed.’ Whenever I asked Michael to get himself checked to make sure everything was fine with his swimmers, he got mad. Thousands of dollars later and after a lot of false starts, it finally happened.

  I couldn’t even be mad about all the strangers that I had had to have poking and prodding at me to see what was wrong because nothing was. Of course, there are options when getting pregnant is difficult for some people, but I didn’t want it to be me. I didn’t want to think that I couldn’t do it, especially because I wanted, desperately to be able to do it. And I had done it.

  And then I lost it. Nearly twenty weeks. It was awful. Do you have any idea how big a twenty-week-old fetus is? It hurt too. In the way that can’t be treated with ibuprofen and the way that can. At the hospital, they offered to give us the body and placenta to perform a burial. How fucked up is that?

  It all went downhill after that, and it kept going downhill until I got pregnant again, a couple of months ago. Another fucked up thing about miscarriage—there are many—is it gets easier, the more times it happens to you. It is not easy losing an unborn baby, it’s fucking terrible, but the things happening in your body, the pain, and the blood; they aren’t unexpected after it’s happened to you before. You know exactly what it is that is happening instead of having to hear it from someone else. When I saw the blood the first time, I thought I was dying. I didn’t think that it could have been what it ended up being. The second trimester was supposed to be safe; we had made it out of the danger zone. Our baby was healthy, and that was why it had gotten as big as it had.

  The second time around we were only several along. I didn’t even bother going to the hospital. The bleeding was less like the deluge that came with the first one and more like a very heavy period. I told Michael the night after it happened, and he left the house. Just went. He must have come back at some time before morning, but he never made it to bed that night. When I asked him whether he wanted to talk about it, he accused me of killing his baby. What a treasure, huh? How’d I get so lucky?

  I rolled onto my stomach and took my phone, tapping out the text message to Michael. I added a couple x’s and o’s too, hugs and kisses for the guy I was paying someone to disassociate myself from. He’d see right through that. He wasn’t the person I wanted to be hugging or kissing, and I wasn’t the one he wanted to be hugging and kissing either. I was going to be one of those bitter ex-wives who hated their ex-husband.

  Considering the way our marriage had gone, I was going to choose to maintain that I was justified in my mistrust of him. I smiled ruefully. Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t have any kids.

  Ben was on the phone when I walked into the office. I sat and waited for him to finish. He looked at me.

  “New look?”

  I smiled tightly.

  “Veronica Mansfield had long hair. I don’t. Are the papers ready?”

  “I’ve handled a lot of divorces. I have never met a woman as resistant as you are to receiving spousal support.”

  I shrugged.

  “Isn’t that refreshing though? The man dogged me for six years, and all I want from him is a speedy divorce?”

  “I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you to stay with this guy.”

  “I would hope not, breaking marriages is what pays the rent, isn’t it?”

  “You didn’t sign a prenup, everything he acquired during the marriage is yours too. You are young. You got married right out of high school to this guy who was arguably older and more established than you. Every judge in the state would make him give you half.”

  “Ben, stop it. I don’t want half.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  He slid the papers to me, and I signed as petitioner.

  “Well, my mistake is earning you two hundred and fifty from me hourly. You’re welcome. How soon can I get my old name back?”

  “We can file for divorce with a court order for name restoration. As soon as it’s finalized, you just use the certification to change your documents. That’s not free, though. A lot of women keep their married names, at least on their documents to avoid the costs.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes. As soon as this was done, I was even changing my email address back. He was really saying that like it was a good enough reason to keep Michael’s name. The man was looking at me with this face that made me really mad. It was like pity. It was the face you gave people when you wanted to say something, but it was not your place to do it. Maybe it was because we, well I, was so young and on my way to becoming a divorcée. Really, he couldn’t afford to be that sentimental in the line of work that he was in. He was the only person I had told that I was getting a divorce, so he was the only person who had been trying to stop me from doing it. Not even Michael knew, which was sort of bitchy of me, but he wouldn’t have taken me seriously if I just told him by myself.

  Ben wasn’t even telling me not to do it; he was just telling me not to do it the way I wanted and to take advantage of my position as this guy’s soon to be ex-wife to basically punish him. I didn’t want this to be a fight, and I didn’t want to have to entertain Michael as a part of my life for any longer than he legally had to be one. All I wanted was to be done. That was it.

  “Just let me know when he’s been served,” I requested quietly.

  Ben looked at me again and sighed. He didn’t have to say it out loud for me to hear him.

  I’m sorry.

  2

  Veronica

  The thought of apartment hunting in San Francisco made me wish I had haggled a little harder at the pawn shop for the rings and maybe taken Ben up on that spousal support offer. Obviously, the first move of my unmarried life had to be finding somewhere to live, and one of the most expensive cities on the west coast was not the best option.

  Maybe a little more forethought on my part could have been useful. It was like trying to dramatically storm out of a house but not realizing that the door was locked. That was where I was. Awkwardly trying to get the front door of my marriage unlocked so I could get the fuck out.

  It was officially day three since I had left home and day five since I had lost the baby. Michael would receive the official news that I was leaving him today or tomorrow; sometime soon and then we could get the ball rolling. For the time being, however, I had to think something up. I couldn’t just hideout in San Francisco indefinitely and staying at a hotel was going to get really expensive really fast.

  Normal twenty-four-year-olds had friends that they could have asked to stay with at times like these. That was because normal twenty-four-year-olds had probably gone to college and did things that put them in a positio
n to make friends with people their own age. When you were married, your friends were other married couples. Our friends certainly had been, and they were not so much our friends as they were Michael’s friends who put up with me because I was Michael’s wife.

  I was young and about to be single again; why were my prospects still so dark?

  My phone rang. I picked it up without looking at who it was before I did. I held my breath realizing that it might have been Michael. I stayed silent allowing whoever it was to talk first.

  “Ron?” a confused voice asked. Michael called me a lot of things, and ‘Ron’ had never been one of them. I paused, looking at the phone. The phone number that had called me was definitely Bart’s. I had to double check.

  “Ron?” he repeated.

  “When did the Navy start letting you make phone calls home?” I asked.

  “I’m not working right now Ron; I’m on leave. Where are you?”

  Running away from my husband.

  “Home,” I lied, “Why?”

  “It’s kind of a long story... listen. I know this is extremely short notice, but I need a favor from you. A huge favor.”

  I frowned a little. Bart was my older brother and the point at which he felt the least like one was when he had joined the Navy to become a SEAL. I was only fifteen when he left. He didn’t owe it to me to stay or anything, but he had missed everything from that point on. He had even missed the wedding. I had had to tell him over email, to which he replied telling me I was out of my mind and that I would regret it.