My Valdez Valentine (An Odds-Are-Good Standalone Romance Book 4) Read online

  My Valdez Valentine

  N e w Y o r k T i m e s B e s t s e l l i n g A u t h o r

  K a t y R e g n e r y

  My Valdez Valentine

  Copyright © 2019 by Katharine Gilliam Regnery

  Sale of the electronic edition of this book is wholly unauthorized. Except for use in review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part, by any means, is forbidden without written permission from the author/publisher.

  Katharine Gilliam Regnery, publisher

  This book is a work of fiction. Most names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. References to real people or places are used fictitiously.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Please visit my website at www.katyregnery.com

  Cover Designer: Marianne Nowicki

  Developmental Edit: Tessa Shapcott

  Formatting: CookieLynn Publishing Services

  First Edition: March 2020

  My Valdez Valentine: a novel / by Katy Regnery—1st ed.

  ISBN: 978-1-944810-49-8

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek

  Also Available from Katy Regnery

  About the Author

  For my #NewportCrew and my #VermontGirls.

  You are my people.

  xoxoxo

  Chapter 1

  Addison

  COME FLY WITH ME

  Chopper pilot with a taste for adventure offers

  a bite of the wild side to a woman with

  courage, curiosity, and confidence.

  I am thirty-five years old. Five foot ten. Lean.

  Alutiiq with husky-blue eyes.

  fortes fortuna adiuvat

  Fortune favors the bold.

  Latin. Interesting.

  My eyes linger on the italic letters at the end of the ad for an extra moment.

  “Ms. DeWitt! Are you even listening? Forcing someone to live ten miles from their ex isn’t a settlement, it’s a punishment! It’s…it’s…abusive!”

  The woman seated across from my desk shrieks the last word at me, and I blink at my desktop screen. My assistant, Kitty, who is obsessed with all things Alaskan, must have been checking out personal ads on my computer this morning and forgot to log herself off.

  Minimizing the ad before me, I click on a file called THURBER_Divorce.doc and slide my eyes to the former Mrs. Thurber as I wait for the file to open.

  “I understand your frustration, Mrs. Th—Jennifer,” I tell her.

  “Do you? Then why aren’t you doing something? They’re my kids, and I should be allowed to take them anywhere I want!” she says. “He barely knows them! Who cleaned the shite from their asses? Me! Who wiped the snot from their noses? Me! Who actually gives a flying fuck if they turn their assignments in on time—”

  “You,” I say, looking her directly in the eye. I wait a beat before adding, “But they are, in fact, his biological offspring, Jennifer. No court in America will deny him the chance to see them.”

  “He can bloody well see them in Melbourne, for fuck’s sake!”

  Jennifer Martin-Thurber, a former sitcom actress and the soon-to-be ex-wife of big-time Hollywood director James Olson Thurber, is hoping to return to Australia with her three children as soon as her divorce is final.

  That simply isn’t going to happen.

  “As we’ve discussed previously, your children are American citizens.”

  “Duel citizens!”

  “Yes, but divorce proceedings were initiated here in America,” I explain for the five hundredth time. “For the time being, at least, you and the children will need to remain here.”

  “And live…” Her voice breaks. I nudge a box of Kleenex forward, but she ignores them, clearing her throat and lifting her chin. “…in the house where he…cheated on me! Within a ten-mile radius of—of him and that…slut!” She grits her teeth, her lovely blue eyes glistening as they bore into mine. “He cheated on me, but I’m being screwed!”

  Honestly? I get it. It’s not fair.

  Last month, James was photographed in Cabo with his kids’ au pair—the happy couple carelessly frolicking in the surf sans bathing suits at a private resort. The pictures, taken with an 800/5.6 lens from a local yacht, were detailed, clear and unforgiving.

  In flagrante delicto.

  There’s some choice Latin for you, pilot-man.

  To be clear, I admire the fact that the photos prompted immediate divorce proceedings by Jennifer without the benefit of couples counseling or kid-gloved arbitration. In my opinion, and with the benefit of being one of the top divorce attorneys in Los Angeles, I firmly believe in the old adage “once a cheater, always a cheater.” There’s no way that this was the first time James strayed from the marital bed, and it likely wouldn’t be the last.

  But my opinions are irrelevant.

  Back to poor Jennifer.

  The pictures were published. Her friends and acquaintances called her in a flurry of faux concern, ratcheting up her indignation and injury with every phone call. As I mentioned before, experience tells me it wasn’t the first time James cheated on Jennifer, but I do believe it was the first time she had solid proof. A decade of simmering suspicions was validated in those splashy clickbait photos. The bastard was a bona fide cheater now; she could no longer deny it, and if she didn’t want to look like a doormat, she had to do something about it.

  When she called my office on Sunday afternoon, Kitty tracked me down at the par-3 tenth on the manicured links of the Bel-Air Country Club. I recognized Jennifer’s name immediately and quickly understood her intentions. I told Kitty to clear my Monday morning and booked Jennifer a nine o’clock a.m. appointment. The only real advice I gave her during that phone call was to shut off her phone, turn off the TV, go to a friend’s house to avoid the press, and sit tight until morning.

  Unfortunately, Jennifer’s anger and embarrassment overruled my guidance. As she drove her Porsche SUV from the family compound to a friend’s beach house in Malibu, she rolled down her window and gave a statement to the press.

  “Jennifer!” they screamed. “Jennifer! Have you seen the photos?”

  “Yes, I have. And I’ve initiated immediate divorce proceedings,” she said. “In fact, I’ve already retained the services of Addison DeWitt. I hope James gets the ass-fucking of his life.”

  Addison DeWitt, Esq., who graduated magna cum laude from Stanford and is, according to The Hollywood Reporter, a “noted divorce shark.”

  Addison DeWitt, who is…me.

  But James Thurber didn’t become a two-time Oscar winner by being a big dummy. He was alerted to Jennifer’s impromptu statement by his eagle-eyed publicist, advised to hop the first flight back to LA, and lawyered-up in the air.

  His first point of business upon returning to his empty house was to confiscate the children’s passports from the family safe and take them to his sister’s house.

  On Monday morning, while Jennifer was sitting at the conference table across from me, crying over her cheating husband and whore au pair, James’ sister took the passports to the Citibank on Wiltshire and Twenty-Thi
rd and plopped them in a safety deposit box.

  And there they will stay until a judge says otherwise.

  For all intents and purposes, Jennifer is now trapped in the United States if she wishes to remain with her children. And while James is giving his almost ex-wife the family’s massive Santa Monica mansion, he’s also insisting that she remain there until each of their children reach the age of eighteen. With the youngest only eight years old, Jennifer’s going to be a Californian for another decade, despite her desperation to return home and raise her children in Oz.

  The reality is that even if the courts eventually give Jennifer access to the passports, there’s no TSA agent in America who’s going to let those kids leave the country without written and notarized permission from James. Well aware of his ex-wife’s intentions, he will certainly never give it. So that’s that.

  Her words still hang in the air: He cheated on me, but I’m being screwed!

  “It may feel that way,” I tell her, perusing the document that I already know like the back of my hand, “but it’s not true. You’re being given a pretty decent deal.”

  “Decent?” she demands, pulling three tissues from the box in quick succession and pressing them to her brimming eyes. “My God, I thought you were supposed to be a shark!”

  “Jennifer,” I remind her gently but firmly. “You signed a prenup.”

  “That fucking prenup!” she cries. “He said it was just a formality. He promised me we’d last forever!”

  I stopped rolling my eyes at this kind of demented thinking long ago. Call me cynical or jaded, but people in love can be so fucking stupid, it makes my entire being flex and release in an internal cringe of disgust.

  Officially, James owes her practically nothing, but in order not to look like a total and complete douche to his friends and peers—and because I’m not half bad at my job—he’s giving her the aforementioned house, she can keep her cars and house staff, plus he’s including a generous financial package that includes alimony and child support until each of their children reaches twenty-one years old, with the stipulation that both parents will maintain permanent, primary residences in Santa Monica for the next ten years and with the further assurance that Jennifer will not, under any circumstances, try to leave the country with said children until they are each eighteen years old.

  Objectively it’s not a bad deal.

  But as the wife of a powerful Hollywood player, Jennifer is used to getting what she wants, and this isn’t it. Not to mention, she is the injured party in terms of spousal infidelity. She feels entitled to more. She feels entitled to getting her way.

  I’m not so cruel or narrow-minded that I can’t see her side of things. It sucks to be hurt by someone you trusted and find yourself without recourse. Vulnerable. Powerless. Weak.

  It’s the reason I promised myself years ago that I would never—never, ever, under any circumstances, come hell or high water or the second coming—get married. I refuse to ever find myself in a similarly vulnerable, unprotected position.

  I despise weakness in others.

  I’d rather die than uncover it within myself.

  “Let’s face facts,” I tell her, pretending to smooth my auburn chignon, though not a hair is out of place. “He hasn’t contested your role as the primary caregiver of the children. You keep your house, cars, and staff. Mr. Thurber is taking care not only of your children financially, as is his legal responsibility, but also of you. Please recall that per the terms of the prenup, he is not required to offer you alimony whatsoever.”

  She blinks at me, her face otherwise blank.

  On my desk, my cell phone chirps, telling me that someone is calling. Glancing down, I see the name ELLIOT flash across the screen.

  I mute the phone and turn it over before looking up at Jennifer.

  “He could have supported your children but otherwise left you with nothing. You would have had to use his child support to find a small apartment, then get a job to support the four of you.”

  Her lips tighten. I’m making her angry, but she needs to hear this.

  “Instead, you’re being offered a comfortable life in Santa Monica. You won’t need to work if you don’t want to, and in ten years, you’ll still have a generous allowance, but you’ll be able to go wherever you want with your children.”

  She takes a deep breath and lets it go slowly before sitting back in the guest chair. Her cornflower-blue eyes, which won her the title of “Your Favorite Girl-Next-Door” so many years ago, scan my face intensely.

  Finally, she whispers, “You’ve never been in love, have you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t think you’ve ever been in love,” she says, her voice stronger and more deliberate as she blinks back tears from red-rimmed eyes. “You keep focusing on what I’m getting, not what I’ve lost. If you’d ever been in love, you would know that the worst thing of all is being expected to regularly see someone who used to love you…but doesn’t anymore.” She gulps quietly, but I can hear it. “I don’t want to go back to Australia just to punish him, though that was an added benefit. I just want to get away from him. I want distance between us. I don’t want to have to see him twice a week when the kids are dropped off or picked up. I don’t want to have to see him at all, ever again, because I still…I’m still…”

  “You’re still…what?”

  “In love with him,” she sobs, tears sliding down her face faster than she can wipe them away. “I d-don’t want the h-house or the—the c-cars. Even the m-money. I just…I j-just…” She shakes her head, taking more tissues to wipe her nose. Once she has a bit more composure, she finishes with this: “He doesn’t love me anymore.”

  Why would you want him to?

  “He cheated on you,” I say.

  “I know that,” she says, sniffling again as she cleans up her runny mascara with a tissue-covered index finger. “Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t want to want to be with him, but I can’t turn off my love for him like a faucet either. A month ago we were happy. He was my husband—the doting father of my kids. We were living the dream.” She shakes her head, then shrugs. “It hurts that he’s moved on. It hurts like bloody hell that he doesn’t love me anymore.”

  “I’m sorry you’re hurting,” I say. I mean it too. Although I will never find myself in a similar position, I can still have sympathy for her, for the pain she’s obviously feeling.

  I wish I could say something that would comfort her, though comforting weeping clients isn’t my forte.

  I clear my throat. “Legally, you can’t take your kids back to Australia. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to go by yourself. You could take a holiday. Visit your family and friends. Regroup. Recharge.”

  “And leave my children with whom? The au pair they love is a fucking slut, and their father broke up our family to get into her size-zero Lululemons.” She takes a deep breath and sighs, balling up the used tissues in her hands and lifting her chin in the first show to spirit since her tears started. “No. I’m not going anywhere. I need to stay. I just—” She sighs heavily, forcing a small smile. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I had no right to make assumptions about you. I’m just…a mess. It’s an emotional time.”

  “Of course,” I say, pressing the button on my intercom. “Kitty, will you bring in some water, please?”

  “Right away, Ms. DeWitt.”

  “But…have you?” asks Jennifer after a brief pause, her head tilted to the side, her expression curious.

  “Have I what?”

  “Ever been in love?”

  I take a deep breath. No. The answer is no. The answer is that I enjoy the company of men and an occasional fuck, but I’ve never let myself fall in love with one. There is only one man on the face of the earth whom I love, and he’s broken my heart more times than I can count.

  Thankfully, I’m saved from answering Jennifer’s question when Kitty interrupts us, opening the door to my office carrying a tray of crystal glass
es, a pitcher of water, a silver bowl of cucumber slices, and a bucket of ice.

  “Ms. DeWitt,” she leans down to whisper, her eyes wide and serious as she sets the tray on the side of my desk, “your brother has called twice since you’ve been in this meeting.”

  I give her a tight smile. “Take a message, please.”

  “Er, um…he sounds, um…” she says, her young face pained, “worse than usual.”

  Fucking Elliot. Just what I need today.

  My eyes flick to my phone, wondering what shitshow my twin has gotten himself into now.

  “Take a message, Kitty,” I repeat.

  My assistant nods in understanding, quickly backing out of my office.

  Jennifer Martin-Thurber leans down to pick up her bag from the floor, then stands up. She’s tall and thin with dark hair that tumbles around her shoulders. She’s still young and very pretty. Not that I would advise it, but if she wants to fall in love again, she should have no trouble making it happen. She was the Girl-Next-Door, after all. Someone’s got to be buying what she’s selling.

  “I’ll get going now,” she says. “You should talk to your brother.”

  My cell phone buzzes again on my desk, dancing like a jumping bean, but I ignore it—Leave a goddamned message, El!—and offer Jennifer my hand.

  “Thanks for coming in. Shall I send the contracts to your house for you to sign?”

  She nods, her lovely face listless. “I suppose so.”

  “I’ll have them finalized and messengered over to you later today.”

  One long buzz from the phone on my desk tells me that my brother has finally left a message and stopped bothering me with calls.

  “Thank you,” she says, giving me a grim smile. “I know you did your best.”

  I drop her hand, walking her to the door and closing it when she leaves so that I have some privacy.

  As I sit back in my chair, I realize that I’m unsettled by the meeting. I don’t know if it’s the circumstances of the Thurber divorce, the fact that Jennifer still loves her husband, or her questions about my own love life, but I kick off my heels as I pick up my phone. After I listen to Elliot’s message, maybe I’ll put on my Keds and power walk around the block a few times. I need to clear my head and refocus for another meeting this afternoon. I could use the fresh air.