The Other Wives Club Read online

  THE OTHER WIVES CLUB

  Shari Low

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.ariafiction.com

  About The Other Wives Club

  Three women thrown together on a surprise Mediterranean cruise to celebrate a milestone birthday of the man they all once loved. What could possibly go wrong?

  Tess Gold – the current wife

  When Tess married Drew Gold, she knew his two ex-wives were still in his life. Now Drew has planned a luxury cruise to celebrate his birthday… and the former Mrs Golds are all coming too.

  Mona Gold – the second wife

  When it comes to style, fashion editor, Mona, never puts a Louboutin wrong. Now it’s time to reclaim the only man she ever really loved… if she can tempt Drew away from his new wife for a second time.

  Sarah Gold – the first wife, the original

  When Drew left her for Mona, Sarah’s emotions went into hibernation. Now she’s decided to shave those legs and start living again…

  To John, Callan & Brad

  Everything. Always.

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About The Other Wives Club

  Dedication

  The Marriages of Drew Gold

  1. All Booked Up

  2. Pack Up Your Troubles

  3. All Aboard

  4. Holiday Home Sweet Home

  5. Anchors Away

  6. Wake Up In Palma

  7. Mad Dogs And Scotsmen

  8. All At Sea

  9. Alghero

  10. Shore Leave

  11. Messina

  12. Naples

  13. Troubled Waters

  14. Catching Up

  15. Livorno

  16. Rocky Seas

  17. Genoa

  18. Sunsets At Sea

  19. Meet Me In Monaco

  20. What Happens In Monte Carlo…

  21. Barcelona

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About Shari Low

  Also by Shari Low

  Become an Aria Addict

  Copyright

  The Marriages of Drew Gold

  1.

  All Booked Up

  Tess Gold

  Tess put her coffee cup down with a sigh. ‘Mum, I have to go – an email has just popped into my inbox that I have to reply to.’

  ‘OK, lovely, I’ll call you tomorrow or the next day. And if I can find a hotspot I’ll scoop you.’

  ‘Skype, Mum. It’s Skype.’

  ‘That’s what I meant. Stupid name. Anyway, hasta la vista baby, as they say here.’

  Tess smiled. ‘They don’t say that anywhere, Mum.’

  ‘Well, your dad does. Every time I leave the van. He thinks he’s hilarious.’

  Tess suddenly pictured her mother’s slightly sunburned nose wrinkling with affection as she said that and felt a distinct tug on her heartstrings. Retirement had been an adventure for Evelyn and Alan Campbell. A former nurse and policeman, they’d quit at fifty-five, jetted off to Brazil and were currently travelling around the nations of South America in a camper van. Tess tried not to think about it. It went against the natural order of things. Her parents should be fretting over their twenty-eight-year-old daughter having wild adventures, not the other way around. The only thing that was likely to catapult her into mortal peril in Anderson & McWilliam Marketing were the rock cakes that Beryl the cleaner insisted on inflicting on them every Friday.

  ‘Bye, Mum. And give Dad a hug from me. Miss you.’

  ‘We miss you too, sweetheart. Love to Drew.’

  As Tess put the phone down and reread the email, she was overcome with an urge to head straight to Glasgow airport and catch the first flight out to join her parents.

  It was sure to be more enjoyable the current plan. Ten days on a cruise with her husband, celebrating his fiftieth birthday. So far, so fabulous. Add in two adult children by one of his previous marriages. Could potentially be a little uncomfortable, but still bearable. Add one ex-wife, and the dread factor started to rise. Add in another ex-wife, her husband and step-kid and the shivers ran all the way to her toes.

  Suddenly, taking on gangs of brutal drugs smugglers in the hills above Bogota seemed like the preferable option.

  “Civilized” Drew called it. Modern. Functional. ‘‘We’re all grown-ups,’’ was his favourite saying, as he surveyed his multi-generational extended family at birthdays, Christmases and assorted special occasions. He was proud of the fact that he still worked with Mona, ex-wife number two, and took Sarah, ex-wife number one, out for lunch on the anniversary of their divorce every year.

  Tess would be lying if she denied that it had taken a while to get used to. But then, she’d known what she was in for. Marrying Drew Gold, a newspaper editor, a man almost twenty-two years her senior, was always going to come with a set of unique baggage.

  And now it had come to this.

  For his fiftieth birthday, she’d envisaged a romantic week in Venice. Or perhaps a gorgeous, intimate weekend in Rome. But no, Drew had ambushed her – yes, ambushed was the right word – with a two-week Mediterranean cruise with both his previous families, and no matter how much she tried to persuade herself that she should be grateful she was going on such a luxurious break, she was still anticipating the trip with all the excitement of, say, ten days with chickenpox scabs.

  ‘You’re thinking about it again, aren’t you?’ Cameron put a fresh coffee in front of her and sat down on the corner of her desk, squashing the artwork for the Doggie Doo Bags campaign. She’d slaved over a concept for the print ads, but the truth was that if she just put Cameron in a shot, surrounded him with cute puppies and wrote the name of the product along the bottom, every female in the country would be lining up to buy them whether they had a pet pooch or not.

  If genetic scientists found a way to combine the DNA of Orlando Bloom and Channing Tatum, the prototype would look something like Cameron. Razor-sharp cheekbones, a thoroughly masculine jawline and dark eyes so intense that only the fact that he was always laughing kept him from looking like a brooding yet undeniably attractive serial killer.

  ‘I am,’ she admitted. ‘It’ll be fine though. Great. Sun, sea, and apparently the ship is gorgeous. I know I’m really lucky to be going.’ There was a tone of conviction that didn’t necessarily reflect how she was feeling.

  ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ Cameron whistled. ‘You managed to say all that while chewing your bottom lip.’

  ‘Oh no, was I doing it again?’ She delved into her drawer for Vaseline and smeared it on. ‘I swear to God, every nerve-wracking event I’ve ever been to started with me showing up with lips that look like they’ve spent ten minutes in a blender. At my wedding my gob rivalled Angelina Jolie’s. And not in a good way.’

  Right on cue Cameron laughed. Again. This level of jolly positivity was not normal in humanity. He was a little slice of levity, sent down by the gods to make the office a happier place. Or perhaps he was just secretly drinking from a bottle of something strong under his desk. If it was the latter, she could be doing with a quick slug herself right about now.

  Of course, she could put her foot down and flatly refuse to go along with the group excursion idea, but how petulant would that look? It was Drew’s birthday, the big five-oh, and he wanted all his family around him. Wasn’t his attitude to his responsibilities one of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place?

  For the sake of cheering herself up, she mentally went along with this notion and disregarded the truth – what had actually attracted her to him in the first place was that he was the most charismatic man she ha
d ever encountered, so sure of himself and sharp and witty. Five years ago, he’d been a guest lecturer in her final year at college and he’d given a talk on the future of the newspaper industry. Despite his candid revelation that it was a declining media sector, being superseded by the Internet and twenty-four-hour news channels, by the time he’d stepped off the stage that day there were two hundred students contemplating changing their course from marketing to journalism. It wasn’t the brown hair with the grey flecks that gave him an air of rugged handsomeness. Or the gym-built wide shoulders, or the crinkly green eyes that shot mischief across the room. Drew Gold had a presence. A confidence. And a memory for faces that swept her off her feet when they bumped into each other at a charity event a couple of years later. He’d overlooked her waitress outfit and spoke to her like she was the only woman in the room. Later she’d discover that was a talent he’d cultivated through years of doorstep interviews, networking, and later, mingling with the good and the great while keeping a newsroom of jaded, disgruntled hacks on his side. After chatting to him for half an hour that night she knew he was special. The age difference didn’t matter. Nor did the job that was paying a fiver an hour that she needed to supplement the internship she had just landed at one of Glasgow’s swankiest marketing companies. He asked her to leave with him and she dropped her tray at the door an hour before her shift officially ended. They spent the next eight hours in an all-night coffee shop and married six weeks later.

  The extended family was a slightly unwanted gift that came with the ceremony. Didn’t every bride get a bread maker, a set of salad tongs, two ex-wives and an instant family?

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Cameron asked, taking a large bite out of an apple Danish he’d liberated from a brown paper bag.

  Tess gently prised a portrait of a spaniel from under his right buttock as she contemplated the question. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to have a normal relationship. Girl meets boy without two ex-wives. They court. Get engaged. Get married. Have children. Ouch, sore subject.

  Well-practised in the art of the swift rebound, she grinned and injected some much-needed frivolity into the situation. ‘I don’t know. What would your six-foot Amazonian, very smart lawyer girlfriend do in my shoes? Apart from moan about the fact that the shoes were too small, obviously.’

  ‘She dumped me.’

  Cameron made a ‘What can you do?’ gesture.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Sadly, yes. Said I wasn’t focussed enough. She needed someone to “get on board” and “stay on message” and “develop a strategy for moving forward”.’

  ‘Tell me you’d have finished with her anyway for overuse of psychobabble lingo.’

  ‘I would.’ Pause. ‘Who am I kidding; I’d never have finished it. She was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen and I’m both male and incredibly shallow.’

  She snatched the Danish from his hand and gulped the last bite, not caring that this sent a confetti of pastry flakes across her suit, his jeans and a cartoon spaniel.

  ‘You are officially pathetic.’

  He feigned outrage at her faux-disgust. ‘Hey, I’m not the one going on holiday with her husband’s entire Christmas card list.’

  ‘True. We’re both pathetic. Want to go drown our sorrows over our clear lack of personal integrity and backbone? Drew’s working late and we’re not meeting until nine thirty for dinner. You can help me plot ways to delay the others so the ship sails without them.’

  ‘Sure, I’ll…’

  A loud jangle cut him off and Tess instinctively dug her hand into her handbag and, without even looking, managed to immediately retrieve her iPhone.

  ‘How do you do that? I need a satnav to find anything in a woman’s bag.’

  ‘It’s a talent.’ She cut him off as she checked the screen. Drew Gold.

  Deep breath. Smile. ‘Hey, honey.’ He’d never have known she had a care in the world.

  ‘Yep, I just got it. Sounds great. Of course I’m looking forward to it – it’ll be good to see everyone again. What’s happened? Oh, lord, that’s incredible. Of course I understand. No, it’s fine – I’m going to go for a drink with a crowd of guys from the office anyway.’

  In front of her, Cameron glanced around searchingly, obviously mocking her exaggeration in using the term ‘crowd’. She picked up the Danish paper bag and hit him with it.

  ‘OK, honey, won’t wait up then. Hope it’s not too tedious. Love you.’

  As she put the phone down, there was no stopping the sigh. Sometimes she felt she didn’t have much say in what went on in their lives. Another Friday night dinner cancelled, this time because of some political crisis that was brewing. Apparently there was a rumour that the French Prime Minister was having an affair with a married supermodel twenty years younger and twelve inches taller, and the world’s media was holding the presses for confirmation.

  Cameron stood up and brushed the food flakes off his jeans. ‘Me and the rest of the “crowd” want to know what’s so “incredible”.’

  ‘Oh. You’ll have to swear not to tell anyone …’

  ‘Promise on my Amazonian ex-girlfriend’s life. Don’t like her any more anyway.’

  ‘Reports that the French prime minister was caught shagging that model, Elan, in a changing room at Chanel. Drew won’t make dinner.’

  Cameron reached over and pulled his jacket off the back of his chair. ‘Then you’re just going to have to put up with me. I’m hereby volunteering once again to be your husband’s stunt double.’

  It was a long-running joke. How many times had Drew cancelled at the last minute? Or had to leave before their main course was served at dinner? Cameron came to her rescue so often she spent more time with him than she did with her husband.

  But there was no point complaining about any of it. She loved Drew Gold and that meant accepting the limitations and constraints that came with being married to him. And the football-team-sized extended family, too. It was worth it, no contest. She never doubted it for a minute. Never.

  ‘And Tess…’

  A dash of red lippy gave her a brightness that didn’t come from the inside. ‘What?’

  ‘If I’m being Drew’s stand-in – do I get to sleep with you? Just want to know whether to bring my emergency toothbrush.’

  ‘You know the power of the press can destroy careers, and render, say, a successful marketing guy homeless and penniless, trash his life and leave him on the streets, a gnarled-out junkie fighting every night to survive?’

  Cameron nodded thoughtfully. ‘I’ll just leave the toothbrush in my desk.’

  Mona Gold

  ‘There. Right there. Oh, lord, that’s it. Yes, baby. Yes…’

  Adrian’s hand clamped down firmly on Mona’s mouth and she rewarded him by biting his ring finger. Hard. It was a testimony to the hours of self-inflicted pain during his daily martial arts session that he barely flinched. If he were a torture victim in a Bond movie he’d last for hours before divulging MI6 secrets. ‘Ssssh, baby, these walls are paper thin,’ he whispered.

  Mona wasn’t listening. Wave upon wave of gorgeous bliss was flooding from her Revlon Red toes to the tips of her twenty-two inch long copper hair extensions. The low, sexy growl she emitted as she came sent him from noise concern to deep, thrusting climax.

  As soon as he was still, Mona pushed back off his rapidly receding cock, unstraddled him and strutted across the office, tantalizingly aware that her back view looked great in just her Louboutin heels and a layer of chestnut St. Tropez. And so it should. She’d worked for that view – one hour of Pilates every morning, three weight-training sessions every week, and at least an hour of cardio at lunch. And the bonus of this energetic session with Adrian was that it burned off the same amount of calories as half an hour on the treadmill. She might even let him do it again and then she could skip sixty minutes in the basement gym later.

  The display on her Longines platinum dial told her differently. No time for a replay. Shit
, she was late. She couldn’t even indulge in her beloved post-coital menthol cigarette. Somehow it made it even more exciting that her nicotine fix was banned by both her personal trainer and the building’s health and safety department. And she was pretty sure at least three of the acts she’d performed in the last half hour would have health and safety fanning their clipboards in horror.

  ‘I have to love you and leave you,’ she said nonchalantly, as she clipped the front-fastening of her bra, then pulled on her white silk blouse. Together with the forties-style calf-length pencil skirt, it was her standard workwear. She had no time for the jeans and the grunge of some of the young reporters these days. In her early days as a journo out on the street, chasing a story to prevent her editor firing her before that day’s deadline, she’d quickly realized that if she dressed for success there was more chance of finding it. The exhausted A&E doctor, the young junior lawyer in a prestigious firm and the cop with the loose tongue always responded better to a mini-skirt and matching jacket, complete with wild hair and luscious red lips. Well, it had been the nineties.

  Now, two decades later, she was fashion editor of a national tabloid and style just came naturally to her. It was what had attracted her husbands – the first one and the second one. It was what made her the envy of all those overbearing ladies’ charity lunches. It was what kept her in a job despite a closet full of heirs apparent snapping at the heels of her Gucci mules.

  And it was what allowed her the regular indulgence of sex on her office sofa with a finely toned specimen who wouldn’t be out of place on the pages of GQ. Outside that office, over a hundred newspaper employees sat eating quarter-pounders and chicken pesto wraps out of cheap plastic wrappings while inside she indulged in something far more appetizing. She was sure some of them guessed what was going on, but she really didn’t give a damn.

  Adrian reached over and pulled his Armani boxer shorts off the back of the sofa, then placed them across his crotch.