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Chanté charged toward the garage, looking for something—anything. From the corner of her eye she spotted a pile of steel pipes on Matthew’s workbench and quickly grabbed one before returning to the yard.
The chainsaw jammed halfway through the Mercedes’ roof and Matthew climbed down, wondering if he had something stronger to finish the job when he saw an angry pink blur rushing toward him and he removed his goggles.
With a firm grip on the steel pipe, Chanté swung at her husband’s head like Barry Bonds going for another home run record.
Matthew ducked and felt the air swoosh past his head as he dropped the chainsaw.
The force of the swing twisted Chanté around in a complete circle and before she could adjust, her husband charged and tackled her to the ground.
This time the air was knocked out of Chanté’s lungs as the steel pipe bounced out of her hands.
“What the hell were you trying to do—kill me?” Matthew barked.
“Damn right,” she growled and tried to twist away and reclaim the pipe.
“Oh, no you don’t.” Matthew scrambled above her and pushed the pipe further out of reach. “You’re absolutely certifiable. You know that?”
“Me?” she shrieked. “Look what you did to my car!” Chanté squirmed and then started pelting him with her hands—a constant occurrence, especially in the last six months.
While the wrestling match grew fast and furious in the grass, the sprinklers came on and immediately drenched the couple from head to toe.
“My hair,” Chanté sputtered. “I just had it done. Let me up!”
Matthew tried, but the grass was slippery now and he had a hard time getting his footing.
“Get up!” she insisted, smacking him again.
After one too many pops against the head, Matthew waved a finger at her. “Has anyone ever told you that it’s never okay to hit?”
Her answer was to smack him again.
“Uh, excuse me.”
Chanté and Matthew froze, and then slowly turned their heads to see old man Roger, the lawn guy, peering curiously over at them.
“Uh, is everything all right, Mr. and Mrs. Valentine?”
Their smiles were instant and their expressions as innocent as they could manage.
“Everything is f-fine,” Matthew said, finally climbing off his wife and pulling her up with him. For a few strained and awkward seconds they stood before the elderly gentleman in the sodden grass while the sprinklers continued to drench and plaster their clothes against their bodies.
“Uh-huh.” Roger eyeballed them as if they were Martians.
Chanté snuggled against her husband and slid her arms lovingly around his neck. “We were just trying something new. You know…to keep things…fresh.” She planted a kiss on Matthew’s cheek. “Isn’t that right, hon?”
Matthew’s smile tightened. “Right…hon.”
Roger’s dusty brown face wrinkled as he scratched his short-cropped, cotton-white hair. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, hon,” Matt said. “I think we better move this lovefest back into the house.” Before Chanté had a chance to respond, Matthew swept up his wife, tossed her over his shoulder, and smacked her hard on the butt.
“Matthew!” Her fist pounded his back.
“Patience, baby.” Matthew winked at Roger. “She gets a little impatient from time to time.”
“Right.” Roger nodded as he watched Matthew march toward the house. From behind, Chanté lifted her head and waved.
At last, Roger turned toward the Mercedes. “Hey, what happened to the car?” He glanced back to his employers, but they were already entering the house.
Mrs. Valentine screeched. “Now put me down!”
The door slammed closed, leaving Roger to scratch his head and glance from the car to the front door. “I swear those two are as loony as they come.”
Chapter 4
Master interviewer, Larry King, dressed in a starched periwinkle shirt, black suspenders and matching striped tie performed his trademark haunch over the desk and welcomed the audience to the night’s show.
“It’s always a pleasure to welcome Dr. Matthew and Chanté Valentine to the show. Dr. Matt is the host of the highly-rated TV talk show, The Love Doctor. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers…”
Matt smiled and scratched at his collar.
Chanté drew a deep breath and forced steel into her spine while keeping her smile on full wattage. This interview called for her finest performance.
Matt shifted in his chair, scratched his arm and then jerked the arm to scratch at his back.
Mr. King flashed Matt an inquisitive glance but kept on with his spiel.
“And this little lady, Dr. Chanté Valentine, has quite a résumé as well,” Mr. King praised. “She is the host of her own syndicated radio talk show The Open Heart Forum. Her first book, IDo—I have the book right here—has been on the bestseller list for ten weeks running. Welcome to the show.”
“Thank you.” She smiled and leaned closer toward her husband.
Matt jerked his head back and tried to scratch at his neck, his chest, his back and his crotch.
“Is everything all right, Dr. Valentine?”
“Oh, uh. Yeah, just fine,” he panted, jerking this way and that. “I just seem to have a little itch.”
Chanté smiled serenely, thinking about the itching powder she’d sprinkled in his clothes. That’ll teach him to destroy my car.
Off set, Edie and Seth Hathaway took turns experiencing chest pains as they watched the Valentines attempt to charm their host, but watching them was like watching and expecting a train wreck.
“This was a mistake,” Edie whispered and glanced nervously around.
“This is damage control. We needed to do something other than let them continue taking public potshots.”
“Look at her. She looks like a plastic Stepford wife and he…what the hell is he doing?”
“Calm down.” Seth looped an arm around her shoulder. “They’re doing fine. Look, Larry is eating it up.”
“Larry is the least of our worries. It’s the court of public opinion that matters here.” She hid her face in the palms of her hands. “Why did she have to call his TV guests Jerry Springer rejects?”
Seth chuckled. “Because some of them are.”
“What?”
“You didn’t know?” He shook his head. “You’re probably the only one who didn’t.”
“Well, we wouldn’t have to do any damage control if your client reined in his jealousy on Letterman.”
“C’mon. If you graduated from a place called Kissessme, you should grow a thick skin.”
Edie stepped away from her husband. “Are you saying all of this is Chanté’s fault?”
Stagehands, cameramen and the director glanced toward them and Edie realized she’d forgotten to use her “inside” voice. “Sorry,” she whispered to the set.
On camera, the Valentines smiled lovingly at each other and their host. But then Matt started raking at his skin like a madman again.
“I’m not saying that it’s anyone’s fault,” Seth resumed the conversation. “But I do think we’re sitting on top of a time bomb. We may be able to fool the public right now, but how long do you think they’ll be able to keep it up?”
Edie thought of Chanté’s constant demand for a divorce. “Not much longer.”
“Right.” Seth’s voice lowered. “Which is why I think it’s up to us to do something about it.”
“Us?” She laughed. “How are we going to help professional psychologists—the top in their field, by the way—mend their own relationship?”
Seth’s lips slid into a wide grin. “An intervention.”
“An intervention?” Edie repeated and turned her gaze back to Chanté and Matt, just as Matt twisted one too many times and fell out his chair, then proceeded to writhe on the floor. “Forget the intervention, I think we need an exorcist.”
“Oh, hell no,” Chanté snapped at Edie above the den of diners at the prestigious Gramercy Tavern. When all eyes shot to their table, Chanté quickly covered with a bland smile, and then added under her breath, “I’m not going to marriage counseling.”
Unfazed by her friend’s outburst, Edie calmly peered over the rim of her glasses. “If you look me in the eye and tell me that you honestly want a divorce, I’ll back off.”
Chanté opened her mouth to make her daily proclamation, but when the words failed her, she closed it and shifted in her chair.
A triumphant smile bloomed across Edie’s lips. “I didn’t think so.”
“Explain to me how it would look for two relationship experts to seek relationship counseling. Wouldn’t that also put a dent in our precious credibility?”
“The public will never know,” she assured.
“Come on. We live in the information age.” Chanté stabbed at her spinach salad. “Secrets always come out—usually on the Internet.”
Edie slumped back in her chair, thoughtful. “Then we could release the information ourselves.” She bobbed her head, warming to the idea. “Hear me out on this.” She sat up again. “You and Matthew promote counseling. What better way to show that all relationships hit rough patches? Right now, you guys appear to have the perfect marriage. There are a good percentage of people who think you guys can never understand their problems because you have it so good. But if they see perfect marriages being not-so-perfect then we can tap into a few more readers.”
“What are you talking about? People see those marriages all the time. They’re called celebrity marriages.”
“Be serious. No one takes celebrity marriages seriously. We’re talking about two famous love doctors, and when you fix their marriage, it will renew hope.”
“If we can fix our marriage.” Chanté bit into her salad and rolled her eyes. “And that’s a very big if.”
“Okay. We’ll keep it out of the papers for now, but if a leak happens we’ll be prepared.”
Chanté lowered her gaze and stared at her half-eaten salad, remembering the first time she’d laid eyes on Matthew. He’d blown a tire out on the main highway and walked ten miles to Sam’s Café on the edge of Karankawa, Texas, where she waitressed. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out with his perfect speech, soft manicured hands and expensive shoes that he wasn’t from around those parts.
Chanté chuckled aloud from the memory, but snapped to attention when Edie’s sharp gaze zeroed in on her.
The last thing she expected today was to be ambushed with an intervention for her own marriage. However, her own solution to surviving the rest of her life with her self-absorbed, self-righteous and pretentious husband had already cost her a new Mercedes.
However, the question was whether she wanted to fix her marriage. As she struggled for an answer, her vision blurred, but she blinked away the tears and forced down another bite of food.
Edie watched Chanté from over the rim of her glasses for a long time before she prompted, “Well? You have to do something before you kill each other or kill yourselves. You know psychologists have the highest suicide rate.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“I read it somewhere.”
“Huh. I always thought it was dentists who had the highest rate.”
“C’mon. What do you say? Will you go to marriage counseling?”
Matthew Valentine, handsome in a royal-blue suit, stared over the heads of his studio audience and into the camera. “Today we will be talking about how to take the bitterness out of your marriage.” He smiled, but remained serious. “Oftentimes, it’s not the big things that break a marriage. It’s the small things.” His voice quivered and for a brief moment, Matt appeared to have lost his concentration.
Seth shifted his gaze from one of the monitors to glance at his client on the stage.
The ultimate professional, Matthew recovered and continued with his spiel. The irony of today’s subject matter didn’t escape Seth so he found himself paying close attention to how Matthew interacted with his guests and the advice Matthew gave them.
“Couples tend to argue over something safe or superficial during battle, but they avoid talking about the serious problems.”
Seth nodded as he listened. Everything Matthew said was sound advice. Everything made sense to him—so what were the serious problems between Matthew and Chanté? Where had they gone wrong?
While Matthew continued to mingle with his audience and offer handkerchiefs to sobbing guests, Seth thought back to when he first sensed trouble between Matthew and Chanté. Actually, he didn’t sense, more like he dodged a glass vase when he’d entered the Valentines’ home during a heated argument. Chanté was a small woman but she had one hell of an arm.
Two hours later, with the day’s show finally completed taping and the last of the audience filtered out of the studio, Seth made it to Matt’s dressing room and lingered just outside the door while a young, petite, yet curvaceous intern fawned over her employer.
“Great show today, Dr. Valentine,” she said breathily. “I swear it’s like you really know how a woman thinks and feels.”
Seth lifted an inquisitive brow.
“Thank you, Cookie.” Matt didn’t spare the young girl a glance as he stripped the light coat of makeup from his face.
However, Cookie ignored his indifference and stepped forward until her perky bosom brushed against Matt’s arm. “I know I’ve only been here six weeks, but I have to tell you—working with you has been like a dream come true.” She reached out a hand and gently stroked the side of his face.
Belatedly, Matt flinched from her touch.
“You’re using the cologne I bought you for your birthday.”
“Yeah, I decided what the hell. I’ve been using the same cologne for ten years.”
