Perfect Together by Kristen Ashley

Seriously?

And he called me “prone to drama” (which he had, numerous times)?

Me (at the same time trying not to let my head explode): “I wasn’t the one who walked out on you, and I wasn’t the one who filed divorce from you. You want to talk about a memory, Remy? Let’s talk about that one.”

For those scores, it was a stalemate on my house reno (only because he still thought he was right; I still knew it was none of his business).

But I’d sure won that last one.

I knew this because it’d bought me three whole Remy-free weeks while he seethed.

And damn it all to hell, while he did that, I’d missed him.

These were my thoughts as I walked from my car to his house, which was set deep into a big lot on a curve in a street in the historic neighborhood of Encanto.

Ranch-style. L-shaped. With lush, tropical landscaping that was so old and established, it was a beautiful, cultivated jungle. This surrounding a small front courtyard with a fountain that you could see through the wall of windows that made up the front of the house.

Although I’d been there several times, I had never been given a full tour, but I knew to one side Remy had a home office and Sabre had a bedroom, which should be the guest suite, but it was a private young-adult-man space now (another reason Sabre stayed with Remy).

Down the longer side, the end of which was Remy and Myrna’s master suite that had a sunken bed area I had a secret longing to see, there were also Jack and Jill bedrooms for Yves and Manon, and a poker room.

Yes, a room dedicated to freaking poker.

Because Remy was that guy.

The man’s man.

He did not sit and watch football on Sundays because those were the days he played rugby. And after he played rugby, he drank beer and ate steak with his rugby buddies. He’d had a spell where he’d been a triathlete, and he’d moved on from this to dedicate time to snowboarding (something he already did, and he still did it) and mountain bike riding (and luckily for him, we lived in Arizona, so he could do that year-round).

Obviously, he played poker the entire time I knew him.

He was further an ace at pool (and had a pool table in his family room, a room that also had a wet bar, not kidding, a wet bar).

His house included a somewhat formal sunken living room, which was what you walked into from the front door.

This room had a grand piano (Remy and all the kids played because his mother decreed that “gentlemen understand the finer arts by participating in them, cher”) and two walls of windows.

One that looked to the front courtyard.

One that looked to a backyard, which showcased a rectangular mid-century pool and patio replete with perfectly placed barrel cacti, boxy furniture with bright turquoise cushions, and shade provided by specially designed “umbrellas” made of turquoise fabric stretched between three wide and tight white circles attached at an angle to a white pole, and they looked like they belonged in Tomorrowland.

In other words, they were fabulous.

Remy’s house further included a one-lane kitchen that managed to have a remarkable amount of counterspace because it was so long. It also had excellent and unexpected lighting, and cabinets suspended by short rods over the outside counter that faced the pool-table-wet-bar-bedecked family room. Milky, sliding glass panels covered the fronts of the overhead cabinets. Minimalistic handles on the lower. Stainless steel appliances that, I noted every time I was there, were miraculously fingerprint free.

It really was magnificent.

The whole home.

Or at least what I’d seen.

And luckily for Remy, he’d found a woman who would move into his massive, four-thousand-square-foot mancave and not change a thing.

Not put her stamp or personality on an inch of it (at least, any of it I’d seen).

Except, of course, the framed nude photograph of herself she’d given Remy for Christmas last year.

In front of my children.

I had to hand it to Remy. By Manon’s report, although this portrait hung in their bedroom, he’d not been best pleased, and he hadn’t hidden it when he’d received something so personal without warning in front of his kids (her excuse, also according to Manon, “But, baby, they’re all grown,” and no, the woman had no children of her own, which might explain that).

But it was on display in his house where his children lived.

Perhaps not in the living room…but still.

“I never go into their room because…gross,” Manon had said about it.

This had genuinely made me sad.

Because Remy and Manon used to cuddle up in our bed all the time, watching romcoms (they were both suckers for a good romcom, or a bad one) or reading (they were big readers and we hadn’t had any furniture where dad and daughter could snuggle and lose themselves in books, except our big bed).

One could say, if you wanted to stake your territory in your man’s house that you had to share with his kids, that was a good way to do it.

And that was how I took it.

With all things Remy! spilling all over his home, including his kids being there a lot of the time, Myrna had to stake her claim somewhere.

So she did.

But honestly, though I’d never utter these words out loud to anyone (not even Kara and Bernice, definitely not Bea), I would be happy in that house.

Absolutely, my huge kitchen with its acres of marble countertops (Remy’s reno, almost upon us moving in, in fact our entire house had been reno’ed and decorated by him—not a surprise, since projects he worked on now, he designed everything from the building to the furniture and carpeting) and my new master suite that was most women’s dream, would be hard to walk away from.