Jesus. He should get somebody to come and clean everything up. Catherine wouldn’t know what to do with the mess she’d created even if her life depended on it.
He went through the living room and kitchen and found her sitting in a burgundy leather armchair in the den. A white chiffon dress hugged her short but well-curved body. The material would’ve rendered her an air of innocent victimhood…if it had held the power to mute her.
The moment she noticed him, Catherine started sobbing, tears streaming from her large light brown eyes. “Oh my god, what do I do? My life’s ruined!” Even in the middle of a cri
sis, she had on full makeup that was apparently waterproof.
Gavin went straight for the wet bar Jacob had installed and helped himself to a generous serving of bourbon. One could never start drinking early enough when dealing with Catherine. And it paid to get right to the point.
“Is it true? Jacob has another wife?”
“Yes! Some stripper from Las Vegas he married before he proposed to me. He left me for her. How could he?”
No shit. Strippers were generally attractive—they had to be, in order to earn any money—but Gavin doubted that any of them could hold a candle to Catherine. “How does that leave The Lloyds Development?”
“TLD? Who cares about the company right now?”
“You should. If TLD goes bad, you’ll have nothing.” Gavin walked over and stood in front of her. “Is it solvent? Bankrupt? What? He couldn’t have left without taking something.” Given Jacob’s propensity to live grandly, Gavin wouldn’t have put it past his brother to have robbed the company of everything except the carpet.
“You saw the quarterly reports. The company’s fine. It just needs a new CEO. But I… I don’t know where to start.” Fresh tears fell. “I have nothing. I don’t know what I’m going to do. My life’s over.”
“Pull yourself together. Your life’s far from over. You’re still young.”
“What’s the point? Your family will protect Jacob and toss me out. I’ll be made the villain in this farce.”
“No, we won’t.”
“Why not?” She sniffed and tossed her dark curls over a shoulder. “They all hate me.”
“That’s not true.” Well, not exactly true. Jacob had left, Gavin had gotten over her, and Ethan, the second oldest…well, he didn’t hate her, but it was mainly because he didn’t consider it worth the effort. Ethan probably suspected there was some history between Catherine and his two other brothers, even though Gavin hadn’t breathed a word, and Jacob in all likelihood hadn’t either.
Or maybe Jacob had blabbed. Given the magnitude of the fiasco he’d left behind, Gavin wasn’t sure if he could trust his oldest brother’s judgment any more.
“Your mother pulled all my favorite flowers from her garden,” Catherine said.
“They were diseased.” Life was too short to tell unpleasant truths to Catherine. He needed to fly home to his wife, who was, to put it mildly, undoubtedly irritated. “She had no choice.”
“What do I do?”
He grabbed a fistful of napkins from the wet bar and shoved them at her. “Stop crying. Start thinking.”
“Who’s going to move the gnomes?” She gestured at the garden and grew even more hysterical.
About a dozen or so colorful giant pointy hat-sporting figures littered the multi-acre yard in an oval. A wheelbarrow squatted in the center.
Gavin shrugged. “Your gardener. Who else?”
“I don’t have one. I fired him.”
“Oh for god’s sake.” One bourbon wasn’t enough for this bullshit. “If it’s that much of a big deal, you should’ve waited until he moved your gnomes.”
“I heard him laugh. I couldn’t stand it.”
Patience. Patience. “Not everything is about you, Catherine. Maybe he was thinking about a joke.”
“You don’t know him the way I do. I was the joke!” She dabbed at her eyes, then blew her nose in that practiced dainty way.
He should’ve expected that his sister-in-law would be crazy with shame. Appearances were paramount to her. She could bear anything except public humiliation. He almost said, “For fuck’s sake, get over yourself,” but the firm voice of his mother stopped him short.