Marriage on Madison Avenue by Lauren Layne

Author:Lauren Layne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1

As far as man caves go, it’s a damn good one,” Clarke said approvingly, looking around the upstairs loft area of Oliver and Naomi’s apartment.

“I guess that’s a pretty good compliment from a guy whose entire house is a man cave,” Oliver said.

“Is it?” Scott asked curiously, taking a sip of beer and eyeing Clarke. “You know, I’ve never seen your place.”

“Me neither,” Oliver said. “I’ve only heard from Naomi who’s heard from Audrey that it’s basically man-heaven.”

“If you’re hoping I’ll be appalled at my oversight and invite you two over for tea, you’re going to be disappointed,” Clarke said cheerfully, settling onto the black leather sofa. “I know better than to invite an architect and contractor into my home.”

“What exactly is it that you think we’re going to say?” Oliver asked.

Clarke shrugged. “That the foundation’s shaky. The drywall’s shit. My floor’s crooked. That my ceiling doesn’t have the right support beams. I don’t know, something that will necessitate me moving out while it gets fixed.”

“You’d think you’d want to know all of that about your own house,” Scott pointed out.

“Nope.” Clarke sipped his beer. “Ignorance is bliss.”

“What if we promise not to utter anything other than ‘it’s nice’?” Oliver proposed, leaning back against the pool table and crossing his feet at the ankles.

Scott was already shaking his head. “I do not agree to that. If your ceiling’s about to cave, I’ll tell you. Which, by the way, is a compliment. It means I count you as a friend.”

“What if I weren’t a friend?” Clarke asked curiously. “You’d just let me be crushed by shoddy house construction?”

Scott grunted. “Let’s just say if I’d walked into Brayden Hayes’s house when he was still alive and saw a wall about to fall on him, I wouldn’t have said a single word. Assuming, of course, Claire wasn’t in the house when it came crashing down around the bastard.”

Oliver reached out and clinked the neck of his beer bottle against Scott’s. “I’ve had some fantasies in a similar vein.”

Same, Clarke thought. Hatred for a dead man was a strange thing to form a friendship on, but it had formed one all the same. Though, technically, Oliver and Scott had been friends since architecture school, long before Clarke had met either of them. But in the past year, their friendship had been cemented even further as Oliver had moved in with Brayden’s ex-mistress and Scott had married the man’s widow.

Clarke had joined the crew at first on the periphery, as Audrey’s occasional tagalong, but over time, he’d become friends with Oliver and Scott in his own right. He and Oliver had run loosely in the same circle for years. In fact, on paper, he and Oliver had plenty in common. Born and raised on the Upper East Side, fathers established business leaders. Had they not been sent to different prep schools, Clarke expected they’d have been friends long before now. As it was, though, it had taken Oliver falling in love with Naomi, and Naomi and Audrey becoming fast friends, to bring them together.

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