Page 1 of Tempt Her

CHAPTERONE

Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve by Taylor Swift

You know you’re in trouble when you wish your husband would die.

I hate him so much I don’t even mind if he’s killed. Like in one of those movies where the evil villain watches as everyone rejoices in his slow, agonizing death.

And I’m in the front row. Munching popcorn. Licking buttery salt off my fingertips before sucking down my last satisfying sip of Diet Coke while that fucker takes his last breath. Staring straight at my smiling face.

Bye-bye, Asshole.

Then I feel guilty. Then I feel like a horrible person and an awful wife this morning as I take three of his golf balls out of the freezer. I hide them in a bag of green peas toward the bottom of the drawer. The man doesn’t know how to boil water, much less dig past his pint of Butter Pecan to find one of the dozens of ways I fuck with his world while he ruins so many others.

Trick #1:If you freeze a golf ball, it increases its weight. It won’t travel as far as you hope across the manicured green.

I don’t know how many millions have been spent perfecting these expensive white balls, but I know the millions many men who play with them have.

And nothing fucks with a man almost as much as fucking with his golf game.

Still, I try not to let my heart become like the core of these balls. Because it’s all I feel sometimes—bitter cold.

Honestly, though? I don’t know who I hate more.

My husband, Senator Gentry Olan Evans III, South Carolina’s youngest and most ambitious vocal conservative ever to take office.

Or myself, his wife. Because that’s what they all call me... “the senator’s wife.”

The day I married Gentry, more than my name died. But I was too young, poor, and desperate to know better.

My maiden name feels like a lifetime ago—Stacey Noel James.

“Stacey” was a name my dad loved. He said it sounded happy, like a girl who always giggled.

“Noel” was from my mom. I was born on Christmas Eve at eleven fifty-eight at night. My mom said it was a sign and raised me like her gift.

And though my parents came from different worlds, where my mother was a very educated high school Chemistry teacher, and my dad was the high school’s head custodian, when they married, she proudly took his last name—“James.”

But now, if I’m not “the senator’s wife,” I’m “Mrs. Evans,” or my favorite... “Mrs. Gentry Evans.”

It makes me madder than a cat being baptized every time someone calls me that—like I don’t have a nameora brain.

I do.

I have a college education and a wicked enough imagination to have figured out this golf ball trick.

Actually, I know lots of tricks.

Men think they’re so smart. Some are. But most women aren’t dumb. We have the ultimate intelligence—survival.

Sneaking into the mudroom off our kitchen, I quietly unzip the front pouch of my husband’s red, white, and blue Terrida golf bag. The damn thing has a special place by the garage door he frequently exits, only to return hours, sometimes days, later.

Gentry always plays with nine Titleist balls. And hisgoodwife, me, I always sneak three out and put three frozen ones back in. He’ll have no idea by his tee time, but it will be a verybadgame.

Every day he does something mean to me, I do something mean back.

Today, he won’t let me see my dad.

It’s the worst he can do to me, and he relishes it. I wish I could do more to get back at Gentry because it’s not just one thing he does to me, this day or that.

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