Still Waters by Tami Hoag

it was easy and habitual; it wasn't as though she were still in love with him or anything.
    She pulled her jeans on and sucked in a breath so she could close the button and zipper. She had the kind of figure that had regrettably gone out of fashion with poodle skirts—full breasts, well-rounded hips that had rounded a little more in the five years since her divorce. She was thirty-three and her metabolism was slowing down in direct proportion to the increase in her appetite for junk food. The extra weight added a fullness to her rectangular face that had the benefit of making her look younger than she was. A person had to peer closely to see the tiny lines of stress that had begun to fan out beside her eyes and around her kewpie-doll mouth.
    “So what's going on?” Rich asked, finally resigning himself to being something other than the center of attention for the moment.
    Dragging a brush through her hair, Jolynn glanced at his reflection in the mirror above her dresser. Thirty-nine, a native son of Still Creek, he was handsome and he still radiated the arrogance he had cultivated as a high school jock—the high point of his life to date. He sat back in her bed as if he owned it, his straw-colored hair tousled, cigarette dangling beneath his mustache, one hand scratching absently through the thicket of rusty-gold curls on his chest. Elizabeth said he looked a little like Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid, only older and debauched. It was an apt description. There was a trace of meanness about his eyes and weakness in the line of his mouth that a person didn't see until the initial dazzle of golden good looks had worn off. He had told her he was going to run for the state representative's seat this fall. Jolynn wondered how many people would catch on to him before they cast their ballots.
    Hate surged through her, as it always did when she looked at Rich and saw him for what he really was—the bastard who'd dumped her for a more advantageous marriage, then had the gall to come around expecting her to fall at his feet . . . which she did, again and again.
    “Someone killed your dear old daddy-in-law tonight,” she said bluntly, reaching for a spray bottle of Charlie on the cluttered dresser top. She spritzed herself generously, hoping to camouflage the scent of sex that lingered on her. Her eyes never left the mirror.
    “No,” Rich murmured, his face registering shock, but not much in the way of remorse. He set his cigarette aside in the overflowing ashtray on the nightstand, but didn't move from the bed. “Killed him? Huh. I'll be a son of a bitch.”
    “Yeah, you are. I'd stay to console you,” Jo said dryly, grabbing her purse off the dresser, “but I've got a job to do.”
    “I'd think your new boss would want to take this one,” he said. “She's the hotshot headliner from Atlanta, right? I'd think she'd be right out there to grab all the glory herself.”
    Jo gave him the same look she gave meat that had overstayed its welcome in her refrigerator. “All that thinking could tax your brain, Rich. I don't want you to hurt yourself, but if you'd think again, you might figure out that nobody working on the
Clarion
is going to get any glory unless we're hit and killed by a news van from Minneapolis.”
    “Then why go?” he said, holding his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and taking a deep drag off it. The smoke he exhaled briefly wreathed his head in gray, then drifted up to add another layer of grime to the ceiling.
    Jolynn looked at him with utter disgust, shaking her head in disbelief at her own stupidity for staying tangled up with him. “You just don't get it, do you, Richard? Some of us don't have wealthy wives to mooch off. Some of us take pride in doing a job. I happen to be good at what I do.”
    “Yeah,” he sneered. “Too bad nobody gives a damn.”
    She flinched as if he'd struck her. He had always known just where to stick the barb to make it hurt the most; it was one of the few