WHEN WERE MARRIED - BOOK ONE - THE LONG FALL

FOUR LITTLE WORDS

CONTENTS

1 Four Little Words 1

2. Breaking Up Is Hard to Do - 88

3. 2nd Thoughts and First Steps 123

4. There's A Reason Why Love Is A

Four Letter Word 146

5. Lew Strikes Back – Or The Other Side Now 177

6. No Happy Endings 233

7. The Angel of Death 275

8. Nice Guy – We All Know How

That Story Ends. 304

9. Bonne Chance 361

10. Fools Rush In 391

11.Tho' Hell Bar The Door 444

12. Riding The Tiger 501

13. Friends In Low Places 531

14. If Tomorrow Never Comes 585

15. Stranger In A Strange Land 633

When We Were Married

VOLUME ONE: THE LONG FALL

AUTHOR'S NOTE: There is a State Attorney's Office headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as a Public Defender's Office. There is a Jacksonville, and a St. Augustine and Matanzas. There are hard working, honest and dedicated prosecutors and similar public defenders facing them. There is a Jacksonville Sheriff's Office known to most as The Cop Shop. Everything, and everyone, else in this long novel is a work of fiction. Any similarities between any characters, on either side of the law, and real people are strictly coincidental and unintended.

CHAPTER ONE – FOUR LITTLE WORDS

April , 2005

Four words destroyed my marriage and my life. And they're not the four words you're probably thinking about.

Not "we have to talk," or "baby, I've met somebody" or "our sex life sucks" or even "You're not giving me enough." Actually that last is five words, but hey, who's counting.

It was a lot stranger, and simpler than that. I had come into our bedroom on a Tuesday night after finishing a "law and order" re-run on cable and was getting ready to take a shower. I tend to watch a lot of cop and lawyer shows. Coals to Newcastle, really.

I should have gotten enough of that stuff in my day job as an Assistant State Attorney in the Duval County State Attorney's Office. To northerners, that's the same as the District Attorney's Office.. We are the people who prosecute bad guys and put them away when we can. Anyway, I like those kinds of cop shows. Even after 10 years on the job, I still like what I do.

Debbie was in bed, lying back on a scrunched up pillow, looking through some travel magazine. She usually brings back a ton of student papers to grade from UNF where she's an associate professor in the College of Business. They generally take a couple to three hours to finish. But she's conscientious and it was 11 p.m. and she was relaxing.

I enjoyed the view. Even though we had been married nearly 18 years, I still enjoyed looking at her. A tall blonde, hair cut fashionably movie star style with Jennifer Anniston bangs, she looked 10 years younger than her true age of 39. The robe she wore was as sexy as a potato sack, but I could still see the curve of her Double D-cup breasts underneath it. I could also envision her long legs.