“I am not jealous.” I felt like I was in the middle of a temper tantrum. “I don’t have anything to be jealous about.”

He threw up his hands as if I’d just made his point. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“It’s just that you and I decided a decade ago how we were going to handle our church. And traveling with a woman was not on that list.”

“Well things change.”

With my eyebrows and my voice raised, I asked, “What changed?”

“I have a reputation already. It’s set. People know that I’m not caught up in any affairs, anything that’s improper. I’m just taking care of God’s business and I thought that’s what you signed up for, too.”

“What I signed up for first,” I held up my left hand and wiggled the five carat ring that now graced my finger, “was to be your wife. And as your wife, I feel all kinds of disrespected right now.”

“Well, you need to find a way to get over it because those people are expecting me, Reverend Jeremy Williams, to be in Atlanta to speak tomorrow.” He snatched his computer bag and moved toward the steps. “The ministers meeting is at noon, as it always is.”

His back was to me when I said, “And like I told you, I have plans.”

But Jeremy kept walking as if his word was the last word. When I heard his footsteps trotting up the stairs, all I could do was squeeze my hands into fists.

It had been a long time since I’d been this angry and the challenge was, when I got like this, there was no telling what I would do.

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

“You didn’t go to the meeting!”

My chest heaved, I was breathing so heavily as I paced the width of our bedroom.

“I can’t believe you didn’t go to the meeting.”

I squeezed my cell phone as if I were trying to break it with my bare hand. But better the cell phone than Jeremy’s neck, which was what I would’ve been breaking if he’d been standing in front of me. He had one more time to shout at me and I would click off this phone, right in the middle of his rant.

“Why didn’t you do what I told you to do?”

With those words, I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. Had Jeremy Williams really just asked me that? Was he truly speaking to me like I was Jasmine or Jayden?

“I’m talking to you, Ginger. Do you hear me?” Jeremy shouted.