The Alpha's Borrowed Wife

Chapter 6

Wren

A hand closed around my arm above the elbow.

“Wren. We’re going.”

I didn’t move. I want to be able to say that I turned away, that some part of me had the sense to spare itself, but I stood in the trees in the rain and watched until he took me by both shoulders and put himself between me and the grass.

He didn’t say anything else. He walked me back along the tree line with one hand at my back, and when my foot went out from under me on the wet slope he had me up again before I understood I was falling.

The fire door is gone. So is the corridor with the itinerary on the wall, and the two men in kitchen whites, and the rain on the roof of the car, and I went through every bit of it.

What is left is my own hands in my lap. They were shaking, and I watched them do it as though they belonged to a woman sitting beside me.

***

“Take me home,” I said, once we were off the private road.

“No.”

“I want to go home.”

“The coast road’s under water two miles south. It went while we were up there.” He put the wipers on the fastest setting and they still couldn’t keep up. “Nobody’s driving anywhere tonight.”

So he turned the car around, went back up through the gate this time, and parked in the residents’ lot on the south side of the Wexford.

I looked at the building. Then at him.

“You have a room.”

“Yes.”

“You booked a room here.”

“I booked it before I ever called your work.” He said it without one ounce of apology. “I came up here to be here for all of it. I wasn’t leaving it to chance.”

Before he called my work, I had been a woman with a husband.

“You knew,” I said. “Before you ever sat down across from me, you knew.”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you make me watch it?”

He turned the engine off. The rain took over the sound of everything.

“Because you would not have believed me,” he said. “Not tonight, not next week, not ever. You’d have gone on believing him until he decided to stop, and he was never going to decide to stop, and one day you’d have been forty and still saying he loves me, he’s good to me. I’ve seen it. I watched my father do it to my mother my whole childhood.”

It was the most he had said to me all at once, and I was in no condition to hear it. My insides felt numb. I was confused. And damn it … I was hurt.

***

The room was on the ground floor at the quiet end, and it was warm, and it was too nice for the kind of night I was having.

I lowered myself onto the floor with my back against the end of the bed, because the chairs looked like they cost more than my car and I was soaked through to the skin.

He didn’t tell me to get up. He crossed the room and put the heat on and came back and dropped a towel over my shoulders, and then he lowered himself down beside me, a body’s width away, forearms on his knees.

Then he waited.

Nobody waits. Everybody I have ever cried in front of starts talking inside four seconds, because the crying is uncomfortable for them and the talking makes it stop. He simply sat there and let it be uncomfortable.

It came out of me sideways. No wailing. Just water running out of my eyes and down my face while my chest did something that had nothing to do with crying and would not stop.

“I made him coffee this morning,” I said. “I ground the beans. He likes them ground fresh.”

He didn’t answer that. There was no answer to it.

“What is it about me?”

“Nothing.”

“There is. He knew about me before … so what changed? There has to be a reason, so give me the reason, because I cannot—”

“Nothing is wrong with you.” Flat. Certain. Not kind, exactly. “That’s the part you won’t be able to stand. If there were something, you could fix it. There isn’t, so you can’t, so you’re going to have to live with the fact that he did it anyway.”

I put my forehead down on my knees and cried properly then, and he let me, and he did not once tell me it was going to be all right.

The towel slipped and he pulled it back up over my shoulder without looking at me.

Some while after that I was leaning on him, and his arm was around me, and I was too far gone to be embarrassed about it.

He smelled like rain and clean cotton and cold iron.

That was the thing. I smelled him.

My whole life and I had never smelled one single thing. Not my own kitchen. Not the man I married. I sat on the carpet of a stranger’s hotel room and smelled rain and iron and thought nothing of it, because grief takes up every room in a person and leaves none for wondering.

I fell asleep like that.