The Alpha's Borrowed Wife

Chapter 5

Wren

We didn’t talk for the first hour.

He drove like he did everything else, without any waste in it, one hand low on the wheel, checking the mirror more often than a man ought to need to. I sat with my bag in my lap and my hands on top of the bag and watched the city give out into scrub and then into pines.

There was a gray sedan four cars back that had come off our street behind us.

I noticed it because I notice things. It is the only skill I have. Which is why I kicked myself for not noticing things about my husband. I cataloged it without meaning to, the same as I would a broken spine, and then I noticed Kaz had already seen it, because his eyes went to the mirror and came back and nothing in his face moved.

He didn’t mention it. So I didn’t either, and I could not have told you which of us that was for.

“Can I ask you something,” I said, once the city was well behind us.

“You can ask.”

“Do you still love her?”

His jaw moved. The road went by.

“I loved a woman I made up,” he said. “She looked like Mari. She had her voice.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“No,” he agreed, and left it there.

The light started going out of the sky about the time the road bent along the shoreline, and I could smell nothing at all, not salt, not pine, not rain, though the clouds ahead of us had gone the color of an old bruise.

***

The Wexford sat at the top of a private road behind a gate, low and long and lit like something out of a magazine, all glass and stone and money that did not need to introduce itself.

Kaz did not go to the gate.

He turned off a hundred yards short of it, onto a service track behind a screen of cedar, and parked in the dark beside a van and two dumpsters, and killed the engine.

Two men in kitchen whites came out through a steel door and stood there.

I had expected cash already out, doing the smiling and the reasoning a man in a work coat has to do to get a door opened for him.

He got out. He didn’t smile. He said one short sentence I couldn’t hear.

The older of the two looked at him. Then he looked at the ground beside Kaz’s boots and kept his eyes there, and the younger one had already turned to hold the door, and neither of them ever looked at his face again.

Deltas do that. I have watched them do it for Marisol’s uncle across a lawn full of people. Nobody on this earth does it for a man who fixes engines. When Kaz put the folded bills into the older man’s hand, the man took them like a coat somebody insists on hanging up for you. As an excuse. As a thing to be holding.

Nobody looked at me at all. Nobody ever does. There is nothing on me to look at.

“Come on,” Kaz said.

***

They took us through a corridor that smelled like bleach and onion, past laundry carts and a whiteboard with the week’s itinerary on it, and out a fire door into the grounds.

The north wing had its own garden. Lanterns in the grass, low hedges, a long lawn running down toward a stand of cypress, and past that the sound of water on rock. Somewhere behind the glass a piano was playing to nobody.

“Stay in the trees,” Kaz said. “Whatever happens, don’t step out onto the grass.”

Then, low, almost to himself, “They’re still blocked. Out here, with nobody within a mile of them. It isn’t caution anymore. It’s a habit.”

The first fat drops came down while we moved along the tree line, and I was glad of them, because rain makes noise and noise makes cover.

Then I stopped thinking about the rain at all.

Because there he was.

My husband was standing out on the lit grass with a glass in his hand, in the linen shirt I had never seen, sleeves pushed up, laughing with his head tipped back. He does not laugh like that at home. He has a version for the house that is gentler and quieter and takes up less room, and I had believed, all this time, that the quiet one was the true one and the rest was for work.

And she was under his arm.

Not beside him. Under it, tucked in under it with her hand flat on his chest, standing how you stand when there is no longer any question about whether you are allowed to.

My legs stopped taking instructions. I put a hand out and found a tree.

“Wren.” His voice was low and it was right at my ear. “Breathe out. You’re holding it.”

I breathed out.

He didn’t kiss her. Not then. That was the part I hadn’t braced for.

He put his empty glass out sideways without turning his head, and her hand was already there to take it, because of course it was. She reached up and folded his cuff back where it had come loose, twice, pressing the second fold flat with her thumb, and he stood there and let her and never stopped talking.

All the years we have been married, my husband has never once handed me anything without looking to see if I was there.

That was what did it. Not the shirt, not the arm, not the laugh. A glass held out to a hand that knew to be under it.

Then he took his phone out.

He did it one-handed, with her still folded in against him, and I watched his thumb move across the screen. I stood in the wet dark holding my own phone and waited for it, braced the same as you brace for a wave you have already watched coming.

It lit up.

Sweetheart. Room’s a shoebox and these people won’t shut up. Wish you were here. Eat something for me.

There was a heart after it … like always.

My thumb hovered over the screen. I don’t know what I thought I was going to type.

Marisol said something into his collar and he laughed, low, and she put her mouth against his jaw. Then her hand went down the front of his pants, unhurried, easy, no more thought in it than a woman reaching into her own bag for her keys.

He turned into it. He caught her mouth with his and got a handful of her breast through the linen, right there under the lanterns with the rain coming down and the piano playing to an empty room, because there was nobody at the Wexford for a mile in any direction who could see them.

Except there was.