The Alpha's Borrowed Wife

Chapter 3

Wren

It wasn’t one photograph. It was a folder of them.

The first was nothing. A table by a window, two glasses, Marisol laughing with her head tipped back, which she does when she has decided to be charming, and Adrien across from her with his sleeves rolled. Friends had lunch. She had told me about lunches. Keeping him company, she’d said, because I worked through mine.

The second was his hand on her back, low, under her jacket.

The third was the inside of a car at night, lit by a dashboard, and I knew the car before I knew the people in it, because there was a dent in the passenger door that I had put there myself backing out of the bindery lot the week we bought it. Adrien was in the driver’s seat. Marisol was not beside him. She was in his lap.

I put the phone down. I did it face-down, as he had, as if that could put it back.

“That was the week he was away,” I said. “He called me from the hotel every one of those nights. I could hear the ice machine in the hall.”

“That’s the yard behind the shop where I work.” Kaz didn’t reach for the phone. “It’s dark back there and it belongs to me, and he parked in it, and he called you from it while I stood twenty feet away. He kept his hand over her mouth the whole time he talked to you.”

The room went strange. The edges went soft and the middle went very clear, and in the middle was a coffee cup with a chip on the rim and a man’s wide flat hands, and I stared at those because they were the only things in it that had not moved.

“How did you get these?”

“I followed my wife.” He said it without any heat in it. “It isn’t hard. She thinks I’m slow.”

Everyone did. I had thought it myself, in a kinder word, at every dinner where he sat at the foot of the table and said nothing.

“Somebody would have known.” I heard how stupid it sounded on the way out of my mouth and I said it anyway. “Not me. I understand about me. But somebody. You cannot do this for months in this city without one person passing them in a hallway and catching it.”

“They block.”

I looked up.

“Blockers,” he said. “Not the drugstore thing. The good kind, that you have to know somebody to get hold of. They have been on them since the start.” He set it down where I could see it. “That is the part I want you to hold, Wren. Nobody buys those by accident. You do not fall into bed with your best friend’s husband and then think to go and source a blocker afterward. They arranged it before either of them ever touched the other.”

Something cold went down the back of my neck and kept going.

“Then how did you catch it?”

“She missed a spot.” He turned his cup a half circle on the wood without drinking from it. “Under the jaw, behind the ear. Faint enough that I carried it around for a day and a half telling myself I was wrong. When I asked her about it, she said the two of them had taken a client to dinner.”

“And?”

“And if it had been dinner,” he said, “she would not have needed to cover herself at all.”

He had been coming home to me wearing it. That is the thing that got in under my ribs and lay down there. Not the car and not the lap. My husband stopping somewhere on the road back so that nothing about his day could be read off his skin, and then coming through our door and taking my face in both hands.

He never needed it for me. I have not smelled one thing in my life, not the coffee going cold at my elbow, not the perfume Marisol has worn since we were girls, not my own husband. It is the first line on my registry paper, above the word.

He was careful for months. Careful about it in the manner of a man protecting a thing that could ruin him. Just never once careful about me.

“You said six months.”

“I said at least.”

“How long?”

“Eight.”

I nodded, as if eight were a number I could hold in my hands.

Eight months ago was our anniversary. He had taken me back to the restaurant where he proposed and ordered for both of us and kept my fingers in his the whole meal, and Mari had called during dessert to say she was so sorry, she’d forgotten, could we do drinks that weekend, the three of us.

“Why bring it to me?” It came out hoarse. “You could have gone to her. You could have taken it to him. You didn’t have to sit a woman you barely know down in a coffee shop and take her apart.”

He was quiet for a moment, and in the quiet I noticed the girl behind the counter had found a reason to be at the far end of it.

“Because they’re going away tomorrow,” he said. “Together. And because I intend to be there for it, and I thought you might want to be.”

“He isn’t going anywhere.”

“He’ll tell you tonight. He’ll come in with flowers, because he always does, and he’ll say there’s a client up the coast. The rest of the week. He’ll say he’s sorry. He’ll say he’ll call every night.” He listed it like a parts order. “Mari told me before I left that she’s going to her mother’s. Her mother rang me an hour later to ask when we were coming to dinner.”

I put my hand over my mouth. I couldn’t have said why. To keep it in, or to keep the room from seeing what my face was doing.

“There’s a lodge on the north shore called the Wexford,” he said. “Private. He’s taken the whole north wing, and he’s taken it to the end of the week.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it’s on her phone, and she leaves her phone on the kitchen table, because she has never once thought I would look.” He let that sit. “Come with me tomorrow evening. If I’m wrong, you’ll know I’m wrong, and you can tell her I’m a jealous man with a bad job, and she’ll believe you. If I’m right, you’ll know that too.”

I did not say yes. I am almost certain of that. But he stood, and put money on the table for a coffee I hadn’t drunk and one he hadn’t ordered to drink, and told me he would come for me the next evening, and I found that I had nodded.

The girl at the counter watched him go with both palms pressed to the wood, as if it were all that was keeping her upright.

***

I sat in the lot behind the coffee shop for a long time with my hands on the wheel and the engine off.

I took out my phone and read the last thing he had sent me. Thinking about you. Eat something. There was a heart after it. There always was.

So I decided, sitting there. Kaz Rhodes was a man who had married above himself and knew it. Every dinner, every eye-roll, every my husband, he’s in engines. Adrien was a Beta of House Sable with a future people talked about in rooms Kaz would never be let into, and jealousy did ugly things to a man. It made him follow his wife. It put him out in the dark with a phone in his hand, finding whatever he needed to find. A hand on a back at lunch. A car that might have been a hundred cars. A woman in a man’s lap who could have been anyone, in a photograph that proved nothing at all, taken by someone with every reason in the world to want my husband ruined.

That held. I made it hold. I drove home gripping it with everything I had.

***

Adrien came home with peonies. He kept the florist on our street in business.

He is beautiful. That is not a small thing and it is not beside the point. Tawny hair he keeps exactly long enough to push back off his forehead, a jaw somebody drew on purpose, and a dimple on the left side that he does not have so much as deploy. He has never stood in a line at a bar in his life. Strangers hold doors for him and then wonder why they bothered.

That was the thing about him, the thing the girls at the bindery sighed over and Marisol had once said she would kill for. He set them on the counter, took my chin, and tipped my face up, and he kissed me like a man with nowhere to be. I made myself go still under it and hunt for the seam. Some hitch. Some half-second where he had to remember who he was kissing.

There was no seam. There was coffee and mint and my husband, the same as he had always been.

There you go, I thought. There’s your proof. Now go to bed.

He asked about my day while he hung his jacket on the hook by the door, and he wanted to know about the ledger by name, because he listened, he had always listened, and I told him the spine was worse than I’d thought and watched him the whole time as if I had any way of reading him.

“You’re quiet,” he said.

“Long day.”

“Then I hate to do this to you.” He tucked my hair behind my ear. “Sweetheart, there’s a client up the coast. I have to go tomorrow, and it’s the rest of the week, and I can’t get out of it. I’m sorry. I’ll call you every night.”

Word for word. In the order a stranger had listed it to me that afternoon, like parts.