The Alpha's Borrowed Wife

Wren “How long have you known?” I looked up from my cup. “Known what?” “About your husband and my wife.” I sat there staring at him, the coffee halfway to my mouth. He was eyeing me, trying to read me as if I was hiding something. “What did you say?” “I asked how long you’ve known your husband has been sleeping with my wife.” He did not soften one syllable of it the second time. His eyes bore into mine and then he sighed. “And now I have my answer.” The cup was still in the air. I could see my own arm holding it up, the sleeve of my cardigan pushed back, the chip on the rim I had turned away from me, and no idea at all how long it had been sitting there. Setting it down took some doing. My hand had gone, and I did not want him watching me try. He noticed. He didn’t say so. His own cup sat at his elbow, black, untouched, and I understood that he had not ordered it to drink it. He was watching my face. Only my face, and closely, how you watch a road sign in fog. There is nothing else on me to look at and he had known that before he sat down. No wolf underneath for anybody to find, no scent on the skin to give anything away, which leaves a man with a nose exactly two guesses when he walks up on a woman like me. Human, or Hollow. He would have settled that in the doorway. Which meant he had come in here already knowing that whatever he got out of me, he was going to have to take it off my face the same as a human would. When he’d called the bindery that morning and asked if I had an hour, I had assumed it was about Marisol’s birthday. It was the kind of favor a husband asked a best friend. I’d even written a list in the car, her sizes and the perfume she’d been wanting, and it was folded in my bag on the floor between his boots and mine. Kaz Rhodes was not someone who joked. I had met him only a few times since the wedding, and I could have counted the words he’d said to me on my fingers. He came to things late and left them early. He is a big man. Tall enough that he ducks a little in doorways without appearing to know he does it, and put together through the shoulders and the forearms by hard labor rather than by anything with a membership fee. Black hair that he plainly cuts himself and does not cut often. A heavy brow, a hard jaw with a few days on it, a mouth that does very little, and gray eyes set deep enough that you have to go looking for them. Nothing on him is broken or bent or badly mended. Nothing on anybody is, so I thought nothing of it. He is not handsome in the sense my husband is handsome. Adrien was like a model you would photograph. Kaz is the sort you keep glancing back at without deciding to, and then feel odd about afterward. He wore the same dark work jacket to every one of those evenings, and Marisol rolled her eyes at it without fail. At their second anniversary dinner I had watched her introduce him to a room full of her family’s people as my husband, he’s in engines, in the tone you’d use for a stain you had given up on. I’d felt sorry for him that night. I did not feel sorry for him now. “Mr. Rhodes.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “If this is a joke, it isn’t funny.” “I’m not a funny man, Wren. Ask my wife.” He wasn’t. He looked exactly as he always did, like a man waiting on a bus, with his hands flat on the wood and his eyes on my face and nothing in them I could use. I couldn’t read him. I have never been able to read anybody, not the way the rest of them do it. Not once in my life have I walked into a room and known what was already sitting in it. So I learned to watch faces instead, and I got good at it, and his gave me nothing at all. “Adrien loves me,” I said. “I know.” His voice went quiet. “I thought the same thing about Mari.”