The Alpha's Borrowed Wife

Chapter 8

Us.

The word went off in that room like a dropped glass.

“You don’t mean it,” I said.

“I never say things I don’t mean. It’s the only thing about me anybody has ever liked.”

Was that a joke? With him, I honestly couldn’t tell. I got up out of the chair, because I couldn’t sit under it. I went to the window and looked out at wet gravel and a stand of dripping pine. My heart was slamming hard enough to taste. Okay. Think, Wren.

“How would he even find out?” My voice came out strange. “We’d have to tell him. And the second we tell him, he gets to make it about me. He gets to stand up in front of every person we know and say look, look what she did. Then it stops being his affair and starts being ours. He is very, very good at that.”

“Then we don’t tell him.”

“Then what’s the point of it?”

“We let him find it.” He hadn’t moved from the table. “Not today. Today he’d fold it into his own story before the week was out. Then he’d come home and forgive you in front of witnesses. We wait. We let it get long enough that it can’t be explained. And then we choose the room he learns it in.”

I turned around. He was watching me the way a man watches a road. “You’ve thought about this,” I said.

“I’ve thought about very little else.”

“Since when?”

Nothing. That flat nothing he did instead of lying.

“What do you get?” I asked. “Out of this. What do you want out of it?”

“The same as you.”

He answered that too fast. Everything else that morning had come out of him after a pause you could have parked a car in. That came out with no space in front of it at all. I put it away somewhere behind my teeth. What it was for I couldn’t say… only that I was going to need it.

I turned back to the glass. “I’ve never been with anybody but him.” I said it to the window. I couldn’t say it to his face. “I was twenty-three. There wasn’t anybody before him, because there was nobody who was going to. And there hasn’t been anybody since, because why would there be. That’s it. That’s the whole list. One man, and he’s been inside my best friend since before our anniversary.”

The back of my neck had gone hot. I could not believe I’d told him that. “So if you were picturing somebody who knows how any of this is done,” I said, “that isn’t going to be me.”

I heard the chair move. I heard him cross the floor without hurrying and stop behind me. He was near enough that I could feel the warmth of him at my back, and not one inch nearer than that.

“Wren.”

“Don’t be kind. If you’re kind I’ll cry again, and I’ve had enough of that.”

“Then look at me.”

I turned. He was close. Up close his eyes weren’t gray at all. There was something under the gray, warmer, and moving. I decided it was the rain light. What else could it be?

“You can go home,” he said. “I’ll put you in the car right now and drive you and never mention any of this. Nothing happens to you if you say the word. You need to know that before you decide anything. If you don’t know it, then whatever you decide isn’t yours.”

I’d spent years getting handled and managed. I’d been told what had already been decided, in the softest voice in the world, by a husband who bought flowers. And this man had put the whole thing in my hands and taken his own off it. He was standing there with them empty at his sides, waiting on me.

Did I want to go home? No. God help me… no. “I’m not going home,” I said.

“Say the rest of it.”

“I want you to.” My voice cracked straight down the middle, and I let it. “And I don’t want either of us being careful about it.”

He took my face in both hands and kissed me.

It was not gentle. Nothing about it was. A whole marriage of being kissed like a thing that might break. And he came down on my mouth like a man who’d stood still a great while… like he’d finally run out of reasons for it. I made a sound against his lips that I didn’t recognize. I wanted him so badly it hurt.

My hands went under his shirt and dragged it up and off him. There were the eleven, right under my palms, and I couldn’t have cared less about one of them.

He lifted me. One arm under me, and I was off the floor. I got my legs around his waist because there was nowhere else for them to go. He carried me across that floor as though I weighed nothing. Which, for the record, I do not.

The bed came up under my back. He came down over me.

His mouth went to my throat and found a spot under my jaw I didn’t know was there. My whole body arched off the mattress. I heard myself make a noise that would have embarrassed me on any other morning of my life.

“There,” he said against my skin. He sounded pleased with himself.

“Don’t look so smug.”

“I’m not looking at all.”

His hand went up under the knit top. It was a mechanic’s hand, calloused and wide. When it closed over my breast and his thumb dragged across my n****e, I stopped being able to think in words. He pulled the top off over my head and threw it somewhere.

And then he stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped, with his mouth an inch off my collarbone and both hands still on me. He’d gone rigid all through, the way you go when you hear a floorboard behind you in an empty house. Had I done something wrong already? “Kaz.”

He breathed in. He did it again, slower, with his face against the hollow of my throat, and I felt his whole body change around me.

“What is it?”

He lifted his head. His eyes had gone from gray to something with light behind it. His voice, when it came, wasn’t the voice he’d been using.

“What is that?” he said.