Chapter Forty-Two
Helen ended up in the bedroom, pacing furiously. She wished she’d stormed away in the other direction, out the front door
instead of back here, even if it meant being outside with the wolves. Now she was marooned in the bedroom.
Or was she? She stopped pacing.
No, she wasn’t. Not if she didn’t want to be. She could march out to the kitchen and snatch the keys to Wade’s truck from
the hook by the door and drive herself into town. In fact, she could keep driving through the night until she arrived in the
city.
Seattle. It sounded like a foreign land now, a place where she no longer spoke the language. Maybe that wasn’t such a good
idea.
Helen looked down and sighed, and that’s when she saw that the bandage she’d wrapped around her shin was beginning to show
red. The cut was bleeding through again.
She went into the hallway, intending to clean up in the bathroom, but stopped short as Isaac exited the guest bedroom.
“Don’t be mad,” he said quietly.
“I’m not mad.” Her voice came out clipped.
He gave her a look that said he knew better. “You said you didn’t want to go anywhere with Wade.”
She looked away. Yes, she had said that, but Isaac had also known how badly she wanted to call her mother and how long it
had been since she’d been to town.
Isaac drew closer to her. “And honestly, the thought of the three of us going into town together, spending that time alone
in the truck . . .” He trailed off and gave her the pained expression of a remorseful man.
Helen wasn’t sure she believed him. His confession felt like lines from a stage play he’d rehearsed. “You didn’t seem to feel
so bad last night.”
“Neither did you.”
“You have no idea how I feel.”
Isaac took a step closer. “So tell me.”
The slight movement of air between them electrified her, and the angry feeling was replaced instantly with the desire to reach
for him. Instead, she stepped back and was met with the wall.
He closed in and put his hands on her waist. Helen could hear Wade turn on the faucet in the kitchen.
“Do you regret last night?” Isaac whispered.
Helen didn’t answer for a long time, until finally she shook her head no.
Isaac reached up and twisted a strand of her hair around his finger, twirling and twirling until it was tight. Then he tugged,
sending a spark of pain to her scalp, and she gasped a little. Then she stopped breathing altogether.
He smiled at her reaction, and she learned a thing or two about him in that moment.
Helen heard a kitchen chair scrape on the kitchen floor. She needed to end this exchange. She cleared her throat and said,
“I’m bleeding.”
Isaac’s smile deepened. “That’s okay, Helen. I don’t mind. Having your blood on me would turn me on.”
It took her a second to comprehend his misunderstanding. “Not that kind of bleeding,” Helen said, and she watched him blink slowly. “My shin.”
He looked down, and the self-satisfied smile on his face changed to an amused one. “Oh, I see,” he said. He looked up and
his eyes were dancing. “Either way.”
“Helen!” Wade shouted.
Helen shoved Isaac back and stepped away from the wall, expecting to see Wade at the end of the hall, but he wasn’t there.
His voice had carried from the kitchen.
Without looking at Isaac again, she hurried to the kitchen and found that Wade had unpacked the groceries from the bags but
left everything on the counter instead of putting things away.
Wade gestured at the food. “I don’t know what you want to make.”
Still a little breathless, she moved past him and began rummaging through the food, for once grateful to be making dinner,
grateful for the distraction.
“Your leg is bleeding,” Wade said.
“Oh, right. Um . . .” Helen didn’t want to go back into the hall again in case Isaac was still there.
“I’ll get something for it,” Wade said, and he left the room.
When he returned, he tended to the cut with a wet washcloth, then dried it with a second clean cloth.
As he carefully rebandaged it for her, Helen almost started to cry.
Seated between the two men, Helen used her fork to push the rice, beans, and pork around on her plate. It was the first decent
meal they’d had in days, but she had no appetite.
She turned to Isaac and asked, “How much longer do you think you’ll be staying with us?”
“I don’t know,” Isaac said, and Wade made a sound in his throat that was barely audible but in the silence of the house, they
could all hear it.
Isaac smiled softly at her. “However long you’ll have me.”
Have me. Helen felt the heat in her face and looked down at her food, afraid Wade would see it.
“But don’t worry, Helen,” Isaac said. “I promise you won’t have to cook for three much longer.”
Under the table, she felt a boot come to rest gently against her stocking foot. An inch farther and it would have crushed
her toes. She looked from one man to the other, but neither met her eyes as they ate their food. Whoever it was probably couldn’t
even feel her foot through the thick leather of their shoe.
She pulled her foot back, and as soon as she did, Isaac looked at her. He raised an eyebrow.
She put her fork down. Her meal was almost untouched, but she felt that if she ate another bite she might get sick.
“This is good, Helen,” Wade said as he swallowed around a bite.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
There were no drugs in Wade’s dinner tonight. If he was spinning deliberate lies about Isaac instead of experiencing true
delusions, the drugs wouldn’t help.
But even more so, there was no way Helen could have watched her husband eat a drugged dinner after she’d slept with his brother.