Chapter 7
7
HELENA
Y esterday was my last day as a virgin. That was why I was humming to myself as I shuffled around Isaac’s kitchen, preparing dinner.
He was at work, leaving me in this big house alone. I’d even gotten bored enough that I pulled out my laptop and did some work on my portfolio. I didn’t have the Wi-Fi password, and cell service up here was pretty much non-existent, so I couldn’t use my phone as a hotspot. But that was a good thing. I’d gotten work done that I normally would have put off, thanks to not having the distraction of social media and texts from friends.
By the time I heard the subtle hum of an engine, followed by a car door shutting, the table was set, and the dinner of chicken and rice was on the table. Isaac had given me a quick tour around his kitchen before leaving that morning, and after a quick inventory of his groceries, I told him I’d have dinner ready when he got home from work.
This was a life I could get used to.
I turned toward the stairs to the basement as I waited for signs that my fiancé was climbing the steps. Nothing but silence, though.
I was just thinking maybe I should have put on something sexier when three loud knocks made me jump. They weren’t the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs. Come to think of it, the car sounds outside had been too close to have been around back, where he parked.
Someone was here.
Oh crap, this wasn’t my house. What was I supposed to do? Should I answer the door? What if it was one of his friends or a neighbor? How did I explain who I was and why I was in his house when he was at work?
Moving as quietly as I could, I headed to the front door, looking for a peephole as I went. No luck there. The only choice I had was to peek through the open blinds on the big windows and hope whoever it was didn’t see me peering out.
When I finally got to the window, I gasped at what I saw. It wasn’t a neighbor or a friend stopping by to say hi. It wasn’t Isaac deciding to come through the front door instead of the basement. No, this was a very familiar face. A face I’d looked at all my life. It was the face of my sister.
The reality of the past two weeks came crashing down on me. The impulsive decision to take my sister’s place. Manipulating her emails so she wasn’t dumping Isaac like she thought. The knowledge that I’d not only betrayed Daphne but also the man who owned the very house I stood in right now. A man who thought he was marrying my sister, not me.
I weighed my options. I could just ignore the visitor on the front porch, pretending I wasn’t home. But then what? Would she wait around until Isaac pulled into the driveway? Probably. She’d obviously figured out what I was doing and was here for answers, so hiding would do no good. She knew I was in here.
Taking a deep breath, I walked over to the door, unlocked it, and yanked it open. But instead of the anger, or at the very least confusion, I’d expected on her face, I saw something else. A big smile. She was happy to see me.
But then her smile fell. “You don’t want me here. I’m interrupting your alone time. I’m sorry. I can go back home. I just thought you might want some company. I was thinking of you all alone up here. I can tell from your face that you’re fine being alone. I’ll just go.”
I tilted my head, frowning at her. “You came up here to spend the week with me?”
Daphne nodded. “I’d booked vacation time for this week anyway with plans to resign if everything went well. Can I come in, or do you want me to go?”
I took the opportunity to look around the front yard. A black sedan that was not my sister’s sat in the driveway. I assumed that was a rental car. She’d flown here, rented a car, and taken the drive from the airport up to the mountains.
I just had one question. “How did you know the address?”
She yanked her phone out of her pocket and held it up. “I found you in the app.”
We had an app where we could see each other’s location at all times. I hadn’t thought much about it, but it wasn’t worth worrying about because I was supposed to be up here in the mountains, anyway. I had no clue that she would use it to navigate her way to this very spot—an address Isaac had shared with her, but the information had gone to that hidden folder, so only I had seen it.
“You know what?” I asked. “Why don’t we go out?”
Yes, we should go out. We’d go to dinner and talk. Anything to get her away from here.
But just as my gaze had scanned the front yard behind her, her attention was on what was going on behind me. “That’s a whole lot of food for one person.”
I turned and followed her gaze to the table where the place settings and bowls full of food now sat. I was busted. There was no point in lying.
“Come on in,” I said, suddenly feeling sick to my stomach.
Any minute now, Isaac would be pulling into that driveway. He’d no doubt wonder where the black sedan with rental tags had come from.
“It smells delicious,” Daphne said. “Did you know I was coming or…?”
She rolled her suitcase through the front door and stopped in the center of the living room, turning to face me. I closed the door and turned, still feeling chilled to the bone, even though I’d closed off the cold weather outside. This chill had nothing to do with the environment around me.
I was about to get every bit of the punishment I deserved.
“This isn’t a rental cabin,” I said.
Daphne looked around, frown taking over her face. “Whose cabin is it?”
I gestured toward the worn sofa Isaac had set up in front of the much smaller TV than the one he had downstairs. “Let’s have a seat.”
My sister didn’t budge. “Whose cabin is it?” she repeated, this time speaking much slower.
The anger in her voice made it clear she knew exactly whose cabin it was. She was mad already, and I hadn’t even fully confessed.
“I got a bit of a crush on the guy you were thinking about marrying,” I blurted.
“My fiancé?” she asked.
I opened my mouth, planning to remind her she’d backed out of that deal, so he technically wasn’t her fiancé anymore, but that was a cop-out. Isaac thought he was marrying the woman he’d been communicating with for six weeks. I was the only one who knew otherwise—until now, anyway.
“I started falling for him,” I said. “From the first time I saw his picture. I was happy for you, but jealous at the same time. He was so handsome and good to you, and a genuinely amazing person, and the chance to live up here in the mountains…well, that’s the dream. So I did something really stupid.”
It might be stupid, but I didn’t regret it, even now. Even though it was all crashing down on me, I didn’t regret a second of it. If all I ever had was that one beautiful day with the man of my dreams, then I’d find some way to live with that, but I’d never regret what I did. I’d only regret hurting two genuinely good people.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Daphne asked.
I blinked in surprise. My sister never cussed. Ever. Neither did I. I’d dropped more F-bombs yesterday than I had in my entire life, combined. If she was speaking like that, she was truly mad.
“Did you come all the way up here and pose as me after I dumped him?”
I shook my head, but the head shake wasn’t to deny things as she might have hoped. Instead, I said, “You never dumped him at all. I intercepted the email. He never got it. As far as he knows, he just spent the night with Daphne.”
She stared at me, her expression not changing. As the silence stretched between us, I found myself longing for her to do anything, even smack me across the face.
The silence was killing me, but I deserved it. I deserved to be punished.
“Why?” she asked.
That question hurt more than anything. There was pain in the word. She was hurt.
“Because I was falling in love with him,” I said. “I am in love with him.”
“You are?”
The male voice that filled the cabin had me practically jumping out of my skin. Daphne flipped around just in time for Isaac to emerge at the top of the stairs, looking from her to me with very obvious confusion.
“I am,” I said. “But I’m not Daphne.”
“I’m Daphne,” my sister said. “And you must be the guy I was chatting with for a month.”
He returned his gaze to me. An explanation. That was exactly what he wanted, and I wished I had a better one, but right now what was most important was that I spit out the truth.
“What’s going on?”
Isaac spoke directly to me, disregarding my sister completely. Absurd as this whole moment was, this was what I’d waited for my whole life—for someone to see me when my sister was standing beside me. That never, ever happened.
“I’m Helena, Daphne’s little sister.”
“She’s been pretending to be me,” Daphne said. “I changed my mind about marrying you. I sent you an email, but she intercepted it.”
“I decided to step in for her when she backed out,” I said.
His features darkened at my words, and I mentally backtracked. What had I just said? Oh, yeah. Basically, I made it sound like I was just jumping in for a free trip to North Carolina or something. Far from it. I had to rush to correct that.
“I had a huge crush on you from the first time I saw your picture,” I said. “I guess you could say I started falling in love with you. I’d resigned myself to being your sister-in-law, but when Daphne backed out?—”
“Hold up a minute,” Daphne interrupted. “I want to make it clear I wasn’t flaking out on something. Marriage is a big step, and I went into it for the wrong reasons. I’d been dumped. I was hurt. I was thinking more about getting back at my ex than what my actual future was. When I really started thinking it through…well, it was just a bad idea.”
“But I came into it for all the right reasons,” I said, looking at my sister. “I want this. I want to live here in Seduction Summit. I want to work from here and be a mom and a wife. But mostly, I want to be with this man.” I shifted to look at Isaac. “I want to be with you.”
I held my breath. This could be it. He could be so furious, he’d tell me he’d never forgive me. And could I blame him? I had deceived him, after all.
But instead, his features softened. “I feel exactly the same. And you’re going to be a great mom.”
“And a great wife,” I said.
“So that’s it?” Until Daphne spoke, I’d almost forgotten she was standing there. But yeah, she had every right to still be mad. “You’re just going to marry this guy and move here. I can’t even see you without hopping on a plane?”
Was she for real? “You were going to do the very same thing just two weeks ago.”
“Yeah, but that’s different,” she said. “I was going to be here, and you’re leaving me in Philadelphia.”
“Everyone loves you there,” I said. “And I know our parents would be far more hurt over you moving away.”
Her expression changed then, and I knew this was the first she was hearing of the reality of the situation. A reality I’d lived with my whole life.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Our parents love you as much as they do me.”
“Maybe, but you can’t deny there’s a little favoritism.”
“Because I’m the oldest,” she said. “Come back and we’ll sit down with them and discuss it.”
I shook my head. “This is my home. This is my family. This is my future.”
“But you’re going to stay for dinner, right?” Isaac asked Daphne. “And we have a guest bedroom, so you’re free to hang out as long as you want.”
We? The fact that he was including me warmed me from the inside out. This was our house. We had a guest bedroom where visitors could stay.
My sister continued to stare at me for a long second before shifting to Isaac. Finally, a smile spread over her face.
“Yes,” she said. “Dinner sounds great. If you have enough, that is.”
I smiled. “Of course.”
I hadn’t been sure how much Isaac ate, so I’d made enough to feed a small army. But the idea of sitting at the table with my fiancé and my sister sounded better than anything I could imagine. It was exactly the family setting I’d always craved.
For the first time in my life, I felt like I really belonged somewhere. And it was all because I was brave enough to follow my heart.