Page 28 of Call Off the Dark

She tugged him toward a low antique dresser against the wall. She sat on the edge of the dresser and spread her legs. “Let the patrons hear what they’re missing.”

“God, Helen.”

Tyler was inside her in one hard thrust that sent the antique dresser rattling against the paper-thin wall. After that, he tried to be quiet, but she kept pulling him into her deeper, telling him how she wanted it, telling him how good he was. The more she talked to him, the more powerless he became. He was no longer trying to be quiet, and the dresser hit the wall more than once.

Then, abruptly, Tyler stopped and rested his head on Helen’s shoulder. “I just almost came,” he said, holding still inside her. He was going to wait for her, but she didn’t want him to wait. He was completely at her mercy, and that was a different kind of turn-on.

“Yes, come for me,” she said. “Right now, Tyler.”

She didn’t have to tell him again. She felt him let go on her command, and it filled her with a powerful kind of satisfaction.

She wanted to be the only woman who could ever haunt this man.

“Do you want to get tea with the others?”

Tyler chuckled. “God no.”

They were lying in a tangle of sheets on the bed. Sex on the dresser had been followed with an encore on the bed, slightly less feverish, but still emotionally charged. And now Helen lazily ran her fingertips through Tyler’s soft hair. The summer sun on their weekend hikes and beach days had bleached some of his sandy strands to pure blond. He closed his eyes and sighed, and she thought of the Persian cat she’d had as a little girl and how if she stilled her hand for even a moment, it would push its head against her palm. She stopped moving her hand, and Tyler angled his head toward her ever so slightly. More, please. She smiled to herself and trailed her fingers across his head and down his neck.

After a bit, his drowsy voice said, “Thank you, Helen.”

He was already drifting to sleep as she said, “I got you, baby. I promise it’s going to be okay.”

She looked toward the window and could see through a gap behind the ruffled curtains into the garden where several angel statues were situated in a circle. They were weathered and ancient. For a moment, she considered how many women—from the glowing ones to the broken ones—had sat here and gazed out at those very same angels through the years. The prostitutes. The wife of the lumber baron. New brides. Hotel patrons like her.

Those angels had been there long before she was born, observing it all, and she wondered if they’d still be there after she was gone.

Chapter Twelve

Present day

Wade and Isaac held eye contact for an uncomfortable length of time, unblinking and unmoving, and Helen knew she was witnessing the unspooling of something bigger than this moment. If she had been outside looking up at the night sky, she might have seen a ripple in the cosmos.

Isaac spoke first. “That’s how you greet your own brother?”

He stepped forward and wrapped Wade in a bear hug. Wade’s hands didn’t quite make their way around Isaac to hug him back. Instead, they got stuck in the air, rigid and uncertain, as he looked at Helen over Isaac’s shoulder.

Wade asked softly, “Are you okay?”

She nodded. Her eyes returned to the knife she’d left on the counter.

Isaac stepped back from Wade but continued to hold him at arm’s length, the way you would hold a friend—Let me look at you—but Helen felt there might be an implicit threat in the way Isaac squeezed Wade’s arms.

“Sorry, Wade,” Isaac said. “I think I startled your wife when I showed up.”

“I imagine you did,” Wade said, in a tone so neutral that it couldn’t actually be neutral.

Isaac looked at her, his expression apologetic now. Wade never took his eyes off Isaac.

Isaac let go of Wade’s arms. “I would have called, but you have no phone.”

Wade studied Isaac for a long moment before asking, “What’s going on?” To Helen, the question sounded like a subtle accusation.

Isaac must have heard it too, because his answer held a note of sadness. “I just wanted to see you again. I’ll have dinner, then be on my way.”

Isaac’s gaze lowered to the floor, and suddenly Helen saw him differently. She’d been quick to perceive his unexpected arrival as a threat, but now she clearly saw the vulnerability in his face. Wade was not denying Isaac’s claim to kinship, and whatever brotherly troubles there had been in the past, did it matter? Isaac was family, and frayed family threads were worth stitching back together. Yes, he’d startled her when he’d arrived, but she was the one who’d mistakenly invited him inside her house and then pulled a knife on him—from his perspective, for no reason. Perhaps it wasn’t that Isaac was being threatening so much as it was that she and Wade were being inhospitable. She wanted him to stay.

Helen watched Wade wrestle with some kind of decision. After a few stiff moments, he nodded and hung the truck keys on a hook above the entry bench. His hands shook slightly as he did so, and she felt a burst of tenderness. He wasn’t even very good at communicating with her, so of course he had to be nervous about seeing his estranged brother.