Re: The woods
Wren wasn't surprised when the women turned mocking and pitying. When she'd been small, she'd wanted nothing more than to be a rich man's mistress (being a wife was never an option, even then), and she'd thought life would be perfect. Mistresses, her maman had taught her, had everything good that a man had to offer. As a little girl, she'd thought that included their love. As an adult woman, one that had managed to weasel her way into that lifestyle in an entirely different manner, she knew that there wasn't any love there to give. Maybe all of them weren't that way, the rich people at this party, the rich people everywhere, but she hadn't experienced it otherwise, not with men, never with men. And she couldn't argue that Thomas loved his company. She couldn't even argue that he loved anyone. She'd always been told that he was good with his own daughter, but she'd never seen it with her own eyes, because she'd never seen that little girl. All she knew was how Thomas had hurt Luke, and how much Luke had suffered because of the man who was supposed to keep him safe. So, no, she didn't defend anyone. She just listened to the women talk, and she tried to keep any anger off her face, and she was glad for the elevator and the hallway that followed.
She was glad, until she started hearing the voices. If anything, she kissed him harder once they began becoming intelligible, the voices.
Because the man's voice - different, but not different enough - made her heart catch in her throat. Not Thomas. He sounded nothing like Thomas. Even if they were only hearing fragments, even if there were only tiny bits and pieces. Even if he sounded older, different.
She tried to focus through the desperation of the kiss (her own desperation, not his), and she stupidly thought it was okay, at first. She knew then, knew what this was, and she didn't want to see it. But she thought the woman sounded reasonable when she asked when the company was going to belong to him - to the him in the room, the him she still couldn't bring herself to think of by name.
When his fingers brushed her jaw, she gave his sleeve a tug, and she tried to drag his attention back to her. "We should go," she said, a whisper, a quiet and pleading thing. She didn't want to see the woman through those doors, she didn't. She didn't care that the hotel thought they should see, and she didn't want to think about why. She just wanted to go home.
The sound of a zipper being unzipped just made her more desperate to leave, and she was tugging harder on his sleeve when the sounds inside went from what she thought they were about to be to something else entirely.