The Lone Wolfe

by Kate Hewitt

  Chapter Five

  She stayed. Mollie wondered if she’d ever really intended to leave. Certainly the desperate impulse had been abandoned from the moment she’d heard Jacob’s heartfelt words. All it had taken was one quiet plea and she’d melted.

  And, she was honest enough to acknowledge, there was truth in what he’d said. It was why she’d accepted the commission in the first place; she wanted to see the gardens restored. She wanted to do it herself. Then she’d be able to move on with a clear conscience and a light heart.

  If she survived.

  Yet she hardly needed to worry about Jacob tempting her yet again, for he kept his distance as June bled into July. Mollie occupied herself with work. There was so much of it, and even though she hired some men from the village to do the heaviest jobs, she could still stay in the gardens from dawn to dusk and never have an idle moment.

  She’d yet to consider how to redesign the parts of the estate that could not be restored, like the Rose Garden. She walked along the octagonal pathways and inspected the rose bushes, now dry and shrivelled, wondering how she could replace something that had been one of the estate’s crowning glories, her father’s proudest achievement. She’d sketched some ideas, perused catalogues of the latest hybrids and perennials, yet anything she came up with seemed a poor second to what had already been there. How could there not be a Rose Garden at all?

  Still, the work of simply restoring the gardens to what they had once been was enough to occupy her, both mind and body.

  Almost. Her mind—and her body—still wandered away from the task at hand, wondered what Jacob was doing. Thinking. Feeling. Wondered how it would feel if he kissed her, if she told him she’d changed her mind and she wanted his no-strings affair after all.

  Mollie knew she never would. Not only was such a possibility still too dangerous, it was also terrifying to imagine Jacob’s cool rejection. What if he’d changed his mind? What if he didn’t want her after all? What if that suggestion had been nothing more than a mockery?

  And since he stayed away from her week after week, that seemed more than a possibility; it was surely a likelihood.

  And a good thing too, Mollie told herself. She didn’t need complications. She didn’t need Jacob Wolfe.

  Even if she wanted him.

  In early July, when the country was in the grip of an unexpected heatwave so the very air seemed to shimmer, he found her in the Rose Garden. She’d gone there, as she often did, to pace those familiar pathways and wonder just what she was going to do. She’d reluctantly removed the rose bushes and turned over the earth; the beds were ready for planting. She just didn’t know what to plant.

  ‘You look like you’re trying to solve a particular complicated maths problem.’

  Mollie whirled around, her heart already starting to thump at the sound of Jacob’s voice.

  He stood in the entrance to the little garden, the hedges dark around him. He wore jeans and a faded T-shirt, yet even in such casual clothes he looked amazing. Mollie drank him in, her gaze lingering on the sinewy muscles of his arms and chest, the way the jeans emphasised his trim hips and powerful thighs, the loose grace of every movement.

  She realised she was staring and jerked her gaze away. ‘Something like that. I’m trying to decide what to plant in this garden.’

  Jacob glanced at the empty beds. ‘This was the Rose Garden, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There have been roses here for five hundred years.’

  ‘Time for a change, then.’

  She laughed; she’d honestly never thought of it that way. ‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘We can’t plant roses, at any rate.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The soil is depleted. That’s what made the plants vulnerable in the first place. After a long time, even new rose bushes will fail to thrive if they’re planted in soil where roses have been before.’

  ‘Rather difficult creatures, aren’t they?’

  A smile tugged at Mollie’s mouth, surprising her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘they are.

  Temperamental and fragile and damned hard to grow.’

  ‘So it seems like something else should grow here.’

  ‘Every manor house has a rose garden,’ Mollie said. Jacob arched an eyebrow.

  ‘All the more reason not to have one, I’d say.’

  ‘You are a contrary person, aren’t you?’ Mollie said, half teasing, half serious. He shrugged, offering her that faint, cool smile.

  ‘So some people say.’

  A silence descended, awkward and uncertain, and Mollie gazed at the empty flower beds, trying to think of something—anything—to say. ‘What have you been doing?’ she finally blurted.

  ‘I haven’t seen you around.’

  ‘I’ve been busy.’ His tone was cool and a bit impersonal, and Mollie knew that he was keeping her from asking more questions. Yet somehow she just couldn’t help herself.

  ‘You mentioned before that you went to London on business. And you have an assistant, so you’re obviously engaged in some kind of work.’ She tried to keep her voice light, friendly.

  ‘What is it that you do, Jacob?’

  He hesitated, and Mollie wondered why he was so reluctant to tell her. Then he gave a little laugh and said, ‘I don’t mean to be so much the man of mystery. I’m an architect actually.’

  ‘An architect?’ Mollie remembered that he had said he was overseeing the renovation himself. ‘J Design,’ she realised aloud, and saw Jacob’s expression flicker before he spread his hands and smiled.

  ‘You sussed me out.’

  She shook her head in disbelief. ‘J Design is an amazing company. You work for them?’

  He didn’t answer, and Mollie thought of the five hundred thousand pounds he’d been able to give away with such ease. ‘You started it,’ she stated. ‘You’re the founder. J is for Jacob.’ He gave a shrug of acknowledgement, and Mollie let out a little laugh.

  ‘And I told you they were quite good!’ She laughed again at the absurdity of it, and was gladdened to see Jacob smile back. ‘But that’s fantastic. Why do you hide it?’

  ‘I’ve been a very private person for many years,’ Jacob said after a moment. ‘I suppose it’s hard to stop.’

  The nineteen years Jacob had spent away seemed to lie between them, heavy with memories and experiences she could neither know nor understand. And none of his family had known either. At least Annabelle hadn’t.

  Yet Annabelle had forgiven Jacob; that much was clear in her emails to Mollie. She simply wanted to see her family reunited and happy once more. Mollie was the one who had wanted explanations, apologies, and she deserved neither. Not as much as the Wolfes did anyway.

  ‘I thought I should give you these,’ Jacob said, finally breaking the silence. He held a bulky plastic bag aloft, and Mollie took it with surprise.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something I thought you needed.’

  Mollie peeked in the bag and saw a spectacular pair of high-end rubber boots. With purple polka dots. She thought of the way the ripped seam in her boot had leaked muddy water across Jacob’s rug, and she looked up, both touched and unsettled. He noticed everything—and he did something about it. ‘Thank you. That’s incredibly thoughtful. And I suppose I should, in kind, give you a new entry rug.’

  Jacob gave her the glimmer of a smile. ‘Hardly necessary. That rug was nearing the end of its life as it was. You simply dealt the necessary death blow.’ His words seemed to echo between them, and Mollie saw how he stiffened. She’d stiffened too.

  Death blow. The words—the innocent expression—brought to mind a crowd of ugly, unpleasant memories.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ she finally said again. ‘Really.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ Jacob said.

  Mollie raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’m going to London tomorrow for a design expo. J Design is featuring some of its newest projects, along with several other architectura
l firms. There will also be a landscaping element that I thought would interest you.’

  Mollie blinked. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jacob said, and she heard humour—rare, precious—in his voice. ‘I’m asking you to go with me.’

  Jacob had made the decision to ask Mollie to accompany him quite suddenly. He’d fully intended to keep out of her way until her work on the gardens was finished, and so far he’d managed that. Occasionally he spied her from the study window, a flash of coppery hair amidst the vivid tangle of green in the garden, and something in him constricted, an unfulfilled ache he knew was more than just simple lust.

  All the more reason to stay out of her way.

  Yet when the expo came up, and he saw the landscaping displays, he thought of her, thought of how the manor seemed as much a prison to her as it was to him. And for a few days they could both break out of it.

  That was the only reason he was asking her, Jacob told himself. Out of kindness. Pity, even.

  He’d lived too long in the confines of his own mind to believe such self-deception.

  Yet he refused to think of what the other reasons could be.

  Now he watched as surprise flashed in her soft brown eyes, turning them golden, and she bit the pink, rosebud fullness of her lower lip in obvious uncertainty. She hadn’t expected to be asked. She probably wondered why he was asking. Was she afraid he’d proposition her again?

  He wouldn’t. Of that Jacob was certain. He surely had enough control over his own mind and body to keep from embarrassing and frightening her again.

  Yet he couldn’t keep himself from wanting to spend a little more time with her, to revel in her soft beauty even if he knew she was out of bounds. He liked just being with her, Jacob knew; she saw something in him that no one else saw. And while that thought half terrified him, it also made him want more. Want to be known and understood, even the darkest, most hidden parts of himself—the truth of himself—he was afraid ever to reveal. Now, that was surely pushing things too far.

  ‘Go with you?’ Mollie repeated. She heard the blatant surprise in her voice and blushed.

  Her heart had already started thudding again, and her palms grew slick with nerves. Already images were dancing through her mind, a hazy montage of seductive possibilities that had no business taking up space in her brain. ‘To London?’ she clarified, because she had no idea what to say.

  ‘Yes, to London.’ Jacob shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and Mollie couldn’t help but notice how the action emphasised the broadness of his shoulders, the T-shirt clinging to the ridged muscles of his abdomen. She swallowed and looked away. Already she knew how dangerous such a trip would be. London. With Jacob. ‘I have a suite at the Grand Wolfe,’ Jacob continued, naming his brother Sebastian’s flagship hotel. ‘The expo goes over two days, so we’d need to stay the night.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I don’t want you to be—’

  ‘No,’ Mollie said quickly. She really didn’t want to hear Jacob assure her yet again that he had no intention or interest in making his no-strings affair offer another time. ‘I’m not—Don’t worry … you don’t need to be—’ She was babbling, and she swallowed hard. Jacob smiled, a sensual tugging of his mouth that Mollie neither expected nor was prepared for. His eyes glinted darkly, and she suspected he knew how frazzled she was. She watched his lips quirk upwards, mesmerised by the simple movement, how it transformed Jacob’s face, lightened it, so the shadows fell away. She wished he smiled more. She was glad, fiercely so, that she had made him smile now, even if it was to her own embarrassment.

  ‘All right,’ he said lightly. ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Mollie mumbled, and Jacob reached out and brushed her cheek. It took Mollie a few stunned seconds to realise he was simply brushing away a smudge of dirt. Even so her heart hammered all the more and her cheek tingled.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ he said softly, ‘you don’t need to be sorry for the truth.’

  But I don’t know what the truth—about you—is. Mollie swallowed the words and just nodded.

  ‘Anyway, it could be fun,’ Jacob said, smiling again. ‘And inspirational. The landscaping displays are meant to be quite good. And I think we could both use some time away from this place.’

  Mollie nodded again. She seemed incapable of managing a coherent sentence, yet she agreed with everything he said. She knew there were things to think about, worry about, questions and concerns and dangers. Yet in that moment all she wanted to feel was the bubbles that raced through her like champagne, that made her feel excited and alive in a way she hadn’t felt in years. ‘Yes,’ she said, firmly, quickly. ‘I’d love to go with you.’

  It was surprisingly easy to leave. She left instructions with the men from the village and packed a single bag. She decided she wanted to feel smart—never mind what Jacob thought—and so she threw in her clothes from Italy, including a sexy little cocktail dress in a shimmery lavender silk that she surely wouldn’t have any need for. Even so, she tucked it underneath her trousers and then closed the lid of her case, zipping it firmly.

  Jacob had told her to meet him up at the manor at nine, and so, lugging her case behind her, Mollie headed through the gardens, now neat and trimmed and ready for planting, towards the house.

  She stopped in surprise when she saw the red convertible, parked in the circular drive.

  Jacob stood next to it, the keys in his hand. He looked relaxed and comfortable in a pair of tan khakis and a white button-down shirt, open at the throat. Mollie couldn’t quite take her eyes from the base of his throat, the skin looking so warm and sun-kissed that she wanted to touch it. Touch him. She determinedly turned towards the convertible.

  ‘Nice car.’

  ‘Not when it rains.’ Jacob responded with a grin as he reached for her case. ‘Sorry, I should have picked you up at the cottage. I’m not even sure how to get there by car, though. Is there a road?’

  ‘No, just a path.’

  Jacob put her case in the car’s boot and then went round to open Mollie’s door. She slipped into the sumptuous interior, feeling as if she were Alice and had fallen down the rabbit hole into an unimaginable world of luxury. Jacob slid into the driver’s seat and turned on the engine, which purred smoothly to life.

  As Jacob pulled away from the house, the wind ruffled Mollie’s hair and the sun was warm on her face. She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

  ‘I never even knew about that cottage until the night I saw you,’ he said. Mollie opened her eyes.

  ‘Not many people did. It was Annabelle’s idea to let us stay on after you’d left. She said no one would even notice we were there.’ She knew she was speaking a bit defensively; even now Jacob’s implication that she’d been freeloading off his family rankled just a little. Jacob, however, did not rise to the challenge of her words.

  ‘How did it feel to be invisible?’ he asked softly as he slid her a sideways glance that managed to be all too knowing.

  Surprised by his perception, Mollie let out a little laugh and looked away. ‘I’m not sure I knew anything else,’ she said. She didn’t want to sound selfpitying, so she cleared her throat and added more robustly, ‘There are worse things to be, in any case.’ She paused, then dared to add,

  ‘I’m sure you wanted to be invisible on occasion.’

  He shrugged. ‘Not so much me,’ he said, ‘as everyone else.’

  ‘You mean your father?’

  He gave a short laugh. ‘That might have been handy, but no. My brothers and sister. If they’d been invisible …’ He lapsed into silence, his fingers tightening on the wheel, and Mollie felt a little aching tug on her heart. No one should have such regret in their voice, etched into the lines on their face.

  ‘You couldn’t save them all,’ she said quietly. She spoke the words from instinct; what did she really know about Jacob and his family? Only what Annabelle had told her, which wasn’t very much at all. Jacob had been her big brother; he’d tried to protect h
er from her father’s blows which had ended in her scar and William Wolfe’s death. He’d left just a year after William’s death; his absence had created an aching void in the family. Those were the bare facts, yet Mollie knew she had no idea what had gone on in the Wolfe family, day after day. How had they endured their father’s drunken fits and rages? How had Jacob endured? As the oldest and the most responsible, what had he suffered? What had he felt? And what had finally driven him to leave?

  ‘I didn’t save them all,’ Jacob said flatly, interrupting her tumultuous thoughts. ‘I didn’t save anyone.’

  ‘You can’t save anyone,’ Mollie told him, her voice surprisingly fierce. ‘I learned that with my dad. I couldn’t save him from dementia or death. I could only ease the way.’ She laid a hand on his arm, the skin warm under her fingers. Warm and tense. ‘You take too much on yourself, Jacob.’

  She felt the muscles leap and jerk under her hand and he threw her a scoffing sideways glance. ‘You speak as though you have years of experience.’

  She knew he was trying to draw away from her, to hide behind mockery. She shrugged.

  ‘A few years, at least.’

  Jacob didn’t speak for a moment, and his silence felt like an acknowledgement. ‘You don’t know anything about me, Mollie,’ he finally said, his voice quiet and a little sad. ‘Or what I am. Our experiences are entirely different.’

  ‘Then tell me. Tell me about yourself.’

  He pressed his lips together. ‘I’m not sure much bears repeating.’

  ‘Tell me how you started J Design, then,’ Mollie said. She refused to be put off. ‘That’s a story worth telling, I should think.’

  ‘I fell into it, more or less,’ Jacob said. He flexed his arms, his hands on the wheel, and Mollie could tell how uncomfortable the whole conversation made him. He wasn’t a man used to talking—or even thinking—about himself. ‘I did some building work, and had a look at the designs. I thought I could improve them, and so I tried. The developer liked my suggestions, and it sort of went from there.’