Lone Wolfe by Kate Hewitt

Author:Kate Hewitt [Hewitt, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

MOLLIE stepped into the bar, amazed to find Jacob there. She’d been wandering through the hotel, down empty corridors, disconsolate, uncertain, wondering where he’d gone, why he’d gone.

And then she’d found him here.

Cautiously she slipped onto the stool next to him and nodded towards the tumbler. ‘You aren’t going to drink that, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’ she asked softly. There were so many whys: why was he here, why did he look so conflicted, why didn’t he want to kiss her any more? She left it simply at Why? and let Jacob choose which one to answer.

‘The point,’ he said carefully, his tone clinical and even a bit cold, ‘is not to drink it.’

‘Why?’ Mollie asked again.

Jacob paused. He smiled, and it looked brittle, fragile. Like his whole face, his whole self, might splinter apart. ‘It’s a test,’ he said simply. ‘How long can I sit here without touching it.’

‘You’ve been here a while already,’ Mollie said quietly. ‘How long do you intend to torture yourself, Jacob?’

He laughed rawly. ‘You have no idea.’

‘No, I don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Tell me.’ Jacob shook his head, the movement no more than an unsteady jerk. ‘Is it because of your father? Are you worried you might have the same problem with alcohol that he did?’

‘Alcohol is the least of it.’

She laid a hand on his arm. ‘What happened?’

‘Annabelle never told you?’

The question startled her. Annabelle? ‘No …’ Mollie felt as if she were spinning in a void of uncertainty, a world of ignorance. There were so many things she didn’t know.

Jacob drew in a shuddering breath. ‘After my father died—after I killed him—’

‘Don’t—’

‘It’s the truth, isn’t it?’ Jacob smiled grimly. ‘Never apologise for the truth.’ He lowered his head, his hand lying on the table now, a grasping fist, closer to the tumbler. ‘You can’t.’

‘It was an accident, Jacob,’ Mollie said firmly. ‘And you were protecting Annabelle. Everyone knows that. You did the right thing …’

‘And I didn’t protect her, did I? Everyone can see the scars.’

What about your scars? Mollie wanted to ask. Who sees them? They were all on the inside, and for so long she’d had no idea they existed at all. How could she have assumed that Jacob had left all those years ago without a care in the world, selfish, self-centred? How could she have judged him so utterly? Yet she had, and his siblings had as well. Everyone had.

Especially himself.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said roughly. He pulled his hand away from the bar. ‘The point is I failed—just as my father failed.’

‘No—’

‘The day I left, Annabelle found me in my father’s study. It was noon and I was already half drunk on his whisky.’ He spoke with revulsion, but Mollie refused to give in to it.

‘And so one moment of weakness condemns you, nearly twenty years later? I don’t believe that, Jacob.’

‘There’s a lot you don’t know,’ he told her in a low voice.

‘I’m sure there is. There’s a lot you don’t know about me too. One morning when my father was ill, he couldn’t remember anything.

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