Lone Wolfe by Kate Hewitt Page A

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 her 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