her, but there were problems with that scenario. “Shouldn’t I honor her wishes?”
Rachel waved that off. “Nah. She’s your wife. You can’t grovel properly if she won’t let you in. And honestly, I’ll be surprised if Nell locks you out of the cabin. She’ll be mad as hell, but she won’t leave you out in the cold.”
He wasn’t so sure about that. He could still remember how hollow she’d looked when she’d asked him for time. “She wanted to be alone for a while.”
“She’ll probably need time to process,” Rachel allowed. “Give it to her. And when she finally explodes, take it.”
“Nell is going to protest you,” Max agreed.
“Nell doesn’t really get angry. Not at her friends.” Rye settled his toddler daughter in his arms. Paige Harper laid her head on her father’s shoulder and seemed ready for a nice nap.
Rachel snorted. “Oh, I assure you, she will explode at some point.”
“She’s a forgiving woman,” Max pointed out. “She tells me that all the time. And then she tells me I have to forgive people too.”
“Yeah, it’s different when it’s the one person in the world who’s supposed to be safe.” Rachel turned back to Henry. “I don’t know how it is for men, but sometimes for women it’s easier to be angry with that person. You’re the person she never has to be fake with.”
“I don’t want her to be. I’ll take all the anger she has.” It was her silence that he feared.
“Good. And you need to understand that I’m going to agree with every terrible thing she says about you. If she says you are the worst human being since…whoever Nell thinks is the worst human being on the planet…I am going to agree,” Rachel explained. “But when she wants my advice I’m going to tell her that sometimes the past is hard to deal with, and who we used to be isn’t nearly as important as who we choose to be.”
Rachel had teared up again, and Henry knew what she was talking about. Rachel wasn’t Rachel’s original name. She’d been Elizabeth Courtney once. “Our situations are not the same. You were hiding from a man who wanted to hurt you. I was hiding from an organization I willingly went into.”
“Oh, big bad Henry can’t make a mistake?” Rachel’s voice was soft, the question not unkindly.
At the time it hadn’t felt like a mistake. It had felt like a way out, a way to finally have some power for himself. “I knew what I was getting into.”
“Did you?” Rye asked. “Because I think there’s probably a big difference between the rah-rah recruitment videos and the real thing. I bet it’s not like a James Bond film.”
“No, it’s not,” Henry agreed. “But I take responsibility for what I did. Rachel had a reason to run.”
“I don’t know. I think it’s kind of similar. We both found ourselves in a situation we couldn’t live with anymore. We both made choices to change our lives. I became someone different, someone I like. I think you did, too, and you did it for a much nicer reason than I did. You changed for her,” Rachel mused. “That’s pretty romantic when you think about it.”
“I already tried that,” he admitted. “And then I was very unromantic and I didn’t think about her when…”
He felt himself flush. This is another place where he’d changed from the John Bishop he’d been. John Bishop never flubbed anything. He wouldn’t have blurted out that he’d gotten overly emotional and had fucked his wife from behind while she held on to the dining table.
For John Bishop, sex had been a perfunctory thing, a bodily function he had to deal with from time to time. Sex had been a way to clear his head.
For Henry, it was a way to express his soul, to bond with the love of his life.
“Are you talking about when you got all caveman nasty on her? Yeah, we knew what was going on in there.” A hint of a smile crossed Max’s lips. “Early pregnancy sex is pretty fun.”
Rachel’s hands went to her hips. “Hey, too much information.”
Max waved her off. “Nah. He needs to hear it. It’s the only reason he agreed to come out here this afternoon. He wanted to talk about how rough pregnancy is on a man.”
Rachel’s brows rose above her eyes. “Really? It’s so hard on you?”
Max’s hands came up as though warding off the inevitable attack. “It is because I love you so much, baby. I