She didn’t need water. For the first time in her life she truly understood why people who got mad thought they could solve their problems with vodka.
“He thinks I passed out from the heat because you didn’t tell him the whole story. I can handle the heat. It was watching my pacifist husband murder a man that made me faint.” She didn’t want to bother Ty or Naomi. Ty was one of the EMTs around town and Naomi was Caleb’s nurse. It was her day off and she didn’t need to be bothered with taking Nell’s blood pressure. Her current health situation wasn’t about pregnancy. It was about marriage.
Her marriage. To a man who killed someone.
Henry sank down onto their sofa, the very sofa where he often sat beside her at night, reading a book while she knitted and listened to podcasts or watched a documentary about climate change.
It was the sofa where at least twice a week, he turned from mild-mannered husband to dirty Dom and ordered her to take off her clothes or to drop to her knees and suck his cock.
Well, until recently.
How could she be so confused and mad and horny at the same time? One second she was on the verge of tears and the next she wanted nothing more than for him to take charge and tell her everything was fine, that she hadn’t understood what she’d seen and all she had to do was follow his lead.
“Nell, we should talk.”
He’d put her off for two hours. Not that she’d asked him anything. She’d come to in his arms. When she’d woken, she’d been on Henry’s lap and he’d been sitting on the riding lawn mower that had been on display at the Feed Store Church for over five years. For a second she’d thought it was all a dream, but then she’d realized there was still a body on the floor.
With vacant eyes and absolutely no blood. If she hadn’t watched Henry snap the man’s neck, she would have thought the man had died of natural causes. But there had been nothing natural about what Henry had done. Graceful, predatory…but not natural.
She stood and paced because she was done sitting still. She’d sat while Henry had talked to Nate and Cam, while they’d closed the building up and taken the body out the back. Nate was talking to Pastor Dennis, who’d been surprised at the fact that someone had died in his church. She’d listened as Nate had covered completely for Henry. “Pastor Dennis thinks that man had a heart attack.”
His eyes came up and he watched her carefully. There was a stillness to Henry that belied the look in his eyes. “It was necessary to control the narrative.”
She put her hands on her hips, outrage rising. He sounded like people they protested. “The narrative? That wasn’t a narrative. That was a murder.”
“It was one hundred percent self-defense. I did not attack him. I followed him inside the building to see where he was going. Heather told me he’d been bothering you and he was asking about Seth. When I turned around, he was in front of the exit and he had a gun on me. We fought. I managed to get the gun from him but that’s when he pulled the knife. I had to fight for my life.”
“Why would he try to kill you? He was a tourist. Did anyone find his wife?” She hated the thought of that poor woman walking around looking for her husband while the Bliss County Sheriff’s Office was busy covering up his murder.
Henry sighed. “Honey, there was no wife.”
She wasn’t sure why or how he thought he knew better than she did. As far as she could tell, she’d had a much longer conversation with the man. All Henry had done was kill him. “He told me he had a wife. He’s staying in Del Norte with her. At least he was before you murdered him.”
Henry’s hands went into fists, but then he took a deep breath and his tone was patient. “He wasn’t vacationing. He was looking for me. The same way the men who nearly killed Seth were looking for me.”
This was it. This was the moment she’d been dreading since she’d found those guns. Or maybe it went back further than that. Maybe it went back to the second she’d looked into his eyes and known a predator was there. She hadn’t been so foolish that she’d believed the Henry Flanders who’d walked into Bliss and challenged her on everything was the same man who’d married her, but she’d thought he’d been hurt in the past and was protecting himself with walls.
It seemed like Henry didn’t need walls. He had guns and very dangerous hands. “So you weren’t hiding in the bathroom. Logan came to get you, and not for your plumbing skills. Logan knows you’re good at killing people.”
His jaw tightened and there was a bleakness in his eyes that threatened to break her. “I need to tell you the whole story.”
“The story that everyone else already knows?” That was what she’d been stewing over for hours. Nate hadn’t looked surprised, with the singular exception that Nell had been there. He’d walked in and sighed and acted like it was nothing more than boys playing games until he’d turned and seen Nell. Nate knew. Cam knew.
Did Laura know? Laura was married to Cam. Had one of her best friends been hiding this massive secret? Had everyone laughed about how dumb the vegan girl was, how naïve she had to be to marry a man and not even know who he was.
He shook his head. “No. Not everyone. Very few people know. In the beginning, it was only Seth, and only because he basically
