LITMIR.BIZ

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office.

      Gathering herself, Jessica went up the steps. The front door to her house was open. She peered in. Her living room was emptied of furniture.

      Kade was glaring down at some instructions in his hand. There was a machine there that looked like a huge floor polisher, only it had a bag attached to it, like a lawn mower. Though it felt like further weakness, she stood there for a minute regarding him, loving the look of him.

      He looked big and broad and strong. He looked like the kind of man every woman dreamed of leaning on. But that was what Jessica needed to remember.

      When she had needed someone to lean on, and when that person should have been her husband? Kade had not been there. At first he had just been emotionally absent, but then he had begun working longer and longer hours, until he was physically absent, too.

      By the time Kade had made it official and moved out, her abandonment by her husband had already been complete.

      Remembering all that as a defense against how glorious he looked right now, Jessica cleared her throat.

      “It’s not for sale,” he said, without looking up.

      “What?”

      He did look up then. “What are you doing back?” he asked with a frown.

      “What’s not for sale?”

      “The furniture. People keep stopping and asking if there’s a yard sale. The coffee table is generating quite a lot of interest.”

      “I always told you it was a good piece.”

      He was silent for a moment. She knew she had left herself wide-open for him to tease her about what a good piece meant to him as opposed to what it meant to her. When he didn’t follow that thread—once he had found teasing her irresistible—she was not sure how she felt. But it was not relieved.

      “If Behemoth was out there,” Kade said, “people would be throwing their money at me. I’d be at the center of a bidding war. The newspaper would probably be here by now to find out what all the fuss on Twenty-Ninth Avenue was about.”

      “Which brings me to my next question,” Jessica said. “Why exactly is everything out on the lawn?”

      He lifted a shoulder. “Faster to toss it out there than move it all down the hall.”

      “Toss?” she said.

      “I meant gently move.”

      Despite the fact it meant he had been careless with her possessions, no matter what he said—and what was to stop anyone from taking whatever they wanted?—she felt relief that he had obviously not been anywhere near the spare bedroom that served as her office. She would know by looking at him if he had seen that adoption stuff, but obviously he was preoccupied with the machine in front of him.

      It didn’t surprise her that he would throw her things out on the lawn if that was faster than maneuvering them down the hallway. He had always had intensity of focus. When he wanted something, he simply removed the obstacles to getting it. It had made him a tremendous success in business.

      It was how he had wooed her. She had been bowled over by him. But then that same attitude had become a toxin in their relationship.

      A baby wasn’t going to happen? Cut your losses and move on.

      “How come you’re home?” he asked again.

      “Things were slow,” she, who never told a fib, lied with shocking ease. “I shut it down a bit early. It seemed to me I should be helping out here. After all, I started it, too.”

      “I don’t really see how you can help. You’re kind of handicapped at the moment.” He regarded her with a furrowed brow. “You still look not quite right. Pale. Fragile.”

      “I’m fine.”

      He brightened as he thought of a use for her. “I know what you could do! You could order pizza. Is Stradivarius still around the corner? God, I’ve missed that pizza. I haven’t had it since—”

      His voice trailed away. Since you left me. Had he missed her? At all? Or had even pizza rated higher than her?

      It didn’t matter. Their lives were separate now. She was moving on. Which reminded her of why she had rushed home. And it was not to order him a pizza!

      She sidled by Kade. She passed close enough to him to breath in the wonderful familiar scent of him, mixed with something unfamiliar. Sawdust from the floor?

      It was tempting to lean just a little closer and breathe deeply of the intoxication that was his scent. But she didn’t.

      “I’ll just go, um, freshen up.” She didn’t mean changing her clothes. Changing clothes had become a rather daunting undertaking with one arm out of commission. What she really meant was she would go to her office and put her life away from his prying eyes just in case he did make it in there.

      Behemoth, it turned out, was in the bathroom, not her office. It would be necessary to climb over it if she was really freshening up, which she wasn’t. How far did she need to take the ruse? Did she need to climb over that thing and flush the toilet?

      It seemed as if it would be endangering her other arm, and unnecessarily, because when she glanced back down the hall, Kade was not paying the least bit of attention to her.

       As always.

      The thought was edged with so much bitterness she could practically taste it, like chewing on a lemon peel.

      Jessica went into her office. The papers were all out, just as she had remembered, but they were undisturbed. She slid them into the top drawer of the desk. She considered locking it, but it fell under the category of him not paying any attention to her. She doubted Kade would find her interesting enough to pry into her closed desk.

      “Interesting placement of Behemoth,” she said when she came back into the living room.

      “I was thinking it might start a trend. Every man would like a recliner in the bathroom. Some kind of recliner-toilet combination is probably a million-dollar idea just waiting to be developed.”

      “That is gross.”

      “It isn’t. It’s combining practicality with extreme luxury. You have to admit there is nothing particularly comfortable or luxurious about a toilet seat.”

      She remembered this about him with an ache of longing: that easy irreverence that made her want to be stuffy and disapproving, but she always gave in and laughed instead.

      She could feel her lips twitching. He saw it, too.

      “Think about it,” Kade pressed on. “We could offer designer colors. Pickled pumpkin and redneck camo. We could throw in a free matching dress with every purchase.”

      She tried to be stern. She giggled. He smiled at her giggle. She succeeded in smothering her giggle. He succeeded in smothering his smile.

      “I think,” she said severely, Mother Superior to misbehaving novice, “we should try to get the floors done before we tackle anything else together.”

      “Oh, right. Okay. So come and look at this.”

      She went over to where he was glaring at the floor. “What do you think?”

      “About what?”

      “That was what I was afraid of,” he groaned. “I already sanded this part. Not much is happening. I just went out and got a different grit of sandpaper. I’m going to try it again. Cover your ears.”

      Obediently, Jessica put her hands over her ears. The machine roared to life. It was like standing next to a jackhammer.

      To her relief, Kade stopped it after a few seconds. “Better,” he said, “but still...” A light came on in his face. “It’s not heavy enough.”

      “Huh?”

      “The

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