LITMIR.BIZ

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this blouse!” She launched to her feet. He was sure it was as much to turn her back to him as anything else. She went to the kitchen drawer where they had always kept the scissors and yanked it open. “Maybe if I cut it along the seam,” she muttered.

      He watched her juggle the scissors for a minute before taking pity on her. He went and took the scissors away and stepped in front of her. Gently, he took her arm from the sling, and straightened the sleeve of the blouse as much as he could.

      There was less resistance than he expected. Carefully, so aware of her nearness and her scent, and the silky feel of her skin beneath his fingertips, he took the sharp point of the scissors and slit the seam of the sleeve.

      She stared down at her slit-open sleeve. “Thanks. I’ll take it from here.”

      “Really? How are you going to undo your buttons?”

      With a mulish expression on her face, she reached up with her left hand and tried to clumsily shove the button through a very tight buttonhole.

      “Here,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

      She realized she could not refuse. “Okay,” she said with ill grace. “But don’t look.”

      Don’t look? Hell’s bells, Jessica, we belong to each other. Instead of getting impatient, he teased her. “Okay. Have it your way.” He closed his eyes and placed his hand lightly on her open neckline. He loved the feel of her delicate skin beneath his fingertips. Loved it.

      “What are you doing?” she squeaked.

      “Well, if I can’t look, I’ll just feel my way to those buttons. I’ll braille you. Pretend I’m blind.” He slid his hand down. He felt her stop breathing. He waited for her to tell him to stop, but she didn’t.

      It seemed like a full minute passed before Jessica came to her senses and slapped his hand away.

      He opened his eyes, and she was looking at him, her eyes wide and gorgeous. She licked her lips and his gaze went to them. He wanted to crush them under his own. That old feeling sizzled in the air between them, the way it had been before her quest for a baby had begun.

      “Keep your eyes open,” she demanded.

      “Ah, Jessica,” he said, reaching for her buttons, “don’t look, but keep my eyes open. Is that even possible?”

      “Try your best,” she whispered.

      “You are a hard woman to please.” But, he remembered, his mouth going dry, she had not been a hard woman to please at all. With this memory of how it was to be together, red-hot between them, his fingers on her buttons was a dangerous thing, indeed.

      Kade found his fingers on the buttons of her shirt. She stopped breathing. He stopped breathing.

      Oh, my God, Jessica, he thought.

      He did manage to keep his eyes open and not look. Because he held her gaze the whole time that he undid her buttons for her. His world became as it had once been: her. His whole world was suddenly, beautifully, only about the way the light looked in her hair, and the scent of her, and the amazing mountain-pond green of her eyes.

      His hands slowed on her buttons as he deliberately dragged out the moment. And then he flicked open the last button and stepped back from her.

      “There,” he said. His voice had a raspy edge to it.

      She stood, still as a doe frozen in headlights. Her shirt gapped open.

      “You want me to help you get it off?”

      She unfroze and her eyes skittered away from his and from the intensity that had leaped up so suddenly between them.

      “No. No! I can take it from here.”

      Thank God, he thought. But he could already see the impracticality of it. “I’m afraid you’ll fall over and break your other arm struggling out of those clothes,” he told her. “The blouse is just one obstacle. Then there’s, um, your tights.”

      “I can manage, I’m sure.” Her tone was strangled. Was she imagining him kneeling in front of her, his hands on the waistband of those tights?

      He took a devilish delight in her discomfort even while he had to endure his own.

      “And I’m not sure what kind of a magician you would have to be to get your bra off with your left hand,” he said.

      She looked stricken as she went over the necessary steps in her mind.

      “If you let me help you this time...” Kade suggested, but she didn’t let him finish.

      “No!”

      “Okay.” He put his hands in the air—cowboy surrender. And suddenly it didn’t seem funny anymore to torment her. It just reminded him of all they’d lost. The easy familiarity between them was gone. The beautiful tension. The joy they had taken in discovering each other’s bodies and the secrets of pleasing each other. In those first early days, he remembered chasing her around this little house until they were both screaming with laughter.

      She blushed, and it seemed to him each of those losses was written in the contrived pride of her posture, too. Jessica headed for the hallway, the bedroom they had shared.

      If he followed her there, there was probably no predicting what would happen next. And yet he had to fight down the urge to trail after her.

      What was wrong with him? What could happen next? She was on drugs. Her arm was disabled. She was being deliberately dowdy.

      The simple truth? None of that mattered, least of all the dowdy part. Around Jessica, had he ever been able to think straight? Ever?

      “While you’re in there,” he called after her, trying to convince her, or maybe himself, that he was just a practical, helpful guy, and not totally besotted with this woman who was not going to be his wife much longer, “you can pick what you’re going to wear for the next four weeks very carefully.”

      “And while you’re out there, you can start making a list of the fixes. Then you won’t have to come back later.”

      To help her. He would not have to come back later to help her. He mulled that over. “I’m not sure how you can do this on your own. Think about putting on tights one-handed. It would probably be even more challenging than getting them off.”

      “I can go bare legged,” she called.

      “I don’t even want to think about how you’ll get the bra on,” he said gruffly. He couldn’t imagine how she was going to struggle into and out of her clothes, but that was not a good thing for him to be imagining anyway.

       CHAPTER SIX

      JESSICA BOLTED THROUGH her bedroom and into the safety of her bathroom. She did not want Kade thinking about her bra, either!

      But the reality of her situation was now hitting home.

      Oh, there were practical realities. How was she going to manage all this? Not just dressing, which was going to be an inconvenience and a major challenge, but everything? How was she going to take a shower, and unpack boxes at Baby Boomer? How was she going to butter toast, for heaven’s sake?

      But all those practical realities were taking a backseat to the reality of how she had felt just now with Kade’s hand, his touch warm and strong and beautiful, on her neck, and then on her buttons.

      That was just chemistry, she warned herself. They had always had chemistry in abundance. Well, not always. The chemistry had been challenged when they—no, she—had wanted it to respond on cue.

      Still, it was easier to feel as if she could control the unexpected reality of Kade being in her home—their home—while she was comfortably locked in her bathroom.

      Just to prove her control, she locked the door.

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