LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      THE NIGHTGOWN BROKE FREE, and her casted arm went through the right hole and the rest of the garment whispered around her. She used her left hand to tug the hem down to a decent level over her legs.

      He bent his head and put his teeth on the fabric of her blouse, and the stubborn seam released. With one final, gentle tug that did not hurt Jessica’s arm at all, the blouse was free from the cast.

      “A good tailor can probably fix that,” he said, laying the destroyed blouse in her lap.

      “I’m not divorcing you,” she said. “We’re divorcing each other. Isn’t that what you want?”

      He found where her sling was discarded on the floor and looped it gently over her head.

      “It seems to be what you want all of a sudden,” he said. “There’s something you aren’t telling me, isn’t there?”

      She felt suddenly weak, as if she could blurt out her deepest secret to him. How would it feel to tell him? Kade, there is going to be a baby after all.

      No, that was not the type of thing to blurt out. What would be her motivation? Did she think it would change things between them? She didn’t want them to change because of a baby. She wanted them to change because he loved her.

      What? She didn’t want things to change between them at all. She was taking steps to close this door, not reopen it! She was happy.

      “Happy, happy, happy,” she muttered out loud.

      “Huh?”

      “Oh. Just thinking out loud.”

      He looked baffled, as well he should!

      “Go to bed,” he told her. “We’ll talk later. Now is obviously not the time.”

      He had that right! Where were these horrible, weak thoughts coming from? She needed to get her defenses back up.

      With what seemed to be exquisite tenderness, he slipped her cast back inside the sling, adjusted the knot on the back of her neck.

      His touch made her feel hungry for him and miss him more than it seemed possible. He put his hand on her left elbow and helped her up, and then across the bathroom and into the bedroom.

      He let go of her only long enough to turn back the bedsheets and help her slide into the bed. She suddenly felt so exhausted that even the hunger she felt for her husband’s love felt like a distant pang.

      He tucked the covers up around her, and stood looking down at her.

      “Okay,” she said. “I’m fine. You can leave.”

      He started to go, but then he turned back and stood in the bedroom door, one big shoulder braced against the frame. He looked at her long and hard, until the ache came back so strong she had to clamp her teeth together to keep herself from flicking open the covers, an invitation.

      Just like that, the intimacies of this bedroom revisited her. His scent, and the feel of his hands on her heated skin, his lips exploring every inch of her.

      “Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re beet red.”

      Flushed with remembered passion, how embarrassing.

      She would do well to remember all that passion had not been able to carry them through heartbreak and turbulence.

      She had bled all the passion out of this bedroom. She had become, she knew, obsessed with having a baby after the two miscarriages. It had become so horrible. Taking temperatures and keeping charts, and their lovemaking always faintly soured with her desperation.

      Seeing him standing in the doorway, she remembered she had stood in that very spot watching him pack his things after their final night together.

      “Please don’t,” she’d whispered.

      “I can’t stay.”

      “But why?”

      Those cruel words that were forever a part of her now.

      “Jessica, you’ve taken all the fun out of it.”

      “Out of making love?” she had asked him, stricken.

      “Out of everything.”

      These were the things she needed to remember when a weak part of her yearned, with an almost physical ache, to be loved by him. To be held by him. To taste his lips again, and to taste faint salt on his skin after they’d made love. To feel the glory of his well-defined muscles under her fingertips. To smell him fresh out of the shower, to laugh with him until she could barely breathe for the ecstatic joy of it.

      No, she needed to remember the pain, not the glory, the loneliness and the disappointment, and all the hurtful things. She needed to remember when she had needed him—when she had felt so fragile it had seemed as if a feather falling on her could have cracked her wide-open—Kade had been unavailable in every way.

      “I’m fine,” she said to Kade now. “Please go.”

      He heard the coolness in her tone and looked offended by it, but she told herself she didn’t care. She told herself she felt nothing but relief as she heard him close the door of the house behind him, and then lock the dead bolt with his key.

      She told herself she didn’t care that he had gone and that she was alone again. For a woman who was happy, happy, happy, she felt an overwhelming need to cry. With her good arm she grabbed her pillow and put it over her face to try to stifle her desire.

      Desire. Why had that unfortunate word popped into her head? This further evidence of her weakness made her fight harder not to cry.

      It was weak—it was not the woman she wanted to be. Today hardly even rated as a bad day. She’d had two miscarriages. Those had been bad days. She’d had the husband she loved madly leave her. That had been a bad day.

      But despite her every effort to talk herself out of them, the tears came, and they came hard, and they came for every bad day Jessica had ever had.

      * * *

      Kade left the house and stood on the front step for a moment. There was a little peekaboo view of the downtown skyline. It was the only place on the property that had any kind of a view, and he and Jessica used to sit out here with a glass of wine on a summer’s night, planning the deck they would build someday to capitalize on their sliver of a view.

      But that had been before the pregnancy quest. Then wine, along with renovations, had been off her list.

      He didn’t want to go there.

      He glanced at his watch and was shocked how early it was in the day. It wasn’t even noon yet. It felt as if he had put in a full day, and a hard day, too. Still, there was a place he could go when he didn’t want to go there for that walk

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