by Cara Colter
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. But as she heard the lock click, she was very aware that she could not lock out the danger she felt. It was inside herself. How did you lock that away?
“Focus,” Jessica commanded herself. But life seemed suddenly very complicated, and she felt exhausted by the complications. She wanted out of her clothes and into her bed.
She wanted her husband out of her house and she wanted the stirring of something that had slept for so long within her to go back to sleep!
Even if it did make her feel alive in a way she had not felt alive in a long, long time. Not even the excitement and success of her business had made her feel like this, tingling with a primal awareness of what it was to be alive.
Even the most exciting thing in her life—contemplating adopting a baby, and starting a family of her own—had never made her feel like this!
“That’s a good thing,” she told herself, out loud. “This feeling is a drug, a powerful, potent, addicting drug that could wreck everything.”
But what a beautiful way to have it wrecked, a horrible uncontrollable little voice deep inside her whined.
“Everything okay in there?”
“Yes, fine, thanks.” No, it wasn’t fine. Go away. I can’t think clearly with you here.
“I thought I heard you mumbling. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” she called. She could hear a desperate edge in her own voice. Jessica was breathing hard, as if she had run a marathon.
Annoyed with herself, she told herself to just focus on one thing at a time. That one thing right now was removing her blouse. By herself.
Her nightie was hanging on the back of the bathroom door. She should not feel regret that the nightwear was mundane and not the least sexy. She should only be feeling thankful that it was sleeveless.
For a whole year, she had not cared what her sleepwear looked like. As long as it was comfortable she hadn’t cared if it was frumpy, if it had all the sex appeal of a twenty-pound potato sack.
For a whole year, she had told herself that not caring what she slept in, that not spending monstrous amounts of money on gorgeous lingerie, was a form of freedom. She had convinced herself it was one of the perks of the single life.
“Focus on getting your blouse off!” she told herself.
“Jessica?”
“I’m okay.” She hoped he would not hear the edge in her voice. Of course, he did.
“You don’t sound okay. I told you it was going to be more difficult than you thought.”
What? Getting dressed? Or getting divorced?
One of the things that was so annoying about Kade? He had an aggravating tendency to be right.
“Focus,” Jessica commanded herself. She managed to shrug the blouse off both her shoulders, and peeled the sleeve off her left arm with her teeth. But when she tried to slide the newly slit sleeve over the cast, it bunched up around it, and refused to move.
By now, Jessica was thoroughly sick of both Kade’s tendency to be right and the blouse. It wasn’t one of her favorites anymore. How was she going to ever wear it again without imagining his hands on the buttons?
She tugged at it. Hard. It made a ripping sound. She liked that sound. She tugged at it harder.
“Argh!” She had managed to hurt her arm.
“Okay in there?”
“Stop asking!”
“Okay. There’s no need to get pissy about it!”
She didn’t want him telling her what to get pissy about! That was why she needed to divorce him.
She investigated the blouse. It was bunched up on the cast, and she had tugged at it so hard it was stuck there. She was afraid she was going to hurt her arm again trying to force it back off. Gentle prying was ineffectual. It refused to budge. The shoulder was too narrow to come down over the cast, and the fabric had ripped to the seams, but the seams held fast.
“That will teach me to buy such good quality,” Jessica muttered, then waited for him to comment. Silence. One-handed, she opened every drawer in the bathroom looking for scissors. Naturally, there were none.
She would just have to forge ahead. So with the blouse hanging off her one arm increasing her handicap substantially, and by twisting herself into pretzel-like configurations, she managed to get the tights off. And then the skirt. She was sweating profusely.
Once the bra was off, she thought, it would be fairly simple to maneuver the nightgown over her head.
She reached behind her with her left hand and the bra gave way with delightful ease. She stepped out of it and let it fall in the heap with her tights and skirt.
The nightgown should be simple. If she left it hanging up as it was on the back of the bathroom door, she could just stick her head up under it, and it would practically put itself on. She grunted with satisfaction as she managed to get inside her nightie, put her left hand through the armhole and release it from its peg.
The nightie settled around her like a burka, her head covered, her face out the neck hole. That was okay. This angle should be good for getting her right arm up through the right armhole.
She tried to get her casted arm up. The nightie shifted up over her head as she found the right armhole and shoved. Of course, the blouse bunched around the cast prevented it from clearing the hole. It snagged on something.
So she was stuck with her arms in the air, and her head inside her nightgown.
She wiggled. Both arms. And her hips. Nothing happened.
With her left hand, she tried to adjust the nightie. She tugged down the neckline. Now half her head was out, one eye free. She turned to the mirror and peered at herself with her one uncovered eye. Her nightgown was hopelessly caught in her blouse, and her arm was stuck over her head.
And it hurt like the blazes.
She plunked herself down on the toilet seat and wriggled this way and that. She wa
s sweating again.
There was a knock at the door.
She went very still.
“I made that list.”
“Good,” she croaked.
“Nothing on it I didn’t expect. What do you think about the floors?”
She could not think about floors right now! She grunted as she tried again to free herself from her nightgown.
“Everything okay in there, Jessica?”
“I told you to stop asking!”
“I heard a thumping noise. You didn’t fall, did you?”
“No.”
“Are you okay?”
“Um—”
“It’s a yes-or-no answer.”
“Okay, then,” she snapped with ill grace. “No.” She unlocked the door.
He opened it. He stood there regarding her for a moment. She regarded him back, with her one eye that was uncovered, trying for dignity, her nightie stuck on her head, and her arm stuck in the air. “Don’t you dare laugh,” she warned him.
He snickered.
“I’m warning you.”
“You are warning me what?” he challenged her.
“Not to laugh. And don’t come one step closer.”
Naturally, he ignored her on both fronts. Naturally, she was relieved, about him coming over anyway. Her arm was starting to ache unbearably. The smile on his lips she could have lived without.
Because there was really nothing quite as glorious as Kade smiling. He was beautiful at the best of times, but when that smile touched his lips and put the sparkle of sunshine on the sapphire surface of his eyes, he was irresistible.
Except she had to resist!
But then the smile was gone. Kade was towering over her. It occurred to her, from the draft she felt and the sudden scorching heat of his eyes, that the nightie was riding up fairly high on her legs.
Wordlessly, the smile gone, his expression all intense focus, he reached for where the blouse was stuck in the right-hand armhole of her nightgown. He began to unwind it. It gave easily to the ministrations of his fingers.
She said nothing.
“You see,” he said softly, “there’s nothing you can threaten me with that will work. Because the worst has already happened to me.”
“What’s that?” she demanded. How could he say the worst had happened to him when she was the one sitting here, humiliatingly trapped by her own clothing?
“You’re divorcing me,” he said softly. And then his face hardened and he looked as if he wanted to choke back the words already spoken.
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 t
alk 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 down memory lane.
Work.
He called his assistant. The handyman had already been dispensed to Jessica’s business. If he went and liked the guy’s work, he could surrender the list. It might minimize encounters like the one he had just had.
He decided he liked the handyman, Jake, and he liked his work. Patty had provided him with the surveillance and security system she had found, and it was already installed when Kade arrived.
“It’s really cool,” Jake said. “It’s motion activated, but you can program it to only send an image to your phone if a door or window is touched. Give me your phone number.”
Kade had the fleeting thought it should be Jessica’s number that he gave him, but on the other hand, how could he trust her not to rush right down here if her phone alerted her to an intruder?
He gave him his number, and they chortled like old friends as they experimented with setting the alarm and then touching the door, watching their images come up on Kade’s phone. Along with the alarm system, a new door was nearly installed, and Jake had matched the old one very closely and even gotten one with shatterproof glass. He was reinforcing the frame so that the dead bolt would not break away.
But somehow when Kade left, the list for the fixes at the house he and Jessica shared was still in his pocket. He had not surrendered it to the obviously very capable handyman.