by Cara Colter
“I was supposed to babysit for my sister at noon, but if you want, I’ll see if my mom can do it instead.”
Jessica was ashamed that her distress, her weakness, was that obvious to her employee. But her soon-to-be ex-husband had always had a gift for rattling her world, in one way or another.
What did it matter if he knew she was contemplating adoption? But at some deep, deep level, she did not want him to know.
So though usually Jessica would have said a vehement no to an offer like Macy had just made, she didn’t. Usually, she would have pulled herself together. She could just phone and tell Kade to put Behemoth in her bedroom instead of the office.
She looked at her watch. He’d been there, in her house, for an hour and a half. It was possible he was already in the office, poring over her personal papers, uncovering her secrets.
“Oh, Macy, could you? I’d be so grateful.” She shoved the bill of lading into Macy’s hand.
And it wasn’t until Jessica was halfway home that she realized she had not even waited for Macy’s answer, but had bolted out the door as if her house was on fire.
Which, in less than half an hour, it would be.
CHAPTER NINE
JESSICA PULLED UP to the front of her house. She usually parked in the back, but such was her sense of urgency, she had decided to cut seconds by parking out front instead.
Her sense of her life spiraling out of her control deepened at what awaited her. All the living room furniture was on the front lawn, with the exception of Behemoth, which, as she already knew, could not fit through the front door. At least she hoped the furniture on the front lawn indicated there had been no invasion of her 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 wit
h 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 sander. It isn’t heavy enough to really dig into those floors. Get on.”
“What?”
“Come on. Sit on the front of it.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“You wanted to help. You can’t do much with your arm like that. Come sit on the sander.”
Why hadn’t she just gone and ordered a pizza? Against her better judgment, she moved a little closer. “Sit on it?” She tapped it. “Here?”
He nodded eagerly.
Oh, jeez, it had always been hard not to get caught up in his enthusiasm.
She kicked off her shoes, gathered her skirt underneath her and sat down regally on the sander. She planted her feet firmly on a part of it that looked like a front fender. “Do not do anything that will jeopardize my other arm,” she warned him.
“Don’t worry.” Grinning happily, he started the sander. A quiver ran through her. And then a tremble.
“Oh, my God.” Her voice came out shaking, as if she was trying to talk from under water. In the midst of an earthquake. With her good hand, she clutched wildly at the side of the sander. She braced her front feet.
“Ready?”
Ready? Sheesh, Jessica, run for your life! Instead, she clung like a bronc rider waiting for the gate to open. She nodded her head.
The machine lurched across the floor.
“That’s better,” Kade called. “It’s working!” He swung the huge machine slowly back and forth over the floor.
“I feel like I’m on one of those machines from a seventies gym,” she yelled. Her voice sounded as if she was a cartoon character. Her whole body was vibrating crazily. She could see the flesh on her arms and legs jiggling rapidly.
She started to laugh. Even her laughter was shaking. Kade also gave a shout of pure glee.
He abandoned the slow sweeping motions in the corner and swiveled the machine outward. He raced across the living room, pushing the machine in front of him. Jessica glanced over her shoulder. A wide swath of sanded wood showed behind them, like the wake behind a boat.
They rocketed toward the front door.
An older woman put her head in. Her glasses slipped down her face and her mouth fell open. She was followed by her husband. His mouth fell open, and he grabbed her arm and tried to push her back out the door, as if protecting her from a sight unsuitable for a lady.
She was having none of it, though. She stood her ground, taking in the sight, wide-eyed.
Kade jerked the machine to a halt so quickly Jessica was nearly launched. He turned off the machine. Jessica pulled her skirt down—the vibrating had made it ride dangerously up her thigh—and tried to quit laughing. An undignified snort, caused by the suppressed laughter, came out of her mouth.
“Yes?” Kade asked their visitors, his voice dignified, as if not a thing was amiss.
“Uh, we were wondering if there’s a yard sale,” the man said when it was evident his wife was still shocked speechless. “We wondered about the bench.”
“Not for sale,” Kade said, and then Jessica heard a familiar wickedness enter his tone. “However, I’ll give you a good deal on the world’s best vibrator.”
The woman staggered backward out the door. The man’s mouth fell open so hard, his chin hit his chest.
“Sorry to disturb you,” he cried as he backed out the door after his wife.
Jessica waited until they were gone. She glared up at the man who was her husband, but she could not stir any genuine annoyance with him. Instead, she remembered how funny and spontaneous he was, she remembered that irreverent edge to his humor.
A smile was tickling his lips. And then she remembered that oh-so-familiar grin. And realized she had never really forgotten that.
Kade gave a shout of pure delight and devilment. And then the laughter spilled out of Jessica, too, and they were both laughing. Hard. Until they were doubled over with it, until the walls of their little house rang with it.
Until the laughter flowed between them like a river that connected them to everything they had once been.
CHAPTER TEN
KADE LOOKED AT Jessica and realized how much he loved to make her laugh. He always had. That was what he had missed most when their relationship had begun to go sideways. Her laughter.
“Goodness,” Jessica said a little breathlessly. “I have not laughed like that in a very long time.”
“Me, either,” he admitted.
“It reminds me of when we were younger,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“Before...” Her voice faded away. But he knew what she meant. Before the loss of the first baby. And then the second one. Her laughter had leached out of her like bloodred wine leaking from a wineskin with a small puncture in it.
And when she had stopped laughing, and when he had realized how powerless he was to fix that, nothing had seemed worth laughing about to him anymore, either.
Now he watched as she scrambled off the sander, brushing at that ugly skirt with her good arm. The laughter had lightened the strained look around her eyes and mouth.
But when she faced him, a different kind of strain was there. And it wasn’t, for once, the strain of remembering everything that had transpired between them.
This had been lost, too, this deep and delicious sense of awareness of each other. Or maybe not lost. Maybe it had gone underground, like a creek that ran below the surface. It didn’t matter that right now, Jessica’s surface was encased in that thoroughly revolting dress. Kade could see, with utter ease, to what was underneath. And not her underwear. Her spirit. He could sense that beautiful, sensual awareness of each other, a longing to touch and explore.
In their marriage, it felt as if that had gone, too. It had gone the same place the laughter had gone—into that lonely abyss. It was as if the raft of life that they had shared had snapped in two, and they had stood by helplessly, with no paddles, drifting farther and farther away, not able to stop it.
“Why babies?” he asked softly.
“What?”
She actually looked frightened by the question.
“Why Baby Boomer? Why is your business about all things baby when that caused us so much heartache?”
“Oh.” She relaxed visibly. “I’m not sure it was even intentional. You know some of my friends had seen the nursery you and I—” Her voice drifted away and she squinted, as if looking at something in the distance. Then she cleared her throat. “Nicole Reynolds asked me if I could do something for her. A mural on the wall of her nursery. It was a forest scene, with rabbits and birds and a deer. It was an immersion and it kind of snatched me back from the brink. Gave me purpose and a reason to get up in the morning. I liked being part of what was happening in their family, that circle of joy and expectation. It just kind of snowballed.”
He was so aware he had caused her that pain. Well, not all of it. The miscarriages had put her in a space he couldn’t reach. And then she’d wanted to try again. To plunge herself into that pool of misery he could n
ot rescue her from again. He’d thought it was his job to make her happy. To make her world perfect. At some point, to his grave detriment, he had given up trying.
“I’m sorry, Jessie. I’m sorry it wasn’t me who snatched you back from the brink.”
Her eyes skittered to him and then away. For a moment it looked as if she would cross that abyss between them, throw herself into his embrace, come home.
But that moment passed even before he recognized completely what was blooming inside him.
Hope.
Shouldn’t he know by now that that was the worst trap of all? To hope?
She seemed to recognize it, because smiling way too brightly, she said, “How about if I go order that pizza now?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.”
She retreated to the kitchen; he looked at the floors. With the extra weight on the sander, wood had disappeared quickly. The wood was bare, but wavy. If he put a level on it, it would probably rock like the little horse in one of her nursery displays. He was fairly certain that the damage caused by her wild ride on the sander was something wood filler could not fix.
But he was aware of liking this kind of problem over the other kind. The baffling problems of the heart.
“What kind of pizza?” she called.
“The usual,” he said, before he remembered they really didn’t have a usual anymore, not since their lives had become unusual.
But she didn’t miss a beat, and he heard her talking into the phone, ordering a half pepperoni and mushroom and a half anchovies and pineapple and ham.
He went into the kitchen and watched her. The afternoon sunshine was painting her in gold. Even in that horrible dress, she looked beautiful. He remembered what it was to share a life with her and felt the pang of intense loss.
And suspected she was feeling it, too. Jessica had hung up the phone, but she had all the old take-out menus out of the kitchen drawer—she’d actually allowed them to have a junk drawer—and was studying them hard.
“You’re too heavy,” he said when she glanced up at him.
“Excuse me? Then maybe pizza isn’t the right choice!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Not like that.”