“There is lots of room here. There’s a guest room.”

Logically, Jessica knew she could not stay. But it felt so good to be here. It felt oddly like home to her, even if it didn’t to Kade. Maybe it was because she was aware that for the very first time since she had been attacked in her business, she felt safe.

And so tired. And relaxed.

Maybe for her, home was where Kade was, which was all the more reason to go, really.

“Okay,” she heard herself saying, without nearly enough fight. “Maybe just for one night.”

The Pregnancy Secret

Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CARA COLTER shares her life in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, nine horses and one small Pomeranian with a large attitude. She loves to hear from readers, and you can learn more about her and contact her through Facebook.

To my friend, and mentor, Joan Fitzpatrick, whose wisdom and compassion have guided and inspired me for three decades.

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

A BLOCK AWAY from a destination he had no desire to reach, it pierced Kade Brennan’s distracted mind that something was wrong.

Very wrong.

There were no sirens, but the strobes of the blue and red bar lights on top of half a dozen police cruisers were pulsing strenuously. It was jarringly at odds with the crystal clear morning light that filtered, a suffused lime green, through the unfurling spring leaves of the huge cottonwoods that lined the shores of the Bow River.

Now, above the sounds of a river bloated with spring runoff, above the sounds of the cheerful chirping of birds, above the sounds of the morning rush of traffic, Kade could hear the distinctive static of emergency frequency radios. A robotic female voice was calling a code he did not understand. It looked as if there was an ambulance in that cluster of emergency vehicles.

Kade broke into a run, dodging traffic as he cut across the early-morning crush of cars on Memorial Drive to the residential street on the other side.

It was one of those postcard-pretty Calgary blocks that looked as if nothing bad could ever happen on it. It was an older neighborhood of arts and crafts–style houses, many of them now turned into thriving cottage businesses. Nestled under the huge canopies of mature trees, Kade noted, were an art-supply store, an organic bakery, an antiques shop and a shoe store.

This neighborhood was made even more desirable by the fact it was connected to downtown Calgary by the Peace Bridge, a pedestrian-only walkway over the river that Kade had just crossed.

Except at this moment the postcard-pretty street that looked as if nothing bad could ever happen on it was completely choked with police cars. People walking to work had stopped and were milling about.

Kade, shouldering through them, caught bits of conversation.

“What happened?”

“No idea, but from the police presence, it must be bad.”

“A murder, maybe?” The speaker could not hide the little treble of excitement at having his morning walk to work interrupted in such a thrilling fashion.

Kade shot him a dark look and shoved his way, with even more urgency, to the front of the milling crowd, scanning the addresses on the cottagey houses and businesses until he found the right one. He moved toward it.

“Sir?” A uniformed man was suddenly in front of him, blocking his path. “You can’t go any farther.”

Kade ignored him, and found a hand on his arm.

Kade shook off the hand impatiently. “I’m looking for my wife.” Technically, that was true. For a little while longer anyway.

“Kade,” Jessica had said last night over the phone, “we need to discuss the divorce.” He hadn’t seen her for more than a year. She’d given him the address on this street, and he’d walked over from his downtown condo, annoyed at what his reluctance about meeting her was saying about him.

All this was certainly way too complicated to try to explain to the fresh-faced young policeman blocking his way.

“Her name is Jessica Brennan.” Kade saw, immediately, in the young policeman’s face that somehow all these police cars had something to do with her.

No, something in him screamed silently, a wolf howl of pure pain, no.

It was exactly the same silent scream he had stifled inside himself when he’d heard the word divorce. What did it mean, he’d asked himself as he hung up his phone, that she wanted the divorce finalized?

Last night, lying awake, Kade had convinced himself that it could only be good for both of them to move on.

But from his reaction to this, to the fact all these police cars had something to do with her, he knew the lie he had told himself—that he didn’t care—was monstrous in proportion.

“She’s okay, I think. There’s been a break-in. I understand she was injured, but it’s non-life-threatening.”

Jessica injured in a break-in? Kade barely registered the non-life-threatening part. He felt a surge of helpless fury.

“She’s okay,” the young cop repeated. “Go that way.”

It was upsetting to Kade that his momentary panic and rage had shown in his face, made him an open book to the cop, who had read his distress and tried to reassure.

He took a second to school himself so that he would not be as transparent to Jessica. He looked up the walk he was being directed to. Twin white lilacs in full and fragrant bloom guarded each side of a trellised gate. The house beyond the gate was the house Jessica had always wanted.

It was a cute character cottage, pale green, like the fresh colors of spring all around it. But it wasn’t her home. A sign hung over the shadowed shelter of an inviting porch.

Baby Boomer, and in smaller letters, Your Place for All Things Baby.

Jessica had given him only the house number. She hadn’t said a word about that.

And he knew exactly why. Because, for a moment, that familiar anger was there, overriding even the knife of panic that had begun to ease when the young cop had said she was okay. Hell’s bells, did she never give up?

Or was the anger because the house, her new business and that phone call last night were evidence that she was ready to move on?

It was not as if, Kade told himself sternly, he wasn’t ready to move on. In fact, he already had. He was just completely satisfied with the way things were. His company, Oilfield Supplies, had reached dizzying heights over the past year. Without the complication of a troubled relationship, he had been able to focus his attention intensely on business. The payoffs had been huge. He was a man who enjoyed success. Divorce did not fit with his picture of himself.

Divorce.

It was going to force him to face his own failure instead of ignore it. Or maybe not. Maybe these days you just signed a piece of paper and it was done. Over.

Could something like that ever be over? Not really. He knew that from trying to bury himself in work for the past year.

If it was over, why did he still wear his ring? He had talked himself into believing it was to protect himself from the interest of the many women he encountered. Not personally. He had no personal life. But professionally he met beautiful, sophisticated, interested women every day. He did not need those kinds of complications.

He was aware, suddenly, he did not want Jessica to see he was still wearing that ring that bound him to her, so he took it off and slipped it in his pocket.

Taking a deep, fortifying breath, a warrior needing the opponent—when had Jessica become the opponent?—not to know he had a single doubt or fear, Kade took the wide steps, freshly painted the color of rich dairy cream, two at a time.

In startling and violent contrast to the sweet charm of the house, the glass had been smashed out of the squares of paned glass in the door. The door hung open, the catch that should have held it closed dangling uselessly.

Inside that door Kade skidded to a halt, aware of glass crackling under his feet. His eyes adjusted to the dimness as he burst out of the bright morning light. He had entered into a world more terrifying to him than an inhabited bear den.

The space was terrifying because of what was in it. It was the world he and Jessica had tried so hard to have and could not. It was a world of softness and light and dreamy hopes.

The stacks of tiny baby things made other memories crowd around Kade, of crying, and arguing, and a desperate sense of having come up against something he could not make right. Ever.

He sucked in another warrior’s breath. There was a cluster of people across the room. He caught a glimpse of wheat-colored hair at the center of it and forced himself not to bolt over there.

He would not let her see what this—her injury, this building full of baby things—did to him.

Unfortunately, if he was not quite ready to see her, he had to take a moment to gather himself, and that forced him to look around.

The interior dividing walls within the house had been torn down to make one large room. What remained for walls were painted a shade of pale green one muted tone removed from that of the exterior of the house. The large space was connected by the expanse of old hardwood, rich with patina, and yet rugs and bookcases had been used to artfully divide the open area into four spaces.

Each was unique, and each so obviously represented a nursery.

One was a fantasy in pink: the crib was all done in pink flowered bedding, with pink-striped sheets and a fluffy pink elephant sprawled at the center. A polka-dot pink dress that looked like doll clothes was laid out on a change table. The letters g-i-r-l were suspended by invisible threads from the ceiling. A rocking chair, with pillows that matched the bedding, sat at right angles to the crib.

The next space was a composition in shades of pale blue. The crib and its bedding, again, were the main focus, but the eye was drawn to the vignette of boyish things that surrounded it. There were toy trains and tractors and trucks displayed on the shelves of a bookcase. Miniature overalls and an equally miniature ball cap hung on an antique coatrack beside it. A pair of impossibly small work boots hung from their laces off the same rack.

Next was one all done in lacy white, like a wedding dress, a basket on the floor overflowing with white stuffies: lambs and polar bears and little white dogs. The final display had two cribs, implying twins, and a shade of yellow as pale as baby duck down repeated in the bedding and lamp shades and teeny outfits.

Kade stood, sucking air into his chest, taking it all in and fighting the unmanly desire to cut and run.

How could Jessica do this? Work every day with the thing that had caused her, and him—and them—such unbelievable heartache? He felt all that anger with Jessica solidifying inside his chest. Now he was ready to face her.

He narrowed his eyes and looked to the cluster of people. They were at the very back of the old house, behind a counter with an old-fashioned cash register perched on it. Feeling as if his masculinity and size could damage the spaces, he passed through them quickly, holding his breath and being careful not to touch anything. Kade edged his way to the back of the room, inserting a firmness into his step that he did not feel.

It was unnecessary, because she didn’t open her eyes as Kade arrived at the back of the store. Jessica was strapped to a wheeled gurney. Her eyes were tightly shut. A uniformed medic was leaning over her, splinting her right arm below her shoved-up sleeve. Two police officers, a man and a woman, stood by, notepads out.

Seeing Jessica would have been, at any time, like taking a punch to the stomach. But seeing her like this was unbearable.

It reminded him of the hardest lesson his marriage had taught him: even though it was his deepest desire, he had been unable to protect her.

Studying her now, without her awareness, Kade could see subtle changes in her. She looked oddly grown-up in a buttoned-up white blouse and a gray pencil skirt. Her slender feet were encased in a pair of very practical and very plain flat pumps. She looked professional, and yet oddly dowdy, like that British nanny on television. Her look, if it could be called that, filled him with a certain sense of relief.

Jessica was obviously not out to capture a man.

But she looked so serious, not that he expected her to be upbeat, given the circumstances. She looked every inch the pragmatic businesswoman she had evidently become, rather than the artist she had always been. He was pretty sure the only day he’d ever seen Jessica out of jeans was the day they’d gotten married.

Her hair was the same color, untouched by dye, wheat ripening in a field, but had been bobbed off short, in a way that made her features seem elegant and chiseled and mature rather than gamine and friendly and girlish. Or maybe it was because she had lost weight that her features, especially her cheekbones, seemed to be in such sharp relief. She had on not a drop of makeup. Again, Kade felt a completely unwanted niggle of relief. She was obviously not making the least effort to play up her natural beauty.

Despite the fact she looked both the same and different, despite the fact she looked pale and bruised and despite the fact she was dressed in a way that suggested she did not like drawing attention to herself, Jessica did what she had always done, even though he tried to steel himself against reacting to her.

From the first moment he had seen her laughter-filled face on campus, he had been captivated. She had been sitting with friends at an outdoor picnic area. She had looked his way just as he was crossing a huge expanse of lawn, late for class.

His heart had done then exactly what it did now. It had stood still. And he had never made that class. Instead, he had crossed the lawn to her and to his destiny.

Jessica—then Clark—hadn’t been beautiful in the traditional way. A little powder had not done anything to hide her freckles, which had already been darkening from the sun. Her glossy hair, sun streaked, had been spilling out of a clip at the back of her head. She’d been supercasual in a pink T-shirt and jean shorts with frayed cuffs. Her toenails had been painted to match her shirt.

But it was her eyes that had captivated him: as green as a leprechaun’s and sparkling with just as much mischief. She had, if he recalled correctly, and he was sure he was, been wearing just a hint of makeup that day, shadow around her eyes that made them the deep, inviting green of a mountain pond. Her smile had been so compelling, warm, engaging, full of energy, infused with a force of life.

But two years of marriage had stripped her of all of that effervescent joy. And he could see, from the downturned line around her mouth, it had not returned. Kade welcomed the iciness he felt settle around his heart.

He had not been enough for her.

Still, even with that thought like an acid inside him, he could not stop himself from moving closer to her.

He was shocked that he wanted to kiss her forehead, to brush the hair back from the smoothness of her brow. Instead, he laid his palm over her slender forearm, so aware his hand could encircle it completely. He saw that she was no longer wearing her rings.

“Are you okay?” The hardness Kade inserted in his voice was deliberate. There was no sense anyone knowing the panic he had felt, just for a moment, when he had thought of a world without Jessica. Especially not Jessica herself.

Jessica’s eyes flew open. They were huge and familiar pools of liquid green, surrounded by lashes so thick they looked as if they had been rolled in chocolate cake batter. She had always had the most gorgeous eyes, and even her understated look now could not hide that. Unbidden, he thought of Jessica’s eyes fastened on him, as she had walked down the aisle toward him... He shook off the memory, annoyed with himself, annoyed by how quickly he had gone there.

Now her beautiful eyes had the shadows of sorrow mixed with their light. Still, for one unguarded moment, the look in her eyes when she saw it was him made Kade wish he was the man she had thought he was. For one unguarded moment, he wished he was a man who had an ounce of hope left in him.

CHAPTER TWO

WARINESS TOOK THE place of what had flared so briefly in Jessica’s eyes when she had seen it was him, Kade. A guard equal to the one he knew to be in his own gaze went up in hers.

“What are you doing here?” Jessica asked him, her brow knit downward.

What was he doing here? She had asked him to come. “Did she hit her head?” Kade asked the ambulance attendant.

Jessica’s frown deepened. “No, I did not hit my head.”

“Possibly,” the medic said.

“What are you doing here?” Jessica demanded again. It was a tone he remembered too well, the faintest anger hissing below the surface of her words, like a snake waiting to strike.

“You asked me to come,” Kade reminded her. “To discuss—” He looked at the crowd around them, and could not bring himself to finish the sentence.

“Oh!” She looked contrite. “Now I remember. We were meeting to discuss...” Her voice drifted away, and then she sighed. “Sorry, Kade, I truly forgot you were coming.” Apparently she hadn’t lain awake last night contemplating the d-i-v-o-r-c-e.

“It’s been a crazy morning,” she said, as if it needed clarification.

“So I can see,” he said. Jessica. Master of the understatement.

“Who are you?” the woman police officer asked.

“I’m her husband.” Well, technically, he still was.

Kade was only inches from Jessica, but he was so aware that the small physical distance between them was nothing compared with the emotional one. It could not be crossed. That was what hissed right below the surface of her voice. There was a minefield of memory between them, and to try to negotiate it felt as if it would be risking having them both being blown to smithereens.

“I think her arm is fractured or broken,” the medic said to Kade, and then returned his attention to Jessica. “We’re going to transport you. They’ll do X-rays at the hospital. I’m going to call ahead so they’ll be ready for you in the emergency department.”

“Which hospital?” Kade asked.

“You don’t need to come,” Jessica said, and there was that tone again, her apology apparently forgotten. She glared at Kade in warning when he frowned at her.

She was right. He did not need to go with her. And he could not have stopped himself if he tried.

“Nonetheless,” he said, “I’d be more at ease making sure you were okay.”

“No.”

Kade knew that tone: she had made up her mind and there would be no getting her to change it.

No matter how stupidly unreasonable she was being.

“I thought he was your husband,” the woman police officer said, confused.

“You don’t need to come to the hospital,” Jessica said. She tried to fold her arms over her chest. The splint on her right arm made it awkward enough that after three attempts she gave up. She glared at her arm accusingly, and when that brought her no relief, she switched her glare to him.

To what he could tell was her chagrin, he accomplished what she had not been able to. He folded his arms firmly over his chest.

Battle stations.

What did this mean that he was insisting on accompanying Jessica to the hospital? That he was accepting responsibility for her?

Had he ever stopped feeling responsible for her?

“I thought he was your husband,” the police officer said again.

“I am,” Kade said, and heard the same firmness in his voice as that day that felt as if it was so long ago when he had said, “I do.”

* * *

Jessica felt a shiver travel up and down her spine.

Her husband.

She watched Kade standing there, so close she could smell the familiar heady scent of him, his arms folded firmly over the deepness of that chest. He looked grim and formidable when he took that stance.

And even with that intimidating scowl drawing his dark brows down and pulling the edges of his mouth? Kade was the most magnificently made man Jessica had ever encountered. And she was pretty sure the female police officer wasn’t immune to that fact, either.

Jessica had never tired of looking at him, not even when their relationship had become so troubled. Sometimes it had made her anger even more complicated that she still liked to look at him when he was so aggravating!

But gazing at him now, she felt resignation. This morning Kade had on a beautifully cut summer suit that she was certain was custom made. With it he had on a plain white shirt, possibly Egyptian cotton, and a subdued, expertly knotted tie, the slight luster of it screaming both silk and expense.

The ensemble made him look every inch the president and CEO of one of Calgary’s most successful companies. Despite a rather mundane name, Oilfield Supplies did just that. It supplied the frantic oilfield activity of Alberta and beyond. With Kade’s work ethic, ambition and smarts, the company’s rise, in the past few years, had been mercurial.

And yet there was nothing soft looking about the man. There was none of the slender build or office pallor of a desk worker about him. He had learned his business from the bottom up, working on rigs to put himself through university. Despite the beautiful clothing, that rugged toughness was still in the air around him. Kade Brennan, with those long legs and those broad shoulders, and that deep chest, radiated pure power.

He had mink-dark hair. It managed, somehow, to look faintly unruly, no matter how short he cut it. And right now, that was very short.

He was clean shaven—Jessica had never known him not to be—and the close shave showed off the masculine perfection of his face: great skin, high cheekbones, straight nose, full lips, faintly jutting chin.

And his damn eyes, sexy and smoldering, were the deep sapphire of the ocean water. It was a color she had seen replicated only once, off the southernmost tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, where they had gone for their honeymoon.

But well before she’d had that reference point, from practically the moment she had met him, Jessica had spent an inordinate amount of time dreaming what their baby would look like. Would it have his eyes or hers, or some incredible combination of both?

The knife edge of that familiar pain was worse than the pain that throbbed along the length of her arm, despite the ice packs splinted in with her limb that were supposed to be giving her relief from pain.

Her husband.

She could feel her heart begin a familiar and hard tattoo at all that had once meant, and at all she knew about this man, the delicious intimacies that only a wife could know.

That he had ticklish toes, and loved the smell of lemons, and that if you kissed that little groove behind his ear, he was putty—

Jessica made herself stop, annoyed that she had gone there so swiftly. With everything between them, how was it she could feel this when she saw him? As if she had made the slow, chugging climb up the roller coaster and was now poised at the very summit, waiting to plunge down?

With everything between them, it felt like a betrayal of herself that she could feel such a deep and abiding hunger for the familiar feeling of his arms around her, for the scrape of his cheek across her own, for his breath in her ear, for the gentle savagery of his lips claiming her lips and his body claiming her body.

Her husband.

She felt weak. Where was her newfound sense of herself when she needed it most? Where was her fledgling self-respect? Where was her feeling that her life was working, and that she could have dreams she had set aside when Kade had walked away from her?

Jessica had discovered she could be responsible for her own dreams. It was really much easier without the complications of a man! In fact, she had decided the things she was dreaming would be so much more attainable without a man, especially one like him, who was just a little too sure that he knew the right answers for everybody.

Jessica was certain Kade would not approve of the secret she held inside herself. It was a secret that gave her pure joy, just as once an ultrasound picture tucked in a pocket close to her heart had. She had made a decision to adopt a baby.

It was at the very initial stages, little more than a thought, but she wanted things between her and Kade finalized before she even started the application process. She reminded herself that she needed to be strong for this meeting with Kade, and she despised the unexpected weakness of desire.

She’d rehearsed for a week before she’d called him, striving for just the right all-business tone of voice, planning this morning’s meeting so carefully...

Of course, being caught in the middle of a breaking and entering had not been part of her plan! She could not believe, in all the chaos, she had totally forgotten he would be coming.

That was it. That explained the way she was feeling right now. She’d just had quite the shock. The pain in her arm was throbbing mercilessly, and despite denying it to the medic, it was possible she’d hit her head in the scuffle. Maybe, just maybe, a tiny bit of weakness in the department of her husband was acceptable.

Except right now she needed to be strong around him, not weak!

She stole another look at him. There was no missing how ill at ease the store made him. Something in his closed expression even suggested anger. At that realization, that he was angry, something in her hardened. She had known he might react like this when she’d invited him here.

And she had told herself firmly that it was a test she needed to pass. Divorcing Kade, not just on paper, but with her heart, would involve not caring what he liked or didn’t like about her choices.

Her lawyer was absolutely right. It was time to tie up some loose ends in her life. And the lawyer was not even aware of all the reasons why it had become so important. Her lawyer knew only about her thriving business. Her decision to adopt was a secret, for now.

But it was a secret that required her to acknowledge that Kade Brennan, the husband she had been separated from for more than a year, was one gigantic loose end!

“What happened here?” Kade asked, but typical Kade, he wasn’t asking. He was demanding, ready to take charge.

And she was never going to admit what a relief it would be to let him. “Really, Kade, it’s none of your business.”

The female officer, in particular, looked taken aback at her tone. “I thought he was your husband,” she said again, almost plaintively.

“We’re nearly divorced,” Jessica explained, trying for the cavalier note of a career woman who didn’t care, but she had to physically brace herself from flinching from the word.

Divorced.

She’d rehearsed that word, too, trying to take the bitter edge out of it, the sense of loss and finality and failure.

“Oh.” If she was not mistaken, Officer—Jessica squinted at her name tag—Kelly took to that information like a starving hound scenting a bone.

“What happened here?” Kade asked again.

Jessica glared at him. To her relief, the medic announced they were ready to go, and she was wheeled out past Kade before having to give in to his demand for answers. Behind her, to her annoyance, she could hear the police officer filling him in on what had happened. She glanced back to see the female officer blinking helpfully at Kade and checking her notes.

“She came in to do paperwork this morning, six o’clock. Someone broke in around seven thirty.”

“Don’t come to the hospital,” Jessica called over her shoulder, feeling a childish desire to get in the last shot. “I don’t need you.”

She glanced back one more time just as they crossed through her doorway to outside, where throngs of people seemed to be gathered in front of her house. But she didn’t really even notice. What she noticed was that her arrow had hit home.

Kade looked momentarily stricken by her words.

That she didn’t need him.

And instead of feeling happy that she had drawn blood, she felt sick about it, and some little demon inside her had to try to repair it, and let him know he was needed after all.

“Actually, Kade, can you find a way to secure everything? Please?”

Really, after her remark that she didn’t need him, he should tell her to go get stuffed. But he didn’t.

“And if you could put up a closed-for-the-day sign over that broken window I’d be most appreciative.”

He snorted, but didn’t say no.

“I can’t just leave things. The door is broken. He could come back. Anybody could come in and just start helping themselves to everything in here.”

All her hopes and dreams. It was a strange twist that she was being forced to ask Kade to rescue them.

“Never mind,” Jessica said, appalled that she had even asked him. “I’ll call someone.”

She didn’t need him. She didn’t! Why was she giving him this mixed message: “I need you. I don’t need you.” She had the stunning realization she was not as clear of her soon-to-be ex-husband as she thought she was!

“I’ll look after it,” he said.

She should have protested harder, but there was no denying what a relief it was to have Kade Brennan, her husband for a little while longer, say that he would look after things.

CHAPTER THREE

JESSICA WAS WHEELED out to the ambulance, and Kade prowled through her shop looking for items to repair her door. Finally, in a back drawer in a tiny kitchen area he found a hammer and regarded it thoughtfully.

“This isn’t really a hammer,” he muttered to himself. “It’s more like a toy, a prop for one of her fake nurseries.”

In a dank cellar, he found some old boards. Thankfully, they had nails in them that he could pull and reuse. Why did women never have the essentials? Nails, screwdrivers, hammers, duct tape?

He boarded up the broken front door and found a square of thick wood to write a few words on.

He had to nail it up over the broken window because of the lack of duct tape. A determined thief could still get in, but the repair, though not pretty, actually looked quite a bit more secure than her old door with its paned glass.

He surveyed his work briefly, and recognized it as temporary but passable. Then he called his personal assistant, Patty, to tell her he would be very late today, if he made it in at all. “I need you to find me a simple surveillance system. I think there’s a kind that alerts to your phone. And then could you find a handyman? I need a door fixed, a window replaced and that surveillance system installed. Have him call me for the details.

“And also if you could have my car dropped at Holy Cross Hospital? Whoever brings it can just give me a call when they get there, I’ll meet them for keys.” He listened for a moment. “No, everything is fine. No need for concern.”

Kade walked out to Memorial Drive and was able to flag a cab to take him to the hospital.

He found Jessica in a wheelchair, in a waiting room in the X-ray department.

“How are you doing?”

It was obvious she was not doing well. Her face was pale, and she looked as if she was going to cry.

He could not handle Jessica crying. There was nothing he hated more than the helplessness that made him feel. To his detriment, he had not reacted well to her tears in the past.

He felt ashamed of the fact that she felt it necessary to suck in a deep, steadying breath before she spoke to him.

“They’ve done an X-ray. I’m just waiting for the doctor. It is broken. I’m not sure if they can set it, or if it will need surgery.” She looked perilously close to tears.

Kade fought an urge to wrap his arms around her and let her cry. But he’d never been good with tears, and it felt way too late now to try to be a sensitive guy. It would require him to be a way better and braver man than he knew how to be.

She knew his weaknesses, because she set her shoulders and tilted her chin. “You didn’t have to come.”

He shrugged. “Your store is secure,” he told her. “I put up a sign.”

The struggle—whether to be gracious or belligerent—was evident in her eyes. Graciousness won, as he had known it would. “Thank you. What did it say?”

“Baby bummer, temporarily closed due to break-in.”

A reluctant smile tickled her lips, and then she surrendered and laughed. “That’s pretty good. Even though it’s a major bummer, not a baby one.”

Kade was pretty pleased with himself that he had made her laugh instead of cry.

“It could have been a much more major bummer than it was,” he said sternly. “Tell me what happened.”

* * *

Jessica couldn’t help but shiver at the faintly dangerous note in Kade’s voice. She could not be intimidated by it!

“Isn’t it fairly obvious what happened?” she asked coolly. “I was doing some paperwork, and there was a break-in.”

“But he came through the front door.”

“So?”

“Is there a back door?” Kade asked. That something dangerous deepened in his tone.

“Well, yes, but we just surprised each other. Thankfully, I called 911 as soon as I heard the glass break.”

“Don’t you think you could have run out the back door and called 911 from safety?”

Jessica remembered what she didn’t like about Kade. Besides everything. She needed a good cry right now and she was sucking it back rather than risk his disapproval. On top of that, he was a big man at work. It made him think he knew the answers to everything.

Which was why she didn’t even want him to know about adoption. He was certain to have an opinion about that that she would not be eager to hear.

“Hindsight is always twenty-twenty,” she informed him snootily.

“How did you end up hurt?” Kade asked.

Jessica squirmed a bit.

“Um, we scuffled,” she admitted. “I fell.”

“You scuffled?” Kade asked, incredulous. “You scuffled with a burglar? I would have thought it was hard to scuffle while running for the back door.”

“I was not going to run away,” she said.

“That is nothing to be proud of.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is. Don’t you dare presume to tell me what to be proud of.”

From their shared laughter over the bummers of life just moments ago to this. It was just like the final weeks of their marriage: arguments lurked everywhere.

“Why are you proud of it?” he asked, that dangerous something still deepening in his tone, that muscle jerking along the line of his jaw that meant he was really annoyed.

“I’m proud I took on that scrawny thief,” Jessica said, her voice low, but gaining power. “I lost my mother when I was twelve. I’ve lost two babies to miscarriage.”

And she had lost Kade, not that she was going to mention that. In some ways the loss of him had been the worst of all. The other losses had been irrevocable, but Kade was still there, just not there for her.

“Sorry?” he said, reeling back slightly from her as if she had hit him with something. “What does that have to do with this?”

“I am not losing anything else,” she said, and could hear the tautness in her own voice. “Not one more thing.”

He stared at her, and she took a deep breath and continued.

“You listen to me, Kade Brennan. I am not surrendering to life anymore. I am not going to be the hapless victim. I am making the rules, and I am making my own life happen.”

Kade was shocked into silence, so she went on, her tone low. “So if that means scuffling with someone who was trying to take one more thing from me, then so be it.”

“Oh, boy,” he said, his voice low and pained. “That’s not even sensible.”

“I don’t care what you think is sensible,” she said with stubborn pride.

Though, she did plan to be more sensible soon. Naturally, there would be no more scuffling once she had adopted a baby. She would think things all the way through then. She would be the model of responsible behavior.

She hoped there were no questions about how one would handle a break-in on the adoption application.

“So you weren’t running for the back door,” he deduced, regaining himself. “Not even close.”

“Nope.” The new Jessica refused to be intimidated. She met his gaze with determination. She was not going to be cowed by Kade. She was not one of his employees. She was nearly not even his wife. In a little while, they would practically be strangers.

At the thought, a little unexpected grayness swirled inside her—she was willing to bet that was a result of her injury, a bit of shock—but she fought it off bravely.

“I was not letting him get away,” Jessica said. “The police were coming.”

For a moment he was stunned speechless again. He clenched that muscle in his jaw tighter. She remembered she hated that about him, too: the jaw clenching.

His voice rarely rose in anger, but that muscle, leaping along the hard line of his jaw, was a dead giveaway that he was really irritated about something.

“Are you telling me—” Kade’s voice was low and dangerous “—that you not only scuffled with the burglar, but you tried to detain him?”

“He was a shrimp,” Jessica said defiantly.

“In case you haven’t looked in the mirror recently, so are you. And he could have had a knife! Or a gun!” So much for his voice rarely being raised in anger.

“I wasn’t going to stand by and let him steal from me!” At the look on Kade’s face, she backed down marginally. “Okay, so maybe I didn’t think it all the way through.” Something that was definitely going to have to change once she embraced motherhood.

“Maybe?”

She was not sure why she felt driven to defend herself, even when she knew Kade was right and she was wrong. Not just defend herself, but goad him a little bit.

“Break-ins started on this block a few nights ago. No one can sleep at night. We all go down there and check our businesses. That business is everything to me now. It’s my whole life.”

He heard the unspoken, she was sure. That the business had replaced him as her whole life.

The jaw muscle was rippling beneath the line of his skin. She watched it, fascinated despite herself. He was really angry.

“You’ve been going down there in the middle of the night to check your business?”

It didn’t seem nearly as clever now with Kade glaring at her.

“Yes, I have,” she said, refusing to back down. “And I’ll probably do it again tonight, since he got away.”

Well, actually, she probably wouldn’t, but there was no sense Kade thinking he could order her around, could control her with even a hint of his disapproval. Those days were over.

“You are not going down there tonight,” Kade said. “For God’s sake, Jessica, haven’t you ever heard of security cameras?”

“Of course I’ve thought of security cameras. And security companies. But the options are many and the selection is huge,” she said. “I’ve been trying to figure out what is best for me and my budget. Not that that is any of your business. And you don’t have any say in how I decide to handle it. None whatsoever. You and I only have one thing left to discuss. And that is our divorce.”

And unbidden, the thought blasted through her that that was a major bummer.

And the doctor, a lovely young woman, chose that moment to come out, X-rays in hand, and say, “Mr. and Mrs. Brennan?”

Mr. and Mrs. Brennan. That should not fill her with longing! That should not make Jessica wonder if there would ever be another Mrs. Brennan taking her place.

It was over. Their brief marriage was over. They were getting divorced. Kade’s life was no longer any of her business, just as hers was no longer any of his.

She would probably change her name back to Clark. She could be Ms. Clark instead of Mrs. Brennan. The baby would be a Clark.

She wasn’t thinking about a first name. She knew better than that. Or at least she should know better than that. A memory knifed through her: Kade and her poring over the baby-name books. Deciding on Lewis for a boy and Amelia for a girl.

And then the first miscarriage. And somehow, she could see now, in retrospect, what she had not seen then. From the moment Kade had asked her not to name that little lost baby, a crack had appeared between them.

No, she was determined to enjoy the success of her baby nursery design business and her new storefront as a means to an end. She could have it all.

She could fill her life with the thrill of obtaining those adorable outfits no other store would carry, those one-of-a-kind over-the-crib mobiles, those perfect lamb-soft cuddly teddy bears that everyone wanted and no one could find.

And someday, maybe sooner than later, the outfits would be for her own baby. She would design a nursery for her own baby.

“Don’t,” he’d whispered when she had started painting the walls of their spare room a pale shade of lavender the second time. “Please don’t.”

But now she didn’t need his approval. She could do it all her way. She could finally, finally be happy. All the pieces were in place.

Weren’t they? If they were, why did Jessica feel a sudden desire to weep? It was that crack on her head. It was the throbbing in her arm. It was her day gone so terribly wrong, nothing according to her plan.

“Mr. and Mrs. Brennan?” the doctor asked, again, baffled by the lack of response.

“Yes,” Kade said.

“No,” Jessica said at the very same time.

He looked stubborn, a look Jessica remembered well.

She didn’t think she should admit a sudden urge to kill him in front of the doctor, so she shrugged. “We’re nearly divorced,” she informed the doctor. “He was just leaving.”

Kade gave her a look, and then got to his feet and prowled around the small waiting area.

“Well, if you could come with me.”

Jessica stood up from the wheelchair to follow the doctor. She wobbled. Kade was instantly at her side.

“Sit down,” he snapped.

Really, she should not tolerate that tone of voice from him, that tendency to bossiness. But the sudden wooziness she felt left her with no choice.

Kade pushed her down the hallway with the doctor, and they entered a small examining room. The doctor put the X-rays up on a light board.

“It’s not a complicated break,” she said, showing them with the tip of her pen. “It’s what we call a complete fracture. I’m going to set it and cast it. I think you’ll be in the cast for about four weeks and then require some therapy after to get full mobility back.”

Four weeks in a cast? But that barely registered. What registered was that this was her arm with the bone, showing white on the X-ray, clearly snapped in two. Her wooziness increased. She had to fight an urge to put her head between her knees.

“Is it going to hurt?” Jessica whispered, still not wanting Kade to see any sign of weakness from her.

“I wish I could tell you no, but even with the powerful painkiller I’m going to give you, yes, it’s going to hurt. Do you want your husband to come with you?”

Yes, part of Jessica whimpered. But that was the part she had to fight! Aware of Kade’s eyes on her, she tilted her chin. “No, I’m fine. Kade, you don’t have to wait.”

CHAPTER FOUR

YOU DON’T HAVE to wait was not quite as firm as you can leave now. Jessica forced herself not to look back at him as the doctor took her to a different room. But she had to admit she felt grateful that he did not appear to be leaving.

A half hour later, her arm in a cast and immobilized in a sling, with some prescription painkillers and some instructions in her other hand, Jessica was pushed by a nurse back to the waiting area. Her feeling of wooziness had increased tenfold.

Because she actually felt happy that Kade was still there. He sprang from a chair as soon as he saw her, and then shoved his hands into his pockets.

“You didn’t have to wait,” Jessica said in stubborn defiance of the relief.

“I’ll make sure you get home safely,” he said. “I had someone from the office drop off my car for me while I waited. I’ll bring it around to that door over there.”

And then, before she could protest on a number of fronts—that she didn’t need him to drive her and that she was going back to work, not home—he was gone.

She didn’t want to admit how good his take-charge attitude felt sometimes. By the time he’d arrived at the door, she’d realized there was no way she was going to work. She was also reluctant to concede how good it felt when he held open the door of his car for her and she slid from the wheelchair into its familiar luxury. Moments later, with the wheelchair returned, he put the car in gear and threaded through what was left of the morning rush with ease.

Why did she feel glad that he didn’t have a different car? She shouldn’t care at all. But he’d bought the car after they’d graduated from university, well before he’d been able to afford such a thing.

“But why?” she’d asked him when he had come and shown it to her. The high-priced car had seemed as if it should not be a priority to a recent university graduate.

“Because when I marry you, this is what we’re driving away in.”

And then he’d shown her the ring he couldn’t afford, either. Three months later, with the roof down and her veil blowing out the back, they had driven away to a shower of confetti and their cheering friends.

One of her favorite wedding pictures was of that scene, the car departing, a just-married sign tacked crookedly to the back bumper that trailed tin cans on strings. In that picture Kade had been grinning over his shoulder, a man who had everything. And she had been laughing, holding on to her veil to keep it from blowing off, looking like a woman embracing the wildest ride of her life.

Which marriage had definitely turned out to be, just not in the way she had expected. It had been a roller-coaster ride of reaching dizzying heights and plummeting into deep and shadowy valleys.

Jessica took a deep breath. She tried to clear her head of the memories, but she felt the painkilling drugs were impeding her sense of control. Actually, she did not know which impaired her judgment more: sitting in the car, so close to Kade, or the drugs.

She had always liked the way he drove, and though it felt like a weakness, she just gave herself over to enjoying it. The car, under his expert hand, was a living thing, darting smoothly in and out of traffic.

They pulled up in front of the house they had once shared. It was farther from downtown than her business, but still in a beautiful established southwest neighborhood with rows of single-story bungalows, circa 1950.

Oh, God, if getting in his car had nearly swamped her with memories, what was she going to do if he came into the house they had once shared? There was a reason she had asked him to meet her at her business.

“Kade,” she said firmly, wrestling the car door open with her left arm, “we need to get a divorce.”

* * *

Kade made himself turn and look at her, even though it was unexpectedly painful having her back in the passenger seat of the car.

He forced himself to really look at her. Beneath the pallor and the thinness, he suspected something.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

She wouldn’t look at him. She got the car door open, awkward as it was reaching across herself with her left arm.

“You could have waited for me to do that,” he said, annoyed, but she threw him a proud glare, found her feet and stepped out.

But her fighting stance was short-lived. She got a confused look on her face. And then she went very white. And stumbled.

He bolted from the car and caught her just as her legs crumpled underneath her. He scooped her up easily and stared down at her. And there he was, in the predicament he would have least predicated for the day—with Jessica’s slight weight in his arms, her body deliciously pliant against his, her eyes wide on his face. She had a scent that was all her own, faintly lemony, like a chiffon pie.

She licked her lips, and his eyes moved to them, and he remembered her taste, and the glory of kissing Jessica.

She seemed to sense the sudden hiss of energy between them and regained herself quickly, inserted her good hand between them and shoved. “Put me down!”

As if he had snatched her up against her will instead of rescuing her from a fall. He ignored her and carried her up the walkway to the house.

Their house.

He was not going to carry her across the threshold. The memory of that moment in their history was just too poignant. He set her down on the front steps and her legs folded. She sat down on the top stair, looking fragile and forlorn.

“I don’t feel well and I don’t know where my keys are,” she said.

He still had one, but he wasn’t sure if he should use it. It felt presumptuous. It didn’t feel as if he should treat it like his house anymore.

“I must have left my purse at the shop,” she said, trying to get up.

“Sit still for a minute,” he said.

It wasn’t an order, just a suggestion, but she folded her good arm over the one in the sling. He half expected she might stick her tongue out at him, but she didn’t.

“You’ve lost weight,” he said, watching her sit on the stoop.

“A little,” she admitted, as if she was giving away a state secret. “You know me. Obsessed about my projects. Right now it’s launching Baby Boomer. Sometimes I forget to eat.”

He frowned at that. She was always obsessed about something. Once, it had been about him.

“What’s your sudden panic to get a divorce?” he asked.

She choked and glared at him. “Over a year is not a sudden panic.”

“Have you met someone?” His voice sounded oddly raw in his own ears.

Jessica searched his face but he kept his features cool.

“Not that it is any of your business, but no.” She hesitated. “Have you?”

He snorted. “No, I’m cured, thanks.”

“I am, too!” She hesitated again, not, he guessed, wanting to appear too interested in his life. “I suppose you’re playing the field, then?”

“What? What does that mean, exactly?”

“Seeing lots of women.”

He snorted and allowed himself to feel the insult of it. Jessica was painting him as a playboy? “You have to know me better than that.”

“You live in that building. It has a reputation.”

“The condominium has a reputation?” he asked, astounded. “The building I live in? River’s Edge?”

“It does,” she said firmly. “Lots of single people live there. Very wealthy single people. It has a pool and that superswanky penthouse party room. The apartments are posh.”

“How do you know all that?” he asked.

She turned red. “Don’t get the idea I’ve been sneaking around spying on you.”

“That is the furthest from any idea I would ever get about you,” he said drily.

“The newspaper did a feature on it.”

“I must have missed that.”

“It seems like a good place for a single guy to live. One who is, you know, in pursuit of fun and freedom.”

That was what Jessica thought he was in pursuit of? Jeez. Well, let her think it. How could it be that she didn’t know him at all?

“Rest assured—” he could hear the stiffness in his voice “—I live there because it is a stone’s throw from work, which by the way is where I spend the majority of my waking hours.” He hesitated, not wanting to appear too interested in her life, either. “So are you playing the field?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

“How come it’s ridiculous when I ask but not when you ask?” And there it was, the tension between them, always waiting to be fanned to life.

“I already told you I’m obsessed with my business. I don’t have time for anything else.”

“So you are not in a new relationship, and apparently not looking for one. You want a divorce why?”

She sighed with what he felt was unnecessary drama. “We can’t just go on indefinitely like this, Kade.”

He wanted to ask why not but he didn’t.

“All those hours I spend working are paying off. My business is moving to the next level.”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“I did over a hundred thousand in internet sales last year.”

He let out a low appreciative whistle. “That’s good.”

“I think it could be double that this year with the storefront opening.”

So she was moving up as well as on. Well, good for her. No sense admitting, not even to himself, how happy he was that her moving on did not involve a new guy moving in.

“My lawyer has advised me to tie up any loose ends.”

He managed, barely, not to wince at being referred to as a loose end. “So your lawyer is afraid of what? That you’ll be wildly successful and I, as your legal partner, will come in and demand half your business?”

“I suppose stranger things have happened,” she said coolly.

“I think my business is probably worth as much as your business if we were going to start making claims against each other.”

“We both know your business is probably worth a hundred times what my little place is worth. It’s not about that.”

“What’s it about, then?” He was watching her narrowly. He knew her so well. And he knew there was something she wasn’t telling him.

She sighed heavily. “Kade, we don’t even have a separation agreement. We own this house together. And everything in it. You haven’t even taken a piece of furniture. We need to figure things out.”

He rolled his shoulders and looked at their house, the hopeless little fixer-upper that she had fallen in love with from the first moment she had laid her eyes on it.

“It’s like the cottage in Snow White,” she had said dreamily.

It hadn’t been anything like the cottage in Snow White. Except for the decorative shutters, with hearts cut out of them, the house had been an uninspired square box with ugly stucco. The only thing Snow Whitish about it? It needed seven dwarfs, full-time, to help with its constant need for repair.

She had not done one thing to the exterior since he had left. They hadn’t been able to afford too much at the time, so they had rented one of those spray-painter things and redone the stucco white. The black shutters and door had become pale blue.

“Isn’t the color a little, er, babyish?” he had asked her of the pale blue.

Her sigh of pure delight, as if the color was inviting a baby into their house, seemed now, in retrospect, as if it might have been a warning.

Their strictly cosmetic changes were already deteriorating.

Was it the same inside as it had been? Suddenly he felt driven to know just how much she had moved on. It felt as if he needed to know.

He looked on his chain and acted surprised. “I have a key.”

And a moment later he was helping her into the home they had shared. He had thought she would, if sensible, rip out every reminder of him.

But she was the woman who had scuffled with a burglar, and she had not done the sensible thing.

Their house was relatively unchanged. He thought she might have tried to erase signs of him—and them—but no, there was the couch they had picked out together, and the old scarred wooden bench she had fallen in love with and used as a coffee table. She hadn’t even gotten rid of the oversize fake leather burgundy recliner with the handy remote control holder built into it. He had thought it would go. When people had come over she had referred to it, apologetically, as the guy chair, her nose wrinkled up with affectionate resignation. She had even named it Behemoth.

In fact, as far as Kade could see, the only change was that the bench contained only a mason glass jar spilling purple tulips. It was not covered with baby magazines. Oh. And there was one other thing changed. Their wedding pictures, her favorite shots in different-size frames, were not hung over the mantel of the fireplace. The paint had not faded where they had hung, and so there were six empty squares where once their love for each other had been on proud display.

The fireplace didn’t actually work. He remembered their excitement the first time they had tried to light it, the year’s first snow falling outside. The chimney had belched so much black smoke back into the house they had run outside, choking on soot and laughter. There was still a big black mark on the front of it from that.

He led her through the familiar space of the tiny house to the back, where the kitchen was. One day, they had hoped to knock out a wall and have open concept, but it had not happened. He made her sit at the table, another piece of furniture they had bought together at the secondhand stores they had loved to haunt on Saturday mornings. Without asking her, he fetched her a glass of water, finding the glasses with easy familiarity.

He remembered trying to paint the oak cabinets white in an effort to modernize the look of the kitchen. It had been disastrous. They had fallen asleep tucked against each other, propped against a cupboard, exhausted, covered in more paint than the cabinets. The cabinets looked as awful as they always had, the old stain bleeding through the white. They’d never bothered to try painting them again. The truth was, he liked them like that, with their laughter and ineptitude caught for all time in the hardened paint dribbles. And he thought she probably did, too.

The memories all felt like a knife between his eyes.

CHAPTER FIVE

BUT OF COURSE, Kade knew, those happy memories of renovation disaster had all happened before everything went south. After Jessica had discovered she was pregnant the first time, renovation had slammed to a halt.

Chemicals. Dust. The possibility of stirring up mouse poo.

Jessica took a sip of the water, watching him over the rim. “We need to make a decision about the house.”

“You can have it,” he said. “I don’t want it.”

“I don’t want you to give me a house, Kade,” she said with irritating patience, as if she was explaining the multiplication tables to a third grader. “I actually don’t want this house. I’d like to get my half out of it and move on.”

She didn’t want the house with the fireplace that didn’t work and laughter captured in the paint dribbles? She’d always loved this house, despite its many flaws.

There was something more going on that she was not telling him. He always knew. She was terrible at keeping secrets.

“I’ll just sign over my half to you,” he repeated.

“I don’t want you to give it to me.” Now she sounded mad. This was what their last weeks and months together had been like. There was always a minefield to be crossed between them. No matter what you said, it was wrong; the seeds were there for a bitter battle.

“That’s ridiculous. Who says no to being given a house?”

“Okay, then. I’ll give it to you.”

“Why are you being so difficult?”

He could not believe the words had come out of his mouth. Their favorite line from Beauty and the Beast. In the early days, one of them had always broken the fury of an argument by using it.

For a moment, something suspiciously like tears shone behind her eyes, but then the moment was gone, and her mouth was pressed together in that stubborn “there is no talking to her now” expression.

“Can’t we even get divorced normally?” she asked a little wearily, sinking back in her chair and closing her eyes.

“What does that mean?” he asked, but was sorry the minute the words were out of his mouth.

Of course, what it meant was that they hadn’t been able to make a baby normally.

But thankfully, Jessica did not go there. “Normal—we’re supposed to fight over the assets, not be trying to give them to each other.”

“Oh, forgive me,” he said sarcastically. “I haven’t read the rule book on divorce. This is my first one.”

Then he realized she was way too pale, and that she wasn’t up for this. “You’re not feeling very good, are you?”

“No,” she admitted.

“We need to talk about this another time.”

“Why do you always get to decide what we need?”

That stung, but he wasn’t going to get drawn into an argument. “Look, you’ve had a tough morning, and you are currently under the influence of some pretty potent painkillers.”

She sighed.

“You should probably avoid major decisions for forty-eight hours.”

“I’m perfectly capable of making some decisions.”

“There is ample evidence you aren’t thinking right. You’ve just refused the offer of a house.”

“Because I am not going to be your charity case! I have my pride, Kade. We’ll sell it. You take half. I take half.”

He shrugged, and glanced around. “Have you done any of the repairs that needed doing?”

Her mutinous expression said more than she wanted it to.

“Nothing is fixed,” he guessed softly. “You’re still jiggling the toilet handle and putting a bucket under the leak in the spare bedroom ceiling. You’re still getting slivers in your feet from the floor you refuse to rip out, even though it was going to cost more to refurbish it than it would to put in a new one.”

“That’s precisely why I need to sell it,” she said reasonably. “It’s not a suitable house for a woman on her own.”

Again, he heard something Jessica was not telling him.

“We’ll talk about selling the house,” he promised. “We’ll probably get more for it if we do some fixes.”

He noted his easy use of the word we, and backtracked rapidly. “How about if I come back later in the week? I’ll have a quick look through the house and make a list of what absolutely has to be done, and then I’ll hire a handyman to do it. My assistant is actually tracking one down to fix the door on your shop, so we’ll see how he does there.”

“I think the real estate agent can do the list of what needs to be done.”

She’d already talked to a real estate agent. He shrugged as if he didn’t feel smacked up the side of the head by her determination to rid herself of this reminder of all things them.

“Your real estate agent wants to make money off you. He is not necessarily a good choice as an adviser.”

“And you are?”

He deserved that, he supposed.

“Okay. Do it your way,” Jessica said. “I’ll pay half for the handyman. Do you think you could come in fairly quickly and make your list? Maybe tomorrow while I’m at work?”

He didn’t tell her he doubted she would be going back to work tomorrow. Her face was pale with exhaustion and she was slumped in her chair. No matter what she said, now was not the time for this discussion.

“I’m going to put you to bed,” Kade said. “You’re obviously done for today. We can talk about the house later.” He noticed he carefully avoided the word divorce.

“I am exhausted,” she admitted. “I do need to go to bed. However, you are not putting me to bed.” She folded her one arm up over her sling, but winced at the unexpected hardness of the cast hitting her in the chest.

“I doubt if you can even get your clothes off on your own.”

She contemplated that, looked down at her arm in the sling. He knew at that moment, the reality of the next four weeks was sinking in. In her mind, she was trying to think how she was going to accomplish the simple task of getting her clothes off and getting into pajamas.

“I’ll go to bed in my clothes,” she announced.

“Eventually,” he pointed out, “you’re going to have to figure out how to get out of them. You’re going to be in that cast for how long?”

“A month,” she said, horror in her features as her new reality dawned on her.

“I’ll just help you this first time.”

“You are not helping me get undressed,” she said, shocked.

He felt a little shock himself at the picture in his mind of that very shirt sliding off the slenderness of her shoulders. He blinked at the old stirring of pure fire he felt for Jessica. She was disabled, for God’s sake.

It took enormous strength to wrestle down the yearning the thought of touching her created in him, to force his voice to be patient and practical.

“Okay,” Kade said slowly, “so you don’t want me to help you get undressed, even though I’ve done it dozens of times before. What do you propose?”

Her face turned fiery with her blush. She glared at him, but then stared at her sleeve, bunched up above the cast, and the reality of trying to get the shirt off over the rather major obstacle of her cast-encased arm seemed to settle in.

“Am I going to have to cut it off? But I love 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.