by Anna Adams
“Lydia.” A man stepped out of the group around Simon to croak her name. Josh’s voice, cut with fear and nameless agony, drew her.
He searched her body with his eyes and then with his hands. His fingers shook as he traced her arms and legs and finally her stomach and back. “Are you all right?”
She nodded, weakness stealing through her as rage faded away. She couldn’t seem to control her own body.
“She’s all right, thanks to Bart,” Simon said. “You gotta take these kids seriously.”
“The gun didn’t even go off,” Lydia said.
“Dad?” Josh turned to his parents with wonder. “You saved Lydia?”
“No.” Lydia’s voice trembled beneath a heavy load of adrenaline. “He tried to get himself killed.”
THE POLICE FINALLY LEFT. Josh followed his parents and Lydia back to the house. They sprawled in the family room. He did that, too.
All the while, sweat soaked him. His head was pounding. He thought his brain might explode. He was about to be sick in front of all of them.
He didn’t like being afraid. In fact, it shamed him. He was so furious he wanted to drive back to Hartford without Lydia.
“A kid has a gun, so you go out to chat. How smart was that, Lydia?”
“He’s a confused kid.”
“He’s not me.” Josh tried to remember holding her, loving her, needing her. He needed to stop being afraid. He stood, his arms shaking. “I don’t want to care this much.” He wouldn’t risk loving and losing another human being.
“What?” Lydia looked stricken. “When Mitch threatened you, I told him he might as well throw his gun in the ocean because he’d never get through me.”
Josh’s own cowardice cut him off at the knees. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“How about some privacy?” His mother came to her senses and towed his father from the room.
“I’m nothing,” Josh said. “You don’t need me.” I don’t want to be needed. Not by someone whose life mattered more to him than his own.
“You want to leave me now?” Tears wet Lydia’s eyes. “Why now? What did I do?”
“I can’t—” Inside, he was fragmented, an unborn boy’s father, Lydia’s unsatisfactory husband, Clara’s failure as a brother. But all those pieces refused to fit together and heal.
“I couldn’t just let him shoot himself.” She pushed her hands into her hair, despair in the curl of her fingers. “I didn’t know if he meant it, but he’s so young. Horrible, but young and he feels unloved.”
“I love you too much,” Josh said.
She stared at him again. “I don’t understand you.”
“I saw him on the ground and the gun and my dad, and I pictured it another way. What if you had died?”
“I didn’t. I’m not even sure the gun was loaded properly. Your dad knocked the hell out of it. I kicked it halfway down the cliff. It never went off.”
“I can’t face it again.”
“Face losing someone? All these years, you’ve been pushing me away because you’re not good at losing people you love?” Lydia looked relieved.
“I can’t lose you. Don’t you see?” He turned toward the door and escape. “Don’t think I can change because I know what’s wrong,” he said. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to love you like this.”
He hit the door, running. He was on the headland before he knew he’d left the house. The grass was crushed and torn where his father and Lydia had wrestled Mitch.
He groaned.
“I don’t care what you want.”
Josh turned.
Lydia stood behind him, her eyes as bright as rain in a puddle. “You do love me, and you can’t stop, can you?”
He couldn’t answer.
“I know you want me,” she said, though the first hint of doubt entered her voice.
Somehow that hurt more.
He caught her close. “I couldn’t get to you at the hospital. They wouldn’t let me hold you because you were so hurt. I kept telling myself it was my fault, that you’d leave me. And you almost did. Then, I thought we’d made it.”
“We have. You’re not going anywhere, because I can’t imagine losing you either. We’ll make everything okay. It’s over now, Josh.”
“Over?”
“We know what’s wrong.”
And despite what he’d said, she thought they could fix it?
She put her arms around him, tentatively.
“I don’t want to do this,” he said, and yet his arms went around her. He held her so tightly the breath whooshed from her lungs.
She laughed with strange relief. “Josh, we have no choice. We love each other. All the fear we can both feel won’t take you away from me. I’m not going away.”
He buried his face in her hair. “A man is not supposed to feel like this.”
“I don’t care what else you feel as long as you love me.”
It was a gift. Unconditional love that wasn’t ashamed of him because he was a coward. He might not be enough, but the woman he’d love all his life believed he was.
“I will,” he said. “I’ll love you all my life—until I’m an empty hulk, incapable of feeling.”
Lydia cradled his face and brushed her lips across his. “That has to be one of the most unattractive images I’ve ever faced, but with you, it sounds close enough to forever.”
AFTER DINNER, they went to their room. Josh closed the door and locked it. He stripped and slid into bed. Lydia was only a few steps behind him.
He turned off the light and then got up to open the curtains so that moonlight came in. “I still don’t know what exactly happened,” he said, climbing back into bed.
Naked, she opened her arms to him. They wrapped themselves around each other, arms and legs a perfect fit. How had she lived without his touch?
“Geraldine called the police,” she said, “after Mitch threatened you.”
“So they were on their way? Simon called me at the courthouse.”
She trembled with exhaustion. “You’ll help Mitch, won’t you, Josh?”
“You realize you’re asking me to do the very work that almost split us up?”
“I finally see why you do it. His father abandoned him and his mother prefers some guy to him and his brother. You are a good man who’s been in more pain than Mitch Dawson will ever know, and you chose to live. He needs help, from a good man, not jail time.” She looked into her husband’s shadowed eyes. “And he made me believe when he turned the gun on himself. Even now I don’t know if he was serious, but I told Geraldine about it tonight.”
“She asked my mom for a therapist’s name. I guess she thinks my mother and father know the local psychologists since they still attend AA meetings.”
“What about Luke?”
“He explained and the judge believed him. It wasn’t hard since the whole courthouse heard the police force was chasing his brother.”
“I mean him and Mitch,” she said.
“Luke is going to see the counselor, too, but I don’t expect he’ll let Mitch use him as a punching bag after today. He was humiliated in court. He’s not gangster material.”
“And what about us? Are we okay?”
“I love you, Lydia. You’re my wife—my heart. My soul is tangled up with yours. You want me even when I’m sure I’m just half a man.”
Choked by her own love, she couldn’t answer. She looked up at him, and he kissed her cheekbones and her nose, finally her mouth, until her body was clay, longing for his touch.
“I want your time and your babies and my side of your bed for the rest of our lives.”
A long time later, when her heart seemed to be struggling for release, he eased back.
“Another thing,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” She blew her tousled hair out of her eyes. “I’ll agree to whatever you ask.”
“I’m thinking there’s plenty to keep me busy here. If I open my own office, we probably couldn’t afford land somewhere else,
and we have the headland.”
Joy exploded inside Lydia, flashing through her body. Pleasant-painful joy.
“Besides,” Josh said, “where could our family be safer? My lunatic father would give his own life to keep us from harm.”
Laughing, Lydia held on to him with all her strength. “We are going to make it.”
“And you love me.”
So they still had pride issues. “I love you,” she said against his ear, laughing as he shivered. She took his lobe between her teeth and breathed gently. “I’m dying to show you.”
“We have to wait five more days, three hours and fourteen minutes.” He tilted her against him, and Lydia lost track of what he was saying.
She wriggled closer, breathing in the delicious scent of his bare chest. “We aren’t going to make that,” she said.
EPILOGUE
Two years later
“ONCE MORE, Lydia.” Dr. Forbes, in mask and gown, sat between her legs, demanding the impossible.
“Lydia,” Josh said, “concentrate. We’re almost there.”
She gathered her strength, pretty certain part of it came from the large hands bracing her shoulders, and then she pushed as hard as she could.
“Wait, wait.” Dr. Forbes laughed. A baby screamed.
Not a baby. Her baby and Josh’s. Their daughter, if the ultrasounds were right. The lights blurred in front of Lydia. The muttering machines took her back to that long-gone day when she’d awakened in another hospital.
“Is she all right?” Lydia asked.
Her infant daughter bellowed with the affront of any sensible girl being forced from a warm, cozy place into the real world.
“She’s fine.” Dr. Forbes beckoned Josh, who cut the cord, looking proud, but endearingly bemused.
A nurse examined their daughter and then wrapped her in a pink blanket and passed her to her father. Josh leaned onto the bed and Lydia pressed her cheek to their baby girl’s.
The baby stopped screaming to stare at her parents, who couldn’t take their eyes off her.
“We still don’t have a name,” Lydia said. She wanted Clara. Josh wasn’t sure his parents were ready.
“We’ll agree on something before we take her home.” He kissed Lydia and then he kissed their daughter. “It can’t be harder than choosing the bedroom furniture.”
“That took us more than six months.”
“Not everything can change.” Josh laughed, cradling the baby between them. “But I won’t change again.”
“I believe in you,” Lydia said.
“Shh. We’re not alone.”
“I’m hurrying,” Dr. Forbes said. “She’s a beauty. See if she’ll nurse, Lydia.”
Josh helped her arrange the hospital gown. Together, they managed to move their rooting daughter to her breast. The baby took over from there.
“She’s starving.” The last nurse in the room managed to tidy up the bed, and then she pulled hangings around it. Dr. Forbes pushed his stool back.
Lydia watched her daughter, awestruck. “How did she know how to do that?”
Dr. Forbes and the nurse laughed. “Call if you need us,” the doctor said. “We’ll be back in a while. Have a nice visit, and I’ll hold off Evelyn and Bart as long as I can.” He peeled off his gloves and planted his hands on his hips. “You make a fine family.”
After they were alone, Josh helped Lydia switch the baby to her other breast, and then he lay down beside them.
“I can’t help thinking about our other baby,” Lydia said, unsurprised to find that this moment, so laced with happiness could hold a pinch of grief for her lost son.
“He’s on my mind.” Josh laid his palm against the baby’s head. His hand completely swallowed her. “But she deserves all our love, and it wouldn’t be fair to let the past make her future bitter.” He looked up. “The son we didn’t get to know will always have a place in our family, but we have to love her without holding back.”
Lydia cuddled the baby closer, smiling as she uttered the faintest grunt. “I knew I’d love her. I thought it would be all sweet and beautiful.” She rubbed her daughter’s leg. “But when I look at her, I’d do anything—I feel it from so deep I don’t know where it starts. It’s savage. I only felt grief like that before.”
He tucked a blanket around Lydia, his hand lingering in the loving touch she anticipated every lucky day of her life. “It’s different this time. She’s in our arms. We’re going to take her home to a house you designed just for us. She’s going to live and grow up in a town where everyone will look out for her.” He smiled, as humbled as Lydia. “I wouldn’t have believed this could happen two years ago, but I see the two of you, and I know I’ll never wonder where home is again.”
Their daughter had fallen asleep. Over her head, Lydia kissed her husband, gently nibbling his whiskered chin.
She snuggled with her daughter and tangled her legs with Josh’s, tired, but tranquil. She no longer knew fear. When his clients got out of hand, they were just part of life. She and Josh protected each other and carried on with living, and now they had this living sign of their love, their infant girl.
“I wish we could all sleep like this for a little while, but any second your parents are going to bust down that door.”
Josh slid his hand around her nape and kissed her forehead, his mouth curved in a smile. “We’ll pretend we don’t notice them.”
ISBN: 978-1-4592-2178-9
MARRIAGE IN JEOPARDY
Copyright © 2006 by Anna Adams.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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Table of Contents
LETTER TO READER
TITLE PAGE
BOOKS BY ANNA ADAMS
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
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
EPILOGUE
COPYRIGHT
