by Cara Colter
Why? He suspected it was not because he had not got an answer from her about the floors.
He mulled it over as he drove into the office. Somewhere between her house and there, he had decided he was doing the fixes himself.
But why?
He wasn’t particularly handy. The state of the kitchen cupboards over there and the fireplace that did not work were ample evidence of that.
Then he knew. It was time to finish it. Not just the house, but all that house represented. It was time to finish his relationship with Jessica. She was absolutely 100 percent right about that.
And as much as he wanted to, he could not hand those finishes off to someone else. It would be cowardly. And he sensed it would leave him with a sense of incompletion that he could never outdistance.
He would go over there, and he would do all the fixes on the list in his pocket, and then they would get a real estate agent in to appraise the place, and then they would put a for-sale sign on it, and it would sell, and that last thing that held them together would be done.
And how should he feel about that?
“Happy, happy, happy,” he said.
Though when Jessica had muttered that, obviously under the influence of whatever, she had looked about the furthest thing from happy! And he was aware that happy, happy, happy was about the furthest thing from how he was feeling, too.
But that just showed him how true it was and how urgent. They needed to be done. He called his assistant and did something he had not done for a long, long time.
He asked her to clear his weekend.
It wasn’t until he hung up the phone that he was aware that, for someone who wanted to finish things, another motivation lurked just behind his need to fix the house.
Was Jessica going to be okay after being mugged? Not her arm. That would heal. But her. She had always had that artistic temperament, ultrasensitive to the world.
If he knew Jessica—and he did—she was not nearly as brave as she was trying to be.
So, on Saturday morning, feeling a little foolish in his brand-new tool belt, Kade knocked on the door of the house he had shared with Jessica. He was certain she had said she would be at work, but she opened the door.
He could see why she wasn’t at work. She would scare people away from her fledgling business in the getup she had on. She was wearing a crazy sleeveless dress that was at least four sizes too large for her.
But, in truth, it was her face that worried him. Just as he suspected, her drawn features hinted she might not be doing well. There was the gaunt look of sleeplessness about her, as well as dark circles under her eyes.
“It’s a maternity dress. I have three of them.” Her tone was defensive. “They’re easy to get on. See the buttons down the front? That is a very hard thing to find in a dress.”
“I didn’t say anything.” Her arm was in the sling. At least she was following doctor’s orders.
“But getting dressed was not that easy, even with the buttons. I’m running late.”
He noticed her cast had been decorated with all kinds of signatures and drawings.
In college, she had always been surrounded by friends. But then marriage had done something to her. Her world, increasingly, had become about him and their house. When the pregnancy quest had begun, Jessica had quit the job she’d had since earning her arts degree. Admittedly, it had not been the best job. She had barely made minimum wage at that funky, fledgling art gallery in east Calgary.
At first, he’d liked it that Jessica was home, and doted on him. He’d liked it quite a lot, actually. Maybe he’d liked it enough he’d encouraged it. Who didn’t want to come home to fresh-baked bread, or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or three dozen chocolate-chip cookies still warm out of the oven?
Who didn’t want to come home to the most beautiful woman in the world waiting for him, with some newly inventive way of showing she loved him? Once it had been rose petals floating in a freshly drawn tub. Another time it had been a candlelit wine tasting in the back garden, a garden that she had single-handedly wrested from a weedy demise.
But slowly, all her devotion had begun to grate on him. He was so aware that Jessica’s world was becoming smaller and smaller: paint colors for rooms rather than canvases. She was always trying new recipes. She discovered shopping online and was constantly discovering useless bric-a-brac that he was supposed to share her enthusiasm for.
It had pierced even his colossal self-centeredness that she was becoming a shadow of the vibrant person she had once been. The obsession with the baby had just intensified the sense he didn’t know who she was anymore.
She’d started buying things for a baby they didn’t have: little shoes just too adorable to pass up, hand-crocheted samplers for the walls of a nursery they didn’t have yet. The magazine racks—God forbid a magazine was left conveniently out—were stuffed with parenting magazines.
She was forever showing him articles on the best baby bottles, and strollers, and car seats. She wanted him to go over fabric samples with her because she had found a seamstress to custom make the crib bedding. But it didn’t matter which one he picked. The next day she had more for him to look at. She was acquiring a collection of stuffed animals that would soon need a room of their own, not to mention require them to take out a second mortgage to pay for them all.
“Jessica,” he remembered shouting at her, “nobody pays three hundred dollars for a teddy bear.”
She had looked crushed, and then unrepentant.
The anger, he knew in retrospect, though he had no idea at the time, had nothing to do with the teddy bear. It had to do with the fact he felt responsible for the awful metamorphosis taking place in her. It had to do with the fact that he was aware, in her eyes, he was not enough for her.
She brought him back to the present. “You didn’t have to say anything about the dress. I can see in your face how you feel about it.”
He was fairly certain it was the memory of the three-hundred-dollar-teddy-bear fight that had been in his face, so he tried to banish those thoughts and stay in the moment. “I’m not sure why you would wear something so...er...unflattering.”
“Because I don’t care what you think, that’s why!”
Or, he thought looking at her, she was trying very, very hard to make it appear that she didn’t care what he thought.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I LIKE THE CAST, THOUGH,” Kade told Jessica.
And he did. He liked it that she had a bigger world again. All the scribbling on the cast was evidence of friends and coworkers and a life beyond the house. Okay, it grated a bit that she had managed to make a bigger world without him, and somehow it was still about babies.
“The dress is what I could get on by myself. See? Buttons down the front.”
“About the dress,” he said, deadpan. “Are they all that color? What would you call that color?”
“Pink?” she suggested.
“Nausea, heartburn, indigestion...” It was the slogan of a famously pink stomach-relief medication.
“The other ones are worse—”
“No, no, they can’t be.”
“Spiced pumpkin and real-woods camo.”
“A camo maternity dress? I guess my next question would be, how are sales?”
“They are very, very popular.”
“Tell me it ain’t so,” he groaned.
“They are part of an extraoversize line.”
“Look, you are scaring me with the visual.”
“Well, your visual is a little scary, too,” she said, standing back from the door to let him by her. “A tool belt? And what is that you’re driving?”
“I borrowed a truck.”
“A truck worthy of a camo-wearing pregnant lady, too.”
“I needed it for the vibrating floor sander I rented to refinish the floors.”
“A floor sander. The scariness increases. You always thought we should just replace the floors,” she reminded him.
“You
always thought we should refinish them.”
“But it doesn’t matter now!” she said, but it felt as if it did. It felt as if it was part of all that was unfinished. In the house, and between them. But Kade did not tell her that.
“What do you know about refinishing a floor?” she asked, looking at her watch.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” he said. “I went on the internet. It’s easier than you think.”
Jessica looked insultingly doubtful.
“I think that refinishing will be less time-consuming than ripping out the old floor and putting down a new one,” he told her. He didn’t add it might be more in keeping with his skill set.
“Why are you tackling it? Why didn’t you just hire someone? That guy you hired to install my door was excellent. By the way, I owe you some money for that.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
She looked as if she was going to argue, but then remembered she already was in the middle of one argument with him and decided to stick to that one. “I mean this is not exactly your line of work, Kade. It’s certainly not in keeping with your current lifestyle.”
“What lifestyle is that?” he asked her.
“You know.”
“I don’t.”
“CEO—chief everything officer—at a prestigious company, resident of River’s Edge.”
“I already told you I work all the time.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to say. You work all the time, and not at renovations. You have a very sophisticated lifestyle. You move in very high-powered circles. I don’t understand why you want to do this.”
“I started it,” he said grimly. “And I’m going to finish it.”
She looked at him, and he knew she got it. She got it at every level that he had meant it at.
“Well, I’d love to stay and help—”
He could tell she meant it to sound sarcastic, but instead they both heard the wistfulness there, and Jessica blushed.
“—but I have to go to work. It already took me nearly forty-five minutes longer to get ready than I thought it would, and my part-time staffer can only stay until noon today.”
“You slept in,” he guessed.
Jessica looked as if she was going to protest, but then didn’t. She sighed. “I had trouble sleeping.”
“I thought you would.”
“What? Why?”
“There aren’t very many people who could walk away from being assaulted without being affected by it. And you’ve always been more sensitive than the average person anyway.”
She smiled wanly and gave in, just a little bit, to the fact that he was her husband. He knew her. “I’m okay till I lie down, then I feel as if I hear glass breaking. I jump at the sound of the furnace turning on, and that tree branch outside the bedroom scraping the window. Then, since I’m awake anyway, I contemplate how to protect my shop, and hate how helpless I feel.”
He drew in a deep breath. The warrior in him wanted to devote his life to protecting her.
But she looked as abashed at her confessions as he was at his reaction to them. Jessica glanced again at her watch. “Yikes! Would you look at the time! Sorry, again. I can’t help.”
“It doesn’t matter. There is a lot of legwork before I actually do anything. I have to move furniture before I get started on the floors.”
She cast a look at Behemoth. She was obviously thinking moving furniture was a two-person job, but he had also rented a dolly this morning with that recliner specifically in mind.
But Jessica surprised him. The practicalities of moving furniture were not what was on her mind.
“Remember the day we brought that home?” she asked softly.
These were the conversations he didn’t want to have. Because the truth was that he remembered everything.
“You protesting the whole way home how ugly it was,” Kade reminded her. He thought her exact words had been that it didn’t fit with her vision for their house. He hadn’t become totally jaded with the vision yet. Or maybe he had started to, because he had brought home the chair over her strenuous protests.
“And then we couldn’t get it in the door. It weighs about a thousand pounds—”
“Well, maybe fifty,” he corrected her wryly.
“And I was trying to hold up one end of it and you were trying to stuff it through the door. I told you it was a sign the house did not want it, and then you shoved extrahard. The frame of the door cracked and Behemoth catapulted into the house and nearly crushed me.”
“Except I saved you,” he said.
She looked at his face. Her eyes were very wide. She looked as if she was going to step toward him.
Suddenly, he remembered how they had celebrated getting that chair into the house. On the chair. And she had seemed affectionately tolerant of Behemoth after that.
The memory was between them, liquid and white-hot. It didn’t mean anything that she still had the chair, did it?
“Go to work,” Kade said gruffly, deliberately stepping back from her. “You probably wouldn’t be of any help in your delicate state anyway.”
Too late, he realized that a delicate state usually referred to pregnancy, and that, of course, was the topic that was a minefield between them.
Thankfully, she seemed a little rattled, as he was himself, by the Behemoth memory. He didn’t intend to share the secret of the furniture-moving dolly with her. She would come home, and the floors would be completely done, and the furniture back in place and she would be filled with complete admiration for his adeptness in all things masculine.
And she would be so sorry things had not worked between them.
That thought blasted through his brain from nowhere that he could discern.
“Where should I put the furniture?” he asked hastily.
“Oh. Good question. Try the guest room. I use it as an office. It probably has the most room in it right now.”
“Okay.”
She cast one last rather insultingly doubtful look around the living room, but then looked at her watch and made a squeaking noise. She disappeared and came back in a few minutes, her look improved ever so slightly by a nice handbag, ultrahigh heels and dark glasses that hid the circles under her eyes.
“All right,” she called. “Good luck. See you later.”
Then she turned and, with her heels clacking sexy defiance of that horrible dress, went through the kitchen and out the back door. The door seemed to snap shut behind her. Was he mistaken, or had she been eager to get away from him?
* * *
Jessica could not wait to get out of that house! Her husband was an attractive man. His executive look—the tailored suits and linen shirts and silk ties, the manicured nails and the beautifully groomed hair—was enough to make any woman give him a second glance.
And yet the man he was this morning felt like her Kade. Casual in jeans faded to nearly white, his plaid shirt open at the beautiful column of his throat, his sleeves rolled up over the carved muscle of his forearms, a faint shadow of whiskers on his face. It was who he had been in private—dressed down, relaxed, so, so sexy.
Add to that the tool belt riding low on his hips, his easy confidence about pitting all that masculine strength against Behemoth...
Behemoth. Back in the day. When everything was still fun.
Good grief, she had wanted to just throw herself against him this morning, feel his heart beating beneath her cheek, feel his arms close around her.
The robbery had left her far more rattled than she ever could have believed. Her sleep was troubled. She started at the least sound. Her mind drifted back to that morning if she let down her guard for even a second. And she felt dreadfully alone with the stress of it.
It was making her weak. The fact that he knew how she would react made her lonely for him, even though the sane part of her knew wanting to lean on Kade was an insane form of weakness. She had already tried that once, and he wasn’t good at comforting her. Probably what had stopped her from throwing h
erself at him this morning was uncertainty. Would he have gathered her to him, rested his chin on the top of her head, folded his arms around her? Or would he, after an uncomfortable moment of tolerating her embrace, have stepped away?
She did not think it would be a good idea to make herself vulnerable to Kade again.
But even with that resolve strong within her, Jessica arrived at work feeling rattled.
Her stomach was in knots.
“Good grief,” said Macy, her part-time staffer, stopping in her tracks. “Where’d you get that dress?”
“You know perfectly well I got it from the rack of Poppy Puppins at the back.”
“It looks horrible on you.”
Jessica didn’t want to look horrible. She hated it that Kade had seen her looking horrible, even though she had deliberately worn the outfit to let him know she did not care one whit what he thought of her.
Sleep deprivation, obviously, was kicking in, plus it was some kind of reaction to being the victim of a crime, just as Kade had said, because Jessica felt as if she was fighting not to burst into tears.
“It has buttons on the front!” Jessica exclaimed for the second time that day. Ignoring the pitying look from Macy, she headed to office and slammed the door behind her.
She could not focus, even before she had the thought. The thought made her stomach feel as if it had become the lead car on the world’s biggest roller coaster. It plunged downward and then did a crazy double loop. She bolted out of her office and into the store.
“Jessica? What’s wrong?”
Jessica stared at Macy, not really seeing her. This was the thought that was tormenting her: Had she told Kade to put the furniture in the guest room? But she used that room as an office! And if she was not mistaken, she had the names of adoption agencies and lawyers who specialized in that field strewn all over the desk.
“Are you okay?” Macy asked. She dropped a tiny stuffed football and rushed to Jessica’s side. “Are you going to faint?”
Jessica looked down at the bill of lading she still had clutched in her hand. She did feel terribly wobbly. “I think I’m okay,” she said doubtfully.
