by Cara Colter
Welcome.
Welcome home.
His hunger was as apparent as hers. He crushed her lips under his own. His tongue found the hollow of her mouth, and she melted against him as he devoured her. His lips moved away from hers and he anointed the hollow of her throat and the tip of her nose and her eyelids.
“Jessica,” he said hoarsely. “Oh, Jessica.”
He scooped her up in his arms and went to the hallway to his bedroom. He tapped open the partially closed door with his foot, strode across the room and laid her on his king-size bed. It gave luxuriously under her weight. She stared up at him.
And wanted her husband, Kade, as she had never wanted anything else in her entire life. The wanting sizzled in her belly, and curled around her heart, and came out her lips as a moan of desire and invitation. She held out her good arm to him.
And he came willingly down to her, laying his body over hers, careful to hold his weight off her broken wing. He found the lobe of her ear and nipped it with delicate precision. He rained tiny kisses down on her brow and her nose and her cheeks and her chin.
Finally, when she was gasping with wanting and longing, he captured her lips and nuzzled teasingly. And then he took her lips more deeply, laying his claim, stoking the fire that was already there to white-hot.
“I am going to melt,” she said hoarsely.
“Melt, then,” he whispered. “Melt, and I will come with you.”
His mouth on hers became a fury of possession and hunger. His tongue plunged the cool cavern of her mouth, exploring, darting, resting, tasting. He left her mouth and trailed kisses down the open collar of her shirt. He laid his trail of fire down her neck and onto her breastbone. His fingers found the buttons of her blouse and released them one by one. His lips found the nakedness of her flesh where it mounded above her bra, then blazed down the rise of her ribs to the fall of her belly. His lips went to all the places on her that only his lips had ever been before.
She did not melt. Rather, the heat built to a near explosion. The first of July, Canada Day, was weeks away, but the fireworks had begun already. They started, always, with the smaller ones, delightful little displays of color and noise, smoke and beauty. But they built and built and built to a fiery crescendo that lit the entire sky and shook the entire world.
It was obvious from the need that ached within her, from the way her body arched against him in welcome and anticipation, that this particular set of fireworks was heading toward only one possible climax.
“My arm— I don’t know...” she whispered. It was her only uneasiness. She felt no guilt and no regret. He was her husband, and they belonged to each other in this way. They always had.
Kade took his weight off her and drank her in deeply.
“Do you want to do this?” he asked, and his voice was a rasp of raw need.
She knew her answer, her certainty, was in her face, and vibrating along the whole length of her body.
“I do. It’s just with my arm like this, I don’t know how we’re going to manage,” she said.
“I do,” Kade whispered, his voice a growl of pure and sensual need. He had, intentionally or not, echoed their vows. I do. “Do you trust me, Jessie?”
“Yes.”
“I know exactly how we are going to do this,” he told her.
And he did. And so did she.
When they were done, in the sacred stillness that followed, the truth hit her and hit her hard.
It was not that she loved her husband again. It was that she had never stopped. Cradling the warmth of that truth to her, in the arms of her beloved, home for the first time in more than a year, Jessica slept.
* * *
Kade woke deep in the night. Jessica was asleep beside him, curled tightly against him, like a puppy seeking warmth. He felt tenderness toward her unfurl in him with such strength it felt as if his throat was closing. He’d known, in some deep place inside himself, ever since he’d seen the police cars in front of her store that morning, that he still loved her.
That he could not imagine a world without her. Not just a world. His world.
Something buzzed by his ear, and Kade realized it was that sound that had woken him up, and he was momentarily confused. His phone was automatically set to Do Not Disturb during the evening hours. He picked it up off the nightstand and squinted at it. It was four-thirty in the morning.
The phone buzzed again, vibrating in his hand. It was not his normal ring. Suddenly it occurred to him they had programmed the alarm at Baby Boomer to this phone to override his do-not-disturb settings. He unlocked the screen. Sure enough, there was a live-feed image of someone at the door of Baby Boomer.
Glancing at Jessica and seeing how peaceful she looked, Kade slipped from the bed, grabbed his clothes off the floor and went out into the hall. He called 911, with his phone tucked in against his ear, pulling on his pants at the same time. He explained what was happening, but the operator sounded particularly bored with his news of an alarm going off and a possible break-in in progress.
He thought of Jessica with her arm immobilized and he thought of her ongoing sleep disturbances and about the way she startled every time there was a loud sound. Even in the cubicle of the dress shop, when the music had started unexpectedly, she had nearly jumped out of her skin. Thinking of that, Kade felt really, really angry. Dangerously angry.
Jessica needed to know that he would look after her. That he would protect her. If her world was threatened, he would be there. He would put his body between her and a bullet if he had to.
And so, like a soldier getting ready to do battle for all he believed in, Kade went out the apartment door, got in his car and headed at full speed to her store.
At first it appeared no one was there. But then he noticed the newly repaired door hanging open and a sliver of light moving inside the store.
Without a single thought, he leaped from the car and took the stairs two at a time. He burst in the door and raced across the room and tackled the shadowy figure by the cash register.
Jessica was right. The thief was scrawny! Holding him in place was ridiculously easy. The anger at all the grief this guy had caused Jessica seemed to seep out of him. The thief was screaming, “Please don’t hurt me.”
He seemed skinny and pathetic, and just as Jessica had guessed, desperate with a kind of desperation Kade did not know.
Kade heard sirens and saw flashing lights, and moments later the police were in the doorway, telling him to put his hands in the air. It seemed to take forever to sort it all out, but finally, he finished filling out reports and doing interviews.
It was now nearly seven. Jessica was probably awake and probably wondering where he was.
He called her, and could hear the anxiety in her voice as soon as she answered the phone.
“Where are you?”
“The alarm at your business alerted to my phone a couple of hours ago. I headed over here.”
“You answered the alarm?”
“Well, I called the police, but I just wanted to make sure they caught him.” He laughed, adrenaline still coursing through his veins. “You were right, Jessie. He was scrawny.”
She cut him off, her voice shrill. “You caught the thief?”
“Yeah,” he said proudly.
“But you are the one who lectured me about being foolhardy!”
He frowned. He wanted to be her hero. He wanted her to know her world was safe with him. Why didn’t she sound pleased? Why wasn’t she getting the message?
“You could have been killed,” she said. “He could have had a gun or a knife. You’re the one who pointed that out to me.”
“Jessica, it all worked out, didn’t it?”
“Did it?” she said, and he did not like what he heard in her voice. “Did it, Kade?”
“Yes!”
“Kade, being in a relationship means thinking about the other person.”
“I was thinking about you.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“Does it?” she said, and her voice was very shrill. “Well, try this out—here we don’t go again!”
And she slammed down the phone. He stared at his phone for a long time, and finally put it back in his pocket. He already knew, when he got back to his apartment, she would be gone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
JESSICA HUNG UP the phone. She was shaking violently. She hugged herself against the feeling of being cold.
And she faced an awful truth about herself. Her courage was all used up. She did not have one drop left. This love made her feel so vulnerable, and she did not want to feel that way anymore.
She thought of how it had been last night, of Kade’s heated lips anointing every inch of her fevered flesh.
In the cold light of dawn, her heart swelled with loving him.
But it didn’t feel good at all. It felt as if that love could not make her whole and could even destroy what was left of her.
It was her curse: her mother, whom she had loved so deeply, taken from her. And then each of those babies, whom she had loved madly and beyond reason, without even having met them, gone from this earth.
Loving Kade felt as if it was leaving herself open to one more loss. And he could be reckless. Impulsive. Look what he had just done! That could have been a far different phone call. It could have been the police calling to tell her Kade was dead.
Was he right? Was she trying to control him? Whatever—she had a deep sense that she could not sustain one more loss.
Quietly, Jessica walked through his beautiful apartment. With each step a memory: pizza and warm croissants and sitting on the sofa and playing a Scrabble game. She went back to the guest room, put on the nearest thing she could find, but left all the rest of the clothing they had bought together, because it, too, held too many memories.
Of dancing with him in Chrysalis. She should have recognized the danger right that second, before rickshaw rides, and Chinese food in the park, and falling asleep on a blanket with the trees whispering their names. Before it had all built to that moment last night of unbridled passion, of hoping for the most uncertain thing of all.
The future.
Feeling like a thief who had stolen the most precious thing of all, a moment of the pure pleasure of love, Jessica slipped out the door of Kade’s empty apartment and locked it behind her. She went down to the lobby and had the concierge call her a cab.
In minutes, she was being whisked through the dawn-drenched city. As soon as they pulled up in front of her house, she wished that she had thought to go to a hotel.
Because this was more of them, of her and of Kade. It was the house they had chosen together and lived in together and loved in together.
And fought in together, she reminded herself, and watched love make that torturous metamorphosis to hate.
She could not survive that again. She could not survive losing him again.
When she let herself in the house, she felt relief. It wasn’t really their house anymore. Though all her familiar furniture was back, except her bench, which was still in the back of a truck somewhere, everything else felt new.
Except Behemoth, which seemed to be squatting on the new floor glaring accusingly at her.
It even smelled new, of floor varnish and paint. The floors glowed with soft beauty; the walls had been painted a dove gray. The soot was gone from where they had tried to use the fireplace that one time, and it was gone off the ceiling.
Jessica went through to the kitchen, and it was as she had dreaded. She reached up and touched the cabinets. The oak stain was no longer bleeding through the white, and that, more than anything else, made her feel like crying.
She kicked off her shoes and passed her bedroom. There would be no going back to bed. She was sure of that. She went to her office and slid open the desk drawer.
Jessica took out all the documents she needed to start filling out to begin the adoption procedure, to get on with her dreams of a life in a way that did not involve him.
But as she stared at the papers, she realized she was terrified of everything that love meant, and especially of the built-in potential for loss and heartbreak.
She was not whole. She had never been whole. She had brought a neediness to her and Kade’s relationship that had sucked the life out of it. And if she did not get herself sorted out, she would do the same to a child.
She thought of putting the documents back in the desk drawer, but it seemed to her they would be just one more thing to move, to sort through when the time came to leave here. It seemed to her she was not at all sure what she wanted anymore.
She dumped the papers in the garbage, and then she went and sat on the couch and hugged her knees to herself, and cried for who she was not, and what she was never going to have.
Finally, done with crying, done with Kade, done with dreams, she called the real estate office. An agent was there promptly, and Jessica calmly walked through the house with him as he did his appraisal. She felt numb and disconnected, as if the agent was on one side of a thick glass wall, and she was on the other. She didn’t really care what price he put on the house. In fact, she barely registered the number he had given her. She gave him the listing, signed the papers, and he pounded the for-sale sign into her lawn.
She kept hoping her phone would ring, but it didn’t. She and Kade had arrived at the same place, all over, an impasse that neither of them would be willing to cross. If it was a good thing, why did she feel so bereft?
After she had watched the agent pound the sign in in front of her house, she went outside and invited him to come by Baby Boomer and do the very same thing.
In the brutal light of this heartbreak, Jessica could see herself all too clearly. The business had risen from her neediness, from her need for something outside herself to fill her. It had been part of that whole obsession that she had not been able to let go of, not even after it had cost her her marriage to the man she loved.
Jessica expected to feel sad when the for-sale sign went up in front of Baby Boomer.
Instead, she felt relief. She felt oddly free.
It was going to be different now. She thought about what she really wanted, and she remembered when she had first met Kade, before she had lost herself, who she had been. An artist, not drawing pictures of bunnies on nursery walls, but drawing from a place deep within her.
That night, after she had closed the shop for the day, she went into the art-supply store next door. As soon as she walked in the door, the smells welcomed her—the smell of canvases and paints and brushes.
It smelled of home, she told herself firmly, her true home, the self she had walked away from again and again and again.
But home conjured other images: Kade laughing, and Kade with his feet up on the coffee table, and Kade’s socks on the floor, and Kade opening a box of pizza, and her sitting on a sander laughing so hard she cried. She shook that off impatiently.
She had made her vow, her new vow. And it was not to have and to hold. The vow she intended to obey was that she would not lose anything else. Not one more thing. And that meant not doing anything that would open her to loss.
Possibly more than any other single thing, loving Kade fell into that category.
* * *
Over the next weeks Jessica had to relearn a terribly hard lesson: you didn’t just stop loving someone because you wanted to, because it had the potential to hurt you.
Love was always there in the background, beckoning, saying you can have a larger life if you risk this. But she thought maybe it was from living in the house they had shared together that she could not shake her sense of grief and torment.
Not even painting could fill her.
So she did other things she had always wanted to do and held back from. She signed up for
a rock-climbing course, and a kayaking program, and a gourmet-cooking class. She had a sense of needing to fill every second so that she would not have time to think, to be drawn into the endless pool of grief that was waiting to drown her. Jessica was aware she was searching frantically to find things she could be passionate about that did not involve that sneaky, capricious, uncontrollable force called love.
But the more she tried to do, the more exhausted she became. If these efforts to fill her life were right, wouldn’t she feel energized by them, instead of completely drained? At rock climbing, her limbs were so weak she could not hold herself on the wall. At kayaking—which was only in a local swimming pool for now—she fell out of the kayak and had a panic attack. At cooking class, she took one taste of her hollandaise sauce and had to run to the bathroom and be sick.
The feeling of weakness progressed. Jessica felt tired all the time. She had fallen asleep at work. She cried at the drop of a hat. Her stomach constantly felt as if it was knotted with anxiety.
Obviously, she had been absolutely correct when she had told him, “Here we don’t go again.” She took this as evidence that she was doing the right thing. If she was having this kind of reaction to a weeklong reunion with her husband, what would happen to her if they tried it for another year? Or two? And then it didn’t work? Obviously, she could not survive.
“You need to go see a doctor,” Macy said to her after finding her fast asleep, her head on her arms on her desk. “Something is wrong with you.”
And so she went to see the doctor. She knew nothing was wrong with her. Love was not an ailment a doctor could cure. You could not take a pill to mend a broken heart. The doctor ordered a raft of tests, and Jessica had them all done, knowing nothing would come of it.
But then the doctor’s office phoned and asked her to come back in. There were test results they needed to discuss with her in person.
And that was when she knew the truth. Jessica knew that, like her mother, she was sick and dying. Thank God she had not proceeded with her adoption idea. Thank God she had not proceeded with loving Kade.
