by Cara Colter
It was just another confirmation that she could not allow herself to love. People could leave her, but she could leave people, too. It was all just too risky.
The doctor swung into the room, all good cheer. Jessica guessed he’d had a fantastic golf game that completely overrode the news he was about to give her.
She waited for him to remember the gravity of breaking it to someone that they were dying.
But that foolish grin never left his face!
“I have wonderful news for you,” he said. “You’re pregnant.”
She stared at him. Life was too cruel. All those years of charts and temperatures and schedules, and now she was pregnant. Plus, she knew a terrible truth. Being pregnant did not necessarily mean walking away with a baby at the end.
Hadn’t she decided she was unsuited for motherhood? She called Macy and told her she wouldn’t be in for the rest of the day. She went home.
Her real estate agent was on the steps. “I’ve been trying to call you all morning. We have an offer on your house! A great offer.”
Numbly she signed the paper he shoved at her. She went into the house and closed the door. Despite all her efforts to control everything, to keep change at bay, everything was changing anyway.
What was she going to tell Kade?
Nothing. He would feel trapped. He would feel as if he had to do the honorable thing, be sentenced to a life of bickering with her.
No. There had been no pretense in their last night together. He did love her. She knew that.
And now they were in the same place all over again. Where that love would be tested by life. What would make it different this time? If they lost another baby, how would it be any better this time?
“It won’t,” Jessica told herself. “It won’t be better. It will be worse.”
She lay down on the couch and cried and cried and cried. She hoped she had cried until there were no tears left, but from experience, she knew. There were always tears left. There was always an event waiting to blindside you, waiting to make you find that place where you had hidden a few extra tears.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
KADE DISCONNECTED FROM the phone call. He was part owner in his and Jessica’s house, so he had been notified. It had just sold. Jessica, apparently, could not even tell him that herself. That had been a secretary at the real estate company asking him to come in and sign some documents.
He had not seen or heard from Jessica since that night when they had made love, and then he had made the fateful decision to go and tackle the breaking and entering at her business himself.
For a guy who thought he had the emotional range of a rock, he was stunned by how he felt.
Angry. And then sad. Frustrated. Powerless. And then sad some more.
He loved his wife. He loved her beyond reason. They were two intelligent people. Why could they not build a bridge across this chasm that divided them?
He mulled over the news about the house. What was he going to do now? Should he be the one to try to cross the minefield between them? A man had to have his pride.
But it seemed to Kade pride might have had quite a bit to do with why they could not work things out in the first place.
Maybe a man didn’t have to have his pride.
Maybe a man having his pride really had nothing to do with being strong, with doing what needed to be done, with doing the right thing. Maybe a man had to swallow his pride.
Jessica, Kade knew, would never take the first step toward reconciliation, and for a second he felt angry again.
But then he relived her voice on the phone that morning of the break-in. It occurred to him that Jessica had not been trying to control him. She had been genuinely terrified.
Suddenly, he felt ashamed of himself. Wasn’t this part of what was destroying them? Pride? Okay, it was a guy thing. It was always all about him. Even when he told himself it was about her. For example, he would go and save her store. But it had really been about him. He’d wanted to be the hero. He’d wanted to see her eyes glowing with admiration for him.
Maybe it was time for him to grow up.
To see things through her eyes, instead of through the warp of his own colossal self-centeredness.
She had been terrified.
And right from the beginning, from the day he had first seen her again, after she had tried to take out the thief herself at her store, she had given him clues where all that terror came from.
I lost my mother when I was twelve. I’ve lost two babies to miscarriage. I am not losing anything else. Not one more thing.
Kade had seen what losing those babies had done to her. He had seen the intensity of her own love tear her apart.
He had seen photos of her when she was a girl. In her fifth-grade class photo, she had been grinning merrily at the camera, all leprechaun charm and joyous mischief. But by the following year, when her mother had died, she had looked solemn and sad, the weight of the whole world on her shoulders.
He tried to imagine her at twelve, her sense of loss, her sense of the world being a safe place being gone.
The loss of each of those babies would have triggered that old torment, that sense of the world not being safe.
As would the man she loved putting himself at risk.
And suddenly, he despised himself. So what if she tried to control him?
“Kade,” he said and swore to himself. “Don’t you get it? It’s not all about you.”
He loved her. He loved Jessica Clark Brennan, his wife, beyond reason. He had cut her loose to navigate her heartbreaks on her own. When she had disappeared into that dark world of her own heartache, instead of having the courage to go in with her, to help her find her way back out, he had abandoned her.
That was not love.
But how was he going to make her see that he understood that now? He suspected she had spent the past weeks building up her defenses against him—against love. How was he going to knock them back down?
They had just sold a house together. The most natural thing in the world would be to bring a bottle of champagne over there and celebrate with her.
And it was time for honesty. Not pride. Pride didn’t want her to know how he felt, pride did not want to be vulnerable to her.
But love did. Love wanted her to know how he felt and love wanted to be vulnerable to her.
Pride had won throughout their separation.
Now it was time to give love, their love, a chance. A second chance.
With his mind made up, a half hour later, Kade knocked on the door of the house they had shared. He saw Jessica come to the window, and then there was silence. For a moment, he thought she was not going to open the door.
But then she did.
What he saw made him feel shattered. She was in one of those horrible dresses again. He thought she had been kidding about one being available in camo, but no, she hadn’t been. Aside from the horror of the dress, Jessica looked awful—tired and pale and thin.
“Hello, Jessica,” he said quietly. His voice sounded unnatural to him.
“Did you come to get your check?”
“My check?” he asked, genuinely confused. Obviously there would be no money yet from a house that had barely sold.
“I told you I’d pay you for those clothes from Chrysalis once the house sold.”
“You didn’t even take the clothes with you.”
“What? Are you wearing them?”
“Are you crazy?”
“Because if you’re not, I’m paying for them.”
“Okay,” he said. “I am, then. Wearing them.”
Just a glimmer of a smile, before she doused it like a spark of a fire in a tinder-dry forest. Still, despite her look of studied grimness, was there a shadow of something in her eyes? Something that she did not want him to see? Despite all her losses, and despite the fact she wanted not to, he could tell she hoped.
And her hope, to him, was the bravest thing of all.
“Well, then, did you brin
g back my bench?”
“No.”
“What are you doing here, then?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I brought a bottle of champagne. I thought we should celebrate the sale of our house.”
“Oh.”
“This is the part where you invite me in,” he told her gently.
“What if I don’t want you to come in?” she said.
But he could still see that faint spark of hope in her eyes.
“We still have some business to complete, Jessie.” Ah, she’d never been able to resist him when he called her Jessie.
She stood back from the door, her chin tilted up in defiance of the hope he had seen in her eyes. He went in.
He tried to hide his shock at what he found inside the house. The house was not a reflection of Jessica. And it wasn’t just that the floors had been refinished, either. There were things out of place. There was a comforter and a pillow on the sofa. Empty glasses littered the coffee table. There were socks on the floor.
Really? It was all very frightening. “Are you okay?” he asked her.
She went and sat down on the sofa, crossed her arms over her chest in defense. Against him. “I’m fine. What do you want to discuss?”
“Ah.” He went through to the kitchen with his bottle of wine. “How’s your arm?” he called. Maybe that was the explanation for the mess. She was not completely able-bodied.
“It’s okay. The cast has been off for a bit. I have some exercises I do to strengthen my muscles.”
The corkscrew was in a familiar place. How was it this kitchen felt so much more like home than his own masterpiece of granite and stainless steel? He opened the bottle, got glasses down and poured. He hated it that the cabinets had been fixed.
He went back and handed her a wineglass, and sat down beside her. He noticed the black soot stain up the front of the fireplace had been fixed, too.
It was as if their memories were being erased, one by one. “Here’s to the sale of the house,” he said.
“To moving on,” she agreed hollowly. But she set her glass down without taking a sip.
He took a sip of his own wine, watching her carefully over the rim of his glass. A bead of perspiration broke out over her lip, and her face turned a ghastly shade of white.
He set his glass down and reached for her, afraid she was going to tumble off the sofa. “Jessica?”
She slid away from his touch and found her feet. She bolted for the bathroom, and didn’t even have time to shut the door. The sound of her getting violently sick filled the whole house.
No wonder the place was a wreck. She wasn’t feeling well.
She came back into the room, looking weak and wasted. She sat on the couch, tilted her head against the back and closed her eyes.
“Why did you say you were fine? Why didn’t you just tell me you had the flu?”
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I should have told you. I don’t want you to catch anything.”
Her eyes were skittering all over the place. She was a terrible liar. She had the same look on her face right now that she’d had the year she’d denied buying him the golf clubs he’d wanted for a long time, when she really had.
But why would she lie about having the flu? Or maybe the lie would be that she didn’t want him to catch anything.
He looked at her hard. After a long time, she looked back at him, proud and...right beneath that, what? Scared? Of what? Him?
Kade felt a strange stillness descend on him, the kind of stillness you might feel in a church with sun pouring through a stained glass window.
He knew. He knew right to the bottom of his soul. Jessica was pregnant. He was being given a second chance.
She looked away. “Yeah,” she finally said, the word obviously an effort from the lie inherent to it. “The flu.”
“Uh-huh.”
Her eyes flew to his face, then moved away again.
“You’re pregnant, aren’t you, Jessica?”
She was silent for a bit and then she sighed with a kind of relief. “Imagine that,” she said quietly. “All those charts and temperatures and schedules, all that taking all the fun out of it, and then one night. One single night...”
“Are you happy at all?” he asked her quietly.
“It’s pretty hard to be happy when you’re terrified,” she said. “You know what the cruelest irony is, Kade? I’d just realized, with your help, that I am not ready for a baby!”
It came out very close to a wail of pure panic.
“Aw, Jess,” he said quietly, “maybe that is when you are ready. When you can see your own imperfections and embrace them. Maybe it’s when you can see it’s an imperfect world, and instead of trying to impose perfection on it, you just embrace that, too. Maybe that’s the only real lesson we can give a baby. It’s the one I learned from the failure of us. The world is not going to be perfect. Life is not going to be easy. I can’t control everything. But together, with love for each other, we can handle whatever it throws at us.”
“We?” she whispered.
“Jessie, I am not leaving you alone with this. And maybe that’s what I really wanted to say that night when you told me you were planning to adopt a baby. Not that you weren’t ready, or that you had issues to work on, because who could ever be ready for a baby? And who does not have issues to work on? I guess what I was trying to say that night was that it’s a lot to take on alone. I didn’t want to think about you taking it on without me. It’s going to take two people, stumbling through, to bring this baby into the world.
“I’m going to be there for you this time.”
Her eyes went to his face, and this time they stayed there, wide and hopeful. She wanted to believe—the capacity for hope was there—but she was frightened, too. And who could blame her?
“I know my track record stinks,” he said.
She didn’t disagree with that.
“And I know I can’t protect you from life. Or from loss. I know we’re months away from holding a baby in our arms, and I know you’re scared this is going to end like all the other times. All I can really protect you from is walking through difficult times alone.”
She was crying now.
“Jessica, I’ve been given a second chance to be a better man. And I’m taking it. I’m proving to you—and to myself—that I can live up to those vows we took. I remember those vows. I remember each word of them. So listen to me. Because I’m doing this again. And I’m doing it right this time.”
His voice was hoarse with emotion, almost a whisper at first, and then with it growing stronger and stronger, he spoke.
“I, Kade Brennan, take you, Jessica, to be my wife, my heart and my soul, my companion through life and my one and only love. I will cherish you and I will nurture a friendship based in trust and honor. I will laugh with you and, especially, I will cry with you. I will love you faithfully, today, tomorrow and forever. Through the best and the worst, through the difficult and the easy, whatever may come, I will always be there for you. I have given you my hand.” Kade held out his hand to her, cleared his throat and said, “I have given you my hand to hold, and so I give also my life into your keeping.”
To him, it seemed like forever that she looked at him, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears. And then her hand slipped into his, as if it had never left it, as if this was where her hand was meant to be.
Jessica spoke. Her voice was husky and tears were set free and flowed down her face, just as they had that day all those years ago, when he had cherished her tears instead of seeing them as a sign of his own powerlessness.
She said, “I, Jessica Clark-Brennan, take you, Kade, to be my husband, my heart and my soul, my companion in life and my one and only true love. I will cherish you and I will nurture our friendship, based in trust and honor. I will laugh with you, and, yes, I will cry with you. I will love you faithfully, today, tomorrow and forever. Through the best and the worst, through the difficult and the easy, whatever may come, I will always be there. I have
given you my hand to hold, and so I give also my life into your keeping.”
She had her knuckles in her eyes, scrubbing like a child who just wanted the tears to go away.
But that was their past. Her tears had upset him and made him feel helpless and hopeless, and so he had turned away. And so she had begun to try to hide how she felt from him, the very one she should have been able to lean on, the one she should have been able to be completely transparent and completely herself with.
Not this time. This time he was walking right into the fire. He slid over on the sofa and crossed the small space that remained between them. Gently, he scooped her up and put her on his lap. She did not resist. She sighed against him as if she had waited her whole life for this moment.
To feel safe, to feel looked after, to feel as if there was a slight possibility everything would be okay. He tucked her head into his shoulder, and felt her tears soak through his shirt.
It wasn’t until a long time later that he realized that it was not only her tears soaking his shirt. His own, locked inside him for way too long, had joined hers.
He could not know how this pregnancy would end. But he did know, however it concluded, they were in this together this time. For all time.
“I love you,” he said. “Jessie, I love you.”
And then he held his breath.
Until he heard the words he needed to hear.
“Kade, I love you.”
At that precise moment, the sound of her voice and her words washed over him, and he felt like a desert that had not seen rain for the longest time. He felt as if the moisture had come, fallen on the parched place that was his soul. He could feel the color and the life seeping back into his world.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“HEY, I LIKE IT.”
“The dress?” Jessica said, turning to Kade. She was teasing. She knew he hated this dress, and every dress from her Poppy Puppins collection. But it did great as a paint smock, and it covered her growing girth beautifully. Jessica watched him shrug out of his jacket at the door.
“Of course not that dress.” He wrinkled his nose. “I have to find your secret cache of those dresses. Every time I throw one out, three more appear.”
