Loves Me, Loves Me Knot (24 page)

“Because of what happened at The Yarn Barn with Zack and Grace. Because I knew what she’d done, but didn’t tell you.”

“Why would I be mad about that?” he asked carefully.

“Well, it was a lie of omission,” she admitted, “and I know how you feel about that sort of thing.”

He mulled that over for a second before the flat line of his mouth relaxed a fraction.

“I understand why you did it. I don’t even blame you; you were just protecting a friend. If Zack had admitted to an affair, I probably wouldn’t have told you, either. But it did make me wonder . . .” His words trailed off for a moment and he shrugged. “Things between us were so ugly there at the end, the thought crossed my mind that this might not have been the first time you lied to me—by omission or otherwise.”

Jenna’s heart pounded against her ribcage like a jungle drum and a lump formed in her throat. She knew how he felt about liars. On his top ten list of sins that would send you to Hell, directly to Hell, do not pass Go and do not collect two hundred dollars, it was right up there with child sex offenders and people who talked in the theatre.

Swallowing hard in an effort to dislodge the knot in her chest, she thought back to everything that had passed between them over the years. Had she ever lied to him, be it a little white lie or a big, honking black one?

After a brief silence, she nodded and looked him directly in the eye as she murmured, “I have lied to you.”

His already tense body tautened even more at her admission, every muscle going tight and a tic starting at the back of his jaw. When he spoke, his voice was thick with emotion. “Do I want to know?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a pretty big one.”

Gage’s eyes slid closed, almost as though what she was about to say might be too much for him to handle.
When his eyes opened again to settle on her, his mouth twisted into a grim line and he said, “All right, I’m ready. Tell me.”

The confession wasn’t easy to get out, and it took her a minute. A minute to form the words. A minute to decide if this was truly a wound she wanted to open, a part of her heart she wanted to bare and leave vulnerable.

But he was waiting, and looking so earnest, she couldn’t find it in her to back out now. Not just because her pulse was pounding in her throat or her stomach was doing handsprings at the speed of light.

“I lied,” she began in a voice so low and shaky, she wasn’t even sure he could hear her, “when I told you I wanted a divorce.”

For a moment, it was as if all the air had been sucked out of her tiny Volkswagen bug. Neither of them moved, and Gage held himself so rigid, she wasn’t certain he was still breathing. But she’d already started to tell him the truth, so she might as well finish it.

“A divorce was the last thing I wanted, but you weren’t talking to me, were starting to shut me out, and I didn’t know how to reach you. Nothing else I tried had worked, so I thought maybe demanding a divorce would shock you into realizing how much you’d changed since we got married.”

Her gaze dropped to stare at her hands where they were clasped tightly in her lap, and if possible her voice grew even softer, more pained. “I expected you to say
No way in hell
and agree to counseling or something to work out our problems . . . not to nod and move out of the house, then sign the papers without a single argument when they arrived.”

She hadn’t intended to cry, had deemed herself well past the point of breaking down every time she thought about that period of her life and how much it had hurt to not only lose her husband, but to have him walk away as though their marriage was no more important to him than a piece of junk mail or an old pair of shoes. But that didn’t stop tears from gathering at her lashes and spilling down her cheeks.

“Why didn’t you fight for me?” she asked, then turned her head to face him full on. “Why didn’t you fight for us?”

The ache in Jenna’s voice, the sadness on her face, squeezed Gage’s heart and tore it into a million tiny pieces. He would rather take a sucker punch to the ribcage than see that expression on her face.

And he’d rather get kicked in the crotch a thousand times than be the cause of it.

But here he was, the main source of her grief and despair, of the tears pouring down her face.

What could he say? How could he explain that leaving her had been the single hardest thing he’d ever done in his life? That it had ripped his guts out and in many ways left him a shell of a man. Or that he’d had to get blind, stinking drunk before he could bring himself to put his John Hancock on those divorce papers.

He couldn’t. Because if he tried, she’d wonder why he hadn’t stayed instead, hadn’t fought the way he now knew she’d hoped and expected him to, and he couldn’t explain the driving force behind that decision, either.

So he did the only thing he knew he wouldn’t screw up. He hooked a hand around the back of her neck,
yanked her forward as far as their seatbelts and the miniscule automobile would allow, and kissed her. With his lips and tongue and body, he tried to tell her what he couldn’t put into words.

Jenna’s nails dug into the muscles of his upper arms and she made small, desperate mewling sounds at the back of her throat. Sounds he answered with low groans of his own.

He shifted, trying to get closer, trying to draw her farther across the seat, but the damn seatbelt dug into his chest, his elbow hit the steering wheel, and the gearshift nearly cut off the circulation in his leg.

With a muffled curse, he pulled back, releasing Jenna—and smacked his head into the roof of the car.

“Fucking damn Volkswagen,” he muttered, breathing heavily and rubbing the sore spots on his thigh and skull at the same time. “Why couldn’t you buy a decent American car instead of this tuna can on wheels? I feel like freaking Frankenstein stuffed into a jelly jar.”

Though her cheeks were still flushed with passion and damp from her tears, the tension of a moment ago seemed to have passed and Jenna’s mouth curved just before she broke out laughing.

“It’s Frankenstein’s monster,” she corrected in typical schoolmarm fashion, “but you’re right, that is sort of what you look like. Minus the bolts in your neck, of course. And this is a perfectly good car,” she added staunchly, defending her bug like a mama dolphin defending her young, “just maybe not for a man the size of a grizzly bear.”

His own lips twisted, and he had no choice but to chuckle along with her. After a minute, he unsnapped
his seatbelt and pushed the driver’s-side door open. “So let’s get out of here before I start to cramp up and somebody has to chop off my limbs to get me free.”

Rounding the hood of the car, he waited for her to collect her purse and knitting tote—a dark blue one with a sunflower on the front that she’d made herself—then took her hand as they walked to the house. Gage was glad she was no longer peppering him with questions about his state of mind when they separated, but he could have stood a few more hours of heavy petting in her front seat . . . even if it made him feel like a horny sardine.

She fitted the key into the lock, then opened the door and preceded him inside. One by one, she flipped on the lights, laying her bags on the table as she made her way to the kitchen.

“Would you like something to drink?” she asked, pulling open the refrigerator door and studying its contents.

Gage didn’t know what he wanted. He wasn’t thirsty, but a couple good stiff shots of Johnny Walker Black might help to numb the prickles of memory stemming to life low in his belly. Memories he didn’t want to think about, and certainly didn’t want to relive.

“No, thanks,” he said, dropping into a straightback chair beside the table and resting his arm along the solid oak surface. He drummed his fingers for a second, then reached almost distractedly for her knitting tote.

A snowball-sized clump of bright purple yarn was sticking out of the top and he grasped it, slowly drawing the length of half-completed boa toward him. She’d completed two or three feet of the thing, but he knew
from her burgeoning collection of homemade boas that she tended to like them quite a bit longer.

Despite the number of times he’d seen her wearing them, the number of times he’d unwound them from her neck, handed them to her while she was getting dressed, or simply moved them out of the way, he didn’t think he’d ever taken note of how soft they were. This one felt like silk, and he couldn’t seem to stop rubbing the feathery strands between his big, callous-rough fingertips.

When Jenna appeared beside the table and took a seat across from him, he jerked, then felt his face heat with embarrassment at being so distracted by the texture of a feminine purple boa that he hadn’t heard her approach. She didn’t seem to notice his discomfort, though; or if she did, she ignored it. Instead, she simply leaned back in her chair and took a sip from the small glass of orange juice in her hand.

“Remember the time you tried to teach me to knit?” he asked quietly, surprised when the question popped out of his mouth. He hadn’t intended to ask it, hadn’t even realized he was thinking along those lines.

She chuckled, and the action did amazing things to her breasts.

“Talk about a disaster,” she said with amusement. “I think it took me a full week to untangle all the knots out so I could use the yarn again.”

Rather than being offended or embarrassed by her recollection of his shortcomings, he took it in stride and found himself enjoying the teasing note in her voice. It was reminiscent of the days when they’d been dating or were newly married. The fun times. The happy times. The times before reality had sunk in and tainted every part of their relationship.

“Hey, I warned you I wouldn’t be any good at it.” He lifted his hands in the air, turning them one way and then the other. “These massive paws are meant for manly stuff like chopping wood and working on car engines.”

Still grinning, Jenna shook her head, sending the short strands of her ebony hair bouncing. “Likely excuse. That’s as bad as claiming cooking and cleaning are woman’s work, when we both know men are as capable of boiling water and pushing a vacuum as anyone else.” Her brow rose as though daring him to argue.

He might have been a fool about many things, but even he wasn’t stupid enough to step on that particular land mine.

And then she upped the ante—practically called his manhood into question—by slanting him a sly glance and adding, “Dylan learned to knit.”

The tone of her voice alone suggested she considered Dylan the more masculine of the two just because he’d managed to click two sticks together and somehow come up with a length of twisted yarn that loosely resembled a scarf.

So of course he responded in the only acceptable manner for someone of the Y-chromosome persuasion. “Dylan is a pansy.”

Her eyes widened at that a second before she burst out laughing. “Oh!” she barked. “So Dylan is man enough to hang out with you and be one of your closest friends, but the minute he picks up a pair of knitting needles, he suddenly becomes a fairy, huh? I’ll have to be sure to share your point of view with Ronnie the next time we talk.”

Gage scowled, because he knew that’s exactly what
she would do. Even if he took it back and proclaimed Dylan the manliest of men because he’d learned to knit, this exchange was still destined to become conversational fodder for their next Girls’ Night Out or Wednesday-night knitting group—if not a good deal sooner.

After that, Ronnie would relate the tale to Dylan, and though he doubted Dylan would be upset by his remark, Gage suspected his friend
would
ride his ass about it from now until the next millennium.

“So teach me,” he said, blurting out the first thing that popped into his head that he thought had a shot in hell of getting him out of the doghouse.

Her mouth went slack and she blinked like he’d just announced he enjoyed wearing ladies’ underwear.

“Excuse me?” she asked, the words garbled with shock.

He shrugged a shoulder and kicked back in his chair even more, assuming a relaxed position. “I know you tried once, but I’m not sure my heart was in it. I was humoring my new bride. Try again, and I promise to take it more seriously. If you think you’re a good enough teacher to pull it off, that is.”

He added the last because he knew it would get her dander up. And sure enough, her spine straightened and she raised a brow, this time in acceptance of his challenge.

“Fine; let’s go.”

She stood up, grabbed her knitting bag and the half-finished purple boa he’d been toying with the entire time, and stalked past him toward the sitting room. He followed at a slower pace, wondering exactly what he’d gotten himself into . . . and what the hell had possessed
him to bring up the ill-fated topic of knitting in the first place . . . before dropping onto Charlotte’s old-fashioned settee beside her.

Jenna pulled the started boa, loose yarn, and two large white plastic needles out of the sunflower tote, then tossed the bag aside. “Are these big enough for your ‘massive paws,’ Sasquatch, or should I go out and chop down a couple of pine trees for you to use instead?”

He pulled a face and shot her a warning glance before palming the needles. “I think I can handle them.”

But inside his head, of course, a small voice was warning him that he might have bitten off more than he could chew. He gave the yarn connected to the needles a sharp tug, testing its tensile strength and wondering if it would hold his weight if he decided to hang himself with it after he royally fucked up this little impromptu knitting lesson.

Idiot, idiot, idiot
, his mind screamed. He should have kept his mouth shut. Or better yet, grabbed Jenna and pinned her to the wall, using his tongue for better things than talking himself into a corner.

A corner filled with knitting needles, frilly purple yarn, and an ex-wife who would never let him live this down.

Taking a deep breath, he tried to remind himself that he was a cop, for God’s sake. Six-feet-three-inches, two-hundred-plus-pounds of solid muscle, capable of intimidating and smacking down some of the biggest, baddest bad-asses out there.