The Pregnancy Secret (Harlequin Romance Large Print) (10 page)

“Oh, Jessie,” he said. “I probably should have figured that out.”

“And then we got married,” she said slowly, “and I already had this idea in my head what a perfect life looked like, and I set out to make our life together look like that. And when I could sense you were dissatisfied, I thought it was because we needed to take the next step—to solidify ourselves as a family.”

“You decided you wanted to have a baby.”

“Didn’t you want to have a baby?” she asked.

“Of course I did,” he reassured her. “But maybe not for me. I wanted you to be happy. It didn’t seem as though paint chips and the creative use of tarragon were making you happy. It certainly didn’t seem as though I was making you happy.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

S
O
HERE
WAS
a painful truth looking Jessica in the face. She’d had a wonderful husband who loved her, and somehow she had managed to manufacture misery.

Not that their challenges had not been real, but why hadn’t she been able to focus on everything that was right and good, instead of working away at the tiny cracks until they had become fractures between Kade and her?

As painful as this conversation was, Jessica was relieved by it. This was the conversation they had needed to have a year ago, when everything had fallen apart so completely between them. Maybe if they had had it even before that, they could have stopped things from progressing to a complete fallout.

“When the first miscarriage happened,” Jessica admitted softly, “I think it was a cruel reminder of what I’d already learned from my mother’s illness—I was not in control of anything. And yet instead of surrendering to that, I fought it hard. The more out of control I felt, the more I started trying to control everything. Maybe especially you.”

“Jessica,” Kade said, and his voice was choked, “I always saw the failure as mine, not yours.”

Her eyes filled with tears. It was not what she needed to hear, not right now, just as she was acknowledging her part in their marriage catastrophe.

“When I married you,” Kade said, his voice low and pain-filled, “it felt as if that was a sacred vow and that I had found my lifelong duty. It was to protect you. To keep you safe. To stop bad things from happening. I felt as if my love should be enough to protect us—and you—from every storm.

“When it wasn’t? When the growing chasm between us was made impassable by the two miscarriages, I could not enter your world anymore. I felt as if I was losing my mind. Those miscarriages, those lost babies, made me admit to myself how powerless I was. I couldn’t do the most important thing I’d ever wanted to do. I could not save my own babies.

“And that compounded the fact I was already dealing with a terrible sense of failure at lesser levels.”

“What levels?” she asked.

“I had failed to even make you happy. I wanted you to stop trying to get pregnant. But you wouldn’t. It made me feel as if I was not enough to meet your needs. It felt as if the bottom fell out of our whole world. When you wanted to keep trying—keep subjecting yourself and us to that roller-coaster ride of hope and joy and grief and despair—I just couldn’t do it. And so I retreated to a world where I could be in control.”

“And abandoned me,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes. Yes, I did abandon you. But I think not nearly so thoroughly as you abandoned yourself. It was as if a baby was going to become your whole reason and your whole life.”

She realized that she had not been ready then, and she was not really ready now, either. She began to cry. She had vowed no more losses, and now she faced the biggest one of all. Somehow in marriage, she had lost herself. She had become the role she played instead of the person she was.

Kade had always hated tears.

Always. If they argued and she started crying, he left.

Except when they had lost the first baby. They had crawled into bed together and clung to each other and wept until there were no tears left.

But after that, it was as if he steeled himself against that kind of pain, against feeling so intensely ever again. Even after the devastation of the loss of the second baby, he had been capable of only a few clumsy claps on the shoulder, a few of the kinds of platitudes she had come to hate the most.

It had seemed as if her grief had alienated him even more, had driven him away even more completely.

The tears trickled down her cheeks. She could not stop them now that they had been let loose.

She expected him to do what he had always done: escape at the first sign of a loss of control on her part. But he didn’t.

“Jessie,” Kade said softly. “In retrospect, we weren’t ready for those babies. Neither of us was. We thought our relationship was on firm ground, but at the first stress, it fractured, so it wasn’t. Babies need to come into a stronger place than that.”

He came and he put his arms around her. He drew her deep against him, doing what she had needed so desperately from him all along. He let her tears soak into his shirt.

“I’m okay now,” she finally sighed against him. “Thank you.”

“For what?” he growled.

“For holding me. It’s all I ever needed. Not for you to fix things, but for you to be there, as solid as a rock, when things went sideways.”

He looked at her. He nodded. She could see the regret in his face. She could see that he got it. Completely.

And then something changed in his eyes, and he reached down and lifted a tear off her cheek with his finger, and scraped his thumb across her lip.

Jessica could feel the move into the danger zone. And she should have stepped back from it. But she could not.

A part of her that would not be controlled missed him—and missed this part of their life together—with a desperation that made her think she knew how heroin addicts felt. The
need
overshadowed everything. It overpowered common sense and reason. It certainly overpowered the need to be in control and the need to be right.

They were all gone—common sense and reason, control and the need to be right. They were gone, and in their place his thumb scraping across her lip became her whole world. Her lips parted, and she drew his thumb into her mouth. His skin tasted of heaven.

He went very still. She gazed up at him. And then she stood on her tiptoes, and she pulled his head down to her. She kissed that beautiful, familiar little groove behind his ear. He groaned his surrender and placed his hands on each side of her face and looked down at her, and then lowered his mouth to hers.

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.”

“How about if you don’t tell me what I was thinking about? We had a great night last night. It doesn’t mean you own me. It doesn’t mean you get to control me. You know what this conversation feels like?
Here we go again
.”

“Does it?” she said, and her voice was very shrill. “Well, try this out—here we
don’t
go again!”