sure.” Her tone was strangled. Was she imagining him kneeling in front of her, his hands on the waistband of those tights?
He took a devilish delight in her discomfort even while he had to endure his own.
“And I’m not sure what kind of a magician you would have to be to get your bra off with your left hand,” he said.
She looked stricken as she went over the necessary steps in her mind.
“If you let me help you this time...” Kade suggested, but she didn’t let him finish.
“No!”
“Okay.” He put his hands in the air—cowboy surrender. And suddenly it didn’t seem funny anymore to torment her. It just reminded him of all they’d lost. The easy familiarity between them was gone. The beautiful tension. The joy they had taken in discovering each other’s bodies and the secrets of pleasing each other. In those first early days, he remembered chasing her around this little house until they were both screaming with laughter.
She blushed, and it seemed to him each of those losses was written in the contrived pride of her posture, too. Jessica headed for the hallway, the bedroom they had shared.
If he followed her there, there was probably no predicting what would happen next. And yet he had to fight down the urge to trail after her.
What was wrong with him? What could happen next? She was on drugs. Her arm was disabled. She was being deliberately dowdy.
The simple truth? None of that mattered, least of all the dowdy part. Around Jessica, had he ever been able to think straight? Ever?
“While you’re in there,” he called after her, trying to convince her, or maybe himself, that he was just a practical, helpful guy, and not totally besotted with this woman who was not going to be his wife much longer, “you can pick what you’re going to wear for the next four weeks very carefully.”
“And while you’re out there, you can start making a list of the fixes. Then you won’t have to come back later.”
To help her. He would not have to come back later to help her. He mulled that over. “I’m not sure how you can do this on your own. Think about putting on tights one-handed. It would probably be even more challenging than getting them off.”
“I can go bare legged,” she called.
“I don’t even want to think about how you’ll get the bra on,” he said gruffly. He couldn’t imagine how she was going to struggle into and out of her clothes, but that was not a good thing for him to be imagining anyway.
JESSICA BOLTED THROUGH her bedroom and into the safety of her bathroom. She did not want Kade thinking about her bra, either!
But the reality of her situation was now hitting home.
Oh, there were practical realities. How was she going to manage all this? Not just dressing, which was going to be an inconvenience and a major challenge, but everything? How was she going to take a shower, and unpack boxes at Baby Boomer? How was she going to butter toast, for heaven’s sake?
But all those practical realities were taking a backseat to the reality of how she had felt just now with Kade’s hand, his touch warm and strong and beautiful, on her neck, and then on her buttons.
That was just chemistry, she warned herself. They had always had chemistry in abundance. Well, not always. The chemistry had been challenged when they—no, she—had wanted it to respond on cue.
Still, it was easier to feel as if she could control the unexpected reality of Kade being in her home—their home—while she was comfortably locked in her bathroom.
Just to prove her control, she locked the door. But as she heard the lock click, she was very aware that she could not lock out the danger she felt. It was inside herself. How did you lock that away?
“Focus,” Jessica commanded herself. But life seemed suddenly very complicated, and she felt exhausted by the complications. She wanted out of her clothes and into her bed.
She wanted her husband out of her house and she wanted the stirring of something that had slept for so long within her to go back to sleep!
Even if it did make her feel alive in a way she had not felt alive in a long, long time. Not even the excitement and success of her business had made her feel like this, tingling with a primal awareness of what it was to be alive.
Even the most exciting thing in her life—contemplating adopting a baby, and starting a family of her own—had never made her feel like this!
“That’s a good thing,” she told herself, out loud. “This feeling is a drug, a powerful, potent, addicting drug that could wreck everything.”
But what a beautiful way to have it wrecked, a horrible uncontrollable little voice deep inside her whined.
“Everything okay in there?”
“Yes, fine, thanks.” No, it wasn’t fine. Go away. I can’t think clearly with you here.
“I thought I heard you mumbling. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” she called. She could hear a desperate edge in her own voice. Jessica was breathing hard, as if she had run a marathon.
Annoyed with herself, she told herself to just focus on one thing at a time. That one thing right now was removing her blouse. By herself.
Her nightie was hanging on the back of the bathroom door. She should not feel regret that the nightwear was mundane and not the least sexy. She should only be feeling thankful that it was sleeveless.
For a whole year, she had not cared what her sleepwear looked like. As long as it was comfortable she hadn’t cared if it was frumpy, if it had all the sex appeal of a twenty-pound potato sack.
For a whole year, she had told herself that not caring what she slept in, that not spending monstrous amounts of money on gorgeous lingerie, was a form of freedom. She had convinced herself it was one of the perks of the single life.
“Focus on getting your blouse off!” she told herself.
“Jessica?”
“I’m okay.” She hoped he would not hear the edge in her voice. Of course, he did.
“You don’t sound okay. I told you it was going to be more difficult than you thought.”
What? Getting dressed? Or getting divorced?
One of the things that was so annoying about Kade? He had an aggravating tendency to be right.
“Focus,” Jessica commanded herself. She managed to shrug the blouse off both her shoulders, and peeled the sleeve off her left arm with her teeth. But when she tried to slide the newly slit sleeve over the cast, it bunched up around it, and refused to move.
By now, Jessica was thoroughly
