eyes were bleak. Vacant. And completely dry.
Erica had to fight not to cry for him.
“Jack,” she said, attempting to bring him back to her if she could. “I’m sorry. So incredibly sorry.”
As he refocused on her, Erica could see the raging emotions he was struggling to control. “I know,” he said.
There was nothing she could do for him, nothing she could say that was going to make any difference at all to the despair he was fighting. She could only sit there. Give him her love. And hope that there really was some healing power in a human heart.
“She was only two months old. Not even rolling over yet.” His voice was low. “That’s when I joined the Crisis Negotiation team.”
Erica ached to hold him in her arms.
She ached for a lot of things she couldn’t have.
CHAPTER TWO
HOURS PASSED. Erica drank four more glasses of wine, well past her limit. But without the numbness it brought, she’d never be able to walk away from Jack and go home to the man she’d married.
Maggie’s was closing within the hour. There were only a few late-night stragglers left.
“I’m glad Jefferson is good to you.”
“I don’t deserve his goodness,” Erica said. She’d always felt that way, but never more so than she did at this moment, sitting here with Jack, clutching his hand, afraid that she’d fallen in love with him.
“How can you say that?” Jack argued. “You spend your life presenting him in the best possible light, giving everything you have to the building of his reputation.”
“He’s in love with me.”
“I sure as hell hope so.” The words were sharp.
“I love him, too, but I’m not in love with him.”
“You said he knew that going in.”
She nodded. “I’d been working in his office for several years, and I’d recently received the promotion to communications director.” Erica, remembering back three years before, could hardly make sense of decisions that had seemed so logical and clear-cut. “The Republican senatorial race in Massachusetts was going to be brutal that year. While Jefferson’s reputation was good, so was the reputation of the state prosecutor hoping to win his seat. No matter how much we pumped the issues, the campaign was going to come down to the fact that the prosecutor had a beautiful wife and three honor-student kids, and Jefferson was childless and had been divorced for several years.”
She didn’t want to waste precious time talking about this. And yet, it was important to know he understood.
She stared at their hands. His tanned skin was in stark contrast to her paleness. She loved the back of his hand, covered with a sprinkling of the same sandy hair that fell across his forehead.
His touch was bittersweet, promising things she’d stopped believing in.
“One night, late, after consuming almost an entire bottle of wine to unwind from a particularly grueling week, Jefferson confessed that he’d been in love with me for years.”
It was well past midnight now. Their hours had turned into minutes.
Jack’s eyes narrowed. “He just blurted it out?”
“No.” She shook her head. “That’s not Jefferson’s style. He was arguing with me, actually, disputing a statement I’d just made about the nonexistence of love. I told him the emotion was a fantasy. That its power was ephemeral. That the happiness I thought I’d found with Shane didn’t really exist.”
It had been one of her many misconceptions, though she hadn’t discovered that until this past week.
“We debated through another glass of wine, and then I finally just told him that if love did exist, it wasn’t anything I was going to allow in my life again. I refused to be that vulnerable. Wasn’t going to give someone else the power to hurt me that much.”
“A wise decision.”
Erica wasn’t surprised he agreed. After sharing a sardonic grin with him, she continued. “At that point, with the conversation at a standstill and the bottle of wine gone, Jefferson’s confession lay between us like…like some shocking indiscretion.”
The bartender came over and handed Jack their final tab. Without letting go of her hand, he fumbled with his wallet, threw his credit card on the table. He caressed her palm with his fingers—and the rest of her with his eyes.
Time was almost up.
She needed more to drink. She wasn’t numb enough yet.
“What happened next?” he asked, as though their world wasn’t coming to an end.
“We talked awkwardly about the campaign for a few minutes, trying to get back on familiar ground. The talk came around to Jefferson’s single status, and the solution seemed obvious. We should get married. He must’ve asked me fifteen times if I was sure I didn’t harbor some secret dream about a knight in shining armor.
“I pointed out that I hadn’t had a date since my divorce and that I didn’t want one.
“He said he hated the thought of me living my whole life alone. I told him I wasn’t thrilled with the idea myself, but that it was far better than the alternative.
“He asked me to marry him and eventually I accepted.”
The bartender came back with the receipt for Jack to sign. Resentment shot through Erica. Couldn’t the man have given them a few more minutes?
“Two months later we were married, and four months after that, he won.” She continued telling her story as though they hadn’t been interrupted, as though they weren’t supposed to be standing up, heading toward the door, leaving the pub.
And each other.
“I had a lot of reservations because I knew he was in love with me and I couldn’t return those feelings. But in the end, he somehow convinced me that being allowed to share my life would make him happy. I let him convince me it would be enough.”
The biggest mistake of all.
Jack was frowning.
“You have to understand,” Erica said quickly. “It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. I did—I do. It’s just not a stars-in-your-eyes, heartjumping kind of love. He’d been a colleague of my father’s, a friend of the family for years. I’d actually had a crush on him for a short time while I was in high school.”
“Just how old is he?” Jack asked, pulling her up to stand with him, still not relinquishing his hold on her hand.
She didn’t want to tell him. Jefferson looked younger than he was, and Jack had told her he wasn’t really up on Washington politicians, anyway. She was pretty sure he’d missed the publicity
