she felt for her husband’s love felt like a distant pang.
He tucked the covers up around her, and stood looking down at her.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m fine. You can leave.”
He started to go, but then he turned back and stood in the bedroom door, one big shoulder braced against the frame. He looked at her long and hard, until the ache came back so strong she had to clamp her teeth together to keep herself from flicking open the covers, an invitation.
Just like that, the intimacies of this bedroom revisited her. His scent, and the feel of his hands on her heated skin, his lips exploring every inch of her.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re beet red.”
Flushed with remembered passion, how embarrassing.
She would do well to remember all that passion had not been able to carry them through heartbreak and turbulence.
She had bled all the passion out of this bedroom. She had become, she knew, obsessed with having a baby after the two miscarriages. It had become so horrible. Taking temperatures and keeping charts, and their lovemaking always faintly soured with her desperation.
Seeing him standing in the doorway, she remembered she had stood in that very spot watching him pack his things after their final night together.
“Please don’t,” she’d whispered.
“I can’t stay.”
“But why?”
Those cruel words that were forever a part of her now.
“Jessica, you’ve taken all the fun out of it.”
“Out of making love?” she had asked him, stricken.
“Out of everything.”
These were the things she needed to remember when a weak part of her yearned, with an almost physical ache, to be loved by him. To be held by him. To taste his lips again, and to taste faint salt on his skin after they’d made love. To feel the glory of his well-defined muscles under her fingertips. To smell him fresh out of the shower, to laugh with him until she could barely breathe for the ecstatic joy of it.
No, she needed to remember the pain, not the glory, the loneliness and the disappointment, and all the hurtful things. She needed to remember when she had needed him—when she had felt so fragile it had seemed as if a feather falling on her could have cracked her wide-open—Kade had been unavailable in every way.
“I’m fine,” she said to Kade now. “Please go.”
He heard the coolness in her tone and looked offended by it, but she told herself she didn’t care. She told herself she felt nothing but relief as she heard him close the door of the house behind him, and then lock the dead bolt with his key.
She told herself she didn’t care that he had gone and that she was alone again. For a woman who was happy, happy, happy, she felt an overwhelming need to cry. With her good arm she grabbed her pillow and put it over her face to try to stifle her desire.
Desire. Why had that unfortunate word popped into her head? This further evidence of her weakness made her fight harder not to cry.
It was weak—it was not the woman she wanted to be. Today hardly even rated as a bad day. She’d had two miscarriages. Those had been bad days. She’d had the husband she loved madly leave her. That had been a bad day.
But despite her every effort to talk herself out of them, the tears came, and they came hard, and they came for every bad day Jessica had ever had.
* * *
Kade left the house and stood on the front step for a moment. There was a little peekaboo view of the downtown skyline. It was the only place on the property that had any kind of a view, and he and Jessica used to sit out here with a glass of wine on a summer’s night, planning the deck they would build someday to capitalize on their sliver of a view.
But that had been before the pregnancy quest. Then wine, along with renovations, had been off her list.
He didn’t want to go there.
He glanced at his watch and was shocked how early it was in the day. It wasn’t even noon yet. It felt as if he had put in a full day, and a hard day, too. Still, there was a place he could go when he didn’t want to go there for that walk down memory lane.
Work.
He called his assistant. The handyman had already been dispensed to Jessica’s business. If he went and liked the guy’s work, he could surrender the list. It might minimize encounters like the one he had just had.
He decided he liked the handyman, Jake, and he liked his work. Patty had provided him with the surveillance and security system she had found, and it was already installed when Kade arrived.
“It’s really cool,” Jake said. “It’s motion activated, but you can program it to only send an image to your phone if a door or window is touched. Give me your phone number.”
Kade had the fleeting thought it should be Jessica’s number that he gave him, but on the other hand, how could he trust her not to rush right down here if her phone alerted her to an intruder?
He gave him his number, and they chortled like old friends as they experimented with setting the alarm and then touching the door, watching their images come up on Kade’s phone. Along with the alarm system, a new door was nearly installed, and Jake had matched the old one very closely and even gotten one with shatterproof glass. He was reinforcing the frame so that the dead bolt would not break away.
But somehow when Kade left, the list for the fixes at the house he and Jessica shared was still in his pocket. He had not surrendered it to the obviously very capable handyman.
Why? He suspected it was not because he had not got an answer from her about the floors.
He mulled it over as he drove into the office. Somewhere between her house and there, he had decided he was doing the fixes himself.
But why?
He wasn’t particularly handy. The state of the kitchen cupboards over there and the fireplace that did not work were ample evidence of that.
Then he knew. It was time to finish it. Not just the house, but all that house represented. It was time to finish his relationship with Jessica. She was absolutely 100 percent right about that.
And as much as he wanted to, he could not hand those finishes off to someone else. It would be cowardly. And he sensed it would leave him with a sense of incompletion that he could never outdistance.
He would go over there, and he would do all the fixes on the list in his pocket, and then they would get a real estate agent in to appraise the place, and then they would put a for-sale sign on it, and it would sell, and that last thing that held them together would be done.
And how should he feel about that?
“Happy, happy, happy,” he said.
Though when Jessica had muttered
