always thought we should refinish them.”
“But it doesn’t matter now!” she said, but it felt as if it did. It felt as if it was part of all that was unfinished. In the house, and between them. But Kade did not tell her that.
“What do you know about refinishing a floor?” she asked, looking at her watch.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” he said. “I went on the internet. It’s easier than you think.”
Jessica looked insultingly doubtful.
“I think that refinishing will be less time-consuming than ripping out the old floor and putting down a new one,” he told her. He didn’t add it might be more in keeping with his skill set.
“Why are you tackling it? Why didn’t you just hire someone? That guy you hired to install my door was excellent. By the way, I owe you some money for that.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
She looked as if she was going to argue, but then remembered she already was in the middle of one argument with him and decided to stick to that one. “I mean this is not exactly your line of work, Kade. It’s certainly not in keeping with your current lifestyle.”
“What lifestyle is that?” he asked her.
“You know.”
“I don’t.”
“CEO—chief everything officer—at a prestigious company, resident of River’s Edge.”
“I already told you I work all the time.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to say. You work all the time, and not at renovations. You have a very sophisticated lifestyle. You move in very high-powered circles. I don’t understand why you want to do this.”
“I started it,” he said grimly. “And I’m going to finish it.”
She looked at him, and he knew she got it. She got it at every level that he had meant it at.
“Well, I’d love to stay and help—”
He could tell she meant it to sound sarcastic, but instead they both heard the wistfulness there, and Jessica blushed.
“—but I have to go to work. It already took me nearly forty-five minutes longer to get ready than I thought it would, and my part-time staffer can only stay until noon today.”
“You slept in,” he guessed.
Jessica looked as if she was going to protest, but then didn’t. She sighed. “I had trouble sleeping.”
“I thought you would.”
“What? Why?”
“There aren’t very many people who could walk away from being assaulted without being affected by it. And you’ve always been more sensitive than the average person anyway.”
She smiled wanly and gave in, just a little bit, to the fact that he was her husband. He knew her. “I’m okay till I lie down, then I feel as if I hear glass breaking. I jump at the sound of the furnace turning on, and that tree branch outside the bedroom scraping the window. Then, since I’m awake anyway, I contemplate how to protect my shop, and hate how helpless I feel.”
He drew in a deep breath. The warrior in him wanted to devote his life to protecting her.
But she looked as abashed at her confessions as he was at his reaction to them. Jessica glanced again at her watch. “Yikes! Would you look at the time! Sorry, again. I can’t help.”
“It doesn’t matter. There is a lot of legwork before I actually do anything. I have to move furniture before I get started on the floors.”
She cast a look at Behemoth. She was obviously thinking moving furniture was a two-person job, but he had also rented a dolly this morning with that recliner specifically in mind.
But Jessica surprised him. The practicalities of moving furniture were not what was on her mind.
“Remember the day we brought that home?” she asked softly.
These were the conversations he didn’t want to have. Because the truth was that he remembered everything.
“You protesting the whole way home how ugly it was,” Kade reminded her. He thought her exact words had been that it didn’t fit with her vision for their house. He hadn’t become totally jaded with the vision yet. Or maybe he had started to, because he had brought home the chair over her strenuous protests.
“And then we couldn’t get it in the door. It weighs about a thousand pounds—”
“Well, maybe fifty,” he corrected her wryly.
“And I was trying to hold up one end of it and you were trying to stuff it through the door. I told you it was a sign the house did not want it, and then you shoved extrahard. The frame of the door cracked and Behemoth catapulted into the house and nearly crushed me.”
“Except I saved you,” he said.
She looked at his face. Her eyes were very wide. She looked as if she was going to step toward him.
Suddenly, he remembered how they had celebrated getting that chair into the house. On the chair. And she had seemed affectionately tolerant of Behemoth after that.
The memory was between them, liquid and white-hot. It didn’t mean anything that she still had the chair, did it?
“Go to work,” Kade said gruffly, deliberately stepping back from her. “You probably wouldn’t be of any help in your delicate state anyway.”
Too late, he realized that a delicate state usually referred to pregnancy, and that, of course, was the topic that was a minefield between them.
Thankfully, she seemed a little rattled, as he was himself, by the Behemoth memory. He didn’t intend to share the secret of the furniture-moving dolly with her. She would come home, and the floors would be completely done, and the furniture back in place and she would be filled with complete admiration for his adeptness in all things masculine.
And she would be so sorry things had not worked between them.
That thought blasted through his brain from nowhere that he could discern.
“Where should I put the furniture?” he asked hastily.
“Oh. Good question. Try the guest room. I use it as an office. It probably has the most room in it right now.”
“Okay.”
She cast one last rather insultingly doubtful look around the living room, but then looked at her watch and made a squeaking noise. She disappeared and came back in a few minutes, her look improved ever so slightly by a nice handbag, ultrahigh heels and dark glasses that hid the circles under her eyes.
“All right,” she called. “Good luck. See you later.”
Then
