best.”
“And today,” she said, her voice slightly slurred with sleep, “today was a good day, like that.”
“I nearly burned your house down.”
“Our house,” she corrected him. “You made me laugh. That made it worth it.”
It made him realize how much pain was between them, and how much of it he had caused. He had a sense of wanting, somehow, to make it right between them. It bothered him, her casual admittance that she did not laugh much anymore. It bothered him, and he accepted responsibility for it.
So it could be a clean goodbye between him and Jessica. They could get a divorce without acrimony and without regret. So they could remember times like that, sitting in the thunderstorm, and know they had been made better for them. Not temporarily. But permanently.
He was a better man because of her.
PERHAPS, KADE THOUGHT, he was not the man he had wished to be or hoped to be, but still, he was better than he had been. Because of her, and because of the love they had shared.
Was there a way to honor that before they said goodbye? What if tomorrow, Sunday, he wasn’t going to go to work after all?
Kade could tell something had shifted. Her head fell against his chest heavily, and he heard her breathing change.
And he knew he should get up and move, but there was something about this moment, this unexpected gift of his wife trusting him and being with him, that felt like one of those best moments ever, a moment just like sitting on the front step with her watching thunderstorms.
And so he accepted that he was reluctant to leave it. And eventually he fell asleep, sitting up, with Jessica’s sweet weight nestled into him and the feel of the silk of her hair beneath his fingers.
* * *
Jessica woke to the most luxurious feeling of having slept well. The sun was spilling in her bedroom window. When she sat up and stretched, she saw that through the enormous windows of the bedroom, she had a view of the river and people jogging down the paths beside it.
Had she dreamed Kade had come into her room and they had talked about thunderstorms? It seemed as if she must have, because things had not been that easy between them for a long, long time.
And yet, when she looked, she was pretty sure the bedding beside her had been crushed from the weight of another person.
Far off in that big apartment, she heard a familiar sound.
Kade was whistling.
She realized she was surprised he was still here in the apartment. She glanced at the bedside clock. It was after nine. Sunday was just another workday for Kade. Usually he was in the office by seven. But not only was he here, he sounded happy.
Like the Kade of old.
There was a light tap on the door, and it swung open. Jessica pulled the covers up around her chin as if she was shy of him.
“I brought you a coffee.”
She was shy of him. She realized she had not dreamed last night, because she had a sudden and rather mouthwatering picture of him in his underwear. Thankfully, he was fully dressed now, though he was still off the sexiness scale this morning.
It was obvious that Kade was fresh out of the shower, his dark hair towel roughened, a single beautiful bead of water sliding down his cheek to his jaw. Dressed in jeans, he had a thick white towel looped around his neck, and his chest and feet were deliciously bare.
She could look at that particular sight all day: the deepness of his chest, the chiseled perfection of his muscles, the ridged abs narrowing and disappearing into the waistband of jeans that hung low on slender hips. Her mouth actually went dry looking at him standing there.
He came in and handed her the coffee. It smelled wonderful—though not as wonderful as his fresh-from-the-shower scent—and she reached out for it. Their fingers touched, and the intensity sizzled in the air between them.
She knew that no part of last night had been a dream. He had slipped onto the bed beside her, and they had talked of thunderstorms, and she had fallen asleep with his big shoulder under her head.
She took a steadying sip of the coffee. It was one of those unexpectedly perfect moments. Kade had always made the best coffee. He delighted in good coffee and was always experimenting with different beans, which he ground himself. It had just the right amount of cream and no sugar.
He remembered. Silly to feel so wonderful that he remembered how she liked her coffee. The luxury of the bed, the sun spilling in the window, the coffee, him delivering it bare chested—yes, an unexpectedly perfect moment.
“I just talked to Jake,” he said, taking a sip of his own coffee, and eyeing her over the rim of it.
“Who?”
“Jake. The contractor who fixed the door at your shop. He’s over at your house.”
“He’s at my house at, what is it, seven o’clock on Sunday morning? How do you get a contractor, especially a good one, to do that?”
“I used my substantial charm.”
“And your substantial checkbook?” she asked sweetly.
He pretended to be offended. “He’s going to do the list of all the things that need fixing—the leak in the roof and the toilet handle and the floors, which really need refinishing now. And he’ll fix the new smoke damage on the ceiling, too. That’s the good news.”
“Uh-oh, there’s bad news.”
“Yeah. There always is, isn’t there? It’s going to take him the better part of a week to get everything done. And he says it will go a lot smoother if you aren’t there.”
She concentrated hard on her coffee. “Oh,” she finally squeaked out. A week of this? Coffee delivered by a gorgeous man whom she happened to know intimately? Who had joined her last night in bed in his underwear? She’d be a basket case. “Look, obviously I can’t stay here. I’ll call a friend. Or get a hotel.”
“Why is it obvious you can’t stay here?” he asked.
“Kade, we’re getting a divorce. We’re supposed to be fighting, not setting up as roommates.” Certainly she should not be feeling this way about the near nudity of a man she was about to divorce!
“‘From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever,’” he said softly.
“I hate it when you quote Chief Joseph.” No, she didn’t. She loved it. She loved it as much as she loved that he had made her coffee exactly as she liked it, without even having to ask.
She loved that he remembered she had once bought a piece of art—that they couldn’t afford—with a part of that quote as its name. She remembered that he hadn’t been mad. He’d turned the piece over in his hands—a shard of gourd,
