coatrack beside it. A pair of impossibly small work boots hung from their laces off the same rack.
Next was one all done in lacy white, like a wedding dress, a basket on the floor overflowing with white stuffies: lambs and polar bears and little white dogs. The final display had two cribs, implying twins, and a shade of yellow as pale as baby duck down repeated in the bedding and lamp shades and teeny outfits.
Kade stood, sucking air into his chest, taking it all in and fighting the unmanly desire to cut and run.
How could Jessica do this? Work every day with the thing that had caused her, and him—and them—such unbelievable heartache? He felt all that anger with Jessica solidifying inside his chest. Now he was ready to face her.
He narrowed his eyes and looked to the cluster of people. They were at the very back of the old house, behind a counter with an old-fashioned cash register perched on it. Feeling as if his masculinity and size could damage the spaces, he passed through them quickly, holding his breath and being careful not to touch anything. Kade edged his way to the back of the room, inserting a firmness into his step that he did not feel.
It was unnecessary, because she didn’t open her eyes as Kade arrived at the back of the store. Jessica was strapped to a wheeled gurney. Her eyes were tightly shut. A uniformed medic was leaning over her, splinting her right arm below her shoved-up sleeve. Two police officers, a man and a woman, stood by, notepads out.
Seeing Jessica would have been, at any time, like taking a punch to the stomach. But seeing her like this was unbearable.
It reminded him of the hardest lesson his marriage had taught him: even though it was his deepest desire, he had been unable to protect her.
Studying her now, without her awareness, Kade could see subtle changes in her. She looked oddly grown-up in a buttoned-up white blouse and a gray pencil skirt. Her slender feet were encased in a pair of very practical and very plain flat pumps. She looked professional, and yet oddly dowdy, like that British nanny on television. Her look, if it could be called that, filled him with a certain sense of relief.
Jessica was obviously not out to capture a man.
But she looked so serious, not that he expected her to be upbeat, given the circumstances. She looked every inch the pragmatic businesswoman she had evidently become, rather than the artist she had always been. He was pretty sure the only day he’d ever seen Jessica out of jeans was the day they’d gotten married.
Her hair was the same color, untouched by dye, wheat ripening in a field, but had been bobbed off short, in a way that made her features seem elegant and chiseled and mature rather than gamine and friendly and girlish. Or maybe it was because she had lost weight that her features, especially her cheekbones, seemed to be in such sharp relief. She had on not a drop of makeup. Again, Kade felt a completely unwanted niggle of relief. She was obviously not making the least effort to play up her natural beauty.
Despite the fact she looked both the same and different, despite the fact she looked pale and bruised and despite the fact she was dressed in a way that suggested she did not like drawing attention to herself, Jessica did what she had always done, even though he tried to steel himself against reacting to her.
From the first moment he had seen her laughter-filled face on campus, he had been captivated. She had been sitting with friends at an outdoor picnic area. She had looked his way just as he was crossing a huge expanse of lawn, late for class.
His heart had done then exactly what it did now. It had stood still. And he had never made that class. Instead, he had crossed the lawn to her and to his destiny.
Jessica—then Clark—hadn’t been beautiful in the traditional way. A little powder had not done anything to hide her freckles, which had already been darkening from the sun. Her glossy hair, sun streaked, had been spilling out of a clip at the back of her head. She’d been supercasual in a pink T-shirt and jean shorts with frayed cuffs. Her toenails had been painted to match her shirt.
But it was her eyes that had captivated him: as green as a leprechaun’s and sparkling with just as much mischief. She had, if he recalled correctly, and he was sure he was, been wearing just a hint of makeup that day, shadow around her eyes that made them the deep, inviting green of a mountain pond. Her smile had been so compelling, warm, engaging, full of energy, infused with a force of life.
But two years of marriage had stripped her of all of that effervescent joy. And he could see, from the downturned line around her mouth, it had not returned. Kade welcomed the iciness he felt settle around his heart.
He had not been enough for her.
Still, even with that thought like an acid inside him, he could not stop himself from moving closer to her.
He was shocked that he wanted to kiss her forehead, to brush the hair back from the smoothness of her brow. Instead, he laid his palm over her slender forearm, so aware his hand could encircle it completely. He saw that she was no longer wearing her rings.
“Are you okay?” The hardness Kade inserted in his voice was deliberate. There was no sense anyone knowing the panic he had felt, just for a moment, when he had thought of a world without Jessica. Especially not Jessica herself.
Jessica’s eyes flew open. They were huge and familiar pools of liquid green, surrounded by lashes so thick they looked as if they had been rolled in chocolate cake batter. She had always had the most gorgeous eyes, and even her understated look now could not hide that. Unbidden, he thought of Jessica’s eyes fastened on him, as she had walked down the aisle toward him... He shook off the memory, annoyed with himself, annoyed by how quickly he had gone there.
Now her beautiful eyes had the shadows of sorrow mixed with their light. Still, for one unguarded moment, the look in her eyes when she saw it was him made Kade wish he was the man she had thought he was. For one unguarded moment, he wished he was a man who had an ounce of hope left in him.
WARINESS TOOK THE place of what had flared so briefly in Jessica’s eyes when she had seen it was him, Kade. A guard equal to the one he knew to be in his own gaze went up in hers.
“What are you doing here?” Jessica asked him, her brow knit downward.
What was he doing here? She had asked him to come. “Did she hit her head?” Kade asked the ambulance attendant.
Jessica’s frown deepened. “No, I did not hit my head.”
“Possibly,” the medic said.
“What are you doing here?” Jessica demanded again. It was a tone he remembered too well, the faintest anger hissing below the surface of her words, like a snake waiting to strike.
“You asked me to come,” Kade reminded her. “To discuss—” He looked at the crowd around them, and could not bring himself to finish the sentence.
“Oh!” She looked contrite. “Now I remember. We were meeting to discuss...” Her voice drifted away, and then she sighed. “Sorry, Kade, I truly forgot you were coming.” Apparently she hadn’t lain awake last night contemplating the d-i-v-o-r-c-e.
“It’s been a crazy morning,” she said, as if it needed clarification.
“So I can see,” he said. Jessica. Master of the understatement.
