was nothing he hated more than the helplessness that made him feel. To his detriment, he had not reacted well to her tears in the past.
He felt ashamed of the fact that she felt it necessary to suck in a deep, steadying breath before she spoke to him.
“They’ve done an X-ray. I’m just waiting for the doctor. It is broken. I’m not sure if they can set it, or if it will need surgery.” She looked perilously close to tears.
Kade fought an urge to wrap his arms around her and let her cry. But he’d never been good with tears, and it felt way too late now to try to be a sensitive guy. It would require him to be a way better and braver man than he knew how to be.
She knew his weaknesses, because she set her shoulders and tilted her chin. “You didn’t have to come.”
He shrugged. “Your store is secure,” he told her. “I put up a sign.”
The struggle—whether to be gracious or belligerent—was evident in her eyes. Graciousness won, as he had known it would. “Thank you. What did it say?”
“Baby bummer, temporarily closed due to break-in.”
A reluctant smile tickled her lips, and then she surrendered and laughed. “That’s pretty good. Even though it’s a major bummer, not a baby one.”
Kade was pretty pleased with himself that he had made her laugh instead of cry.
“It could have been a much more major bummer than it was,” he said sternly. “Tell me what happened.”
* * *
Jessica couldn’t help but shiver at the faintly dangerous note in Kade’s voice. She could not be intimidated by it!
“Isn’t it fairly obvious what happened?” she asked coolly. “I was doing some paperwork, and there was a break-in.”
“But he came through the front door.”
“So?”
“Is there a back door?” Kade asked. That something dangerous deepened in his tone.
“Well, yes, but we just surprised each other. Thankfully, I called 911 as soon as I heard the glass break.”
“Don’t you think you could have run out the back door and called 911 from safety?”
Jessica remembered what she didn’t like about Kade. Besides everything. She needed a good cry right now and she was sucking it back rather than risk his disapproval. On top of that, he was a big man at work. It made him think he knew the answers to everything.
Which was why she didn’t even want him to know about adoption. He was certain to have an opinion about that that she would not be eager to hear.
“Hindsight is always twenty-twenty,” she informed him snootily.
“How did you end up hurt?” Kade asked.
Jessica squirmed a bit.
“Um, we scuffled,” she admitted. “I fell.”
“You scuffled?” Kade asked, incredulous. “You scuffled with a burglar? I would have thought it was hard to scuffle while running for the back door.”
“I was not going to run away,” she said.
“That is nothing to be proud of.”
“Yes,” she said, “it is. Don’t you dare presume to tell me what to be proud of.”
From their shared laughter over the bummers of life just moments ago to this. It was just like the final weeks of their marriage: arguments lurked everywhere.
“Why are you proud of it?” he asked, that dangerous something still deepening in his tone, that muscle jerking along the line of his jaw that meant he was really annoyed.
“I’m proud I took on that scrawny thief,” Jessica said, her voice low, but gaining power. “I lost my mother when I was twelve. I’ve lost two babies to miscarriage.”
And she had lost Kade, not that she was going to mention that. In some ways the loss of him had been the worst of all. The other losses had been irrevocable, but Kade was still there, just not there for her.
“Sorry?” he said, reeling back slightly from her as if she had hit him with something. “What does that have to do with this?”
“I am not losing anything else,” she said, and could hear the tautness in her own voice. “Not one more thing.”
He stared at her, and she took a deep breath and continued.
“You listen to me, Kade Brennan. I am not surrendering to life anymore. I am not going to be the hapless victim. I am making the rules, and I am making my own life happen.”
Kade was shocked into silence, so she went on, her tone low. “So if that means scuffling with someone who was trying to take one more thing from me, then so be it.”
“Oh, boy,” he said, his voice low and pained. “That’s not even sensible.”
“I don’t care what you think is sensible,” she said with stubborn pride.
Though, she did plan to be more sensible soon. Naturally, there would be no more scuffling once she had adopted a baby. She would think things all the way through then. She would be the model of responsible behavior.
She hoped there were no questions about how one would handle a break-in on the adoption application.
“So you weren’t running for the back door,” he deduced, regaining himself. “Not even close.”
“Nope.” The new Jessica refused to be intimidated. She met his gaze with determination. She was not going to be cowed by Kade. She was not one of his employees. She was nearly not even his wife. In a little while, they would practically be strangers.
At the thought, a little unexpected grayness swirled inside her—she was willing to bet that was a result of her injury, a bit of shock—but she fought it off bravely.
“I was not letting him get away,” Jessica said. “The police were coming.”
For a moment he was stunned speechless again. He clenched that muscle in his jaw tighter. She remembered she hated that about him, too: the jaw clenching.
His voice rarely rose in anger, but that muscle, leaping along the hard line of his jaw, was a dead giveaway that he was really irritated about something.
“Are you telling me—” Kade’s voice was low and dangerous “—that you not only scuffled with the burglar, but you tried to detain him?”
“He was a shrimp,” Jessica said defiantly.
“In case you haven’t looked in the mirror recently, so are you. And he could have had a knife! Or a gun!” So much for his voice rarely being raised in anger.
“I wasn’t going to stand by and let
