Loves Me, Loves Me Knot (26 page)

So nothing he told her now was going to impact
their relationship one iota. She might cut him off, get her panties in a bunch and impose a no-more-sex rule. But that only meant they would go back to the way things had been that first day—he’d still stick around until she either got her period . . . or didn’t . . . and she’d go about her business, ignoring him and making it clear he was an unwelcome addition to the house-and alpaca-sitting stint she was pulling for her aunt.

In the end, though, they would still be divorced, still go their separate ways. Well, give or take, depending on how the daily over-the-counter pregnancy test thing turned out.

With both sides of the
tell her/don’t tell her
arguments warring in his head, he released an audible sigh, then heard himself ask in a low voice, “What does it matter now?”

Pushing away from his chest, she propped herself up on one arm to stare down at him. Her eyes glowed emerald-green even in the dim light of the bedroom, expressive as ever and telling him exactly how serious she was about this.

“It matters,” she said barely above a whisper.

“I never meant to hurt you,” he told her, wanting to be sure she understood that first and foremost.

Rather than nodding and simply accepting his statement as fact and a partial apology, she arched a brow. “Really?” was her equally arch response. “Because you did. Long before you moved out, you shut down on me, started pulling away. You made decisions about our life together without consulting me and wouldn’t budge, simply expecting me to go along with them. When I tried to talk to you, you clammed up. You grew silent
and brooding and . . . turned into someone I didn’t know anymore. What I want to know is
why
.”

The house was dark and quiet. He was drowsy and sated from hours of amazing, spine-tingling sex. For those reasons, or maybe a dozen others, his defenses were down at the moment and he found he didn’t have the energy to fight her need to know.

“Because I loved you.”
Because I still love you
, he thought, but kept that particular confession to himself. “And because I was trying to protect you.”

Jenna blinked, having the strange urge to stick a finger in her ear and wiggle it, then ask Gage to repeat himself so she could be sure she’d heard him correctly.

“Protect me?”

Tugging at the sheet that had covered them both a few minutes ago, she pulled it up and held it in place over her bare breasts. “Protect me from what?” she asked.

“Everything.”

It might have been only one word, spoken in little more than a whisper, but it hit her like a sledgehammer to the solar plexus. She tried to draw in a breath, to get oxygen to her deprived brain and other malfunctioning organs. But her lungs seemed frozen in her chest just as surely as her tongue was frozen behind her lips.

Pushing up into more of a sitting position against the headboard, Gage’s earnest brown gaze drilled into hers. “I want to protect you from every single thing out there that might cause you harm or pain.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, aware deep down of just what an understatement that was.

“You don’t know how bad it is out there, Jenna. You don’t know the kinds of things I’ve seen day in and day out since joining the vice squad.”

Her mouth parted slightly as things began to click. Oh, she still had six or eight million questions she was dying to pepper him with, but what he’d just said sank in and so much of what had passed between them before the divorce suddenly made sense.

She’d started to notice a change in him only
after
he’d started working undercover. Before that, things had been fine. More than fine; they’d been deliriously, almost sickeningly (at least according to her friends) happy.

The silent treatment and growing distance between them had come directly on the heels of the physical transformations he’d adopted in order to fit in to whatever group he happened to be infiltrating that week or month. She’d never put two and two together before, but looking back she could clearly see the timeline of events as they’d played out.

But she still didn’t understand
why
. What did one thing have to do with the other?

“I can imagine,” she offered carefully, some part of her afraid that if she said the wrong thing, he might clam up on her again and they’d never get to the bottom of this.

“No,” he told her firmly, the word whipcord sharp, “you can’t. And I never wanted you to. I did everything I could think of to shield you from that world.”

Jenna cocked her head, surprised by the vehemence in his tone, and as confused as ever by the direction this conversation was going.

“Why would I need to be protected from any of
that?” she asked him. “I’m not a porcelain doll, Gage. I may live in a nice section of town and lead a nice, middle-class life, but I’m aware that not everyone is so lucky. I read the paper and watch the news. I know what some of the conditions are like in the seedier sections of town, even if I’m not intimately familiar with them.”

He regarded her in silence for a long, drawn-out minute before speaking. “It’s worse,” he said quietly, his eyes darkening and clouding over with something she couldn’t quite identify. “The things you read about in the paper or hear about on the evening news . . . They gloss over the gory details. They don’t show pictures of victims with needles stuck in their arms or lying in pools of their own blood. Children covered in bruises and living in drug dens so full of the stuff, you can get high off the fumes.”

Her stomach fluttered—and not in a good way. It was ironic that he proclaimed to want to spare her the knowledge of what that world was really like, yet had just painted a vividly disturbing picture of exactly that.

She didn’t think it wise to mention that fact, though. This was the most he’d talked about his job, about working undercover, in all the time she’d known him. She might not like what he was telling her, but she wanted to hear it all the same. Especially if it gave her some inkling of what had gone so wrong between them.

“I understand,” she said. “I may not have seen those things with my own eyes, and I’m sorry that they happened, but I do understand. I also understand that you’re one of the good guys. You’re a superhero, out there fighting the good fight, doing what you can to
stop the bad guys and help the innocents. What I’m not clear on—and forgive me if I’m being dense—is what that has to do with us.”

Shifting on the bed, she brought her legs closer to her chest, resisting the urge to wrap her arms around her knees and show him just how vulnerable she was feeling. “You pulled away from me, stopped talking to me after you started working undercover. I see that now. But I don’t see what one has to do with the other, or how you think you were protecting me by ignoring me, changing your mind about wanting children, distancing yourself from me emotionally . . .”

She trailed off when her voice started to rise and both anger and sadness began to creep into every word. Because what she really wanted to do was throw up her hands and scream,
What the hell does that have to do with anything? Why the hell did a handful of junkies and child-abusers cost me my husband and marriage?

“How can I bring a child into the world, knowing what’s out there? Knowing that every time he left the house, he’d be faced with drugs, alcohol, prostitution. Pedophiles and murderers. People who will do anything for a buck or their next fix, and have no compunction about using or abusing children to get them.”

Jenna heard what he was saying, but she wasn’t sure she comprehended it. Possibly because the words echoed in her ears, coming to her as though from the end of a very long tunnel. Her head buzzed, her vision clouded, and her heart pounded in her throat.

This had to be what high blood pressure felt like. Perhaps the early warning signs of a heart or panic attack.

“That’s why you don’t want a baby?” she demanded,
surprised when her voice came out steady and not nearly as
Taming of the Shrew
as she felt. “Because of what
might
happen? Because of a dozen or so negative
possibilities
?”

Mouth a thin line of anguish, he said, “There’s some ugly stuff out there, Jenna.”

“Without a doubt. There’s ugly stuff everywhere, especially if you go looking for it. But you can’t live your life in fear of it touching you.”

Feeling as though she were about to crawl out of her skin, she pushed herself up and climbed over his legs to get off the bed. Giving the top sheet a mighty yank, she pulled it free of the bed and wrapped it around her so that it draped across the floor like a long-trained ball gown.

“What if none of that ever happened?” she turned to demand of him face-on. “What if we’d stayed married, had a child—
children
, even—and lived happily ever after? What if none of them ever got addicted to drugs or were molested or mugged on the street? It happens, you know,” she charged in a tone growing ever more uncontrolled. “People all across the country lead happy, healthy lives, with solid marriages and perfectly content children, who never get caught up in any of those bad things you’re so worried about.”

Gage remained still on the bed, staring at her like a statue. Was he even listening to her? Did anything she’d said have an impact on him?

“We both grew up that way. Nothing awful ever happened to us. I mean, we used to joke all the time about our families giving the Cleavers or Bradys a run for their money, and how we wanted to create the same sort of environment for our own kids.”

It wasn’t entirely true that they’d grown up like sitcom children, of course. No family was perfect, and everyone had their own personal issues or baggage from the past, but not everyone had horrible, traumatizing, oversized baggage.

Jenna’s parents happened to be stiff and stoic. Whenever the topic had come up, she’d described them as being the American Gothic version of the Cleavers. But she’d been well cared for, and no one had ever beaten, neglected, or molested her, and neither of her parents was an alcoholic, drug abuser, or even compulsive gambler.

And Gage had had an even more storybook childhood. His parents were fabulous. Jenna loved them to death, had been overjoyed to join their family—and had thankfully been welcomed with open arms by his mother, father, and siblings all—and had cried as much over losing such close contact with them as in losing Gage when she’d filed for divorce. Everything about his childhood had been perfect, from a mother who baked cookies and sewed Halloween costumes to a father who built him a treehouse and coached his Little League team.

Which only made it all the more difficult to wrap her mind around his current attitude about family and child-rearing.

“Things are different now,” he told her, still morose, still holding tight to his horribly skewed point of view. “The world is a much more dangerous place now than it used to be.”

“Maybe you’re too close to it,” she said, trying not to jump completely off the deep end. “You’ve worked undercover for so long and seen so much of the dark side
of society that you can’t see there are still good people out there. We’re good people, Gage. We would love and protect our children, give them a warm home and a soft place to fall if anything ever did hurt them.”

He shook his head. Sadly, it seemed, as though he wished things could be different, but still clinging tightly to his belief that having a baby meant one day losing that child to something painful and ugly.

Lowering his eyes to his lap, now covered by the thin, quilted spread her aunt kept on the guest room bed, he threaded his fingers together and shook his head again. “It’s too risky,” he rasped. “I can’t take the chance.”

She waited a beat, breathing slowly in and out, letting his final decision sink in. Anger bubbled in her belly, while at the same time a chill of sorrow spread through her veins.

“So that’s it,” she replied woodenly. “I don’t get a say in the matter? You can’t stretch your mind to believe that we could instill enough self-esteem and strong moral principles in our children that they wouldn’t get mixed up in any of that stuff? You’re going to trust that nameless, faceless strangers would wield enough power to hurt our kids before they’re even born, but you can’t trust the two of
us
enough to know we’d keep them safe and raise them right?”

He lifted his head to meet her gaze and the answer was clear. His eyes were bleak, splintering her heart into a thousand tiny shards. There was no changing his mind; she understood that now, even though somewhere, in the very distant back of her mind, she’d hoped and thought maybe, just
maybe
there was a chance.

Until that moment, however, she hadn’t realized how
much pain of his own Gage was carrying around—because of his job, because of the things his job had forced him to witness, and because of the decisions they’d driven him to make.

She’d thought she’d lost it all when he’d pulled away from her and she’d been forced to ask for a divorce. Now she knew that wasn’t true. She hadn’t lost it all; he had. Because she still believed that good could win out over evil and had faith in humanity, while he . . .

He’d apparently lost faith in everyone and everything. Including her.

Including himself.

Gage got out of bed just as the sun was rising on the distant horizon, casting the sky in soft pink and orange and purple.

Not that he’d gotten a wink of sleep after Jenna had pressed him with the hard questions . . . and hadn’t liked his answers.

He didn’t think she’d gotten much rest, either.

There at the end, she’d had such a look in her eyes. A look of sadness, disappointment, and loss. It had clutched at him, squeezed him from the inside out and made him want to reach out. To grab her up, tug her back into bed, and hold her, murmuring reassuring promises until the sorrow faded from her eyes.

But he couldn’t do that. He hadn’t been able to offer a single soothing word, because everything he’d had to say had already been said. There was no changing his mind—no changing hers, either, he knew—and nothing was going to soften that blow for her.