The Pregnancy Secret (Harlequin Romance Large Print) (11 page)

And she slammed down the phone. He stared at his phone for a long time, and finally put it back in his pocket. He already knew, when he got back to his apartment, she would be gone.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

J
ESSICA
HUNG
UP
the phone. She was shaking violently. She hugged herself against the feeling of being cold.

And she faced an awful truth about herself. Her courage was all used up. She did not have one drop left. This love made her feel so vulnerable, and she did not want to feel that way anymore.

She thought of how it had been last night, of Kade’s heated lips anointing every inch of her fevered flesh.

In the cold light of dawn, her heart swelled with loving him.

But it didn’t feel good at all. It felt as if that love could not make her whole and could even destroy what was left of her.

It was her curse: her mother, whom she had loved so deeply, taken from her. And then each of those babies, whom she had loved madly and beyond reason, without even having met them, gone from this earth.

Loving Kade felt as if it was leaving herself open to one more loss. And he could be reckless. Impulsive. Look what he had just done! That could have been a far different phone call. It could have been the police calling to tell her Kade was dead.

Was he right? Was she trying to control him? Whatever—she had a deep sense that she could not sustain one more loss.

Quietly, Jessica walked through his beautiful apartment. With each step a memory: pizza and warm croissants and sitting on the sofa and playing a Scrabble game. She went back to the guest room, put on the nearest thing she could find, but left all the rest of the clothing they had bought together, because it, too, held too many memories.

Of dancing with him in Chrysalis. She should have recognized the danger right that second, before rickshaw rides, and Chinese food in the park, and falling asleep on a blanket with the trees whispering their names. Before it had all built to that moment last night of unbridled passion, of
hoping
for the most uncertain thing of all.

The future.

Feeling like a thief who had stolen the most precious thing of all, a moment of the pure pleasure of love, Jessica slipped out the door of Kade’s empty apartment and locked it behind her. She went down to the lobby and had the concierge call her a cab.

In minutes, she was being whisked through the dawn-drenched city. As soon as they pulled up in front of her house, she wished that she had thought to go to a hotel.

Because this was more of them, of her and of Kade. It was the house they had chosen together and lived in together and loved in together.

And fought in together, she reminded herself, and watched love make that torturous metamorphosis to hate.

She could not survive that again. She could not survive losing him again.

When she let herself in the house, she felt relief. It wasn’t really
their
house anymore. Though all her familiar furniture was back, except her bench, which was still in the back of a truck somewhere, everything else felt new.

Except Behemoth, which seemed to be squatting on the new floor glaring accusingly at her.

It even smelled new, of floor varnish and paint. The floors glowed with soft beauty; the walls had been painted a dove gray. The soot was gone from where they had tried to use the fireplace that one time, and it was gone off the ceiling.

Jessica went through to the kitchen, and it was as she had dreaded. She reached up and touched the cabinets. The oak stain was no longer bleeding through the white, and that, more than anything else, made her feel like crying.

She kicked off her shoes and passed her bedroom. There would be no going back to bed. She was sure of that. She went to her office and slid open the desk drawer.

Jessica took out all the documents she needed to start filling out to begin the adoption procedure, to get on with her dreams of a life in a way that did not involve him.

But as she stared at the papers, she realized she was terrified of everything that love meant, and especially of the built-in potential for loss and heartbreak.

She was not whole. She had never been whole. She had brought a neediness to her and Kade’s relationship that had sucked the life out of it. And if she did not get herself sorted out, she would do the same to a child.

She thought of putting the documents back in the desk drawer, but it seemed to her they would be just one more thing to move, to sort through when the time came to leave here. It seemed to her she was not at all sure what she wanted anymore.

She dumped the papers in the garbage, and then she went and sat on the couch and hugged her knees to herself, and cried for who she was not, and what she was never going to have.

Finally, done with crying, done with Kade, done with dreams, she called the real estate office. An agent was there promptly, and Jessica calmly walked through the house with him as he did his appraisal. She felt numb and disconnected, as if the agent was on one side of a thick glass wall, and she was on the other. She didn’t really care what price he put on the house. In fact, she barely registered the number he had given her. She gave him the listing, signed the papers, and he pounded the for-sale sign into her lawn.

She kept hoping her phone would ring, but it didn’t. She and Kade had arrived at the same place, all over, an impasse that neither of them would be willing to cross. If it was a good thing, why did she feel so bereft?

After she had watched the agent pound the sign in in front of her house, she went outside and invited him to come by Baby Boomer and do the very same thing.

In the brutal light of this heartbreak, Jessica could see herself all too clearly. The business had risen from her neediness, from her need for something outside herself to fill her. It had been part of that whole obsession that she had not been able to let go of, not even after it had cost her her marriage to the man she loved.

Jessica expected to feel sad when the for-sale sign went up in front of Baby Boomer.

Instead, she felt relief. She felt oddly free.

It was going to be different now. She thought about what she really wanted, and she remembered when she had first met Kade, before she had lost herself, who she had been. An artist, not drawing pictures of bunnies on nursery walls, but drawing from a place deep within her.

That night, after she had closed the shop for the day, she went into the art-supply store next door. As soon as she walked in the door, the smells welcomed her—the smell of canvases and paints and brushes.

It smelled of home, she told herself firmly, her true home, the self she had walked away from again and again and again.

But home conjured other images: Kade laughing, and Kade with his feet up on the coffee table, and Kade’s socks on the floor, and Kade opening a box of pizza, and her sitting on a sander laughing so hard she cried. She shook that off impatiently.

She had made her vow, her new vow. And it was not to have and to hold. The vow she intended to obey was that she would not lose anything else. Not one more thing. And that meant not doing anything that would open her to loss.

Possibly more than any other single thing, loving Kade fell into that category.

* * *

Over the next weeks Jessica had to relearn a terribly hard lesson: you didn’t just stop loving someone because you wanted to, because it had the potential to hurt you.

Love was always there in the background, beckoning, saying you can have a larger life if you risk this. But she thought maybe it was from living in the house they had shared together that she could not shake her sense of grief and torment.

Not even painting could fill her.

So she did other things she had always wanted to do and held back from. She signed up for a rock-climbing course, and a kayaking program, and a gourmet-cooking class. She had a sense of needing to fill every second so that she would not have time to think, to be drawn into the endless pool of grief that was waiting to drown her. Jessica was aware she was searching frantically to find things she could be passionate about that did not involve that sneaky, capricious, uncontrollable force called love.

But the more she tried to do, the more exhausted she became. If these efforts to fill her life were right, wouldn’t she feel energized by them, instead of completely drained? At rock climbing, her limbs were so weak she could not hold herself on the wall. At kayaking—which was only in a local swimming pool for now—she fell out of the kayak and had a panic attack. At cooking class, she took one taste of her hollandaise sauce and had to run to the bathroom and be sick.

The feeling of weakness progressed. Jessica felt tired all the time. She had fallen asleep at work. She cried at the drop of a hat. Her stomach constantly felt as if it was knotted with anxiety.

Obviously, she had been absolutely correct when she had told him, “Here we
don’t
go again.” She took this as evidence that she was doing the right thing. If she was having this kind of reaction to a weeklong reunion with her husband, what would happen to her if they tried it for another year? Or two? And
then
it didn’t work? Obviously, she could not survive.

“You need to go see a doctor,” Macy said to her after finding her fast asleep, her head on her arms on her desk. “Something is wrong with you.”

And so she went to see the doctor. She knew nothing was wrong with her. Love was not an ailment a doctor could cure. You could not take a pill to mend a broken heart. The doctor ordered a raft of tests, and Jessica had them all done, knowing nothing would come of it.

But then the doctor’s office phoned and asked her to come back in. There were test results they needed to discuss with her in person.

And that was when she knew the truth. Jessica knew that, like her mother, she was sick and dying. Thank God she had not proceeded with her adoption idea. Thank God she had not proceeded with loving Kade.

It was just another confirmation that she could not allow herself to love. People could leave her, but she could leave people, too. It was all just too risky.

The doctor swung into the room, all good cheer. Jessica guessed he’d had a fantastic golf game that completely overrode the news he was about to give her.

She waited for him to remember the gravity of breaking it to someone that they were dying.

But that foolish grin never left his face!

“I have wonderful news for you,” he said. “You’re pregnant.”

She stared at him. Life was too cruel. All those years of charts and temperatures and schedules, and now she was pregnant. Plus, she knew a terrible truth. Being pregnant did not necessarily mean walking away with a baby at the end.

Hadn’t she decided she was unsuited for motherhood? She called Macy and told her she wouldn’t be in for the rest of the day. She went home.

Her real estate agent was on the steps. “I’ve been trying to call you all morning. We have an offer on your house! A great offer.”

Numbly she signed the paper he shoved at her. She went into the house and closed the door. Despite all her efforts to control everything, to keep change at bay, everything was changing anyway.

What was she going to tell Kade?

Nothing. He would feel trapped. He would feel as if he had to do the honorable thing, be sentenced to a life of bickering with her.

No. There had been no pretense in their last night together. He did love her. She knew that.

And now they were in the same place all over again. Where that love would be tested by life. What would make it different this time? If they lost another baby, how would it be any better this time?

“It won’t,” Jessica told herself. “It won’t be better. It will be worse.”

She lay down on the couch and cried and cried and cried. She hoped she had cried until there were no tears left, but from experience, she knew. There were always tears left. There was always an event waiting to blindside you, waiting to make you find that place where you had hidden a few extra tears.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

K
ADE
DISCONNECTED
FROM
the phone call. He was part owner in his and Jessica’s house, so he had been notified. It had just sold. Jessica, apparently, could not even tell him that herself. That had been a secretary at the real estate company asking him to come in and sign some documents.

He had not seen or heard from Jessica since that night when they had made love, and then he had made the fateful decision to go and tackle the breaking and entering at her business himself.

For a guy who thought he had the emotional range of a rock, he was stunned by how he felt.

Angry. And then sad. Frustrated. Powerless. And then sad some more.

He loved his wife. He loved her beyond reason. They were two intelligent people. Why could they not build a bridge across this chasm that divided them?

He mulled over the news about the house. What was he going to do now? Should he be the one to try to cross the minefield between them? A man had to have his pride.

But it seemed to Kade pride might have had quite a bit to do with why they could not work things out in the first place.

Maybe a man didn’t have to have his pride.

Maybe a man having his pride really had nothing to do with being strong, with doing what needed to be done, with doing the right thing. Maybe a man had to swallow his pride.

Jessica, Kade knew, would never take the first step toward reconciliation, and for a second he felt angry again.

But then he relived her voice on the phone that morning of the break-in. It occurred to him that Jessica had not been trying to control him. She had been genuinely terrified.

Suddenly, he felt ashamed of himself. Wasn’t this part of what was destroying them? Pride? Okay, it was a guy thing. It was always all about him. Even when he told himself it was about her. For example, he would go and save her store. But it had really been about him. He’d wanted to be the hero. He’d wanted to see her eyes glowing with admiration for him.

Maybe it was time for him to grow up.

To see things through her eyes, instead of through the warp of his own colossal self-centeredness.

She had been terrified.

And right from the beginning, from the day he had first seen her again, after she had tried to take out the thief herself at her store, she had given him clues where all that terror came from.

I lost my mother when I was twelve. I’ve lost two babies to miscarriage.
I am not losing anything else. Not one more thing.

Kade had seen what losing those babies had done to her. He had seen the intensity of her own love tear her apart.

He had seen photos of her when she was a girl. In her fifth-grade class photo, she had been grinning merrily at the camera, all leprechaun charm and joyous mischief. But by the following year, when her mother had died, she had looked solemn and sad, the weight of the whole world on her shoulders.

He tried to imagine her at twelve, her sense of loss, her sense of the world being a safe place being gone.

The loss of each of those babies would have triggered that old torment, that sense of the world not being safe.

As would the man she loved putting himself at risk.

And suddenly, he despised himself. So what if she tried to control him?

“Kade,” he said and swore to himself. “Don’t you get it? It’s not all about you.”

He loved her. He loved Jessica Clark Brennan, his wife, beyond reason. He had cut her loose to navigate her heartbreaks on her own. When she had disappeared into that dark world of her own heartache, instead of having the courage to go in with her, to help her find her way back out, he had abandoned her.

That was not love.

But how was he going to make her see that he understood that now? He suspected she had spent the past weeks building up her defenses against him—against love. How was he going to knock them back down?

They had just sold a house together. The most natural thing in the world would be to bring a bottle of champagne over there and celebrate with her.

And it was time for honesty. Not pride. Pride didn’t want her to know how he felt, pride did not want to be vulnerable to her.

But love did. Love wanted her to know how he felt and love wanted to be vulnerable to her.

Pride had won throughout their separation.

Now it was time to give love, their love, a chance. A second chance.

With his mind made up, a half hour later, Kade knocked on the door of the house they had shared. He saw Jessica come to the window, and then there was silence. For a moment, he thought she was not going to open the door.

But then she did.

What he saw made him feel shattered. She was in one of those horrible dresses again. He thought she had been kidding about one being available in camo, but no, she hadn’t been. Aside from the horror of the dress, Jessica looked awful—tired and pale and thin.

“Hello, Jessica,” he said quietly. His voice sounded unnatural to him.

“Did you come to get your check?”

“My check?” he asked, genuinely confused. Obviously there would be no money yet from a house that had barely sold.

“I told you I’d pay you for those clothes from Chrysalis once the house sold.”

“You didn’t even take the clothes with you.”

“What? Are you wearing them?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Because if you’re not, I’m paying for them.”

“Okay,” he said. “I am, then. Wearing them.”

Just a glimmer of a smile, before she doused it like a spark of a fire in a tinder-dry forest. Still, despite her look of studied grimness, was there a shadow of something in her eyes? Something that she did not want him to see? Despite all her losses, and despite the fact she wanted not to, he could tell she
hoped
.

And her hope, to him, was the bravest thing of all.

“Well, then, did you bring back my bench?”

“No.”

“What are you doing here, then?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I brought a bottle of champagne. I thought we should celebrate the sale of our house.”

“Oh.”

“This is the part where you invite me in,” he told her gently.

“What if I don’t want you to come in?” she said.

But he could still see that faint spark of hope in her eyes.

“We still have some business to complete, Jessie.” Ah, she’d never been able to resist him when he called her Jessie.

She stood back from the door, her chin tilted up in defiance of the hope he had seen in her eyes. He went in.

He tried to hide his shock at what he found inside the house. The house was not a reflection of Jessica. And it wasn’t just that the floors had been refinished, either. There were things out of place. There was a comforter and a pillow on the sofa. Empty glasses littered the coffee table. There were socks on the floor.

Really?
It was all very frightening. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

She went and sat down on the sofa, crossed her arms over her chest in defense. Against him. “I’m fine. What do you want to discuss?”

“Ah.” He went through to the kitchen with his bottle of wine. “How’s your arm?” he called. Maybe that was the explanation for the mess. She was not completely able-bodied.

“It’s okay. The cast has been off for a bit. I have some exercises I do to strengthen my muscles.”

The corkscrew was in a familiar place. How was it this kitchen felt so much more like home than his own masterpiece of granite and stainless steel? He opened the bottle, got glasses down and poured. He hated it that the cabinets had been fixed.

He went back and handed her a wineglass, and sat down beside her. He noticed the black soot stain up the front of the fireplace had been fixed, too.

It was as if their memories were being erased, one by one. “Here’s to the sale of the house,” he said.

“To moving on,” she agreed hollowly. But she set her glass down without taking a sip.

He took a sip of his own wine, watching her carefully over the rim of his glass. A bead of perspiration broke out over her lip, and her face turned a ghastly shade of white.

He set his glass down and reached for her, afraid she was going to tumble off the sofa. “Jessica?”

She slid away from his touch and found her feet. She bolted for the bathroom, and didn’t even have time to shut the door. The sound of her getting violently sick filled the whole house.

No wonder the place was a wreck. She wasn’t feeling well.

She came back into the room, looking weak and wasted. She sat on the couch, tilted her head against the back and closed her eyes.

“Why did you say you were fine? Why didn’t you just tell me you had the flu?”

“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I should have told you. I don’t want you to catch anything.”

Her eyes were skittering all over the place. She was a terrible liar. She had the same look on her face right now that she’d had the year she’d denied buying him the golf clubs he’d wanted for a long time, when she really had.

But why would she lie about having the flu? Or maybe the lie would be that she didn’t want him to catch anything.

He looked at her hard. After a long time, she looked back at him, proud and...right beneath that, what?
Scared?
Of what? Him?

Kade felt a strange stillness descend on him, the kind of stillness you might feel in a church with sun pouring through a stained glass window.

He
knew
. He knew right to the bottom of his soul. Jessica was pregnant. He was being given a second chance.

She looked away. “Yeah,” she finally said, the word obviously an effort from the lie inherent to it. “The flu.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her eyes flew to his face, then moved away again.

“You’re pregnant, aren’t you, Jessica?”

She was silent for a bit and then she sighed with a kind of relief. “Imagine that,” she said quietly. “All those charts and temperatures and schedules, all that taking all the fun out of it, and then one night. One single night...”

“Are you happy at all?” he asked her quietly.

“It’s pretty hard to be happy when you’re terrified,” she said. “You know what the cruelest irony is, Kade? I’d just realized, with your help, that I am not ready for a baby!”

It came out very close to a wail of pure panic.

“Aw, Jess,” he said quietly, “maybe that
is
when you are ready. When you can see your own imperfections and embrace them. Maybe it’s when you can see it’s an imperfect world, and instead of trying to impose perfection on it, you just embrace that, too. Maybe that’s the only real lesson we can give a baby. It’s the one I learned from the failure of us. The world is not going to be perfect. Life is not going to be easy. I can’t control everything. But together, with love for each other, we can handle whatever it throws at us.”

“We?” she whispered.

“Jessie, I am not leaving you alone with this. And maybe that’s what I really wanted to say that night when you told me you were planning to adopt a baby. Not that you weren’t ready, or that you had issues to work on, because who could ever be ready for a baby? And who does not have issues to work on? I guess what I was trying to say that night was that it’s a lot to take on alone. I didn’t want to think about you taking it on without me. It’s going to take two people, stumbling through, to bring this baby into the world.

“I’m going to be there for you this time.”

Her eyes went to his face, and this time they stayed there, wide and hopeful. She wanted to believe—the capacity for hope was there—but she was frightened, too. And who could blame her?

“I know my track record stinks,” he said.

She didn’t disagree with that.

“And I know I can’t protect you from life. Or from loss. I know we’re months away from holding a baby in our arms, and I know you’re scared this is going to end like all the other times. All I can really protect you from is walking through difficult times alone.”

She was crying now.

“Jessica, I’ve been given a second chance to be a better man. And I’m taking it. I’m proving to you—and to myself—that I can live up to those vows we took. I remember those vows. I remember each word of them. So listen to me. Because I’m doing this again. And I’m doing it right this time.”

His voice was hoarse with emotion, almost a whisper at first, and then with it growing stronger and stronger, he spoke.

“I, Kade Brennan, take you, Jessica, to be my wife, my heart and my soul, my companion through life and my one and only love. I will cherish you and I will nurture a friendship based in trust and honor. I will laugh with you and, especially, I will cry with you. I will love you faithfully, today, tomorrow and forever. Through the best and the worst, through the difficult and the easy, whatever may come, I will always be there for you. I have given you my hand.” Kade held out his hand to her, cleared his throat and said, “I have given you my hand to hold, and so I give also my life into your keeping.”

To him, it seemed like forever that she looked at him, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears. And then her hand slipped into his, as if it had never left it, as if this was where her hand was meant to be.

Jessica spoke. Her voice was husky and tears were set free and flowed down her face, just as they had that day all those years ago, when he had cherished her tears instead of seeing them as a sign of his own powerlessness.

She said, “I, Jessica Clark-Brennan, take you, Kade, to be my husband, my heart and my soul, my companion in life and my one and only true love. I will cherish you and I will nurture our friendship, based in trust and honor. I will laugh with you, and, yes, I will cry with you. I will love you faithfully, today, tomorrow and forever. Through the best and the worst, through the difficult and the easy, whatever may come, I will always be there. I have given you my hand to hold, and so I give also my life into your keeping.”

She had her knuckles in her eyes, scrubbing like a child who just wanted the tears to go away.

But that was their past. Her tears had upset him and made him feel helpless and hopeless, and so he had turned away. And so she had begun to try to hide how she felt from him, the very one she should have been able to lean on, the one she should have been able to be completely transparent and completely herself with.