The Pregnancy Secret (Harlequin Romance Large Print) (12 page)

Not this time. This time he was walking right into the fire. He slid over on the sofa and crossed the small space that remained between them. Gently, he scooped her up and put her on his lap. She did not resist. She sighed against him as if she had waited her whole life for this moment.

To feel safe, to feel looked after, to feel as if there was a slight possibility everything would be okay. He tucked her head into his shoulder, and felt her tears soak through his shirt.

It wasn’t until a long time later that he realized that it was not only her tears soaking his shirt. His own, locked inside him for way too long, had joined hers.

He could not know how this pregnancy would end. But he did know, however it concluded, they were in this together this time. For all time.

“I love you,” he said. “Jessie, I love you.”

And then he held his breath.

Until he heard the words he needed to hear.

“Kade, I love you.”

At that precise moment, the sound of her voice and her words washed over him, and he felt like a desert that had not seen rain for the longest time. He felt as if the moisture had come, fallen on the parched place that was his soul. He could feel the color and the life seeping back into his world.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“H
EY
, I
LIKE
IT
.”

“The dress?” Jessica said, turning to Kade. She was teasing. She knew he hated this dress, and every dress from her Poppy Puppins collection. But it did great as a paint smock, and it covered her growing girth beautifully. Jessica watched him shrug out of his jacket at the door.

“Of course not that dress.” He wrinkled his nose. “I have to find your secret cache of those dresses. Every time I throw one out, three more appear.”

She laughed. It was the small things that she had come to love the most: him coming through the door at night, playing a Scrabble game together, watching TV and eating popcorn together, him licking her fingers, slick with butter.

Sometimes she wondered, if they had never had a bad spell, if she had never known what it was like to live without him as part of her daily life, would she love these little things as much as she did? Would she have known to appreciate them?

She had moved into his place at River’s Edge after her house had been turned over to the new owners. Eventually, after the baby was born, they would buy a house for the three of them.

But at the moment, they were both cautious about making decisions based on a baby. This caution remained, even though her due date was looming large. They didn’t even have a nursery, and the guest room was untouched. No lavender paint or murals this time. No crib, no mobiles, no teddy bears.

They had a beautiful handmade crate they could line with blankets and put beside their bed. When the time came. She loved the idea of the baby sleeping next to them, so close they could breathe in each other’s breath, exchange air, become even more a part of one another.

Kade came over and put his hand on the gentle swell of her belly under the paint smock.

He put his head down and spoke directly to her stomach. “Hello, baby. Do you hear me in there? Moving,” he said with satisfaction. “A football player.”

“Or a ballerina.”

“Nah, it’s a boy.”

It was only in the past few weeks that they had dared to play this game, so afraid were they of jinxing this incredibly magical and miraculous experience. But this time, the fear was different. They would lie awake with it, deep into the night, holding hands, leaning on each other.

They had chosen not to know the sex of their child. This baby was a miracle, boy or girl. Besides, it was endlessly fun debating it, even as they carefully avoided the baby sections of the stores. It was like a superstition, but she did not care. She was not buying one thing for that baby until she had held it in her arms.

She had barely set foot in Baby Boomer since selling it to Macy. But she knew Macy had her covered. She knew there was a shelf there filled with things Macy was quietly selecting for her: bottles and blankets and tiny disposable diapers and little outfits.
If
the time came this time—that hope fluttered in Jessica’s chest, they were so close now, and the doctor smiled and shook his head at Jessica’s fears—they had a whole nursery that could be put in a box and delivered to them.

There was an unexpected new dimension to Jessica’s relationship with Macy and with her old place of business.

Macy was selling paintings almost as fast as Jessica could produce them. Jessica was working largely in abstract, the colors and motion flowing out of her like rivers of light. It was as if this part of her, dammed up for too long, was bursting forth now that it had been set free.

And for some reason, that kind of art appealed to people shopping for baby stuff, not for nurseries, necessarily, though there was a whole move away from the cute traditional look of babies’ rooms.

No, people having babies these days, and especially the ones who shopped at an upscale store like Baby Boomer, were largely established professional couples. They had whole gorgeous big houses to decorate, not just nurseries.

And the name Jessica Brennan was causing a surprising stir in the Calgary art scene.

“I like it,” Kade said. Having greeted the baby, he turned his attention to the canvas. “What’s it called?”

She didn’t have a studio. The light pouring through the windows of his apartment had proved perfect. When it was too strong, she closed the curtains and had lights set up to point to the canvas. Between the canvases, paints, lights and paint tarps on the floor, the place looked very messy. Add to that a sock of Kade’s, menus out on the counter and magazines on the coffee table, and the effect was one of moderate disarray. And she loved it.

Kade had, with gentle strength, helped her probe the origins of that terrible need to feel in control.

Perhaps, she thought, eyeing their space, she had gone a little too far the other way.

She lifted her shoulder.
Oh, well.

She turned her attention to the canvas. She was not sure where this came from, this endless current of inspiration, but she was pretty sure it came from love.

“Today it’s called
Joy Rising
.” She shrugged. “Who knows if it will still be called that tomorrow.”

“Joy Rising,”
Kade said, and stood back from it.

The backdrop of the canvas was a light gray neutral. The rest of it was filled with hundreds of bubbles—like soap bubbles—rising, starting small at the bottom left of the canvas, growing larger at they reached the right-hand corner.

“It’s good,” he said. “Now, what’s for dinner?”

It was a standing joke between them, a light tease about what she liked to call her Martha Stewart phase. “The pizza menu is on the counter.”

He laughed.

And his laughter shivered along her spine. They had almost lost this. They had almost walked away from it. And that was what made it even more precious today.

And maybe that was what all loss did, if you were brave, if you were open to its lessons. Maybe all loss sharpened your sense of the now, of the gifts of this very moment.

He had moved over and was studying the menu.

“Kade?”

“Huh?”

Jessica put her hand to her swollen belly. “Ah.”

He was at her side in an instant, scanning her face.

“It’s time,” she said. “Oh, my God, it’s time.”

And even this moment, with intense ripples of pain possessing her body, was awash with light, with joy rising. Jessica looked into the face of the man who was her husband, and she read the strength there and knew, together, whatever happened next, it would be just fine.

* * *

Kade woke up. His neck was sore. He had fallen asleep in the chair. For a moment, he was disoriented, but then he heard a little sound, like a kitten mewing, and it all came back to him.

His eyes adjusted to the dark, and there they were. His wife and his daughter, the baby on Jessica’s chest.

He had thought over the past few months with Jessica as they came together as a couple again, as they celebrated their second chance, that he had come to know the depth and breadth of love completely.

Now, looking at his child, he knew he had only kidded himself. He had only scratched the surface of what love could be.

The baby made that mewing sound again.

Jessica stirred but did not wake.

Jessica. How could someone that tiny, someone who appeared that fragile, be so damned brave? Men thought they were courageous, but that was only until they’d seen a baby born. And then they had to admit how puny their strength was, how laughable this thing they had passed off as courage was.

Courage certainly was not tackling a thief!

Kade got up from his chair. Jessica needed to rest. She had done her bit. Thirteen hours of the most unbelievable pain Kade could imagine.

How he had wanted to take that pain from her, to take her place.

But that was one of the lessons of this remarkable second chance. He could not take her pain away. He could not fix everything, or really, even most things.

He had to be there. He had to stand there in his own helplessness, and not run from it. He had to walk with her through her pain, not try to take it away from her. Admitting his own powerlessness sometimes took more courage than anything he had ever done before.

The baby mewed again, and stirred again.

He touched the tiny back of his baby girl. It was warm beneath his fingers. He could feel the amazing miracle of the life force in that tiny little bundle.

He had been the first to hold her, the nurse showing him how. He had looked into that tiny wrinkled face, the nose crunched and the eyes screwed tightly shut in outrage, and he had recognized her.

Love.

Love manifest.

And so, summoning his courage, he lifted the baby off the gentle rise and fall of his wife’s sleeping chest.

He could hold her in the palm of one hand, his other hand supporting her neck, as the nurse had shown him.

Destiny.

They had decided to call her Destiny.

Her eyes popped open, a slate gray that the nurse had told him would change. They didn’t know yet if she would have green eyes like Jessica’s or blue like his, or some amazing combination of both.

The nurse had said, too, that this little baby probably could not see much.

And yet, as Kade held her, her eyes seemed to widen with delighted recognition.

“That’s right, sweetie, it’s me. Daddy.”

Daddy.
The word felt incredibly sweet on his tongue, and the baby squirmed in his hand. He drew her close to his chest and went and sat back down on the chair, awkwardly stroking her back.

He was so aware of how tiny she was, and helpless. How she was relying on him.

He felt a moment’s fear. The world always seemed to be in such a fragile state. The weather changed and wars broke out, and floods came and fires.

People could be fragile, too, held in the trance of long-ago hurts, hiding the broken places within them.

There was so much that he was powerless over, and yet this little girl would see him as all-powerful. Her daddy.

This was what he needed to teach her: that yes, the world could be fragile and easily broken. And people could be fragile and easily broken, too.

But there was one thing that was not fragile, and that was not easily broken.

And that thing was love.

It was the thread that ran, strong, through all the rest. It was what gave strength when strength failed, what gave hope when it was hopeless, what gave faith when there was plenty of evidence that it made no sense at all to have faith. It was what healed the breaks, and made people come out of the trance and embrace all that it was to be alive.

“Welcome to this crazy, unpredictable, beautiful, amazing life,” Kade whispered to his little girl. “Welcome.”

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, Jessica’s hand was on his shoulder, and she was awake, looking at them both.

“I need to confess something to you,” Kade growled.

“What?”

“I’ve broken one of my vows to you.”

“Impossible,” she whispered.

“No. You are not my one and only true love anymore. I have two of you now.”

And the smile on Jessica’s face—radiant, a smile that shamed the very sun—said it was worth it. Every piece of pain they had navigated was worth it.

Because it had brought them here.

To this place. To this moment.

Where they knew that all else might pass away, but that love prevailed.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from A BRIDE FOR THE RUNAWAY GROOM by Scarlet Wilson.

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