The Coltons: Nick, Clay & Jericho. Marie Ferrarella

Dad didn’t want us.” Her parents, both officers in Naval Intelligence, had dropped her and her sister off at Aunt Imogen’s on their way to an isolated duty station in Turkey. From there, they’d gone on to one unaccompanied assignment after another, and Cate and Caroline had remained with their maiden aunt and bachelor uncle in Leith. “They’re both alone and over seventy. I look in on them.” And they continued to give her the unconditional love she’d never had from either her parents or Alan.

      “What about Caroline? You run to her and Shelly every time they try to change a lightbulb.” Her sister had raised her daughter alone since Caroline’s husband had abandoned them when Shelly was only four. Alan had never seemed to resent her attention to their extended family before, but desperation edged his tone. “You cushion them and Dan in cotton wool. I’m only trying to give you the kind of care you give our family.”

      His last, self-serving point pushed Cate too far. She turned on him, but momentum carried her too close to him. His familiar, spicy scent triggered a basic need whose power had always frightened her. Wanting him so much, she felt weak and angry with herself. “Don’t look for someone to blame because you and I failed at our marriage.”

      He reeled backward, stumbling into a model of the library they were supposed to refurbish. Instinctively, Cate caught his arm before she was certain whether she wanted to shove him or help him.

      No, she knew what she had to do. “I stayed for Dan, but he leaves for college in a few weeks. I don’t have to pretend you and I are going to live happily ever after. Not together, anyway.”

      “Cate.” His husky plea caught her unawares. He reached for her, his wedding band glowing gold in the building’s artificial light.

      She arched away from him. Tears clouded her vision, but she grabbed the chrome rail on the front doors. Approaching night had strengthened the ocean breeze, and she had to lean her whole body into the door to open it.

      Outside the wind whipped her hair into her eyes. She bumped into a soft figure that had to be a woman. Cate muttered a tear-choked apology and broke for the street. But she stumbled into a parking meter and fell off the sidewalk.

      Her right ankle turned over. Pain nearly paralyzed her as her foot skidded through sand. Behind her, a woman’s voice shrilled, but the deep blast of a car horn seemed to finish her shriek. Cate straightened, turning. A green sports car, coming fast, froze her.

      “Cate!” Alan must have followed her. He was furious, afraid and too far away.

      She reached blindly into thin air, twisting back toward the sidewalk. Seconds stretched, defying the laws of nature. Alan caught her hands. She recognized the strength of his long fingers, the breadth of his palms. She grabbed at him, but she couldn’t get her feet beneath her in the sand. Holding on to her husband, she peered over her shoulder at the driver.

      Intensity crumpled his face. His body lifted in the seat, as if he were standing on his brakes.

      They screamed, and time lost its elasticity. Cate willed her body away from the car. Alan yanked her, but something glanced off her leg, more a jarring thump than real pain.

      At first.

      Alan pulled her hard against his body as a fire-edged knife seemed to slice through her thigh. Behind her, the car’s tires ground into the road and chaos faded to silence.

      An unnatural silence, empty of voices or traffic, footsteps or the constant whisper of the ocean. Cate knew only pain and an overwhelming nausea. Panic clutched at her. Was she sick because of the baby, or the torture of her leg? Was she going to lose her baby?

      “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

      She looked up. Alan’s fear fed her terror. She hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him about her pregnancy, and now she didn’t know how to say the words.

      “Focus on me.” Alan turned his head. “Somebody call 911!”

      Around them, cell phones erupted in a cacophony of beeps. Somehow, Cate found a smile, but Alan stared at her, amazed.

      She concentrated on his green eyes. “You’ve always wanted to save my life.”

      With his face pale as beach sand, Alan didn’t smile back. “Don’t talk.”

      People she knew, Alan’s busiest carpenter and Mr. Parker, who owned the Bucket O’ Suds, edged into her peripheral vision.

      “Look at the blood running down her leg, Alan.” Mr. Parker pushed a man-smelling apron beneath her nose. “Maybe you need this.”

      “Get a damn ambulance,” Alan snarled, but then the muscles around his mouth worked as he fought to maintain his composure. “Cate, you’re all right.”

      A resounding roar overwhelmed her silent prayer that he’d keep holding her too close for her to look down and see the blood. Pressure, like a giant hand, seemed to push her toward the ground. “I think I’m not all right.”

      She was going to faint. First time she could ever remember fainting. Was she dying? “Alan, I—Dan—I want—”

      “Dan’s fine.” Alan’s voice cracked. “You’re fine.”

      “I have to tell you…” That strange pressure swathed her in darkness. Only Alan’s arms kept her from falling. She forgot what she had to tell him, but she hung on until the darkness swallowed her whole.

      DR. BARTON’S CALM infuriated Alan. “After a thirty-six hour coma, we can’t know how she’ll be when she wakes up. She lost a lot of blood from that gash in her thigh, and she went into shock.”

      Each word the doctor spoke embedded itself in Alan like a gut shot. Infuriated that he couldn’t help her, he stared at his unconscious wife. Her vulnerable, wounded body rumpled the blanket on her bed. The bank of blinking monitors that surrounded her screeched persistently enough to wake the dead. Alan bit the side of his cheek.

      Men didn’t cry. So his father had preached, weeping into his beer or scrambled eggs or the ironing they’d both avoided after Alan’s mother left. Clutching Cate’s unresponsive hand, Alan alternated between an urge to bawl with unmanly pain and an acute need to break everything in the small hospital room.

      “She’ll wake up,” Dr. Barton said, as if he saw through Alan’s attempt at stoic silence. “She’s healthy—no sign of infection in her wound. We just have to see where we stand. Tests, physical therapy—Excuse me, Alan, Nurse Matthews wants me.”

      The doctor barely cleared the doorway before Cate’s twin, Caroline, slipped into the room.

      She shared his wife’s fragile bone structure and dark auburn hair. In the old days, only he could tell them apart until Cate had begun using a blow-dryer to straighten her hair into a sleek curtain that brushed her shoulders. She’d looked more like a bank president than a loving creative homemaker. Caroline, a pragmatic businesswoman, never bothered to tame the wild curls she used now to cover her face. Neither of them seemed to see the contradiction in their hairstyles, but maybe Cate had expressed her altered feelings about her life in a not so subtle change.

      Alan rubbed his fist against his temple, annoyed that he hadn’t asked her such questions before she’d decided to leave him.

      Caroline eased around the bed. “What does Dr. Barton say?”

      The sisters were so close they sometimes shared each other’s thoughts. If only Cate could sense Caroline’s pain, she’d wake up, feeling a compulsion to help her twin.

      “Barton says the same thing over and over. We have to wait.” He stroked his wife’s forearm, grateful for the body heat that warmed her silky skin. How long since he’d touched her? How had he not noticed she was avoiding him, even in their bed? “I’m fed up with waiting.” Waiting and thinking about all the signs he should have read as he and Cate traveled to the end of their marriage.

      “Where’s your dad, Alan? He’s the only member of our families unaccounted for in the waiting room, and I