The Pregnancy Pact. Kandy Shepherd

of the next four weeks was sinking in. In her mind, she was trying to think how she was going to accomplish the simple task of getting her clothes off and getting into pajamas.

      “I’ll go to bed in my clothes,” she announced.

      “Eventually,” he pointed out, “you’re going to have to figure out how to get out of them. You’re going to be in that cast for how long?”

      “A month,” she said, horror in her features as her new reality dawned on her.

      “I’ll just help you this first time.”

      “You are not helping me get undressed,” she said, shocked.

      He felt a little shock himself at the picture in his mind of that very shirt sliding off the slenderness of her shoulders. He blinked at the old stirring of pure fire he felt for Jessica. She was disabled, for God’s sake.

      It took enormous strength to wrestle down the yearning the thought of touching her created in him, to force his voice to be patient and practical.

      “Okay,” Kade said slowly, “so you don’t want me to help you get undressed, even though I’ve done it dozens of times before. What do you propose?”

      Her face turned fiery with her blush. She glared at him, but then stared at her sleeve, bunched up above the cast, and the reality of trying to get the shirt off over the rather major obstacle of her cast-encased arm seemed to settle in.

      “Am I going to have to cut it off? But I love this blouse!” She launched to her feet. He was sure it was as much to turn her back to him as anything else. She went to the kitchen drawer where they had always kept the scissors and yanked it open. “Maybe if I cut it along the seam,” she muttered.

      He watched her juggle the scissors for a minute before taking pity on her. He went and took the scissors away and stepped in front of her. Gently, he took her arm from the sling, and straightened the sleeve of the blouse as much as he could.

      There was less resistance than he expected. Carefully, so aware of her nearness and her scent, and the silky feel of her skin beneath his fingertips, he took the sharp point of the scissors and slit the seam of the sleeve.

      She stared down at her slit-open sleeve. “Thanks. I’ll take it from here.”

      “Really? How are you going to undo your buttons?”

      With a mulish expression on her face, she reached up with her left hand and tried to clumsily shove the button through a very tight buttonhole.

      “Here,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

      She realized she could not refuse. “Okay,” she said with ill grace. “But don’t look.”

      Don’t look? Hell’s bells, Jessica, we belong to each other. Instead of getting impatient, he teased her. “Okay. Have it your way.” He closed his eyes and placed his hand lightly on her open neckline. He loved the feel of her delicate skin beneath his fingertips. Loved it.

      “What are you doing?” she squeaked.

      “Well, if I can’t look, I’ll just feel my way to those buttons. I’ll braille you. Pretend I’m blind.” He slid his hand down. He felt her stop breathing. He waited for her to tell him to stop, but she didn’t.

      It seemed like a full minute passed before Jessica came to her senses and slapped his hand away.

      He opened his eyes, and she was looking at him, her eyes wide and gorgeous. She licked her lips and his gaze went to them. He wanted to crush them under his own. That old feeling sizzled in the air between them, the way it had been before her quest for a baby had begun.

      “Keep your eyes open,” she demanded.

      “Ah, Jessica,” he said, reaching for her buttons, “don’t look, but keep my eyes open. Is that even possible?”

      “Try your best,” she whispered.

      “You are a hard woman to please.” But, he remembered, his mouth going dry, she had not been a hard woman to please at all. With this memory of how it was to be together, red-hot between them, his fingers on her buttons was a dangerous thing, indeed.

      Kade found his fingers on the buttons of her shirt. She stopped breathing. He stopped breathing.

      Oh, my God, Jessica, he thought.

      He did manage to keep his eyes open and not look. Because he held her gaze the whole time that he undid her buttons for her. His world became as it had once been: her. His whole world was suddenly, beautifully, only about the way the light looked in her hair, and the scent of her, and the amazing mountain-pond green of her eyes.

      His hands slowed on her buttons as he deliberately dragged out the moment. And then he flicked open the last button and stepped back from her.

      “There,” he said. His voice had a raspy edge to it.

      She stood, still as a doe frozen in headlights. Her shirt gapped open.

      “You want me to help you get it off?”

      She unfroze and her eyes skittered away from his and from the intensity that had leaped up so suddenly between them.

      “No. No! I can take it from here.”

      Thank God, he thought. But he could already see the impracticality of it. “I’m afraid you’ll fall over and break your other arm struggling out of those clothes,” he told her. “The blouse is just one obstacle. Then there’s, um, your tights.”

      “I can manage, I’m sure.” Her tone was strangled. Was she imagining him kneeling in front of her, his hands on the waistband of those tights?

      He took a devilish delight in her discomfort even while he had to endure his own.

      “And I’m not sure what kind of a magician you would have to be to get your bra off with your left hand,” he said.

      She looked stricken as she went over the necessary steps in her mind.

      “If you let me help you this time...” Kade suggested, but she didn’t let him finish.

      “No!”

      “Okay.” He put his hands in the air—cowboy surrender. And suddenly it didn’t seem funny anymore to torment her. It just reminded him of all they’d lost. The easy familiarity between them was gone. The beautiful tension. The joy they had taken in discovering each other’s bodies and the secrets of pleasing each other. In those first early days, he remembered chasing her around this little house until they were both screaming with laughter.

      She blushed, and it seemed to him each of those losses was written in the contrived pride of her posture, too. Jessica headed for the hallway, the bedroom they had shared.

      If he followed her there, there was probably no predicting what would happen next. And yet he had to fight down the urge to trail after her.

      What was wrong with him? What could happen next? She was on drugs. Her arm was disabled. She was being deliberately dowdy.

      The simple truth? None of that mattered, least of all the dowdy part. Around Jessica, had he ever been able to think straight? Ever?

      “While you’re in there,” he called after her, trying to convince her, or maybe himself, that he was just a practical, helpful guy, and not totally besotted with this woman who was not going to be his wife much longer, “you can pick what you’re going to wear for the next four weeks very carefully.”

      “And while you’re out there, you can start making a list of the fixes. Then you won’t have to come back later.”

      To help her. He would not have to come back later to help her. He mulled that over. “I’m not sure how you can do this on your own. Think about putting on tights one-handed. It would probably be even more challenging than getting them off.”

      “I can go bare legged,” she called.

      “I