The Pregnancy Pact. Kandy Shepherd

of pain and distress for their victims?”

      He felt her relax, snuggle against him. “I feel sorry for him.”

      He snorted. “You would.”

      “I don’t think you or I have ever known that kind of desperation, Kade.”

      Except that was not true. When she had wanted to have that baby, he had been desperate to make her happy. Desperate. And her own desperation had filled him with the most horrifying sense of helplessness.

      He reached over and snapped off the light. His hand found her head, and he pulled it onto his shoulder, and stroked her hair.

      “Go to sleep,” he said softly. “I’ll just stay with you until you do. You’re safe. I’ll take care of you. Why don’t you lie back down.”

      “In a minute,” she said huskily. “You know what this reminds me of, Kade?

      “Hmm?”

      “Remember when we first met, how I was terrified of thunderstorms?”

      “Yeah,” he said gruffly, “I remember.”

      “And then that one night, a huge electrical storm was moving over the city, and you came and got me out of the bathroom where I was hiding.”

      “Under the sink,” he recalled.

      “And you led me outside, and you had the whole front step set up. You had a blanket out there, and a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and we sat on the step.

      “At first I was terrified. I was quivering, I was so scared. I wanted to bolt. The clouds were so black. And the lightning was ripping open the heavens. I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, as if I could be swept away.

      “And then you put your hand on my shoulder, as if to hold me to the earth. You told me to count the seconds between the lightning bolt and the thunder hitting and I would know how far away the lightning strike was.”

      He remembered it all, especially her body trembling against his as the storm had intensified all around them.

      “It kept getting closer and closer. Finally, there was no pause between the lightning strike and the thunder, there was not even time to count to one. The whole house shook. I could feel the rumble of the thunder ripple through you and through me and through the stairs and through the whole world. The tree in the front yard shook.”

      “Yeah, I remember.”

      “The whole night lit up in a flash, and I looked at you, and your face was illuminated by the lightning. You weren’t even a little bit afraid. I could tell you loved it. You loved the fury and intensity of the storm. And suddenly, just like that, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I loved it, too. Sitting out on the front steps with you, we sipped that wine, and cuddled under that blanket, and got soaked when the rain came.”

      She was silent for a long time.

      “And after that,” he said gently, “every time there was a storm, you were the first one out on that step.”

      “It’s funny, isn’t it? It cost nothing to go sit on those steps and storm watch. They came from nowhere. We couldn’t plan it or expect it. And yet those moments?”

      “I know, Jessica,” he said softly. “The best. Those moments were the best.”

      “And today,” she said, her voice slightly slurred with sleep, “today was a good day, like that.”

      “I nearly burned your house down.”

      “Our house,” she corrected him. “You made me laugh. That made it worth it.”

      It made him realize how much pain was between them, and how much of it he had caused. He had a sense of wanting, somehow, to make it right between them. It bothered him, her casual admittance that she did not laugh much anymore. It bothered him, and he accepted responsibility for it.

      So it could be a clean goodbye between him and Jessica. They could get a divorce without acrimony and without regret. So they could remember times like that, sitting in the thunderstorm, and know they had been made better for them. Not temporarily. But permanently.

      He was a better man because of her.

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      PERHAPS, KADE THOUGHT, he was not the man he had wished to be or hoped to be, but still, he was better than he had been. Because of her, and because of the love they had shared.

      Was there a way to honor that before they said goodbye? What if tomorrow, Sunday, he wasn’t going to go to work after all?

      Kade could tell something had shifted. Her head fell against his chest heavily, and he heard her breathing change.

      And he knew he should get up and move, but there was something about this moment, this unexpected gift of his wife trusting him and being with him, that felt like one of those best moments ever, a moment just like sitting on the front step with her watching thunderstorms.

      And so he accepted that he was reluctant to leave it. And eventually he fell asleep, sitting up, with Jessica’s sweet weight nestled into him and the feel of the silk of her hair beneath his fingers.

      * * *

      Jessica woke to the most luxurious feeling of having slept well. The sun was spilling in her bedroom window. When she sat up and stretched, she saw that through the enormous windows of the bedroom, she had a view of the river and people jogging down the paths beside it.

      Had she dreamed Kade had come into her room and they had talked about thunderstorms? It seemed as if she must have, because things had not been that easy between them for a long, long time.

      And yet, when she looked, she was pretty sure the bedding beside her had been crushed from the weight of another person.

      Far off in that big apartment, she heard a familiar sound.

      Kade was whistling.

      She realized she was surprised he was still here in the apartment. She glanced at the bedside clock. It was after nine. Sunday was just another workday for Kade. Usually he was in the office by seven. But not only was he here, he sounded happy.

      Like the Kade of old.

      There was a light tap on the door, and it swung open. Jessica pulled the covers up around her chin as if she was shy of him.

      “I brought you a coffee.”

      She was shy of him. She realized she had not dreamed last night, because she had a sudden and rather mouthwatering picture of him in his underwear. Thankfully, he was fully dressed now, though he was still off the sexiness scale this morning.

      It was obvious that Kade was fresh out of the shower, his dark hair towel roughened, a single beautiful bead of water sliding down his cheek to his jaw. Dressed in jeans, he had a thick white towel looped around his neck, and his chest and feet were deliciously bare.

      She could look at that particular sight all day: the deepness of his chest, the chiseled perfection of his muscles, the ridged abs narrowing and disappearing into the waistband of jeans that hung low on slender hips. Her mouth actually went dry looking at him standing there.

      He came in and handed her the coffee. It smelled wonderful—though not as wonderful as his fresh-from-the-shower scent—and she reached out for it. Their fingers touched, and the intensity sizzled in the air between them.

      She knew that no part of last night had been a dream. He had slipped onto the bed beside her, and they had talked of thunderstorms, and she had fallen asleep with his big shoulder under her head.

      She took a steadying sip of the coffee. It was one of those unexpectedly perfect moments. Kade had always made the best coffee. He delighted in good coffee and was always experimenting with different beans, which he ground himself. It had just the right amount of cream and