White Picket Fences. Tara Taylor Quinn

how long I’ve been thinking about it, and now that I know for sure, I just have to do it and get it done.” She was talking so fast he could hardly keep up with her.

      Mrs. Andrews’s beagle was going to have another day, another chance.

      Zack took a deep breath. “What’s wrong?” he asked. If only he could get to the root of this problem he hadn’t even known he had. He was sure they could fix it, whatever it was. He and Dawn were great together. Their relationship worked smoothly, and they solved problems by consensus. They compromised easily, hardly ever disagreeing.

      They were a good pair. A team.

      Just look at the beautiful house they owned and ran together. Their well-organized lives. The dogs they both adored.

      Her eyes lifted, met his again. He glimpsed the pain in them, the regret, and started to feel sick.

      “I can change.” He said the first thing that came to mind, idiotic though it was. Not that he wasn’t willing to do whatever he could to save his marriage, but he had no idea what was even bothering her.

      Maybe she hated Phoenix, wanted to move. Maybe she’d had a job offer somewhere far away—like Massachusetts. He’d hate to give up his practice, his patients, but he would. He’d hate the cold weather, too. The snow. But he’d adjust.

      She’d do the same for him if the situation were reversed.

      They were a team. Comfortable. Part of the same whole.

      “It’s not you, Zack,” she said, her voice breaking as she turned away, fumbled with the diamond tennis bracelet he’d bought her for their fifth anniversary.

      “What is it?” he asked again, standing upright, his muscular frame leaving barely any space in the doorway. He had some crazy notion of blocking her escape should she try to leave before she came to her senses, before he helped her work this out. But he knew that if she pushed past him, he’d let her go.

      He had to. They were equals. A team.

      His pager went off. Zack ignored it. His staff would be worried; he never missed an appointment. But for once, they’d have to wait. They’d understand.

      Dawn stopped fiddling with her jewelry and Zack approached her slowly, taking her slim shoulders in his hands. “Talk to me, honey,” he said. “I know we haven’t spent much time together in the past year or two…” Make that five or six. “We’ve both been so busy getting established, but we’re there now. We can finally afford to slow down a little bit, take those trips we always talked about.”

      She shook her head, cutting him off. When Zack looked up, he saw tears in her eyes.

      “There’s someone else,” she whispered.

      Jerking his hands away from her, he backed up a step. “You’ve slept with another man?”

      The thought had never even occurred to him. She was his wife.

      “No.” She shook her head.

      Thank God.

      “Where would I ever find a man better-looking than you?” she asked, giving him an intimate little smile through her tears.

      “Indeed,” he agreed, because she seemed to expect it. He’d certainly never had troubles attracting women—the best-looking women. But he wasn’t foolish enough to think that looks were all that mattered in a relationship. Far from it.

      “I knew this was going to be hard,” she whispered, still standing there by her dresser, watching him. “But I had no idea it was going to be this hard.”

      “Dawn, for God’s sake, tell me what’s wrong.” He couldn’t ever remember being so tense. Wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand there calmly discussing things that made no sense.

      “I’m in love with someone else.”

      But she’d just told him there was no one else. He was the best-looking man she’d ever seen.

      “Who?”

      She turned away, and something inside Zack cracked wide open.

      “Barbara Sharp.”

      He frowned, his head spinning. He had to be missing large parts of this conversation.

      “The golfer?” he asked. Zack didn’t follow the game, but the Sharp woman was a local and had been in the news a lot lately.

      Dawn nodded.

      “But…”

      Zack swallowed. Suddenly wanted to be anywhere but here. Anywhere but in this house—their house.

      As the air grew almost too thick to breathe, Zack refused to utter the words screaming inside him. They were so incomprehensible he couldn’t even say them.

      Dawn finally turned toward him.

      “But she’s a woman.” The words came, anyway. Zack wanted to snatch them back.

      More so when he saw the pathetic glow in his wife’s eyes as she nodded again.

      CHAPTER TWO

      ZACK TOOK ANOTHER SIP of beer, tried to clear his head, to send himself on another path. But the words and pictures just kept coming.

      “But she’s a woman.” He’d said the words so innocently, as though his wife didn’t know damn well what she was asking him to accept. Even now, after almost a year, he still couldn’t believe that his wife had left him for a woman. That the woman he’d slept with for six years was more attracted to her own sex than she was to him.

      He finished his beer in one long gulp and opened another.

      In spite of making every effort not to fall in to the trap, he was back there again, seeing that glow in her eyes…

      HE REELED BACK, feeling as though he’d been sucker punched. He had been sucker punched.

      “I’m so sorry,” Dawn said, her voice barely audible as her tears started to fall in earnest. “You don’t know how hard I’ve fought this, but I just can’t fight anymore.”

      There were a million things he didn’t say. Accusations. Questions. Zack couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even think clearly enough to string coherent thoughts together. He could only stand there and stare at his sweet feminine wife. And wait.

      Wait for her to do something. To take back the things she’d just said. Things that were too terrible to bear.

      “Last night Barbara asked me to move in with her, and I can’t tell her no, Zack. I want to be with her, to share her life more than anything I’ve ever wanted before. Suddenly things feel right—peaceful. When I’m with her, I feel…complete.”

      It just kept getting worse. “How long have you been seeing her?”

      “A while.”

      “How long?” He was sure it didn’t matter, but he had to focus on something before he crawled right out of his skin.

      “I met her last year at the Phoenix Open.”

      She’d been there as a company sponsor, schmoozing in a VIP booth.

      “You’ve been seeing her for more than a year?” He thought of all the nights he’d made love to her in the past fourteen months.

      “For a long time we were just friends.”

      “Define ‘long time.”’

      “I don’t know. Six months, maybe.”

      Which left eight unaccounted for. He nodded, clenching his jaw so hard it ached.

      “Then, one night after we’d gone to a movie, she asked me if I wanted to stop by her place for a drink….”

      “I don’t want to hear this.” He ordered himself to vacate the premises, but