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Marriage in Jeopardy
Anna Adams
Every marriage has its problemsOn the surface, Josh and Lydia Quincy have it all–a nice house, a baby on the way, work they both love. But one tragic act reveals cracks in their marriage that can't stay hidden.While Lydia mends physically from an attack that ends her dream of family, neither she nor Josh is sure their marriage will recover. Hoping they can still make things work, the two go to Josh's hometown. A place where even more ghosts exist for Josh.A husband and wife–physically together, but emotionally so very far apart. Can they find a way back to each other?
He reached for her hand, but she couldn’t stand his touch
“Don’t. I only want to feel my baby.” Lydia laid her hand on her stomach, aching to feel the sensation of their unborn son, lazily twisting inside her. “I miss him.”
Josh’s expression went blank again. He folded his hands, white-knuckled, in his lap.
She could end it now, put a stop to the loneliness and fear. Once they’d married, he’d considered their relationship complete, nothing more to worry about. He’d turned his attention to his priorities—his clients. Feeling left out and unneeded, more hurt than she’d ever admitted, she’d tried arguing, explaining, and finally she’d found poor comfort in her own work. But the baby had made them try again.
She had two choices. Tear him to shreds or try to save their marriage. Could hurting him ever be revenge enough?
Dear Reader,
My favorite romances are about couples struggling with life—the everyday challenges that follow that first happily ever after. It can be small things--not knowing your mate prefers potatoes when you love rice, needing the comfort of a thin sliver of night-light when he can sleep only in total darkness and complete silence. Or it could be, as with Lydia and Josh Quincy, separate views of life that simply refuse to meld.
Josh and Lydia coast along in their marriage, ignoring ever-increasing differences, until a tragedy forces them to reevaluate everything about themselves—what they want, where they want to live, if they can be together. Even in the best of marriages, these questions arise, and I’m always curious about how we answer them. Josh and Lydia made me wonder how I’d answer them myself.
I hope you’ll enjoy this story, which remains with me still. I’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to e-mail me at anna@annaadams.net.
Best wishes,
Anna
Marriage in Jeopardy
Anna Adams
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Sarah—with all my love and my deepest hopes that
all you desire and dream of will come to you. You are the
essence of joy. You shine with hope. You make me glad.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
LYDIA QUINCY OPENED her eyes. Memory rushed at her with the menace of an oncoming tornado. She remembered walking out of the elevator at the courthouse construction site. A woman had come around a stack of bricks. She’d never forget that woman’s mouth, stretched in a grin of pure malice. Lydia’s muscles clenched as she tried to duck again. That woman had swung a piece of rebar straight into Lydia’s stomach.
The moment replayed like a loop of film.
She tried to breathe.
Staring around the unfamiliar room, she saw blank tan walls and mountains of hoses, wires, tubing. A machine that screamed with blinking numbers. A shapeless beige curtain and hard plastic rails on her bed.
One more breath brought nausea so strong she had to escape. She struggled to sit, but an IV stung her arm. Oxygen tubing pulled her head back.
“Lydia?” Evelyn, her mother-in-law, spoke to her in a sleepy voice. How could she be here? She lived four hours away. “Lie down, honey.” Evelyn leapt to her feet, sending a metal chair screeching across the tile floor.
Lydia slumped against a flat pillow and it crackled beneath her head. She pushed both hands down to her stomach, but bone deep, she already knew what had happened.
The physical pain was nothing, compared to her grief. She drew her knees high, clamping her hands to her belly. She felt only emptiness. Not life. Emptiness.
“My baby.” She let her hands sink to her sides. “My baby,” she cried in anguish more animal than human.
Evelyn grabbed her arm. Tears washed her glasses and spilled over her lined cheeks.
“I’m sorry.” She peered toward the door, as if she hoped someone would show up and save her.
“Where’s Josh?” Lydia half expected he’d stayed at work.
Evelyn had been reaching for the call button at Lydia’s side, but drew back. “He wanted to be the one to tell you, but I can explain—”
“I know. Don’t say it out loud.” The second someone did, her pregnancy would be truly over. All that hope, so futile now… She couldn’t stop loving her son just because she’d never have him.
“Lydia, honey…”
She pushed at her mother-in-law’s thin shoulders. “No, no, no.”
“Shh,” Evelyn whispered, putting her arms around Lydia anyway. “Shh.”
Lydia sobbed. “I want my baby.” He’d died, but somehow she hadn’t. “Why am I alive?”
Evelyn moved away, grimacing. “I know how you feel, but you can’t—you have to live.”
A nurse hurried into the room and nudged Evelyn away. “Mrs. Quincy, I’m glad you’re awake.” The woman checked the machine’s readouts and threaded the IV tubes through her fingers. “Mrs. Quincy?” she repeated as if she needed Lydia to answer.
“I’m all right.” Lydia nodded at the nurse, but reached for her mother-in-law. Her hand fell through air to the sheets. “Is Josh in court? How did you get here first, Evelyn, when his office is only a few blocks away?”
“Your husband?” the nurse asked. “He’s here. He passed our station a few minutes ago.”
“He left?” Typical, but still it hurt. Things had begun to get better during the twenty-two weeks of her pregnancy, but before then, they’d spent much of their five-year marriage pulling in opposite directions, unable to speak, unable to explain why they couldn’t. Once they’d learned the baby was coming, they’d both wanted him so much they’d pretended nothing was wrong.
“Josh has been here whenever they let us in,” Evelyn defended her son. “But you know how he is. Impatience and anger go hand in hand, and add worrying about you—he needed a walk.”
Lydia knew Josh better than his mother did. While she could hardly hear above the pain screaming in her own head, Josh had no doubt taken refuge in calls to his office. That was Josh. If he couldn’t fix his private life, he turned to maintaining his reputation as the best public defender in Hartford, Connecticut.
“I—” She wanted to be angry. God knew, she’d had practice, but she needed her husband. He’d lost their baby, too.
“What?” Evelyn asked. “What can I do for you?”
“Do?” No one could erase the instant or the memory. Sun glinting off a green truck’s hood had blinded her as she’d walked around the bricks. One of those bricks had grazed her arm. She turned her elbow, trying to see the scrape, to see anything except that woman.
Her unborn son had probably died the moment the rebar hit. She covered her mouth.
“Try not to think about what happened. Let me call Josh.”
“Don’t go.” She didn’t trust herself to think on her own yet.
Evelyn squeezed her hand but turned to the nurse. “My daughter-in-law’s lips are cracking. Can you get her something?” Her voice rasped as if she’d been yelling.
“How long have you been here?” Lydia had assumed this was the same day, but her mother-in-law looked tired and worn.
“I’ll bring you both something to drink.” The nurse gave the machines a last look as she backed toward the door. “Mrs. Quincy, you’re in good shape. Your doctor will be in to see you—well, I can’t say for sure when—but you don’t need to worry.”
Not worry? She had to be nuts.
“What happened after she hit me, Evelyn?”
Josh’s mother splayed her fingers into short red curls that were flat on one side from her long stint in the chair. “I’ll tell you what we know.” Weariness veined her eyes. She stole a glance at her watch. “Unless you want me to find Josh,” she said again.
This woman who never cried on the principle that tears were weakness had cried a lot. Lydia brushed a teardrop off her own cheek.
“He’s not here. Explain what happened to my baby. I remember being at the courthouse.” An architect, she’d been hired to help restore it to eighteenth-century splendor. She’d visited that day only to discuss a change with the contractor. “I was leaving.” At a new wave of sorrow, she pressed her palms to her stomach again. “How long have I been here?” How many days had she been alive instead of her son, who’d never had a chance to live?
“Three days.” Evelyn wiped her face with the hem of her cotton shirt. “You’ve been awake now and then.”
“I don’t remember.” But bursts of pain and light and that damn machine bleating ran through her mind. “Who was she?”
“Vivian Durance. I lost her husband’s case.” Josh’s voice, thick with sorrow, made Lydia and Evelyn look toward the doorway. He stood, frozen.
His words didn’t register. She drank him in, desperate, because he was the only one who could really understand. Tall and aloof-looking—as always, when he felt most emotional—he stared at her, guilt in his brown-black eyes. Tight dark curls stood on end as if he’d yanked at his hair to punish himself.
“I’ll wait outside,” Evelyn said, and she passed Josh without looking at him.
He stepped aside to avoid his mother’s touch.
After the door closed, he crossed to the bed, unsure of his welcome. Lydia held out her arms. With a sigh, his eyes beginning to redden, he caught her, his arms rough. She flinched.
“I’m sorry.” He eased up a little, but when he buried his face in her shoulder, his breathing was jagged. “I’m sorry.”
His remorse forced the truth to sink in. “Vivian Durance is married to one of your clients?”
She’d been afraid of this, a low-grade fear, like a fever she’d never managed to get over. About two weeks after their wedding, the first threat from an unsatisfied client had arrived in the form of red paint thrown across their town house’s door. The client’s father had also slipped a red-stained note through the letter box. “If my son goes to prison, you die,” it read, and it was written with so much rage, the words almost ripped the paper.
Josh had repainted the door, chucked the note away and reassured her that all attorneys, even public defenders, occasionally received threats. Two years later another client had met him on the courthouse steps. Everyone who’d seen the man on the stand knew his own testimony had sealed a guilty verdict. Nevertheless, the man had blamed Josh, screaming until the cops had dragged him away.
Three more years had passed, but Lydia had never again felt entirely safe.
“Did you know she was coming after us? What did she say to you?” Lydia tried not to blame him, but the words begged to be said.
“Nothing.” He leaned back. “She screamed at the court in general.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
He shook his head, but his eyes were blank. He was hiding something.
Furiously, she bit down on the words, but she couldn’t help herself. “Third time’s the charm, I guess. Someone finally got to us.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said, his calm dignified—and infuriating. “That you’d blame me.”
“Our baby didn’t have to die.”
“I am sorry.” His lips barely moved. She’d loved his mouth, full, moist, capable of giving her pleasure that was almost pain. That was the physical part of their marriage. Nothing else about living together had come easy. “I’m not hiding anything,” he said. “The truth was bad enough.”
She stared, unable to speak. He was in shock, too, which exaggerated his guilt. It couldn’t be all his fault.
“I lost Carter Durance’s capital case. After the police caught her, Vivian said she felt someone I loved needed to die, too.” Josh stated the facts without defending himself. “I tried everything I could think of to save the man, but he wasn’t crazy or innocent enough.”
Lydia pushed her fists into her eyes. His flat tone hurt most of all.
“Lydia?” He’d said her name a million times, but never before had it sounded like begging.
“I have nothing more to give.” This Vivian had taken everything. “Why do you have to defend guilty people?”
Pain rippled across his face. “You know why. Almost everyone I defend grew up the way I did. I made better choices, but do you know how many times I see myself and my parents in my clients?”
