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“Have you met someone?” His voice sounded oddly raw in his own ears.
Jessica searched his face but he kept his features cool.
“Not that it is any of your business, but no.” She hesitated. “Have you?”
He snorted. “No, I’m cured, thanks.”
“I am, too!” She hesitated again, not, he guessed, wanting to appear too interested in his life. “I suppose you’re playing the field, then?”
“What? What does that mean, exactly?”
“Seeing lots of women.”
He snorted and allowed himself to feel the insult of it. Jessica was painting him as a playboy? “You have to know me better than that.”
“You live in that building. It has a reputation.”
“The condominium has a reputation?” he asked, astounded. “The building I live in? River’s Edge?”
“It does,” she said firmly. “Lots of single people live there. Very wealthy single people. It has a pool and that superswanky penthouse party room. The apartments are posh.”
“How do you know all that?” he asked.
She turned red. “Don’t get the idea I’ve been sneaking around spying on you.”
“That is the furthest from any idea I would ever get about you,” he said drily.
“The newspaper did a feature on it.”
“I must have missed that.”
“It seems like a good place for a single guy to live. One who is, you know, in pursuit of fun and freedom.”
That was what Jessica thought he was in pursuit of? Jeez. Well, let her think it. How could it be that she didn’t know him at all?
“Rest assured—” he could hear the stiffness in his voice “—I live there because it is a stone’s throw from work, which by the way is where I spend the majority of my waking hours.” He hesitated, not wanting to appear too interested in her life, either. “So are you playing the field?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
“How come it’s ridiculous when I ask but not when you ask?” And there it was, the tension between them, always waiting to be fanned to life.
“I already told you I’m obsessed with my business. I don’t have time for anything else.”
“So you are not in a new relationship, and apparently not looking for one. You want a divorce why?”
She sighed with what he felt was unnecessary drama. “We can’t just go on indefinitely like this, Kade.”
He wanted to ask why not but he didn’t.
“All those hours I spend working are paying off. My business is moving to the next level.”
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“I did over a hundred thousand in internet sales last year.”
He let out a low appreciative whistle. “That’s good.”
“I think it could be double that this year with the storefront opening.”
So she was moving up as well as on. Well, good for her. No sense admitting, not even to himself, how happy he was that her moving on did not involve a new guy moving in.
“My lawyer has advised me to tie up any loose ends.”
He managed, barely, not to wince at being referred to as a loose end. “So your lawyer is afraid of what? That you’ll be wildly successful and I, as your legal partner, will come in and demand half your business?”
“I suppose stranger things have happened,” she said coolly.
“I think my business is probably worth as much as your business if we were going to start making claims against each other.”
“We both know your business is probably worth a hundred times what my little place is worth. It’s not about that.”
“What’s it about, then?” He was watching her narrowly. He knew her so well. And he knew there was something she wasn’t telling him.
She sighed heavily. “Kade, we don’t even have a separation agreement. We own this house together. And everything in it. You haven’t even taken a piece of furniture. We need to figure things out.”
He rolled his shoulders and looked at their house, the hopeless little fixer-upper that she had fallen in love with from the first moment she had laid her eyes on it.
“It’s like the cottage in Snow White,” she had said dreamily.
It hadn’t been anything like the cottage in Snow White. Except for the decorative shutters, with hearts cut out of them, the house had been an uninspired square box with ugly stucco. The only thing Snow Whitish about it? It needed seven dwarfs, full-time, to help with its constant need for repair.
She had not done one thing to the exterior since he had left. They hadn’t been able to afford too much at the time, so they had rented one of those spray-painter things and redone the stucco white. The black shutters and door had become pale blue.
“Isn’t the color a little, er, babyish?” he had asked her of the pale blue.
Her sigh of pure delight, as if the color was inviting a baby into their house, seemed now, in retrospect, as if it might have been a warning.
Their strictly cosmetic changes were already deteriorating.
Was it the same inside as it had been? Suddenly he felt driven to know just how much she had moved on. It felt as if he needed to know.
He looked on his chain and acted surprised. “I have a key.”
And a moment later he was helping her into the home they had shared. He had thought she would, if sensible, rip out every reminder of him.
But she was the woman who had scuffled with a burglar, and she had not done the sensible thing.
Their house was relatively unchanged. He thought she might have tried to erase signs of him—and them—but no, there was the couch they had picked out together, and the old scarred wooden bench she had fallen in love with and used as a coffee table. She hadn’t even gotten rid of the oversize fake leather burgundy recliner with the handy remote control holder built into it. He had thought it would go. When people had come over she had referred to it, apologetically, as the guy chair, her nose wrinkled up with affectionate resignation. She had even named it Behemoth.
In fact, as far as Kade could see, the only change was that the bench contained only a mason glass jar spilling purple tulips. It was not covered with baby magazines. Oh. And there was one other thing changed. Their wedding pictures, her favorite shots in different-size frames, were not hung over the mantel of the fireplace. The paint had not faded where they had hung, and so there were six empty squares where once their love for each other had been on proud display.
The fireplace didn’t actually work. He remembered their excitement the first time they had tried to light it, the year’s first snow falling outside. The chimney had belched so much black smoke back into the house they had run outside, choking on soot and laughter. There was still a big black mark on the front of it from that.
He led her through the familiar space of the tiny house to the back, where the kitchen was. One day, they had hoped to knock out a wall and have open concept, but it had not happened. He made her sit at the table, another piece of furniture they had bought together at the secondhand stores they had loved to haunt on Saturday mornings. Without asking her, he fetched her a glass of water, finding the glasses with easy familiarity.
He remembered trying to paint the oak cabinets white in an effort to modernize the look of the kitchen. It had been disastrous. They had fallen asleep tucked against each other, propped against a cupboard, exhausted, covered in more paint than the cabinets. The cabinets looked as awful as they always had, the old stain bleeding through the white. They’d never bothered to try painting them again. The truth was, he liked them like that, with their laughter and ineptitude caught for all time in the hardened paint dribbles. And he thought she probably did, too.
The memories all felt like a knife between his eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE (#u3e8dc4ab-89bf-5f1e-8782-ac9193400ecf)
BUT OF COURSE, Kade knew, those happy memories of renovation disaster had all happened before everything went south. After Jessica had discovered she was pregnant the first time, renovation had slammed to a halt.
Chemicals. Dust. The possibility of stirring up mouse poo.
Jessica took a sip of the water, watching him over the rim. “We need to make a decision about the house.”
“You can have it,” he said. “I don’t want it.”
“I don’t want you to give me a house, Kade,” she said with irritating patience, as if she was explaining the multiplication tables to a third grader. “I actually don’t want this house. I’d like to get my half out of it and move on.”
She didn’t want the house with the fireplace that didn’t work and laughter captured in the paint dribbles? She’d always loved this house, despite its many flaws.
There was something more going on that she was not telling him. He always knew. She was terrible at keeping secrets.
“I’ll just sign over my half to you,” he repeated.
“I don’t want you to give it to me.” Now she sounded mad. This was what their last weeks and months together had been like. There was always a minefield to be crossed between them. No matter what you said, it was wrong; the seeds were there for a bitter battle.
“That’s ridiculous. Who says no to being given a house?”
“Okay, then. I’ll give it to you.”
“Why are you being so difficult?”
He could not believe the words had come out of his mouth. Their favorite line from Beauty and the Beast. In the early days, one of them had always broken the fury of an argument by using it.
For a moment, something suspiciously like tears shone behind her eyes, but then the moment was gone, and her mouth was pressed together in that stubborn “there is no talking to her now” expression.
“Can’t we even get divorced normally?” she asked a little wearily, sinking back in her chair and closing her eyes.
“What does that mean?” he asked, but was sorry the minute the words were out of his mouth.
Of course, what it meant was that they hadn’t been able to make a baby normally.
But thankfully, Jessica did not go there. “Normal—we’re supposed to fight over the assets, not be trying to give them to each other.”
“Oh, forgive me,” he said sarcastically. “I haven’t read the rule book on divorce. This is my first one.”
Then he realized she was way too pale, and that she wasn’t up for this. “You’re not feeling very good, are you?”
“No,” she admitted.
“We need to talk about this another time.”
“Why do you always get to decide what we need?”
That stung, but he wasn’t going to get drawn into an argument. “Look, you’ve had a tough morning, and you are currently under the influence of some pretty potent painkillers.”
She sighed.
“You should probably avoid major decisions for forty-eight hours.”
“I’m perfectly capable of making some decisions.”
“There is ample evidence you aren’t thinking right. You’ve just refused the offer of a house.”
“Because I am not going to be your charity case! I have my pride, Kade. We’ll sell it. You take half. I take half.”
He shrugged, and glanced around. “Have you done any of the repairs that needed doing?”
Her mutinous expression said more than she wanted it to.
“Nothing is fixed,” he guessed softly. “You’re still jiggling the toilet handle and putting a bucket under the leak in the spare bedroom ceiling. You’re still getting slivers in your feet from the floor you refuse to rip out, even though it was going to cost more to refurbish it than it would to put in a new one.”
“That’s precisely why I need to sell it,” she said reasonably. “It’s not a suitable house for a woman on her own.”
Again, he heard something Jessica was not telling him.
“We’ll talk about selling the house,” he promised. “We’ll probably get more for it if we do some fixes.”
He noted his easy use of the word we, and backtracked rapidly. “How about if I come back later in the week? I’ll have a quick look through the house and make a list of what absolutely has to be done, and then I’ll hire a handyman to do it. My assistant is actually tracking one down to fix the door on your shop, so we’ll see how he does there.”
“I think the real estate agent can do the list of what needs to be done.”
She’d already talked to a real estate agent. He shrugged as if he didn’t feel smacked up the side of the head by her determination to rid herself of this reminder of all things them.
“Your real estate agent wants to make money off you. He is not necessarily a good choice as an adviser.”
“And you are?”
He deserved that, he supposed.
“Okay. Do it your way,” Jessica said. “I’ll pay half for the handyman. Do you think you could come in fairly quickly and make your list? Maybe tomorrow while I’m at work?”
He didn’t tell her he doubted she would be going back to work tomorrow. Her face was pale with exhaustion and she was slumped in her chair. No matter what she said, now was not the time for this discussion.
“I’m going to put you to bed,” Kade said. “You’re obviously done for today. We can talk about the house later.” He noticed he carefully avoided the word divorce.
