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“I am exhausted,” she admitted. “I do need to go to bed. However, you are not putting me to bed.” She folded her one arm up over her sling, but winced at the unexpected hardness of the cast hitting her in the chest.
“I doubt if you can even get your clothes off on your own.”
She contemplated that, looked down at her arm in the sling. He knew at that moment, the reality 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 don’t even want to think about how you’ll get the bra on,” he said gruffly. He couldn’t imagine how she was going to struggle into and out of her clothes, but that was not a good thing for him to be imagining anyway.
CHAPTER SIX (#u3e8dc4ab-89bf-5f1e-8782-ac9193400ecf)
JESSICA BOLTED THROUGH her bedroom and into the safety of her bathroom. She did not want Kade thinking about her bra, either!
But the reality of her situation was now hitting home.
Oh, there were practical realities. How was she going to manage all this? Not just dressing, which was going to be an inconvenience and a major challenge, but everything? How was she going to take a shower, and unpack boxes at Baby Boomer? How was she going to butter toast, for heaven’s sake?
But all those practical realities were taking a backseat to the reality of how she had felt just now with Kade’s hand, his touch warm and strong and beautiful, on her neck, and then on her buttons.
That was just chemistry, she warned herself. They had always had chemistry in abundance. Well, not always. The chemistry had been challenged when they—no, she—had wanted it to respond on cue.
Still, it was easier to feel as if she could control the unexpected reality of Kade being in her home—their home—while she was comfortably locked in her bathroom.
Just to prove her control, she locked the door. But as she heard the lock click, she was very aware that she could not lock out the danger she felt. It was inside herself. How did you lock that away?
“Focus,” Jessica commanded herself. But life seemed suddenly very complicated, and she felt exhausted by the complications. She wanted out of her clothes and into her bed.
She wanted her husband out of her house and she wanted the stirring of something that had slept for so long within her to go back to sleep!
Even if it did make her feel alive in a way she had not felt alive in a long, long time. Not even the excitement and success of her business had made her feel like this, tingling with a primal awareness of what it was to be alive.
Even the most exciting thing in her life—contemplating adopting a baby, and starting a family of her own—had never made her feel like this!
“That’s a good thing,” she told herself, out loud. “This feeling is a drug, a powerful, potent, addicting drug that could wreck everything.”
But what a beautiful way to have it wrecked, a horrible uncontrollable little voice deep inside her whined.
“Everything okay in there?”
“Yes, fine, thanks.” No, it wasn’t fine. Go away. I can’t think clearly with you here.
“I thought I heard you mumbling. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” she called. She could hear a desperate edge in her own voice. Jessica was breathing hard, as if she had run a marathon.
Annoyed with herself, she told herself to just focus on one thing at a time. That one thing right now was removing her blouse. By herself.
Her nightie was hanging on the back of the bathroom door. She should not feel regret that the nightwear was mundane and not the least sexy. She should only be feeling thankful that it was sleeveless.
For a whole year, she had not cared what her sleepwear looked like. As long as it was comfortable she hadn’t cared if it was frumpy, if it had all the sex appeal of a twenty-pound potato sack.
For a whole year, she had told herself that not caring what she slept in, that not spending monstrous amounts of money on gorgeous lingerie, was a form of freedom. She had convinced herself it was one of the perks of the single life.
“Focus on getting your blouse off!” she told herself.
“Jessica?”
“I’m okay.” She hoped he would not hear the edge in her voice. Of course, he did.
“You don’t sound okay. I told you it was going to be more difficult than you thought.”
What? Getting dressed? Or getting divorced?
One of the things that was so annoying about Kade? He had an aggravating tendency to be right.
“Focus,” Jessica commanded herself. She managed to shrug the blouse off both her shoulders, and peeled the sleeve off her left arm with her teeth. But when she tried to slide the newly slit sleeve over the cast, it bunched up around it, and refused to move.
By now, Jessica was thoroughly sick of both Kade’s tendency to be right and the blouse. It wasn’t one of her favorites anymore. How was she going to ever wear it again without imagining his hands on the buttons?
She tugged at it. Hard. It made a ripping sound. She liked that sound. She tugged at it harder.
“Argh!” She had managed to hurt her arm.
“Okay in there?”
“Stop asking!”
“Okay. There’s no need to get pissy about it!”
She didn’t want him telling her what to get pissy about! That was why she needed to divorce him.
She investigated the blouse. It was bunched up on the cast, and she had tugged at it so hard it was stuck there. She was afraid she was going to hurt her arm again trying to force it back off. Gentle prying was ineffectual. It refused to budge. The shoulder was too narrow to come down over the cast, and the fabric had ripped to the seams, but the seams held fast.
“That will teach me to buy such good quality,” Jessica muttered, then waited for him to comment. Silence. One-handed, she opened every drawer in the bathroom looking for scissors. Naturally, there were none.
She would just have to forge ahead. So with the blouse hanging off her one arm increasing her handicap substantially, and by twisting herself into pretzel-like configurations, she managed to get the tights off. And then the skirt. She was sweating profusely.
Once the bra was off, she thought, it would be fairly simple to maneuver the nightgown over her head.
She reached behind her with her left hand and the bra gave way with delightful ease. She stepped out of it and let it fall in the heap with her tights and skirt.
The nightgown should be simple. If she left it hanging up as it was on the back of the bathroom door, she could just stick her head up under it, and it would practically put itself on. She grunted with satisfaction as she managed to get inside her nightie, put her left hand through the armhole and release it from its peg.
The nightie settled around her like a burka, her head covered, her face out the neck hole. That was okay. This angle should be good for getting her right arm up through the right armhole.
She tried to get her casted arm up. The nightie shifted up over her head as she found the right armhole and shoved. Of course, the blouse bunched around the cast prevented it from clearing the hole. It snagged on something.
So she was stuck with her arms in the air, and her head inside her nightgown.
