Heidi Betts - Loves Me, Loves Me Knot

Mouth a thin line of anguish, he said, “There’s some ugly stuff out there, Jenna.”

“Without a doubt. There’s ugly stuff everywhere, especially if you go looking for it. But you can’t live your life in fear of it touching you.”

Feeling as though she were about to crawl out of her skin, she pushed herself up and climbed over his legs to get off the bed. Giving the top sheet a mighty yank, she pulled it free of the bed and wrapped it around her so that it draped across the floor like a long-trained ball gown.

“What if none of that ever happened?” she turned to demand of him face-on. “What if we’d stayed married, had a child- children , even-and lived happily ever after? What if none of them ever got addicted to drugs or were molested or mugged on the street? It happens, you know,” she charged in a tone growing ever more uncontrolled. “People all across the country lead happy, healthy lives, with solid marriages and perfectly content children, who never get caught up in any of those bad things you’re so worried about.”

Gage remained still on the bed, staring at her like a statue. Was he even listening to her? Did anything she’d said have an impact on him?

“We both grew up that way. Nothing awful ever happened to us. I mean, we used to joke all the time about our families giving the Cleavers or Bradys a run for their money, and how we wanted to create the same sort of environment for our own kids.”

It wasn’t entirely true that they’d grown up like sitcom children, of course. No family was perfect, and everyone had their own personal issues or baggage from the past, but not everyone had horrible, traumatizing, oversized baggage.

Jenna’s parents happened to be stiff and stoic. Whenever the topic had come up, she’d described them as being the American Gothic version of the Cleavers. But she’d been well cared for, and no one had ever beaten, neglected, or molested her, and neither of her parents was an alcoholic, drug abuser, or even compulsive gambler.

And Gage had had an even more storybook childhood. His parents were fabulous. Jenna loved them to death, had been overjoyed to join their family-and had thankfully been welcomed with open arms by his mother, father, and siblings all-and had cried as much over losing such close contact with them as in losing Gage when she’d filed for divorce. Everything about his childhood had been perfect, from a mother who baked cookies and sewed Halloween costumes to a father who built him a treehouse and coached his Little League team.

Which only made it all the more difficult to wrap her mind around his current attitude about family and child-rearing.

“Things are different now,” he told her, still morose, still holding tight to his horribly skewed point of view. “The world is a much more dangerous place now than it used to be.”

“Maybe you’re too close to it,” she said, trying not to jump completely off the deep end. “You’ve worked undercover for so long and seen so much of the dark side of society that you can’t see there are still good people out there. We’re good people, Gage. We would love and protect our children, give them a warm home and a soft place to fall if anything ever did hurt them.”

He shook his head. Sadly, it seemed, as though he wished things could be different, but still clinging tightly to his belief that having a baby meant one day losing that child to something painful and ugly.

Lowering his eyes to his lap, now covered by the thin, quilted spread her aunt kept on the guest room bed, he threaded his fingers together and shook his head again. “It’s too risky,” he rasped. “I can’t take the chance.”

She waited a beat, breathing slowly in and out, letting his final decision sink in. Anger bubbled in her belly, while at the same time a chill of sorrow spread through her veins.

“So that’s it,” she replied woodenly. “I don’t get a say in the matter? You can’t stretch your mind to believe that we could instill enough self-esteem and strong moral principles in our children that they wouldn’t get mixed up in any of that stuff? You’re going to trust that nameless, faceless strangers would wield enough power to hurt our kids before they’re even born, but you can’t trust the two of us enough to know we’d keep them safe and raise them right?”

He lifted his head to meet her gaze and the answer was clear. His eyes were bleak, splintering her heart into a thousand tiny shards. There was no changing his mind; she understood that now, even though somewhere, in the very distant back of her mind, she’d hoped and thought maybe, just maybe there was a chance.

Until that moment, however, she hadn’t realized how much pain of his own Gage was carrying around-because of his job, because of the things his job had forced him to witness, and because of the decisions they’d driven him to make.

She’d thought she’d lost it all when he’d pulled away from her and she’d been forced to ask for a divorce. Now she knew that wasn’t true. She hadn’t lost it all; he had. Because she still believed that good could win out over evil and had faith in humanity, while he…

He’d apparently lost faith in everyone and everything. Including her.

Including himself.

Gage got out of bed just as the sun was rising on the distant horizon, casting the sky in soft pink and orange and purple.

Not that he’d gotten a wink of sleep after Jenna had pressed him with the hard questions… and hadn’t liked his answers.

He didn’t think she’d gotten much rest, either.

There at the end, she’d had such a look in her eyes. A look of sadness, disappointment, and loss. It had clutched at him, squeezed him from the inside out and made him want to reach out. To grab her up, tug her back into bed, and hold her, murmuring reassuring promises until the sorrow faded from her eyes.

But he couldn’t do that. He hadn’t been able to offer a single soothing word, because everything he’d had to say had already been said. There was no changing his mind-no changing hers, either, he knew-and nothing was going to soften that blow for her.

Or the blow for him, especially after she’d looked at him that way, then simply turned and walked out of the room. She hadn’t closed the door behind her, but she might as well have slammed it for the hollow, resounding heartache she left in her wake.

Gage straightened what was left of the covers before leaving the room and heading downstairs. He suspected Jenna had slept-or not slept, as was more likely the case-on the sofa after leaving him. He’d thought about following her, but what would have been the point?

So he’d stayed where he was and hoped she wasn’t completely miserable, even though he’d known wishing for that was like wishing rain would fall up instead of down.

The stairs of the old farm house creaked as he took them slowly one at a time. He stopped in the entrance of the living room, but there was no sign of Jenna. No sheet or pillow on the antique settee. Not even the big, white plastic needles and purple yarn he’d tossed aside last night when things had still been good between them.

Good, ha! Before the conversation to end all conversations, things hadn’t just been good, they’d been freaking fantastic. He could have gone on that way with her…

Yeah, well, if he’d been lucky, forever. But where Jenna was concerned, he didn’t seem to be walking around with a four-leaf clover in his pocket. More like a black cat, a handful of spilled salt, and an upside-down horseshoe. Maybe even the number thirteen tattooed on his ass.

Turning away from the living room, he headed for the kitchen, but didn’t find Jenna there, either. Her yellow VW was still in the drive, he noticed when he glanced out the window, so unless she’d taken off on foot, there was only one place left where she could be.