Chapter Thirty

Jewell stretched out her arms and was surprised to find the bed cold next to her. She opened her eyes slowly and smiled when she found a rose and a note lying on the pillow where Blake’s head should have been.

XXXX

Good morning, beautiful. I got called into the office to deal with an emergency. I will be home in plenty of time for our date.

Love,

Your husband.

XXXX

They’d been man and wife for a month now. Thirty great days and thirty even better nights. No matter how many times they made love, she still felt as if she could never get enough of this man, a man who had so suddenly entered her life and changed it almost instantly.

He was so different from the man she had met six months ago, but she still saw traces of the person who had bought her from Relinquish Control, especially when they were together in the bedroom. The man was insatiable, but since being with him, she had discovered that she was pretty insatiable too.

No matter how many times she lay in his arms, no matter how many ways they made love, each and every time was just as exciting as the last. It was the one place she knew that Blake fully let down his guard.

Yes, he was good to her, and he was even better with Justin, but there were parts of himself that he held back, pieces of his soul he refused to share. She wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t trust her completely, or if it was just because he wasn’t capable of loving another human being after what he had gone through with his parents.

Either way, Jewell was both blissfully happy and, at the same time, almost unbearably lonely. She was in love with Blake, in love with this hard man who had such a beautiful soft side, a hidden soft side, and the thing that frightened her most was realizing that he might never be able to return her feelings.

She tried not to think about it too much, because if she did, she feared she wouldn’t be able to honor their wedding vows into eternity. And that’s what she wanted more than anything else.

She desperately wanted to speak to Blake about having children, but he’d never mentioned whether he was at all interested in becoming a father. Instead, when the subject of fathers and fatherhood came up somehow, a shutter would close over his eyes and he would change the topic of conversation.

He was so good with Justin, but Justin was ten, almost eleven. There were many men, and many women for that matter, who didn’t want to have their own families. Love and children had never been a condition of her marriage to Blake, and for all she knew it never would be. That didn’t alter her love for her husband, though.

But as hard as she tried not to let the doubts creep into her thoughts of happiness, Jewell couldn’t help but worry. She wanted a family, a real family, one in which everyone loved each other equally. She wanted babies she could watch grow, and she wanted Blake’s brothers to be these children’s uncles in every sense of the word. She wanted noisy holiday dinners, and lazy summer days at the lake. She wanted it all.

But was that too much?

For a month, she’d pushed aside her worries and tried instead to focus only on the good. But recently, even when lying asleep in his arms, she felt pain, her dreams filled with visions of Blake running off with someone else, abandoning her and Justin forever, to start a life with a woman he could truly love.

“Good morning, Jewell.”

Jewell jumped when she stepped into the kitchen and found McKenzie sitting at the table, clutching some papers in her hands, and looking forlorn. The woman waited for Jewell to pour herself a cup of coffee.

“Hi, McKenzie. I normally love to see you, but when you’re wearing that expression on your face before I’ve had even one cup of coffee, I tend to worry,” Jewell said with a brittle laugh before she sat down, gripping her cup tightly in her hands.

She didn’t even ask how McKenzie had gotten into the house, but McKenzie shared anyway. “Elsa let me in an hour ago. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”

“Yes, I actually love the days Elsa works,” Jewell said. “Breakfast is so much better than the bowl of cereal I usually go for out of sheer laziness.” But why the hell were they making small talk, she wondered, when it was more than obvious that McKenzie had something important to say?

“I … I don’t know how to talk to you about this, Jewell,” she said, pausing and starting again as she looked down at the table. “I … crap, this is complicated.”

This was a first. McKenzie had never been afraid to meet Jewell’s eyes.

“You know what they say about bad news, McKenzie — it’s better to just spit it all out and get it over with,” Jewell told her while gulping down her coffee. From the way McKenzie was acting, Jewell had a feeling she was going to need a lot more of the stuff to get through whatever this was.

“Jewell, you know I care about you, don’t you?” McKenzie began, and Jewell’s stomach clenched.

“Blake wants a divorce, right?” she said, a false bravery in her tone.

“No, nothing like that,” McKenzie assured her.

“I’m not a fool, McKenzie. I’ve known all along this isn’t going to last forever. And you’ve always been honest with me. That’s not always been pleasant, but I know I can count on you to tell me the truth.”

“I promise you, Jewell, that it’s not that,” McKenzie said again.

“Please just tell me, McKenzie. Your hemming and hawing around it is only making whatever this is about, worse.” Jewell got a second cup of coffee for herself and refilled McKenzie’s cup as well.

Maybe the nightmares she’d been having were coming true. Maybe a person really wasn’t allowed to be too happy. She’d known that Blake was holding back from her, so having McKenzie confirm her suspicions shouldn’t be so devastating, but as she waited for the woman to speak, she felt like she couldn’t even breathe.

No matter which way this went, she was going to suffer through some major pain.

“It’s not about Blake wanting to leave you. I think that’s the last thing he would ever want to do. It’s just that …” McKenzie stopped and looked down at her hands again before she looked up, sympathy in her eyes. “It’s time I tell you the truth …”