“Sounds good to me,” Jenna said. “We’ll stop for massive quantities of wine and cookies on the way.”

They had Grace halfway across the living room when she stopped, muttered, “Wait,” and turned back toward the bedroom. Jenna and Ronnie raced after her, afraid of what she might be up to, but then gave mirrored sighs of relief when all she did was grab an old taped and battered hockey stick from the rear of Zack’s closet.

Grace returned a second later, stick in hand. “This is mine now,” she told them.

Jenna and Ronnie exchanged a glance, silently agreeing not to question or argue. They had Grace calmed down and moving in the right direction; that’s all that mattered. If she wanted to steal a single piece of hockey equipment in order to stick it-pun intended-to Zack, they weren’t going to fight her on it.

Gathering purses and jackets, they herded Grace toward the door, and Jenna made a point of getting there a split second before the others to frantically wave Gage away. Smart man that he was, he strolled a few yards down the hall and out of sight.

“Wait,” Grace said again when they had her halfway out the door.

Both women froze, afraid Grace had changed her mind and was about to go back on a rampage.

But instead, she merely snapped her fingers and called, “Here, Bruiser.”

The giant brown and white Saint Bernard, who had been only a couple steps behind them to begin with, padded straight to Grace, nudging her in the side with his nose and wet, panting tongue.

“He’s mine now, too,” she said to no one in particular, then turned on her heel and marched down the hall toward the elevator, the dog formerly known as Zack’s trailing along at her side.

Purl 10

Thanks to a lot of well-mimed signals and hand gestures, Gage got the hint that Jenna and Ronnie were carting an emotionally battered Grace off and away from causing any more damage at Zack’s apartment. He took the stairs to the lobby while they headed down in the elevator, then followed at a discreet distance as they made their way out of the building and along the sidewalk-at one point skirting piles of broken, torn, and otherwise bedraggled items that looked as though they’d once belonged to Zack-to the parking lot.

Jenna gently set her keys on the roof of her yellow VW Beetle, silently leaving them for him as she passed by and climbed into the back seat of Grace’s car with a much-worse-for-wear-looking Grace. Zack’s dog rode shotgun in the front beside Ronnie, strapped in and for all the world acting like the human he thought he was.

It was funny, he thought, as he squeezed himself into his ex-wife’s sorry excuse for a motor vehicle, that Jenna was suddenly leaving bread crumbs for him when only an hour before she’d been telling him off and insisting he wasn’t welcome at her aunt’s farm or to follow her back to town for this girlfriend crisis intervention.

But that was his Jenna. She might not want him around, but she would never abandon him downtown and without a viable mode of transportation, either.

Then again, she knew how much he hated riding around in her tiny tuna can with wheels. She was probably sitting in that back seat, laughing her ass off over the image of him stuffing himself inside. Steering wheel bumping his chin, knees pressed to his ears. He felt like he was driving a freaking clown car.

Despite his discomfort and wish for his bike, he followed behind Grace’s much larger, more sensible sleek silver Lexus halfway across town to her equally sleek apartment complex. Taking his time, he parked a few spaces away from them, then sat and watched as the foursome piled out of the car and trailed into the building.

As soon as they disappeared, he climbed out of the bug to stretch his legs… and arms and hips and back and neck. If he’d had a cigarette, he probably would have smoked one, but since he tried to limit them to his undercover work only, he leaned his arms on the roof of Jenna’s yellow jelly-bean car and tapped out a bored rhythm with the sides of his thumbs.

The thing about being a cop and working vice was that he was used to waiting. Nine times out of ten, his job involved sitting around doing not much of anything, watching for that one moment when he had enough evidence and the opening to make an arrest.

He used the time-most of it, anyway-to go back over the details of his cover and make sure there were no holes that might get him dead. Or to map out all the ways a bust might go down, also in hopes of minimizing casualties and not getting dead.

And sometimes, after he’d gone through all of that, he’d think about why the job was so important to him. The fact that he was making a difference and taking scum off the streets so they couldn’t hurt innocent people like Jenna.

The only problem was, the longer he worked undercover and the more immersed he became with society’s lowlifes, the more he came to think that what he was doing wasn’t really making that much of a difference, after all. No matter how many thieves, murderers, sex offenders, or drug dealers he took down, more seemed to crop up. They were like the mythical Hydras; sever one head and another-maybe even two more-grew in its place.

So what was the point? If he wasn’t really making a difference, if he wasn’t truly keeping the streets safe for his wife and citizens like her, then why bother?

It wasn’t that he didn’t like his job or being undercover. There were parts of it that were downright invigorating. The secrets and lies. The role-playing. The delicate web of deceit that had to be woven around the criminal element. The heightened anticipation of the chase and eventual take-down.

When Jenna filed for divorce, though, it had made him stop and analyze his life, his decisions. He’d thought he was protecting her, keeping her at arm’s length from what he did and the ugliness he saw on a daily basis.

But if what he was doing to keep her safe ended up pushing her away, then was any of it really worthwhile? It felt an awful lot like oiling the squeak in a hamster’s wheel after the animal had already gone paws-up.

And with Jenna no longer around, he couldn’t even be sure she was safe. He couldn’t know where she was or what she was doing.

Oh, he wasn’t one of those men. The possessive types who had to know where their women were every minute of every day for fear they might actually exchange a word or two with another human being. But he did like knowing that she never had any reason to wander into areas where she didn’t belong and could get seriously hurt.

And yeah, if he could have cocooned her inside their house while they were married, he would have. Not to keep her in, but to keep every bad, negative element out.

She’d never understood that about him; his almost obsessive need to protect her. She’d thought he was simply becoming sullen, distant… that he didn’t care enough.

Christ, could anything have been farther from the truth? He’d have taken a bullet for her. Still would.

What he wouldn’t do was bring a child into the world-a world he was all too familiar with-when there was no way for him to guarantee that child’s safety until he was old enough to take care of himself.

Smacking his palms flat on the roof of the Volkswagen, he muttered a short, colorful curse and took a step back.

But now Jenna very well may have taken that choice away from him.

A man should have the right to make his own decisions about whether or not he became a father. He shouldn’t be dosed, bound, and used for stud service.

He’d learned the hard way, however-and on more than one occasion-that people didn’t always get their way. What he did or didn’t want was moot at this point… or at least until they found out whether or not Jenna was pregnant.