Damn, life was good. Or at least-with the exception of not being able to stay with this woman forever-it sure as hell could be.

Hours later… hours and hours later, after he’d made love to her on the sofa, halfway up the stairs, then again when they’d reached the guest room bed.

It was far better than playing around with yarn and pointy plastic sticks any day of the week.

And between bouts of going at it like meerkats, they’d rested, pressed against each other like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

She was curled around him now, head on his shoulder, arm around his chest, leg thrown over his thigh. But he didn’t think she was any more asleep than he was. Drowsy, maybe. Sated and comfortable, definitely, but not sleeping.

He was thinking about rolling over, kissing her from brow to ankle and back again, though he wasn’t quite sure where he was supposed to get the energy.

Jenna shifted slightly, her breath warming him as she sighed.

“Gage?”

“Hmm?” he responded without opening his eyes, his arm tightening automatically at her waist.

“You never answered my question.”

“What question?” he asked after a second. He tried to think back, but his brain was apparently so sex-zapped he had no recollection of a question left unanswered or a conversation left unfinished.

“From earlier, in the car,” she continued softly.

It came back to him with all the subtlety of a baby grand falling on his head from twenty stories above. The car. Her tears. Her watery voice asking why he gave up on them so easily, why he hadn’t fought to keep their marriage together.

The pain he’d felt then, seeing and hearing her pain, clutched him again, raking across the inside of his gut like razor blades, leaving him raw and bleeding.

How could it still hurt this much, for both of them, so long after the fact? The old adage that time heals all wounds was apparently a load of crap.

Time certainly hadn’t healed anything for him. He’d missed Jenna every day since the split. Wished things could have been different every day since she’d asked for a divorce. Hated and came close to strangling every other man he’d seen with or even near her since.

He suspected the same was true for Jenna, otherwise she wouldn’t have brought it up, wouldn’t be pressing for an answer that had the potential to be even more distressing than the question itself.

And suddenly, he was tired. So fucking tired of it all.

Gage would give his life to protect her, but if she needed to know… They might have silently agreed to spend the week rolling around like ferrets on Ecstasy, but they’d also made it clear to each other that there was no going back.

This wasn’t the beginning of a reconciliation. They weren’t taking a stab at patching things up, only enjoying each other’s company in and out of bed while they waited to find out whether or not she was pregnant.

So nothing he told her now was going to impact their relationship one iota. She might cut him off, get her panties in a bunch and impose a no-more-sex rule. But that only meant they would go back to the way things had been that first day-he’d still stick around until she either got her period… or didn’t… and she’d go about her business, ignoring him and making it clear he was an unwelcome addition to the house-and alpaca-sitting stint she was pulling for her aunt.

In the end, though, they would still be divorced, still go their separate ways. Well, give or take, depending on how the daily over-the-counter pregnancy test thing turned out.

With both sides of the tell her/don’t tell her arguments warring in his head, he released an audible sigh, then heard himself ask in a low voice, “What does it matter now?”

Pushing away from his chest, she propped herself up on one arm to stare down at him. Her eyes glowed emerald-green even in the dim light of the bedroom, expressive as ever and telling him exactly how serious she was about this.

“It matters,” she said barely above a whisper.

“I never meant to hurt you,” he told her, wanting to be sure she understood that first and foremost.

Rather than nodding and simply accepting his statement as fact and a partial apology, she arched a brow. “Really?” was her equally arch response. “Because you did. Long before you moved out, you shut down on me, started pulling away. You made decisions about our life together without consulting me and wouldn’t budge, simply expecting me to go along with them. When I tried to talk to you, you clammed up. You grew silent and brooding and… turned into someone I didn’t know anymore. What I want to know is why.”

The house was dark and quiet. He was drowsy and sated from hours of amazing, spine-tingling sex. For those reasons, or maybe a dozen others, his defenses were down at the moment and he found he didn’t have the energy to fight her need to know.

“Because I loved you.” Because I still love you, he thought, but kept that particular confession to himself. “And because I was trying to protect you.”

Purl 16

Jenna blinked, having the strange urge to stick a finger in her ear and wiggle it, then ask Gage to repeat himself so she could be sure she’d heard him correctly.

“Protect me?”

Tugging at the sheet that had covered them both a few minutes ago, she pulled it up and held it in place over her bare breasts. “Protect me from what?” she asked.

“Everything.”

It might have been only one word, spoken in little more than a whisper, but it hit her like a sledgehammer to the solar plexus. She tried to draw in a breath, to get oxygen to her deprived brain and other malfunctioning organs. But her lungs seemed frozen in her chest just as surely as her tongue was frozen behind her lips.

Pushing up into more of a sitting position against the headboard, Gage’s earnest brown gaze drilled into hers. “I want to protect you from every single thing out there that might cause you harm or pain.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, aware deep down of just what an understatement that was.

“You don’t know how bad it is out there, Jenna. You don’t know the kinds of things I’ve seen day in and day out since joining the vice squad.”

Her mouth parted slightly as things began to click. Oh, she still had six or eight million questions she was dying to pepper him with, but what he’d just said sank in and so much of what had passed between them before the divorce suddenly made sense.

She’d started to notice a change in him only after he’d started working undercover. Before that, things had been fine. More than fine; they’d been deliriously, almost sickeningly (at least according to her friends) happy.

The silent treatment and growing distance between them had come directly on the heels of the physical transformations he’d adopted in order to fit in to whatever group he happened to be infiltrating that week or month. She’d never put two and two together before, but looking back she could clearly see the timeline of events as they’d played out.

But she still didn’t understand why. What did one thing have to do with the other?

“I can imagine,” she offered carefully, some part of her afraid that if she said the wrong thing, he might clam up on her again and they’d never get to the bottom of this.

“No,” he told her firmly, the word whipcord sharp, “you can’t. And I never wanted you to. I did everything I could think of to shield you from that world.”

Jenna cocked her head, surprised by the vehemence in his tone, and as confused as ever by the direction this conversation was going.

“Why would I need to be protected from any of that?” she asked him. “I’m not a porcelain doll, Gage. I may live in a nice section of town and lead a nice, middle-class life, but I’m aware that not everyone is so lucky. I read the paper and watch the news. I know what some of the conditions are like in the seedier sections of town, even if I’m not intimately familiar with them.”