He regarded her in silence for a long, drawn-out minute before speaking. “It’s worse,” he said quietly, his eyes darkening and clouding over with something she couldn’t quite identify. “The things you read about in the paper or hear about on the evening news… They gloss over the gory details. They don’t show pictures of victims with needles stuck in their arms or lying in pools of their own blood. Children covered in bruises and living in drug dens so full of the stuff, you can get high off the fumes.”

Her stomach fluttered-and not in a good way. It was ironic that he proclaimed to want to spare her the knowledge of what that world was really like, yet had just painted a vividly disturbing picture of exactly that.

She didn’t think it wise to mention that fact, though. This was the most he’d talked about his job, about working undercover, in all the time she’d known him. She might not like what he was telling her, but she wanted to hear it all the same. Especially if it gave her some inkling of what had gone so wrong between them.

“I understand,” she said. “I may not have seen those things with my own eyes, and I’m sorry that they happened, but I do understand. I also understand that you’re one of the good guys. You’re a superhero, out there fighting the good fight, doing what you can to stop the bad guys and help the innocents. What I’m not clear on-and forgive me if I’m being dense-is what that has to do with us.”

Shifting on the bed, she brought her legs closer to her chest, resisting the urge to wrap her arms around her knees and show him just how vulnerable she was feeling. “You pulled away from me, stopped talking to me after you started working undercover. I see that now. But I don’t see what one has to do with the other, or how you think you were protecting me by ignoring me, changing your mind about wanting children, distancing yourself from me emotionally…”

She trailed off when her voice started to rise and both anger and sadness began to creep into every word. Because what she really wanted to do was throw up her hands and scream, What the hell does that have to do with anything? Why the hell did a handful of junkies and child-abusers cost me my husband and marriage?

“How can I bring a child into the world, knowing what’s out there? Knowing that every time he left the house, he’d be faced with drugs, alcohol, prostitution. Pedophiles and murderers. People who will do anything for a buck or their next fix, and have no compunction about using or abusing children to get them.”

Jenna heard what he was saying, but she wasn’t sure she comprehended it. Possibly because the words echoed in her ears, coming to her as though from the end of a very long tunnel. Her head buzzed, her vision clouded, and her heart pounded in her throat.

This had to be what high blood pressure felt like. Perhaps the early warning signs of a heart or panic attack.

“That’s why you don’t want a baby?” she demanded, surprised when her voice came out steady and not nearly as Taming of the Shrew as she felt. “Because of what might happen? Because of a dozen or so negative possibilities?”

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.