Читать книгу The Pregnancy Pact: The Pregnancy Secret / The CEO's Baby Surprise / From Paradise...to Pregnant! - Cara Colter - Страница 23
ОглавлениеMONDAY, AFTER WORK, Jessica returned to Kade’s apartment. She was somewhat ashamed that she had not done a single thing to make new living arrangements for herself. And now here she was, aware she was waiting for the door of the apartment to open.
Why? Kade never came home at regular hours. What was she waiting for? Hadn’t this been part of their whole problem? That she waited, as if her whole life depended on him, and he had a whole life that had nothing to do with her?
Surely she’d come further than this, still waiting for him to come home! It was pathetic, and she was not being pathetic anymore. And so, instead of sitting in the apartment, she went and explored his building.
There was a good-size pool that they were conducting a kayaking class in, and beside that was a climbing wall. She went and sat on a bench and watched people climb the wall.
A good-looking man came over and introduced himself as Dave and asked her if she was going to try it.
She held up her arm. “Already did,” she said, deadpan. He laughed and flirted with her a bit, and she realized whatever had happened when she had put on all those clothes had been good. She was wearing one of her new outfits, and it seemed to fill her with confidence she hadn’t had for some time. Dave went up the wall, obviously showing off, and she was content to let him.
She watched for a while, and decided as soon as her arm got better, she would try climbing. The wall looked really fun.
After doing a thorough tour of the building and the gorgeous gardens outside, which included that impressive waterfall at the front, she wandered back to the apartments.
Kade was there. Did he look pleased when she let herself in using the code he had given her?
“Hey,” he said. “How was your day?”
“Oh, I struggled through.”
“Work late?”
“Oh, no, I’ve been back for a while. I thought I’d check out your building. It’s great. I love the climbing wall.”
“Really? I’ve never been on it. Is that one of the outfits we bought yesterday?”
“Yeah, I’ve had lots of comments on it. A guy named Dave, down at the climbing wall, stopped to talk to me. I don’t think he normally would have mistaken me for his type.”
She felt just the littlest thrill of pleasure that Kade could not hide his annoyance at Dave’s attention.
“Want to order something for dinner? I don’t have much here to cook.” He snapped his fingers. “Unless you want an omelet.”
He’d always made the best omelets.
“Perfect,” she said.
And it was perfect. After dinner they watched the news together, and it felt so utterly easy, as if they were an old married couple.
Which they were, sort of.
Of course, when they’d been a newly married couple, they hadn’t sat around watching television. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Later, when that stage had passed—or when she’d killed it, by bringing out the dreaded chart—they had played cards sometimes in the evening.
She suddenly longed for that.
“You have a deck of cards, Kade?”
“Why? You want to play strip poker?” he asked with such earnest hopefulness she burst out laughing.
“No!”
“How about a strip Scrabble game, then?”
“How about just an ordinary Scrabble game?” she said, trying not to encourage him by laughing.
“Can we use bad words?”
“I suppose that would be okay. Just this once.”
“How about if we use only bad words?”
She gave him a slug on his arm. “That falls into the ‘give him an inch and he’ll take a mile’ category.”
Suddenly, she wanted to play a bad-words Scrabble game with him. She wanted to not be the uptight one, the stick-in-the-mud. “A bad-words Scrabble game it is,” she said.
“I don’t actually have a Scrabble board.”
“That figures.”
“But I bet we can find it on the computer.”
And so that was what they did, sat side by side on his sofa, playing a bad-words Scrabble game on the computer until she was laughing so hard it felt as if she could die from it.
“So,” he said casually, after he had just played phaut
