Page 63 of Armed ’N’ Ready

She arched a brow back. “There was nothing natural about how you and I met.”

“I suppose not.” He grinned at her.

There were so many things she wanted to know about him. One thing in particular was difficult to ask, but she had to. “Do you have any children?”

A deep line creased his forehead. “No.”

She waited, hoping he’d tell her more. Like how his wife had died. Whether he still grieved for her. Her insides were screaming for more information.

“I’m sorry.” She instantly regretted her question. “I shouldn’t have pried.” She tried pulling away, but he wrapped his arm around her waist, locking her securely against him.

“You,” he said softly, “could never be insensitive. I’ve seen you interact with your staff and customers. You don’t have an insensitive bone in your body.”

“Unfortunately, I have my moments. Like right now.” How she wished she could take back her question.

The night air filled with more awkward silence, and she feared their line of conversation had come to an abrupt end.

“Tanya—my wife—and I tried to have kids.” His eyes took on a faraway look. “She got pregnant three times but always miscarried. Twice in the first trimester. The third time early on in the second.”

Her heart ached for him, his dead wife, and their unborn babies. She couldn’t imagine what they both must have gone through. Losing a child would be far more painful than never being able to conceive one.

“Each miscarriage killed something inside her, and she began withdrawing from me. After the third time,” he continued, “she went into a deep depression. I couldn’t take what it was doing to her. I told her we should stop trying, and that we could adopt.”

“Tanya wanted her own child,” she murmured, inherently understanding what she must have been feeling. “She wanted a child from both of you.”

“Yeah, but she could never accept that it wasn’t going to happen for us.” His voice had turned bitter. “I tried to get her the help she needed. Got her to see a shrink. That only seemed to make things worse. Her depression kept spiraling downward. Every day became torture. For both of us. No matter how much I tried convincing her, she could never believe that I loved her regardless of whether or not we had kids. She asked for a divorce, but I refused to give it to her. In her mind, she was trying to set me free.” He shook his head. “Didn’t work.”

“What happened?” she whispered, starting to have a bad feeling where this was going.

He took a deep breath and raked his fingers through his hair. “It got to the point where she barely left the house anymore. I tried to get her to talk to her friends, but she refused. Then, she tried to kill herself.”

Andi couldn’t stop her soft intake of breath.

He paused and looked up at the early morning sky. “Her first attempt, she used pills. I found her and got her to the hospital in time to pump her stomach. A few months passed, then… I should have known something wasn’t right. One night, she was almost…happy. She made me dinner, told me she would always love me, then said good night and went to bed.”

Oh, no. This was going to be worse than she’d imagined.

“During work the next day it kept bugging me how she’d been acting the night before. I swung by the house to check on her.” When he stopped talking, there was so much despair in his eyes, her throat constricted until she could barely breathe. “I found her in the bedroom.”

She laced her fingers through his and squeezed his hand.

His jaw went harder than she’d ever seen it. “She’d shot herself in the head.”

“Oh, Nick.” Tears began welling in her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“She left a note. What she wanted most in the world was to have a baby. My baby. She finally accepted that it wasn’t going to happen but couldn’t live with it. In the letter, she apologized to me for being a failure. For not being complete enough as a woman to give me a child. No matter how many times I said it, she never believed me that we could be perfectly happy just being us.” He laughed bitterly. “To this day, I don’t know where she got the gun. The serial number had been filed off. It was an illegal gun off the street.”

That explains a lot.

She remembered the cold fury she’d seen in his eyes as he’d described the teenage girl who’d been struck in the head by a bullet during a drive-by shooting. It hadn’t been solely the girl’s death that he’d been reliving. It had been his wife’s, too.

“I loved her, but it wasn’t enough.” He began shaking his head, clenching his jaw. “I couldn’t give her what she wanted, then I failed to protect her when she needed it most.”

“No, Nick. No.” She rose on her elbow, stroking his cheek while her heart broke for him. On the outside, he was as tough as they came—a battle-scarred cop who’d seen the worst mankind had to offer. Inside, he experienced pain just like everyone else. Maybe more so, because there was a deeply ingrained protective core running through him. “There wasn’t anything you could have done. You said so yourself. She planned this so there’d be no opportunity to save her.”

“Christ, I do know that. Now.” He inhaled deeply then let it out. “Everyone else told me the same thing. Matt, Eric, Kade… We’ve all seen enough suicides to know that.”

“But this hit you personally, and it still hurts.”