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She whipped her head around and narrowed her eyes. “No need to apologize to me,” she grunted. “I don’t really care how late you sleep. Of course, who you sleep with might be a problem.”
I could have pointed out that all Brendan and I did was sleep last night, but there wasn’t much of a point. We got very little sleep over the weekend. “I really don’t see how that would be any of your business,” I said coolly. “Not only are we both adults, but it’s actually legal.”
“It’s my damn business because he’s my brother. It’s my damn business because this is my ranch too,” Kim snapped. “It’s my damn business because I don’t want you pretending to be in love with my brother just so you can take a shot at his money. What? He wasn’t good enough for you when he was broke, but he is now that he’s wealthy?”
Immediately, I stiffened. “If I cared about your brother’s money, I wouldn’t have married him when he didn’t have two nickels to rub together. He had no plans to return to this ranch, and I didn’t give a damn if we were broke our entire lives.”
“Sure you didn’t,” she sneered. Darling whinnied nervously and stamped her feet, but Kim didn’t pay any attention to her. “Convenient how it all worked for you, didn’t it? A fake divorce just so you can come back once he’s head of the family fortune.”
The idea was so unbelievable that I just tossed my head back and laughed. “You think that I set up a fake divorce? Just so I could maybe break his heart enough to run back home? I’ve got news for you, sweetheart. That divorce that you hate me so much for wasn’t even my damn idea.”
The bottle crashed to the floor and splintered into pieces. His face was red with anger, and his fists were clenched. “What do you want from me?” he asked hoarsely. “You won’t talk to me. You won’t let me touch you. What are we supposed to be to each other, Jillian?”
Trembling, I stared at him. He’d been gone for days. Days, and I hadn’t heard a word from him. “I want…” The words got caught in my throat. I wanted him to forgive me. I wanted to hear that he still loved me.
“A divorce?”
The words sliced through me, and I flinched. I wanted to scream at him. Of course I didn’t want a divorce. I was his wife. It was the only thing that kept me going.
“Do you want a divorce, Jillian?”
Fueled by the pain that seared through me, I was on a roll as I rounded on his sister. “I guess you think that I faked that miscarriage too and all the nights that I spent crying alone because he was nowhere to be found. Or maybe I faked the arguments where he told me that I’d let part of me die with our baby? Are you going to blame me for that too?”
In my anger, I almost missed the blood rush from her face. She went from blazing mad to pale and ashen in a matter of seconds. As her pretty eyes widened and her jaw dropped, I realized that she didn’t know.
He’d never told her.
Her heartbreak was written all over her face. In that moment, I’d made her an aunt and just as quickly taken away the baby. “Jillian,” she managed softly.
“We’d known for weeks that we were going to be parents. It was why he married me in the first place.” Tears burned my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. “Then we went to the appointment to learn the baby’s gender, and that’s when they told us. No heartbeat. The doctor told us that it just happened sometimes. No one knew why.”
Even now, it was hard to talk about it.
“He never said a word.” Kim’s eyes filled with tears. “Why didn’t he tell me?”
“I don’t know. We were young, lost, and he wasn’t really talking to his father. We handled the whole situation poorly. We don’t even talk about it now.” I put my hand on my belly. “Kim, I didn’t try to divorce your brother because I didn’t love him or because he wasn’t good enough for me. We left each other because we weren’t the same after that. Maybe if we’d been older or more mature, we could have handled it. I never expected Brendan Ward to come waltzing back into my life, and I sure as hell didn’t realize that we were still married. I’d moved on with my life.”
“Really?” Kim shook her head. “Because it sounds to me that it wouldn’t be possible for the two of you to get over it unless you talked about it. Isn’t that what a therapist would say?”
Of course she’d say something like that. Deep down, I knew that she was right, but I also knew that it wasn’t something I thought Brendan could handle. And we weren’t through playing this little charade of his.
