Jessica had walked her brother to the door, and now they both stood in the foyer, their furtive whispers attesting to the nature of their conversation.
Pierce crossed the hardwood floor to the fireplace and picked up one of the pictures of Max he’d studied so intently that morning. A baseball cap angled over the boy’s forehead as his brown eyes squinted into the sun. There was a rip in his shorts and a scab on one scrawny knee.
Pierce’s heart melted. He’d loved the baby Jesse had been carrying, and now he loved this little boy with an intensity that astounded him.
Jessica stood at the end of the sofa and watched Pierce. He didn’t look up, and she realized he hadn’t heard her come in. She watched him trace a finger gently along the photo, and the look of fierce possessiveness that came over his face shocked her. Her heart skidded with warning as her own defenses rose in reaction.
Pierce glanced up, and the expression in his eyes confirmed her deepest fears. When he spoke, his voice gave rise to new ones. Jessica trembled with dread as his gaze continued to hold hers.
“Where is he, Jessica? Where’s my son?”
Chapter Four
Jessica tried to keep her voice controlled. She didn’t want to give away her fear, didn’t want to appear weak or vulnerable even to Pierce. Especially to Pierce. “Max isn’t here,” she said, glancing away.
“Where is he?”
“He’s somewhere…safe.”
“Safe? That’s a strange term to use.”
Her eyes challenged him. “Is it?”
He lifted his brow, and the scar twisted it, giving him an almost sinister appearance. “Are you implying that I’m a threat to our son? Or to you?”
Jessica hesitated, then said, “You barely resemble the man I knew back then. You’ve obviously been hurt. Maybe you’re even in some sort of trouble. God knows what might have happened to you since you left. You’ve been gone for five years, Pierce. Five years. I don’t even know who you are anymore,” she finished in a whisper.
His voice lowered. “I’m your husband.”
“Technically,” she said, borrowing Jay’s term. Jessica took a deep breath and let it out, trying to calm her pounding heart. She walked over to the window and stared out into the darkness. “Can you even begin to imagine what this is like for me? All those years you were gone and not one word, not one clue, and now suddenly here you are, acting like nothing’s happened. Acting like you think…everything should be the same between us. It’s not. It’s not the same.” She turned and faced him. “It’ll never be the same again.”
His eyes close briefly. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s the truth. I don’t want to hurt you, but the sooner we face it, the better off we’ll both be.”
“My God, Jesse.” He spread his hands in appeal. “You’re acting like you think I left because I wanted to. And given your background, I guess I can understand that. My…disappearance—whatever you want to call it—must have seemed like the ultimate betrayal to you. You must have felt as though I had deserted you, too.”
“You can’t know how I felt,” she said, crossing her arms.
“No, I guess I can’t,” he agreed. “But one thing I do know. I didn’t leave you because I wanted to.”
Her chin lifted a fraction. “Then why did you leave me?”
“I’ve already told you,” he said helplessly. “I don’t know what happened.”
“You have no idea?”
Pierce hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “I have no memory of the past five years,” he finally said.
“It’s incredible,” she whispered. “So hard to believe.”
“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “It’s even hard for me to believe. So I guess I have to ask you, Jesse, given the circumstances, where does this leave us? Where do we go from here?”
Jessica made a futile gesture with her hand. “I don’t know. I think the first thing you should do is see a doctor, but beyond that…I just don’t know….” Her words trailed off as she glanced away. She couldn’t bear to look at him any longer. Couldn’t bear to see what the past five years had done to him. To her. “You need a place to stay for the time being. I won’t ask you to leave, Pierce. I…can’t.”
“Is it just pity you feel for me, then? I know how I look to you,” he said, with a derisive smile. “As you said, I’m hardly the man I once was.”
“That’s not what I said,” she flared out. “It has nothing to do with the way you look. At least not in the way you mean. It has everything to do with where you’ve been these past five years. What you’ve been doing. Why you left me in the first place.”
Her anger deepened as she forced herself to meet his dark gaze. Her voice grew shaky with emotion as she spread her hands in supplication. “Can’t you understand? Maybe you didn’t leave because you wanted to, but that doesn’t change the fact that you did leave me. I thought you were dead. All these years, I’ve mourned you, and now I find out it was all for nothing. It was all a lie.”
“You sound disappointed, Jesse.”
His observation startled her. Made her feel just a trifle uneasy about herself. Was she disappointed? Or was she just feeling hurt and confused? Angry and betrayed and…wronged. “I feel a lot of things,” she admitted. “Not the least of which is fear.”
“I would never hurt you.”
“You already have,” she said. “You have no idea.”
“But not intentionally. Never intentionally.” Pierce took a step toward her, but stopped when she flinched away. “You have to believe that, Jesse. I don’t know what happened five years ago. I don’t know where I’ve been, what I’ve done, why I couldn’t come back to you. I wish to God I did.”
He raised his hand to massage his right temple. His eyes closed for a moment as though he were experiencing excruciating pain. “It’s something I have to figure out. I have all these bits and pieces of memories floating around inside my head, and somehow I have to fit them all together again. I know none of this makes any sense to you right now. To me, either. But the one thing I do know is that I never stopped loving you.”
“How can you possibly know that?” she demanded. “If you have no memory of the past five years, how can you be so sure there wasn’t someone else?”
He lifted his gaze to hers. “Because there could never be anyone else. At least…not for me.”
It took Jessica a few seconds to register the note of accusation in his tone. The brown of his eyes deepened almost to black. His gaze was intense, probing, his voice a little too calm. Jessica felt a chill of apprehension as he said slowly, “Perhaps that should have been my first question. I’m almost afraid to ask it, though.”
Jessica glanced away guiltily.
“With good reason, it would seem. Is there someone else?” he persisted.
She hesitated, then shook her head. “No.”
“You don’t sound too sure.”
“There isn’t anyone else,” she repeated angrily. She tossed back her hair and eyed him defiantly. “But there could have been. And who would have blamed me? You were gone all that time. I didn’t know if you were dead or alive. For all I knew, you could have had another family somewhere else. You could have been in love with someone else. You could have forgotten all about me,”