Harlequin Romance March 2021 Box Set Cara Colter (the mitten read aloud TXT) 📖

“Your parents?”

And so she ended up telling Theresa about that, too.

“And now you’re going to have a baby,” Theresa said.

Krissy went very still. “How do you know?”

“I’d like to tell you I can see it in you, and I can, now that I know. But I saw the test strip in the bathroom. Did you suspect it at the reunion?”

“Yes.”

“So that explains the fast exit.”

“Are you going to tell him?” Krissy whispered.

“No, Krissy, I’m not. You’re going to have to make that decision.”

“What if I tell him, and he feels obligated to make our marriage real because of a baby?”

“Just like your parents?”

“Yes.”

Theresa sighed. “This isn’t about the baby, not really. It’s about whether or not you love him. Because that would involve a level of trust in him. And you can’t decide that based on what your aunt thought, or what I think, either. Your heart is telling you the truth, and I think you are brave enough to listen to it. But I can’t make that decision for you.”

As Theresa spoke, as her words washed over Krissy, it felt as if a dark curtain was being lifted and the sun was dancing back into her life.

That thing that would not be killed and would not be quelled, no matter how hard she tried. It winked back to life, an ember that had been blown on.

Hope.

A sudden illuminating realization came to her. The level of trust she needed, she realized, was not in Jonas. She needed to trust herself.

“I need to see him,” Krissy said. And then she laughed. “I don’t even know where my husband lives.”

“Luckily for you,” Theresa said, grinning, “I do.”

* * *

Jonas’s face itched from not shaving. His hair was too long. He could smell himself, for God’s sake. His breath could make a train take a dirt road. Added to that, Jonas had the headache of all headaches. He wished he could blame it on alcohol, but no, it was heartache pure and simple. He wasn’t eating right. He was barely sleeping.

How well he remembered this kind of pain from the loss of his parents.

He counted back to the day he had first met Krissy. Barely a month. If she could do this to him after one month, wasn’t it for the best that she was gone? What if they’d been together a year, and she decided to pull the plug? Or two years. Or ten.

Or maybe she wouldn’t make a decision to pull the plug. Maybe she would die in a terrible accident, just like his parents had.

This was what he’d forgotten when he was falling for her and falling so hard. The pain, not so much of loving, but of losing that love.

It was why he had wrestled down the desire to phone her. A thousand times he had looked up her number, thought of calling it just to hear her voice. But then, no.

He’d get through this period of grief.

He’d white-knuckle his way through it. Go cold turkey, like an addict leaving behind their drug, their source of pleasure, their one thing that made them want to live, that gave them the impetus to get up in the morning.

But he wasn’t strong enough to go completely cold turkey. Well-meaning relatives—who had no idea his marriage was over before it had really begun—kept sending him pictures from the reunion.

The tug-of-war, her face caught in the reflected light of the fireworks, her expression as she ate her first s’more and of course, her coming toward him with those flowers in her hair and that look on her face.

That was the problem, really.

The look on her face. Nobody could make up a look like that, could they?

He groaned, back on the merry-go-round, revisiting all those things he needed to stop revisiting.

He glanced at the clock: 10:00 a.m. Today, he’d go to the office. Today, he’d make those phone calls, today he’d answer emails.

He took his phone out.

He ordered himself to look at his emails, to return a call, to look for a new resort to buy.

But instead, he opened the pictures of Krissy, felt his heart fall all over again and realized he would not be getting back to normal today.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

JONAS WOKE UP, feeling groggy and out of sorts. His teeth felt as if they were wearing socks. He glanced at the clock. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

What kind of self-respecting person was napping at two in the afternoon?

He realized someone was at the door. You practically had to have secret service clearance to get in his building so he knew it must be Theresa.

“Go away,” he called.

She knocked at the door again. He knew his sister. She wasn’t going away. He got up and went to the door, flung it open.

It wasn’t his sister.

Krissy stood there, with Chance.

The dog apparently had forgotten all the good things they had taught him, because he leaped at Jonas, put his paws on his shoulders and cleaned his face.

“Get off me,” he bellowed.

“If I were you,” Krissy said, slipping in the door completely uninvited and shutting it behind her, “I’d take kisses where you can get them. You look terrible.” She wrinkled her nose. “And you smell.”

He managed to get the dog off of him. “Sit down!”

The dog did so reluctantly. Jonas stared at Krissy. His wife. Unlike him, she looked at the top of her game. Not the least heartbroken, apparently. Radiant.

Beautiful in a pair of jeans and open-toed shoes and a clinging T-shirt. Her hair was flowing free around her shoulders, and he had to shove his hands in his pockets to keep from touching it.

He looked away from her so that he didn’t have to see her lips. How could he look at them without remembering? Wanting? Longing?

“Sorry,” Krissy said. “I had to bring Chance. He won’t leave me since I left him at Boy’s Den. He has anxiety now, every time I go out the door.”

Perfectly understandable, Jonas thought.

“What do you want?” he asked