Nightingale Way: An Eternity Springs Novel (9 page)

Well, he certainly hadn’t stopped with her hand, now, had he?

And you didn’t stop him from not stopping. What’s wrong with you? You don’t do booty calls
.

This hadn’t been a booty call. This had been … what? Disaster? Embarrassment? Mistake? Certainly a mistake.

I’m sorry, Cat. I’m so damned sorry
.

That had to be the most flattering après-sex comment she had ever received. Not.

Maybe she was the one who should be sorry. She’d poked the bear, after all. She’d wanted to know what was wrong. But she hadn’t exactly expected
that
.

As she lay in her bed and absorbed the facts of what had just taken place, Cat began to stew. He’d said he was sorry. Sorry about what? The sex? The tears? The
fact that he’d broken his cardinal rule and communicated with her about his job?

And what was that all about? She was sorry that he’d lost his friend. Truly, she was. However, a part of her couldn’t help but notice and resent that he had grieved for a friend, but not for the child they had lost.

It was one thing she’d never understood. Oh, he’d been disappointed and sorrowful, she’d give him that, but he’d never shown any signs of the gut-wrenching, heart-ripping pain that had come close to destroying Cat. She’d held it against him then, and she held it against him now.

Restless, she rose from her bed and padded to the bathroom. Halfway there, she stopped as a new and unwelcome thought occurred. She’d had wham-bam-not-even-a-thank-you-ma’am sex with Jack Davenport without protection!

It hadn’t even occurred to her at the time. The sex had caught her off guard, and besides, it was
Jack
. She and Jack hadn’t used anything in years before the divorce when they’d tried so hard—and failed—to get pregnant.

They’d been married then. She had trusted him not to be sleeping around on her. That wasn’t the case today.

Oh, no. Catherine Blackburn, you stupid fool!

Who knows how many women he’d been with since their divorce?

He could have just given her a disease. Wouldn’t that simply be wonderful?

In the shower, she brooded and sulked. While she blow-dried her hair, she muttered to herself. As she reached into her closet for a clean sleep shirt, she paused. Instead of donning her nightclothes, she put on a bra and panties, then shorts and a T-shirt. If she didn’t confront him now and get this off her chest, she wouldn’t sleep at all. She’d be doing him a good turn, too, because she was
about to distract him from his misery with a good old-fashioned tongue-lashing.

Okay, bad choice of words. Jack had always been exceptionally good at his personal version of tongue-lashing.

She exited her room and marched down the hall toward the master bedroom. Outside his door, she paused just a moment and braced herself for the confrontation to come. Without bothering to knock, she shoved open the door and stepped inside, demanding, “Just what are you sorry for, Jack Davenport?”

Dimmed ceiling lights cast a muted glow through the room. He sat sprawled in the brown leather easy chair that sat beside the wall of windows in his bedroom wearing shorts and nothing else. He didn’t bother himself to even look in her direction. “Go away, Cat.”

“No, I don’t think I will. You owe me, Davenport. You owe me a conversation, not only because of what took place a few minutes ago, but also because of what happened years ago.”

“This is not a good time.”

“It’s
never
a good time for you.” She slammed his bedroom door behind her—not that it needed slamming; they were the only two people in the house—and doing it felt good. “This will have to do. So, I’ll ask you again. What are you sorry about?”

Having stepped around to view him from a better angle, she could now see that he was sipping a drink. She wished she had one of them herself. “Talk to me, Davenport. Are you sorry about what happened to your friend? About having sex with me? Abducting me? Failing to grieve over the death of our child?”

He whipped his head around at that, fury on his face. “Stop right there, Catherine. You just stop right there.”

“Why? Did one of my questions bother you? Perhaps the one about our baby? You remember our baby, don’t
you, Jack? The little girl who died in my womb before she ever had a chance to live? The one I named Lauren? Or wait. Maybe you don’t remember her. After all, you weren’t there with me when I gave birth to her still body or when I buried her all by myself.”

He very carefully set down his glass, then rose to his feet and faced her. His expression was hard, his eyes blue ice. “Catherine, you are treading on a minefield. Believe me, you don’t want to have this conversation right now. I don’t have the ability to choose my words carefully.”

“I never asked you to choose your words,” she snapped back, bracing her hands on her hips. “I asked you to
use
your words. I want to know why you were able to share more about the death of your friend than you ever did about the death of our child!”

His eyes flashed with blue fire. “Because I
knew
him, dammit! I never knew the baby. I never got to hold her. You at least got to do that. You buried her before I ever had the chance. You handed me a slip of paper, Catherine. You did that to me. You took her away from me.”

Guilt swirled inside her, and she lashed out with the truth. “You weren’t there! You were never there!”

“You knew what the job was when you married me.”

He had her there. Cat had no comeback to that.

Before she could think of what to say next, he continued, “You blame me for not talking. Let me tell you, sweetheart, you weren’t exactly a fountain of words yourself in those days.”

Her chin came up. “I was depressed, clinically depressed and grieving.”

“I know. I tried to get you to go for help, but you wouldn’t do it.” Bitter temper fired his words. “It was all about you. Your pain. Your baby. How many times did you say it? My baby. My baby. My baby. It was
our
baby.”

“Not
it
!” Cat fired back. “
She!
And she
was
my baby. You weren’t there. You didn’t go through it.”

“Because you didn’t let me. I tried. You pushed me away and locked me out.”

“I wasn’t ready then.”

“And I’m not ready for any more of this now. It can’t always be on your terms, Cat. I lived that way when we were married, but I don’t have to now.”

“My terms? What do you mean, my terms?”

“For God’s sake, enough! This one time, can you cut me some slack? Please, get out of here before I say something I regret.”

This one time
? Cat folded her arms. She’d cut him slack plenty of times during the course of their marriage.

Jack exhaled a long, heavy sigh. “I’m going to bed. Shut the door on your way out, would you?”

He turned his back on her and walked to his bed where he dropped his shorts, yanked back the bedclothes, and climbed naked between the sheets before he reached over and shut off the lamp. It was the most effective insult he’d ever sent her way.

Cat set her teeth. Okay, then. Fine.
Jerk
.

She turned to leave and in the darkness had to feel for the doorknob. Once she found it and opened the door, she hesitated. She hadn’t addressed the issue that originally propelled her to his room. Turning toward the bed, she spoke with accusation in her tone. “You didn’t use any protection.”

At first he gave no sign of having heard her, but just as she was about to give up and leave, he let out a bitter laugh. “What’s the problem, Catherine. Are you afraid I might have gotten you pregnant?”

Cat’s hand slipped off the doorknob as she reeled from the blow. Did he really just say that? For all his faults, Jack had never been mean to her before. Never cruel.

Fighting to keep her voice steady, she said, “You’ve changed, Jack, and not for the better. I was asking about disease. Have you been tested recently?”

After a moment of silence, he wearily replied. “Trust me or not, but you don’t have to worry about that one. I’m clean, Catherine. Good night.”

She returned to her room, crawled into her bed, and cried herself to sleep.

Jack wasn’t surprised when Cat failed to join him for breakfast. He didn’t expect to see her much at all until she cooled down, and knowing his ex-wife, that wouldn’t be any time soon. The woman held a grudge like nobody’s business.

Not that he blamed her. He’d been an ass last night. He’d treated her like dirt and she hadn’t deserved it. And yet, he didn’t regret all the things he’d said. Some of them he’d wanted to say for years.

There had been no knockdown, drag-out, air-clearing fight before their divorce. Their marriage had ended quietly, more like the snuff of a candle flame at the end of a bad dinner date than an explosion of temper and pain.

Maybe if they had fought, they’d have found something to salvage. He hadn’t fought for her. He didn’t try. He’d allowed their marriage to just … die.
Like Lauren
. Maybe deep down he’d known that once the baby was gone, the marriage hadn’t stood a chance.

At midmorning, as Jack sat at his desk in his office trying to work up the energy to deal with his email, he decided that he should probably hunt up Cat and apologize. The crack about getting her pregnant had been especially wrong.

Good thing he kept his guns locked up.

Maybe I should hand one of them over to her. Let her put us both out of our misery
.

Jack felt like crap. What had happened to Tony was part of it. Being around Cat again and the daily reminder of all that he had lost contributed to his funk, too. His body was tired, his soul weary. Years of job-related stress and tensions were beating him down. The work had never been easy, but in the last year or so, the hoops they had to jump through to appease the politicians had made the work especially messy.

The whole thing was getting old. He was getting old. What did he have to show for his life’s work? Sure, the men he’d helped liberate from one prison or another counted as a huge accomplishment, but the cost to him personally couldn’t be ignored. In his private life he had a handful of big, empty houses all across the world and an ex-wife who despised him—for good reason.

“Might as well tackle that little problem next,” he muttered, pushing back from his desk. He had just started to stand when the knock on the door kept him seated. Cat walked into his office wearing the flirty sundress she’d worn the day he grabbed her. She looked beautiful, and as cold as the summit of Murphy Mountain in January.

“Hi,” he said. “I was just coming to look for you.”

“I came to tell you that I’m leaving Eagle’s Way.”

He grimaced. “Look, Cat. I know you’re upset with me and you have every reason to be, but it’s not safe for you to return to D.C. quite yet. Give my people a few more days, and I am certain—”

“I’m not going home,” she interrupted. “I’m staying in Eternity Springs. I’ve rented a room at Angel’s Rest.”

Oh. Surprised, Jack sat back in his chair. He thought it through quickly and decided that he couldn’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work. Based on what he’d learned during his quick phone call to Cam this morning, she’d
had no trouble during her visits there while he’d been away. She’d be comfortable at Angel’s Rest. She’d probably like being around Nic and Sarah and the rest of their friends. It was a good solution.

With those thoughts uppermost in his mind, he had no explanation for the words that came out of his mouth. “No. You need to stay here.”

“No, I don’t. You agreed that it was fine for me to go into town before you left on your trip. There’s no reason I can’t stay there.”

The crazy words just kept on rolling. “You’re not going. I forbid it.”

That last little bit shocked them both. “Excuse me?” Cat tilted her head and studied him like a bug. “Did you just use the word ‘forbid’? In relation to me?”

Yeah, he had. What the hell was he thinking?

“What the hell are you thinking?” she asked.

He didn’t have a clue. His brain and mouth obviously were experiencing a disconnect.

She folded her arms. “I didn’t let you tell me what to do when we were married. I’m certainly not going to let you do it now that we’re divorced. Allow me to point out that I could have put a stop to the whole abduction thing if I’d truly wanted to—at least after the initial event. I’m here right now because I chose to be here. Now I’m choosing to leave. We are not married anymore. You don’t have the right to stop me. You don’t have the right to sleep with me. We’re done, Davenport. Done for good this time.”

Her lips lifted in a smile that didn’t reach her eyes as she added, “Honestly, I’m fine with that. I think we both probably needed to say some of the things we’ve said. It’s even possible that my mother was right that I hadn’t moved on. Now I can. Thank you for caring enough to want to protect me. You’re off the hook now … and so am I. My ride will be here in a few minutes.” As she
turned to go, the words
Please don’t leave me, Cat
leaped to his tongue. He snapped his mouth against them just in time.

A few minutes later, he stood watching through a window as the Eagle’s Way entrance gate opened for the Angel’s Rest passenger van. Cat came downstairs carrying a suitcase and her computer backpack. He stood in his office doorway, his hands shoved into his pockets. He couldn’t stop himself from making one last try. “I think this is a mistake.”