One True Love by Barbara Freethy Page A

expecting a baby. They thought their life together would be happily ever after.
    “What do you think?” Nick asked, as he shut off the engine. The tightness in his voice told her any answer would probably be the wrong answer. He was itching for a fight. She could see it in the tension of his shoulders, hear it in the coldness of his voice.
    She looked away from his penetrating eyes and focused on the house. “It could use a new coat of paint.”
    “The salt from the ocean tears the paint right off. I put a new coat on a few years ago, but it didn’t last.”
    Great, they were talking about paint. They’d once made love in every room of the house, and now they were talking about chipped paint. She waited for him to say something more, but now that they had arrived, he seemed strangely reluctant to even get out of the car.
    “Why are you doing this, Nick?”
    For a moment she didn’t think he would answer her, then his words came stiff and unyielding. “You never looked back, Lisa, not once. I watched you from the window. You just got in your car and left.”
    “How would you know? You were drunk the day I left.”
    “I was drunk, deliberately drunk, because the tequila was the only thing that took the edge off, that kept your knife from plunging all the way through to my heart.” His voice faltered for a moment, then gained strength. “I’m not proud of the way I behaved, yelling at the doctors and at you. I just hurt so damn much. And you wouldn’t talk to me. You^ wouldn’t look at me.”
    And she couldn’t look at him now. She couldn’t bear to see the pain in his eyes, the accusation.
    “You’re doing it again.” He pulled her chin around with his hand, his gaze revealing more anger than hurt. “Tuning me out. I hate when you do that. I remember that night, about a week after the funeral. You practically jumped out of yours king when I accidentally touched your breast, as if the feel of me was so repulsive you couldn’t stand it.”
    Lisa clapped her hands over her ears. “Stop it!”
    “Why? It’s the truth. I came to you naked, wanting, needing, and you walked away.”
    Lisa heard the bitterness, the anguish, the accusation in his words, in his voice. She couldn’t deny what he was saying, but whereas he had drunk to escape, she had closed off every emotion so she wouldn’t feel anything. “I couldn’t make love to you,” she whispered. “I know you wanted a release from all the tension, but I couldn’t give it to you.”
    “A release?” he asked in amazement. “That’s what you thought I wanted? My God, we’d just lost our daughter. You were so distant, so cold. I didn’t want a release. I wanted you. I wanted to feel your heartbeat beneath mine. I wanted to be with you, so I wouldn’t feel so damn alone.”
    Lisa sucked in a breath of air, suddenly feeling as if she were suffocating. Nick had always been passionate and personal, unafraid to talk about the most intimate details of their life. At one time, she’d thought it good that he was so willing to tell her how he was feeling, but after—after it happened—she had hated his desire for conversation. She hadn’t wanted to talk about any of it. She had felt like a failure, and talking about it only made her feel worse. Nick had kept pushing, and she’d kept withdrawing, until they were both angry. Finally, they’d given up.
    Nick threw open the door, letting a blast of fresh air into the car.
    “We’re here. We might as well go in.”
    “So you can prove to me—what?”
    “I don’t know. I just think you should see the house.”
    “When she—when it happened,” Lisa amended, “everyone wanted me to forget, even you. My mother told me to think only of the good times and to go on with my life. She said I’d have other babies.” Lisa’s mouth trembled, and she fought back a wave of emotion. “She said someday I would understand why it had happened.” She shook her head in bewilderment. “I’ve never