Page 17 of Her Last Hope
“Just over two years.”
“Had you known him long?”
“A year before we married,” she said, letting out a long breath. Normally, she couldn’t bring herself to talk about Kent with anyone, especially strangers, but Nick did something to her brain, making her want to share her sob story with him.
Perhaps misery loves company.
“Kent, my husband, was originally from the Bronx, and we met in a bakery when he managed to dump his jelly doughnut all over my white shirt.” Her lungs burned at the memory. She’d been admiring his physique since he’d opened the door for her. She couldn’t decide what she wanted, which was often the case, so she let him go first. When the clerk handed him his order, she suspected he’d go to the left, but instead he turned right, and she walked into him and his doughnut. “It was love at first stain.”
Nick laughed. “First time I saw my wife, I thought my heart would stop beating. When she smiled at me, I was toast.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, how old were you when she died?”
He continued to caress her ankle and foot as if it were a normal thing to do while talking about their dead spouses.
“We were both twenty. Only been married for a few months.”
“That’s young.”
He nodded, dropping his head to the sofa. “Most people think we got married because she was pregnant, but we’d planned our elopement two weeks before we found out. I lost her and our baby.”
Leandra gasped, covering her mouth with both hands. She and Kent had decided to start trying to have children as soon as he returned home from his last deployment, only he never came home.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“Thank you.” He rolled his head and stared at her with a mixture of commiseration and intent, a contrast of emotions that only another survivor could comprehend. “A couple of months after she died, I enlisted. I couldn’t stand to be near anything that reminded me of her.”
“I can understand that.”
“For a couple of years, I couldn’t even look at another woman. Everyone told me I needed to move on. That Joanne would want me to.”
“I’m getting that left and right, and it makes me nuts.” But deep down, she knew there was a truth to the statements. “I’ll be ready when I’m ready.”
“If you think like that, you’ll end up like me, and sometimes it’s a very lonely headspace.”
“Being a widow is a lonely place to be in general,” she said, lifting her other foot to the couch and leaning back, resting her head on the side of the sofa.
Nick’s fingers dug into her heels, massaging her aching feet. “My older brother, who you’ll meet this afternoon, thinks I wear my pain as if it were burned onto my chest like a scarlet letter.”
“My mother thinks I hold on to my grief out of fear.” Talking about her late husband never seemed natural, much less comfortable, but Nick had a way of making her feel as though he understood why moving on was something that wasn’t in her wheelhouse.
“Your mother could be right.”
“Have you ever tried peeling the scarlet letter off?”
“No,” he said, still rubbing her feet with strong fingers. “But I’ve learned to accept things as they are. I’ll never love another woman, nor be in a lasting relationship, and I’m okay with that.”
She moaned as he worked from her heels across her arches. “I want to be okay with that.” Tossing her arm over her eyes, she tried to ignore the heat pulsing through her body. “I know I’ll never find love again because I don’t want it, but I’m tired of closing myself off to being a woman.”
The sofa shifted as he pushed her one foot to the side. She jerked her head up as he settled between her legs.
Her body betrayed her as she let her knees fall outward, giving him plenty of room to nestle himself in her womanhood.
She sucked in a breath as his hands framed her face. Her arms wrapped around his broad shoulders.
“You’re a beautiful woman.” His lips brushed the tip of her nose. “Only way to be okay with having sex with someone else is to do it with someone who doesn’t want or expect anything else from you.”
“Is that what you did?” she asked.
