Free Only Forever by Linda Lael Miller Page A

changed her forever still fresh in her mind. Her gaze skittered nervously to the big bed and back again.
    Nick saw her trepidation and smiled. “Come in and sit down, Van. You ought to know by now that I’m not going to hurl you down and have my way with you.”
    There were comfortably upholstered chairs in front of the fireplace, and Vanessa went to sit in one of them, watching the motions of Nick’s back as he finished building the fire, and thinking.
    Ever since she’d met Nick, she’d been pondering the powerful effect he had on her senses and emotions, and she understood at least one thing, Nick DeAngelo was the kind of man most women dreamed of meeting—strong, handsome, successful and far too good to be true.
    There had to be a glaring fault that would come leaping out at her when she let down her guard and trusted him—and that was the moment Vanessa feared most. She drew her bare feet up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her legs.
    “Tell me about Jenna,” she said, tilting her head to one side.
    Nick sighed and reluctantly turned from the fire. “Okay. What do you want to know?”
    “Why she left you, for one thing.”
    “She had a big problem with trust,” Nick recalled, looking not at Vanessa but beyond her, it seemed, into the distant past. “I couldn’t go anywhere without having her call or drive by to see if I was really where I said I’d be. We startedto fight, the marriage fell apart and we went our separate ways.”
    Vanessa swallowed, remembering her own experience with Parker. “Did you give Jenna reason not to trust you?”
    Nick looked insulted that she would even ask the question. “No,” he replied with biting directness.
    A few moments passed before Vanessa had the courage to speak again. “There was more to it than that, I think,” she mused aloud.
    “We disagreed about a lot of fundamental things,” Nick admitted. “Kids, for instance.”
    Vanessa sat up straighter. This was a subject that mattered to her. She wanted children of her own more than anything else in the world, including the job on Seattle This Morning or a place on a television news team. “She wanted them and you didn’t,” she blurted out, braced for the worst, expecting Nick to feel as Parker had.
    She got another angry, heated look for her trouble. “Wrong,” he replied, turning away to throw an unnecessary chunk of wood onto an already thriving fire. “Jenna wanted to be the only child in my life. She was afraid a baby would steal the show.”
    Vanessa bit her lower lip and looked down at her lap, wishing she’d allowed Nick to tell her what he felt without holding him up against Parker first and then taking her clues from the comparison.
    The silence stretched, and Nick finally got to his feet and pushed the screen up close to the fireplace. “What about you?” he asked, keeping his back to her. “Do you want children, Vanessa?”
    She swallowed. Here was her chance to distance herself from Nick DeAngelo once and for all, to eliminate him and all the danger he represented from her life. Here was her opportunity to go back to being safe and ordinary.
    She couldn’t lie to him.
    “A houseful,” she answered, dropping her eyes when she saw him start to turn toward her.
    “What about your career?” he asked. “What about selling foot massagers and wicker bird-cages and porch lights?”
    He was crouching in front of Vanessa’s chair, grasping both its arms in his hands, and there was no way she could escape. “I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life selling birdcages and porch lights,” she said. “I—I have an interview for another job on Friday, as a matter of fact.”
    “You’re hedging,” Nick accused, and the timbre of his voice and the scent of his freshly showered skin combined to make Vanessa slightly dizzy.
    “I want to work, Nick,” she said quietly, purposefully. “And I want babies, too. When—and if—I remarry, my husband will have to do more than help