Page 51 of The Marriage Mistake

“Come in,” I said.

Jack opened the door and leaned against the frame. “She’s in bed,” he said. “I asked her if she needed anything, and she said she’d ask you if she did.”

I laughed. “Don’t take it personally. It’s a big thing to go through for a teenage girl.”

He shoved a hand through his hair again, a sure sign that he was frazzled, and his gaze strayed to the floor while he shook his head. “I wasn’t ready for this. If you hadn’t been here, I would’ve made a mess of it.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

Sensing he wanted to talk, I sat up in bed and put my book aside. Jack slipped inside and leaned against the wall. He tipped his head back and closed his eyes, and all I could do was stare at the line of his throat, his jaw, his chest. He was a beautiful man. A man I would never have for my own.

He let out a sigh, and when he spoke, his voice was rough. “It seems like last week that I was holding her in my arms for the first time. I remember her looking at me with these huge eyes, right after she came out. Staring at me. I swore she could recognize me. It was the craziest moment of my life. And now…”

He trailed off, so I said, “Now she’s a sensitive, clever, funny girl.”

Jack’s smile was pure love. “Yeah,” he said, and opened his eyes to look at me. “She’s the best.”

Tightness gripped my chest as my almost-husband held my gaze. “You should be really proud, Jack. And apart from the whole banging-the-door-off-the-hinges moment, I think you handled tonight pretty well.”

A humorless laugh slipped past his lips. “That’s generous of you.”

I grinned, saying nothing.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be able to manage these moments on my own. She’s getting older, and she hasn’t got anyone who…” He swallowed, cutting himself off. “It just wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” he finally said, his gaze sliding away from me to stare at the wall.

He was thinking about his late wife. My heart gave another twist, and I felt foolish for being attracted to him. He was so painfully unavailable, and never mind the fact that I didn’t want to be with him. “I saw a photo of your wife on top of the piano,” I said. “She was beautiful.”

His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “We met in third grade.” His smile was a sad curve, one side of his mouth tilting higher than the other. “I loved her the way only young people can love each other. My mom left when I was a kid, and my dad died when I was sixteen. So Tanya was my whole world. I thought we’d grow old together. Thought the hard parts of my life were over.”

“She died?”

A sharp nod. “Car accident.”

“I’m so sorry.”

The amount of grief Jack had endured was monumental. My heart ached for him.

His gaze touched mine for a second. Slid away. He shook his head. “It was hard,” he admitted. “She’d just—” He huffed, a bitter laugh, a shake of the head. “She’d gotten breast cancer. Found a lump one day, and had to fight to get it checked out because she was so young. The doctors told her it was nothing until I went in and insisted they run the tests. Twenty-one years old. Did the whole thing. Surgery, chemo, radiation, all of it. We thought we were in the clear, and we decided…”

I did some quick mental math. Jack was thirty-six and Darby was thirteen, so he’d had Darby at twenty-three. Forty weeks of pregnancy, plus the time for his late wife to go through all her cancer treatment. That meant… “When you got the all-clear, you decided to have a baby,” I finished. “You had Darby.”

“I was so fucking terrified that the cancer would come back,” he said, his voice a bare scrape. “Scared Tanya would be taken from me, and I wouldn’t have any piece of her left. We had Darby, and I thought… God, I thought life was just beginning. Thought we were getting our happily-ever-after after all the shit we’d been through with her cancer. And barely two years later⁠—”

There’d been a car accident, and the love of his life had died. He’d been left with a toddler to raise on his own.

My chest felt squeezed by a vise. No wonder Jack kept people at arm’s length. No wonder he slept around but refused to date. How could he possibly trust himself to love anyone ever again after being through that?

It was selfish to think of myself in that moment, but I did. I thought of the attraction I felt for him, the glimpse I’d had—and loved—of the man behind the charm. And I mourned the love story I knew we would never have.

Jack Mars would never love again.

Indulging my own attraction to him would end badly. I would end up hurt.

And here he stood in front of me, grief written in the downturned corners of his mouth and the faraway look in his eyes. Alone.

I knew how that felt.

I found myself slithering out from under my blanket and padding toward him. When I wrapped my arms around his waist, he went stiff for a moment, then slowly put his arms around me.