Gone by Annabel Wolfe

house.”
    She nodded. “The big back yard, four bedrooms… I will have to move from my apartment anyway and you are never home.”
    He winced. It was true. “Can’t we negotiate?”
    “I’m not the leader of a terrorist cell, Peter.”
    “Everything in life involves compromise. And I am the father of your child and still your husband at this moment. I’d like to bring to the table I never wanted the divorce in the first place.”
     
    For an influential man who did so many things right, Peter did a few things wrong.
    It wasn’t intentional, but it still happened.
    On the plus side, he was sensitive—it made him a talented commander—but yet able to see past the small costs as opposed to the big ones, and at the end of the day, one of the casualties was their marriage.
    Kathy didn’t just love him—he was the love of her life, and she knew it. The day she’d found out she was pregnant she’d already made the decision to leave him, so the joy had been bittersweet. There was nothing she wanted more than to have his child, but she wasn’t sure she could live with his job.
    But he was blind too often to the nuances of mundane reality, like his life at home was an afterthought. She’d felt set aside one too many times and it rankled.
    Deeply.
    There was no doubt she was torn.
    Into one million pieces. She realized he was not intentionally absent, but there was a devotion to duty that surpassed his devotion to her.
    Some men are born great and some have greatness thrust upon them …
    In his case she thought it was both.
    He certainly wasn’t ordinary, in any way. The physical part of it was undeniable, and even now, as they sat there in this particularly transitional moment in their life, she felt the pull of his magnetism. There was nothing she wanted more than for him to take her in his arms and promise it would all be different.
    Which was exactly why she hadn’t contacted him before now.
    She cleared her throat and gently extracted her hand from his clasp. “Let’s make sure we understand each other. There is no table. Got it, Colonel?”
    As if she hadn’t thought about this for the past six months. The moment she realized she was pregnant, she’d had to make decision after decision, but not just for herself. Now she was deciding for two.
    Or three, if Pete counted, and he did.
    His fair hair was a little longer than usual, which spoke of his duty assignment, which meant out of the country at least half the time—she was a military wife and knew the signs. In contrast, his eyes were almost a topaz color, clear and amber, and she could see both the joy and confusion there. His features were chiseled—he was a very handsome man—and at the moment his expression was unreadable.
    “Never in our lives,” she confessed, looking away, “did I think we’d be in a place where we did not know what to say to each other.”
    “I love you.”
    Now that , she didn’t need. Not to mention the feathering of his touch over the curve of her stomach, at the moment swollen with their child as he grew inside her.
    “Pete,” she whispered.
    “I love you enough I can forgive you for shutting me out of something that should have been mine as well as yours.”
    “You’re angry.”
    “I might be. I haven’t processed it yet…” His hand slipped to her thigh and then he removed it, his face somber. “I’ve missed a lot, but I am going to concede I wouldn’t have been here anyway.”
    “No, you wouldn’t.”
    “ You’re angry.”
    Damn right, she was mad. Furious. He just never seemed to see it, and that had made everything worse. She’d tried playing nice. It didn’t work. Unless you held a nuclear bomb pointed at the United States of America, it was impossible to hold his attention. “You have to admit for the past thirteen months you’ve just been gone. Even when you were here, you were somewhere else.”
    He audibly took in a breath. “Kath, the lives of a number of people were in my hands and I