“I wasn’t thinking about kids when we met. Neither were you.”
“You should have told me how you felt about having a family.”
“It never came up.”
“You avoided the topic because you didn’t want me to know why you feel the way you do.”
He laughed, but the sound was stark and bitter. “Oh, for pity’s sake, don’t start psychoanalyzing me!”
“It took you almost two years before you told me about your father. About what he did to you.”
Buzz flushed, his hands clenching into fists at his sides, and Kelly knew she’d hit a nerve. She knew that nerve was alive and exposed and painful as hell when exposed. And she knew he would fight her tooth and nail to keep it buried.
“Damn it, Kel, that’s ancient history.”
“It’s exactly that kind of history that molded us into the people we became. You didn’t want me to know your own father abused you. That you were taken away from him by Child Protective Services when you were a teenager. To this day you’ve never told anyone what he did to you.”
“That’s enough,” he said in a dangerously calm voice.
“Not all people are as cruel as your father.”
“There are a hundred other reasons why I never wanted kids. My father was just one of them.”
“When we were married, I was stupid and naive enough to think I could change you. That I could change your mind. I thought our love was so strong we could overcome any problem, any disagreement. We had something beautiful, and I wanted so badly to make it complete. I wanted a family. Then you took the job in the Child Abuse Division and everything changed.”
His expression closed up, the way it always did when she brought up the dark years he’d spent working the CA Division of the Denver PD. “I saw first-hand the things people do to their children,” he said. “The things they do to other people’s children. The things I saw, the things I learned when I worked CAD made me realize I did not want to bring anything as innocent as a child into this world. I won’t apologize for that.”
“You never considered my feelings, Buzz.”
“In your eyes, considering your feelings would have meant doing something I didn’t want to do.”
“God forbid you might have to compromise,” she snapped. “That word isn’t part of your vocabulary, is it?”
“How in the hell do you compromise when one of us wanted children and the other did not?”
“You didn’t want children because you were afraid,” she said. “In my mind, that’s not good enough. I never accepted that. Not from you.”
“Is that why you asked for a divorce?”
She hated the way he was looking at her. With hurt and fury and a newfound coldness she’d never seen in his eyes before. “You know why I filed for divorce. You know it was a hell of a lot more complicated than that.”
“Maybe you filed for divorce because you knew you could get what you needed from me even if we weren’t married. I mean, come on, we both know sex was the one thing we never argued about. The one thing we could never resist no matter how angry we were at each other.”
The anger struck her with such force that for a moment she wanted to strike him. She’d never hit anyone in her life, but the urge to do so now was so strong she could barely hold herself back. “How dare you accuse me of something so despicable.”
“What do you expect me to think? How do you think this looks to me? If Eddie hadn’t gotten lost in those woods, I never would have known about him, would I?”
“You never wanted a child. Damn it, Buzz, you never even wanted a wife. Sure, you went through the motions. But the whole time we were married, you did what you wanted to do—even if that meant risking your life—and all the people who loved you could just be damned.”
“I may not deserve a husband of the year award,” he said. “But I damn well didn’t deserve to be treated the way I was.”
“We were already divorced when I got pregnant.”
“That divorce was a farce,” he snarled.
“Our marriage was a farce!” she shot back.
“You took care of that, though, didn’t you?”
“I did what I had to do to keep from becoming a widow! At the rate you were going that would have happened sooner or later. I ended our marriage because I refused to live in fear of getting that phone call in the middle of the night, telling me my husband wouldn’t be coming home ever again.”
“You knew who and what I was when you married me.”
“And it took me three years to realize marrying you was the biggest mistake of my life!”
Cursing, Buzz rose abruptly and paced to the edge of the clearing and stood there with his back to her.