David started the car. “Actually, I have one other thing to give you. At the house.”

Her lips twitched. “Is that your idea of a come-on line?”

“No.” He laughed at her. “I really do have another present waiting for you at the house. Tanner and I set it up last night while you were at Mom and Dad’s.”

“Oh.” That sounded big. She wondered what it could be, but her curiosity wasn’t enough to keep her awake.

The motion of the car, the white noise of the engine and the road beneath them lulled her to sleep, but it was only a short ride and she woke a few minutes later, more groggy than refreshed. Would David’s feelings be hurt if she asked to postpone unwrapping her second present until tomorrow?

Oh, don’t be a killjoy, she chided herself. Christmas came only once a year, and he was obviously excited. She could prop herself up long enough to appreciate whatever it was he’d done for her.

Inside the house, he flipped on the hallway light and turned to her with a huge smile. “This way.”

After a second, she realized he was leading her toward the guest room. Intrigued, she hid a yawn behind her hand and followed. What was he up to? He walked through the doorway first, but spun to face her so quickly she almost bumped into him.

“Ta-da!” David spread his arms proudly.

She was so stunned at what she was seeing that it took a moment for reality to register. They were standing in a baby nursery. If it wasn’t fully furnished, it was darn close. A white wooden crib, changing table and bookshelf were all assembled and set in place. Brightly colored curtains matched the rainbow comforter and mobile of primary-colored fuzzy shapes.

The world slipped out from under her. Rachel felt as though she were standing on the deck of a ship that was about to capsize; she even reached out for something to anchor herself, but the only thing within grasp was David himself. All those wonderful possibilities, gone in one fell swoop. She let her arms fall back to her sides. A familiar feeling was welling in her.

After everything the two of them had been through during the past few months, he still didn’t get it.

“Speechless, huh?” He beamed. He moved to the side so she could get a better view of everything. “And here Tanner was worried you might find out, that it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

“Tanner,” she repeated.

David trailed his hand over the crib railing, looking impossibly pleased with himself. “I couldn’t have done it without him. At least not under these time constraints.”

You shouldn’t have done it without me. But she bit her tongue, not wanting to lash out, not when they’d been so close…

“So?” He stood there expectantly, waiting for gushing praise. While she struggled to find words, choking on despair, he prompted her as clearly as a drama teacher cuing a nervous student onstage. “It looks great, doesn’t it? Works for either a boy or a girl, with all the cheery red, blue, yellow and green. You see we put up a switch plate and that wallpaper border halfway down the wall. If you want, we can paint the trim, too. That might be pretty. Really dresses up the room without painting it all some pastel color we’d have to cover later.”

The trim. Her mind was working furiously, one part of her brain pointing out that he’d put a lot of effort into this. He thought he’d done a nice thing. But the rest of her was enraged. She was carrying a baby she’d wanted for the past three years. She’d read parenting magazines cover to cover, thumbed through consumer rating reports and cut out pictures of baby paraphernalia-and David didn’t think she’d want any more input on the nursery than what color to paint the trim? An aborted scream caught in her throat.

“There’s a rocker on back order,” he continued, oblivious. “It doesn’t match exactly, it’s a blond wood, but the cushion will work with what we used in here-”

“By we, I assume you mean you and Tanner?”

He started, seeming perplexed that she wasn’t turning cartwheels of joy. “Well…yeah. You’re not mad because I told him about the baby a couple of days early, are you? Because I did this for you.”

For her, not with her. Crucial difference. “I know, David. Th-thank you.” Squeezing her eyes shut, she struggled to pull the sentences from her tired brain that would finally make him hear her. She rubbed her temples. “But I had thought that, once we were living together again, if we were living together again, we could…that we would-Were you just assuming that everything would revert to the way it used to be after Winnie got home from the cruise?”

“Well, that was definitely my hope,” he said carefully. “Come on, Rachel, I love you. You love me. I know you do!” Possibly not the best way for him to argue his case right now, telling her how she felt.

“We’re dating right now,” she reminded him. “Taking it slowly?” Or had he just been humoring her?

He sighed, shifting his weight. “If it’s that important to you, I can get an apartment. Give you your space for a little while. I could stay at Tanner’s place if it’s really necessary. I’d already decided that if you and I weren’t together, you and the baby should take the house, anyway.”

Her blood pressure soared. “If you and I didn’t stay together, don’t you think it should be my decision where I lived? You can’t make those choices for me, especially not without even consulting me.”

“But you already said you’d stay in Mistletoe until at least the birth, maybe longer. It just makes sense for you to stay here,” he argued, regarding her as if she were mentally unstable. “Hell, I got this place for you!”

“That’s right!” Inwardly, she flinched at her own raised voice, but she couldn’t seem to calm herself enough to get her volume back under control. “For me, with no input from me whatsoever.”

“Well, that would have spoiled the surprise. I knew you’d love this house. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

There was no sane way for her to explain that, at the moment, his being right-again-was more a liability than asset. Just as she was at a loss to explain how he could be right and dead wrong at the same time.

“We had been looking for houses on my weekends here,” she reminded him, thinking of Lilah and Tanner, building their home, trading opinions on everything from light fixtures to the welcome mat. A surge of envy pierced her. “Together.”

“But we hadn’t found any we loved. This met all your qualifications, and I knew it wouldn’t stay on the market long at that asking price!”

All valid points. However, it made it difficult to connect with her husband when, every time she tried to explain her feelings, he cut her off with logical arguments instead of understanding what she was trying to share.

“Rachel, if you didn’t like the house, why didn’t you say so four years ago?”

If she’d spoken up the moment he proudly handed her the keys-the way she was trying to speak up now-would it have set a different tone for their marriage? “Because I did like the house. You were right, of course. It’s perfect for us, so it seemed childish to whine, ‘But I wanted to help pick it out.’ Only now it’s four years later, and half the time I feel like a part-time consultant on my own life, with you making unilateral decisions. I wish sometimes that instead of my moving to Mistletoe, where you already had a life established, we’d moved to a neutral location where we could build a life together from the ground up. Because-”

“You love Mistletoe! You always have.” He scowled at her, equal parts angry and confused.

Some days more than others. But this wasn’t about the town. She was trying to explain her feelings about them. “Damn it, David! Could you please just listen? I feel…extraneous. I daydreamed about brainstorming nursery themes with you,” she blurted, tears rising. “Looking through catalogs, discussing baby names…Unless you’ve already picked out one of those, too?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous to me, David. I…” She glanced around again, hating how wrong she’d been, feeling stupid for all that hope she’d been nurturing for the past week. “I had this image of the two of us, paint smears on our clothes and faces, standing in the middle of a nursery we’d created together.”

“I didn’t think the physical exertion and fumes would be good for you and the baby,” he muttered, intractable. “I’m sorry you don’t like the nursery. I can-”

“No! This isn’t about me being some shrew who doesn’t appreciate her husband’s kind acts. I like surprises. Smaller ones, anyway. This is about your entrenched mantra of ‘I can.’ David, why isn’t it ever we can?”

She knew she’d ruined the moment he must have been picturing, savoring, while he sweated over furniture assembly and wallpaper paste. She saw the wounded look deep beneath his rapidly cooling gaze and hated herself a little for putting it there…and hated him a little for putting her in this position. This was too important for her to nod politely and pretend she was overjoyed. She’d let lots of incidents pass unremarked-if you could call buying an entire house an “incident”-because they were sweet and she didn’t want to hurt him. But she couldn’t go back to their marriage the way it was. She needed-she deserved-a partnership.

“You make it sound like I don’t think about you. I did this for you,” David protested.

“If you really thought about me, if you really knew me…For a couple of months, I was unsatisfied at my job, partly because I’d fallen into a rut, partly because of the subliminal guilt my parents heap on me that I’m not doing anything more ‘important.’ I’ve come to terms with never again having the kind of salary I gave up, never being an executive or having the type of career other people see as important, but I should feel important in my own house. I should feel important to you.”