Chapter Two
Montana sang out the last word crystal clear and then because she had none of her mother’s shyness, tongue-tied tendencies or fear of strangers, she dive-bombed into “Daddy’s arms.”
Sky should have been prepared for that move. Montana never wanted to be held for long, and maybe if she hadn’t been shaky with shock and wearing heels when she normally only wore athletic shoes to teach, flip-flops when running errands or steel-toed work boots in her studio, she wouldn’t have toppled with her daughter. Kane, being Kane, didn’t miss a beat. He caught his child in one arm, pulled her to eye level. Tucked her in close.
Sky’s arms were empty. They hung at her sides, useless.
He wrapped his other arm around her daughter. Father and daughter’s eyes met. Held. Kane’s eyes blazed, and Sky felt the threads connecting them, pulling her child away from her.
“Give her back, Kane.” She tried to control her voice, but the words bounced around like bingo balls rolling out of the spinning basket. “Right now.”
He didn’t even spare her a glance. He and his child just stared and stared and stared. Pale, silvery blue-gray mirroring pale, silvery blue-gray. Sky swallowed sickly and stepped forward. She grabbed Kane’s arm. It was a steel cable, with hard, outlined muscles. Kane didn’t budge or seem to notice.
Jonas said something, but she couldn’t hear over the roaring in her head.
“Kane. Give her back right now.” She tried to prize his fingers open, but she might as well have tried to bend the upraised hand of the sculpture.
“Mine,” he said. His eyes blazed with absolute possession.
“Give her back.” Fear was a smothering cloak. “You have to give her back right now. Kane.”
Montana had slapped her wet hand on Kane’s cheek. She smiled.
“Daddy on a horse.” She pointed to the sculpture.
Kane looked awed. “You want to watch Daddy ride for real, baby girl?”
Her little dark curls bounced as she nodded enthusiastically.
He grinned back like this was the most normal situation in the world, and Sky thought she was really going to lose it because there was nothing normal about this, and Kane had a will more honed than anything she could hammer out on an anvil. He was wild, unpredictable, and didn’t know the meaning of back off or back down. He didn’t lean in to anything. He flung himself in, and she so didn’t like the way he was holding her little girl.
Their little girl.
Oh. God.
“Please, Kane. Please you’re scaring me. Give her back now.”
“No.” The word was quiet, nearly a whisper, but it sounded like a gong in her ears. And his eyes finally cut into hers. They blazed heated mercury and Sky took an unsteady step back.
“Kane.” She could barely force out the whisper.
“Hey, asshole. Give the kid back and get out of my gallery before I call the cops.”
“Call them,” Kane said casually, still smiling at his child. “We’re leaving.”
“Wait, what?” Sky yelped.
“My daddy.” Montana pointed to her heart and smiled so eerily like Kane that Sky’s heart skipped a beat, and still seemed to flounder in her chest like a trapped bird in a too small cage.
“My daughter.” Kane’s eyes blazed into Sky’s. “My woman. My sculpture.”
And then he picked up The Ride. One-handed. Like it was a box of cereal on a shelf he was going to put in his basket. Sky blinked. Two men had carried the crated sculpture into this gallery last night in a wood box. And Kane now held it tucked under one arm.
“All of it mine.”
Kane strode toward the exit of the gallery with the same fluid pace he’d entered only this time he had her daughter and her signature art piece in his hands.
“Kane, wait.” Sky ran after him, awkward with the long clingy dress tangling around her legs and the heels making her sprint precarious.
The doctor blocked his path.
“Kane,” he said quietly.
Kane didn’t even slow or make eye contact, just neatly dodged around him not even breaking his flow.
“Wait! What are you doing! Where are you going! You can’t just…” Sky broke off not wanting to alarm Montana although the only person the least bit fazed was herself.
Kane clicked the alarm on a huge black truck parked illegally. Sky stumbled to a stop. He was really planning to take her daughter. Put her in that monster truck and drive off. Without her.
“You can’t take her, Kane. Really you can’t.” She lurched forward and grabbed his arm as he slid her little girl into the back seat. “Stop playing games,” she hissed dimly aware that Jonas was standing at the gallery door, phone in hand. “This isn’t funny.”
“No.” Kane finally turned to look at her, and Sky wished he hadn’t because the ice in his eyes, and the barely leashed tension in his body, scared the hell out of her. And then her mind and body did what they always did when primal fear kicked in. She froze. She felt herself do it, and she screamed inside. She had to focus. She had to get Montana back.
“You’re right about that, Sky. Keeping my child a secret is not funny.”
“You can’t take her.”
“You did.”
She opened her mouth but nothing came out. No words. And she couldn’t breathe.
He really intended to take her child.
“Un-for-giv-a-ble.” His voice usually so deep and warm and sexy was the slash of a whip. Each syllable was enunciated and cut through her tender flesh. She felt like he’d flayed her soul open. “And I’m not driving off without her, and hell no I won’t play nice and make this easy for you. Mine.”
She felt so stupid trying to gather her wits in the blazing morning light on the sidewalk of Scottsdale’s arts district with a gallery full of potential clients staring at her while she shook and tried to think of words to make Kane drive out of her life and their child’s life again.
“Kane.” She forced his name out through cold, stiff lips that no longer seemed to belong to her. His name had always been her talisman when she’d been scared or lonely or hurt. He’d been so strong. So confident. Her opposite. Now she could barely say it, could barely look at him without feeling slashed and burned.
“Get in the truck, Sky.”
Relief made her sag. She nearly sat down on the sidewalk. He wasn’t taking Montana away from her.
She sucked in a shaky breath, tried to lock her knees. “Kane.” Her words trembled and tumbled out of her mouth in a frightened whisper. “You need to let her go. You can’t just take her with no warning.”
“Like you did?”
“I can explain.” Sky stared hard at his black boots, handtooled Tony Lama cowboy boots, and winced at her words because really she couldn’t, not in words that he would accept, and she couldn’t make herself that vulnerable to Kane ever. Tell him about her life. Her fears.
“You stole my child. You stole my life. You stole her father.”
Sky wrapped her arms tightly around her slim, shivering body, each accusation another flick of the whip. She looked at her bare arms almost expecting to see blood. Kane Wilder had never once mentioned wanting children, and he didn’t remotely live a lifestyle conducive to having a wife or a kid. She’d done him a favor. At least she’d tried to while also protecting herself.
“I’m not wasting one more second not being a father to our child. Our daughter. Not yours. Now get in the truck.”
Kane pushed past her and strode to the other side of the truck. He placed the sculpture on the seat and buckled it in. Like it was a person. Kane neatly hung his tux jacket on a hook behind the passenger cab. He opened the passenger door and then loped around the truck to the driver’s side. He opened the door and climbed in.
“Get in.” He jerked his head toward the passenger door. His voice roughened. “No way would you rather stay with that gallery idiot. You can do way better.”
“What?” She stared at him blankly. Kane’s mind was crazy quick and often left others straggling behind, but she couldn’t comprehend this shift.
“He was more pissed that I grabbed the art than you.”
He’d grabbed his child and the art. Not her.
And then Kane looked at his watch like he had somewhere to be. Like he had some appointment and she and Montana had just been a little detour. Kane Wilder was a jerk. And a lot of other four-letter words. She’d done the right thing running away from him. In four years he’d only gotten cockier, and more beautiful and honed and… She had to stop noticing him physically.
She was responding to him when Kane was pissed and vengeful and determined. Imagine if he ever decided to turn on the charm. She’d be as helpless as a frog in a high school biology lab.
Again.
“What’s it going to be?” He rolled up the sleeves on his silky black shirt and looked like he didn’t care if she agreed or not. “Climb in or I’ll toss your ass in the truck,” he said in a low, conversational voice.
Sky stared at his muscled, tanned forearms. She remembered working out in the gym with him. How fit he was. Strong. Driven. God he still cast that physical spell on her. Four years she hadn’t noticed another man. Two minutes with Kane and she couldn’t think beyond his physical attributes even in a stage-four, all-sirens-screaming panic attack.
“She can’t be buckled in like that. You need her booster seat.”
“Get it.”
“I…” Sky avoided his eyes. “It’s heavy, and these heels.”
“Lose the shoes. Get it.”
“Please, Kane.”
“Not going to be fucking stupid again.” He spit each word at her.
Again?
“You were never stupid,” she whispered.
“I trusted you,” he said. “The only woman I’ve ever trusted and that includes my mother. You told me you loved me over and over and I fucking believed every one of your lies.”
Lies?
She couldn’t even move beyond that way-off-the-mark accusation. Kane had been her whole world. She’d been so terrified of him becoming bored with her, of cheating on her, that she’d left him first.
“Get the booster seat and whatever was in that backpack the sitter dropped off.”
“You won’t leave?”
“Like you did?” he taunted.
Any other woman would have been playing this better, Sky thought with a familiar burst of self-recrimination.
“Our daughter needs both her father and her mother, and lover boy’s about to make a call to the cops so we gotta roll.”
Sucking in a deep breath Sky willed her thrashing heart to settle so she could maybe think and react. She glanced past Kane’s shoulders to where she could see Montana sitting cross-legged in the truck and clapping and singing to some song in her head. Sky bit her lip, crossed her fingers and said a little prayer.
“She likes to sing,” she whispered wanting to give him something to hold on to. Something to make him stay long enough for her to grab the car seat and whatever Brandy had thought to pack in the owl-shaped backpack. Sky didn’t even know where Kane intended to take them.
“I’ll get the booster seat,” she whispered, trying to move her body toward the door and away from her entire world that was now in a stranger’s truck. Because Kane was a stranger, she fiercely reminded herself. They’d been apart almost four years. They were different people. And he’d been with a lot of women since her.
Why did she have to think of that?
She didn’t care. That was only one in a long list of reasons she’d left him.
“What the hell is happening?” Jonas demanded as she re-entered the gallery. “He’s bringing that sculpture back, right? What was the trademark issue he babbled about? What an asshole. Who dresses like that? And that kiss. Where the hell did that come from? That cowboy pawed you like he owned you.”
If her reaction to his kiss were anything to go by, he clearly still did.
Despair swamped her. She was scared yet worried that some stupid part of her still wanted him.
Something was seriously wrong with her head.
Sky kept walking, having to concentrate on putting her feet one in front of the other, not just because of the heels but also because her limbs felt like they belonged to other people and couldn’t quite coordinate with each other. And she was tired. So tired. The after effect of too many shots of adrenaline hitting her system at once.
And yet she had to stay alert. Get the booster seat. The backpack. She should sprint, not walk like she weighed four hundred pounds and was on a tightrope.
“Wait, what are you doing? You’re not really going with him are you?” Jonas demanded, outraged as he saw her pick up the discarded large, plush Britax booster seat complete with two cup holders and an adjustable five-point harness restraint. Sky had skimped on many things in her adult life, but safety for her child was not one of them.
“He’s got my daughter. Of course I’m going with him.”
“This is the preview brunch of the biggest art show of the season. A privilege I extended to you, an unknown, I’d like to remind you.” Jonas could barely speak around his clenched teeth. “And what about tonight? It’s one of the biggest art openings of the year. The party will spill out into the street. Art patrons from all over the country will be here. I need that sculpture.”
The sculpture not her.
“It’s the centerpiece of the art auction. Dr. Sheridan and the guild worked with me to choose that one to highlight over many art pieces from better-known artists.
Sky tried to push past him, conscious of time slipping. Jonas had reminded her many times of how lucky she was. Theme of her life. She was lucky. Even when she didn’t feel lucky at all. Jonas reached out and stroked one finger along her bare arm.
She looked out toward the street where Kane waited, framed by the truck’s open window. His eyes were watchful, and tightly focused on her. She pulled away from Jonas and scooped up the booster seat and the little owl backpack that Montana had seen at a street fair and had fallen in love with. The booster seat seemed like a lead weight, even though she was strong from wielding heavy materials for her sculpting and from teaching Pilates, yoga, pump and spin classes to supplement her income for the past five years.
She kept her eyes on Kane as she walked back across the terrazzo floor that had seemed so beautiful to her when she’d first seen it last week, but now seemed fraught with peril. She expected to stumble in the shoes and long skirt at any moment, and her legs were trembling so violently she thought they’d snap in two.
She tried to ignore the stares and whispers.
“Sky, you dropped this.” An older woman held out the jeweled stick that she’d used to pin up her hair. She’d forgotten Kane had tossed it.
“Sky, excuse me. Do you remember me? Dr. Sheridan. You kindly let me into your studio.”
Sky looked up into his dark blue eyes. His smile seemed tense, and his tall frame even more so.
“I…” She paused. “I’ll get the sculpture back.” He must be worried by the bizarre scene. God, she hated being the center of attention. “Or I will donate another. I have six others from that series.”
Not like that one.
She didn’t even know when she’d get back to her studio to pick another. Didn’t know where Kane was taking them, but she had to make him see sense. She had a life. She was finally getting traction on her career. He couldn’t toss her and their child in his truck and head out across the desert. The truck’s deep engine rumbled to life. Her heart leapt painfully.
“Jonas, I have to go,” she said softly when she should be firm.
“Sky, you are going to ruin your career before it gets started.” Jonas was back in her ear like the bad angel.
“I’ll return and will have another sculpture for you. Please just give me a little time,” she pleaded.
“Let me call the cops.”
Police. That was all she needed. Kane in jail.
“No,” she snapped. “Montana is his daughter. He’s not doing anything illegal.”
“You can’t walk out on a showing. I’m calling the cops.” Jonas was furious, and his grip on her shoulder and arm hurt. “He’s stealing my art.”
She tugged herself to get free just as she heard the truck door slam. Oh no. Kane could not come back in here. Then Jonas would really have a reason to call the police. The felony charges started racking up in her head and she jerked out of Jonas’s grasp and rushed toward the door. Her heel caught on the doorjamb. She face-planted, barely managing to break her fall with her hands. The booster seat hit her in the ribs and the backpack was flung across the sidewalk.
Strong hands lifted her up. Thinking it was Jonas she struggled briefly.
“Baby, you okay?” Kane’s strong hands swept down her body. “Are you hurt?” His hands parted the long, sexy slit in the skirt, probably searching for blood, but screw that. She slapped at his hands, her embarrassment monumental. Worse, his knuckles brushed along her thigh and shivers of awareness heated her skin.
She’d not only just had her budding art career destroyed by the most unwelcome blast from the past ever, but due to the local press for the gallery showing and the upcoming auction coupled with Kane’s celebrity—not likely he’d be unrecognized for long especially with the AEBR Tour hitting Phoenix next weekend—it was highly likely her unglamorous and clumsy face-plant would grace far more than a few snarky FB, Instagram and Twitter posts.
She didn’t need to top off the disaster by flashing her sexy blue thong at the rich and connected of the valley. Coupled with being in the arms of one of the top bull riders in the world who was celebrated equally for his skills on bulls and in bed while their secret baby sat in the back of his idling truck, she’d never be able to show her face in public again.
A starring role in her own soap opera. And her parents would know!
Sky felt sick.
“Talk to me.” Kane tried to tip her face up so he could see her, but Sky thought if she had to look him in the eye one more time she’d hit him. Better than crumbling. “Are you hurt?”
“Let’s just go.”
“Dammit, Sky, you’re bleeding.” His hand swept apart the slit, but at least his body was blocking her from the wall of gallery windows.
He paused and sucked in his breath.
“Were you wearing those panties for him?”
“Really, really off topic,” she whispered again, the pain and the shock starting to catch up with her and pull her under.
“You never wore anything like that for me.”
“It’s not a contest.”
Although for Kane, probably everything was a contest.
And he won.
“Please can we just go?”
Only they couldn’t. Kane had to install the booster seat. She tried to show him how, but Kane being Kane and perfect at everything, slid the belt through the back of the Britax like he did it every day. Montana hopped up and wriggled into the five-point harness. Kane buckled her in and checked the fit before Sky noticed she was bleeding down her right leg. Great. She’d probably stain the dress. She winced thinking of the deposit. The night just got worse.
She’d been excited about her art being included in the auction, but nervous about the showing. And now her emotions seesawed everywhere but where she wanted them to be. Calm. Over Kane Wilder.
Nope. Not even close.
She tried to move around Kane to check on Montana, but her ankle wobbled and pain shot up her leg.
Kane didn’t say anything as she sucked in a breath and grabbed the doorframe for stability, but he definitely acted. He reached down and pulled off one shoe and then the other and tossed them against the gallery wall. “Now you can walk.”
She stared at the shoes tumbled together in a graceless tableau of electric blue silk and crystal beads. Didn’t that just symbolize her night, heck, her life?
“Those aren’t even my shoes,” she said pointlessly. “I rented them. And the dress.”
“I’d pull that off too and leave it for your most recent lover to deal with, but since you’re not wearing a bra I’ll refrain,” he grit out.
He was pissed about Jonas? Her latest lover? As if! Kane was the serial sex machine not her. He could have a parade in downtown Phoenix with all his ex-hookups.
Kane picked her up and put her in his truck, even shocked and angry, his hands were gentle. He slid the seat belt across her body, his arm—in the silky western-style shirt—brushed her body and his heat and the hard muscles jangled her nerves with memories she really wanted to forget.
He hesitated, but didn’t meet her shattered gaze. Shaking, her hand reached to touch his silky hair even though she silently screamed no.
Kane’s eyes glittered, and he sucked in a quick breath. Time seemed to stop. The past four years apart fell away. Her awareness of the world narrowed to Kane. His arm across her body caged her in, and the tension pulsed between them like a drum that beat in her chest in time with the one that beat between her thighs.
Sky wanted to hold him as much as she wanted to cry.
She’d spent four years trying to rip Kane Wilder out of her heart, and with one look, all those efforts were doomed. She was lost.
“Kane,” she whispered her voice unbearably husky. She barely bit back an apology. She’d spent her childhood apologizing. When she’d left home at seventeen, she’d vowed to be different. To find a place to belong. To shine. It couldn’t be in Kane’s world. She wouldn’t survive that. “You have to let us go.”
“Hell no.”
He slammed the truck’s door and before Sky could even process she didn’t have her cell phone back from Jonas, her purse, her keys or her change of clothes, Kane was back in the driver’s seat. He shifted into drive and they sped off.