Chapter Three
Sky clenched both hands together and winced at the pain. She’d fallen hard. Stupid heels. Stupid dress. Stupid her. How could this be happening? Kane back. Kane turning onto Scottsdale Road. Kane in a truck with her. More beautiful and potent and take charge than even she remembered. And she’d thought about him constantly, especially when she’d been trying not to.
She was living the moment she’d hoped to avoid for so many reasons. And though she had wrestled hard with her decision to not tell Kane, especially the first few months after discovering she was pregnant, she’d never planned for what she would do if he did find out. It wasn’t as if he’d ever loved her. His silence had screamed ‘not that into you.’ So she’d given him what she thought he wanted.
Freedom.
And why not? Kane could have most any woman he wanted and judging from so many pictures she’d seen of him over the last few years, he had. That alone had reinforced she’d done the right thing—protecting her daughter’s heart from a father who would resent her existence, but Kane’s simmering barely repressed tension was digging sharp claws of guilt into her, and all of her rationalizations over the past few years were starting to seem awfully flimsy.
She sucked in a shaky breath and looked back at Montana. The movement caused her to wince. Her ribs ached from the fall and her knees stung as did her palms.
“How bad?” Kane asked, his voice low and tense.
“What?”
Montana stared out the window, her feet bouncing to some internal rhythm and her lips moving to the notes in some inner song.
“You went down hard.”
Sky watched a freeway sign blur by.
“Wait! Where are we going? My studio is…”
“I’ve got to get back to Santa Fe,” he interrupted. “Finals are tonight and I have a preshow interview and a quick meet and greet with the local tour sponsors.”
“Wait. What?” She spun now in the large truck seat to face him but couldn’t suppress her yip of pain.
“Jesus, Sky, how bad?”
“You don’t really think you are driving to Santa Fe today?” She stared at him like she’d never seen him before. “With us?” Kane had always been calm and reassuring. Not a man given to impulse or irrational behavior.
Kane again looked at his watch, his face grim. “No choice.”
She willed herself to remain calm. She taught yoga. She got paid to intone about breath. She should not be on the verge of hyperventilating.
“You need to take us home,” she said gripping the edge of the seat and ignoring the sting of pain. “I am not prepared to go to Santa Fe.”
She had no shoes, an inappropriate dress to walk into a bull-riding event, no wallet, no phone. And that was just the beginning of the list of why this was a disaster.
He didn’t answer. His face looked carved. Beautiful. Remote. Sky felt panic wash through her. She didn’t know him like this at all. She had no idea what was roiling through that big brain. He was overreacting, wasn’t he? Her Kane had always been in control. Thinking.
“You need to be in Santa Fe,” she said coldly, crossing her arms to ward off the icy blast of the air conditioner. “We don’t.”
“I go. You both go,” he said. He turned down the AC fan on her side and raised the temperature a little.
She tried not to notice the unconscious action—to remember how he’d always taken care of her without ever making a big deal of it. As if it were natural when no one else ever had. Even shocked and angry he’d noticed she was cold and done something about it.
But the rest of his behavior this morning stomped out the blossoming warmth, and alarm blared through her. He was acting out of character. Unpredictable. He didn’t want her. And what was he going to do with a three-year-old? He wasn’t thinking. He was reacting. Badly. With his primitive brain. But why?
Sky couldn’t even get her own brain to kick in. She still felt like she was reeling—stuck back in the gallery, hating the crowd and Jonas’s sexual interest. Then she’d looked up Kane Wilder, hero, man of her dreams, sexy cowboy personified and trampler on her heart strode across the gallery like he’d been expected.
His reaction had been over the top. Like a movie. And that had been before he’d kissed her.
And you kissed him back like you were thirsty.
Breathe, she reminded herself. In through her nose for seven. Out for seven. Five cycles. She didn’t even make it through one.
“You’re not being practical, Kane.”
Nothing.
“You don’t want me.”
“I want my child.”
She flinched. She was irrelevant. Just like she’d feared. Life with Kane would be her childhood all over again. She’d be an inconvenience. But what about her precious daughter? No way would she let Montana experience what she’d had—wanting love but never understanding why she didn’t quite deserve it, never feeling like she’d been wanted or belonged. Trying desperately to please when no one could be pleased.
“We’ll fly to Vegas Sunday.” His beautiful face briefly twisted with distaste. “Get married. Fly to Phoenix for the competition. Pack up your things. Move them to my family’s ranch in Montana.”
She stared at him.
“Or better yet…” He handed her his phone. “Check the marriage requirements of Arizona.”
Sky shoved the phone back at him.
“You don’t mean that.” She squeezed the words out. This wasn’t the Middle Ages when women were property and did what the big heap of a man said. “I have a life. I’m not trailing after you city to city,” she said outraged. “I’m not going to sit in a hotel room or a trailer and wait for you to come back at night after your ride and your whooping it up with the boys and the women in the bar so you can grace us with your fabulous, god-like presence.”
Like a dog waiting happily for its master.
But the worst part of it, Sky thought dismally, was what hurt the most was how his face had twisted at the word marriage. She was not going to live her life unwanted one more moment. Not one!
Without thinking she grabbed the truck’s door handle.
“Stop the truck. Stop it. I mean it, Kane. Stop. I’m not going to Santa Fe.”
He didn’t reply. His calm made her reckless and she yanked on the handle, which didn’t budge.
“Take me home. I mean it. I am not marrying you.”
“You will.” His voice sounded cool, far away, as if his attention were somewhere else. Then he looked at his watch again, which really made her want to toss it out the window. Again something chased across his face before he shut it back down to his remote mask. “Sunday if we can swing it. Monday at the latest we will marry, which is already four years too late.”
Marry.
The word conjured up every stupid childish fantasy she’d harbored since she’d first spied him with her brother when she’d been eleven. She’d stupidly dreamed about him since that day until reality had slapped her besotted idiot face when Kane dropped her off on an airport curb clutching the boarding pass he’d printed off to send her back to school a few days before fall term started after they’d spent three months together—him riding bulls and then riding her just as hard for the entire summer. He’d smiled, kissed her cheek and then had returned to his truck with that deadly sexual swagger. No promise to call. No turning around.
And a week later, her churning worry that had dogged her the past month had been realized with a positive pregnancy test.
He hadn’t wanted to marry her, and he hadn’t wanted a child. Oh, she’d known he would have tried to control his dismayed expression. Would have married her because it was his duty. Like military service. A sacrifice for his child. But he wouldn’t have wanted to.
“I am never marrying you.”
If possible his features cranked even tighter. God, any more and his skin would tear with the pressure from all those arrogantly perfect, sculpted bones.
“Too bad,” he said coolly. “I am not raising my child without being married to her mother. And I sure as…” he lowered his voice even more so that she had to strain to hear it over the whir of the air conditioner “…hell am not letting any other man raise my child, so ditch Gallery Boy.”
His lips were tight. His mouth tight. He spit the words like pebbles. Each one hit with deadly accuracy, and Sky found herself recoiling, wrapping her arms tight around her bare skin and trying to find a safe zone that didn’t exist.
“Just stop talking.” She hunched in her seat, wanting to slap him, which was an impulse she’d never had in her life. “Just shut up. Now, please.”
Maybe it was the ‘please,’ but Kane huffed out a laugh that definitely mocked her.
Sky balled her fists and slapped them on her legs in frustration and then yipped as pain shot up from her knee and both hands.
“Dammit,” he hissed and instead of getting on the freeway, he signaled and pulled off into a shopping plaza. “Tired of asking, Sky. Open the glove box. There’s a first aid kit in there.”
“I’m fine.”
“Open it. You can clean the scrapes on your hands. And I want to see what the fffff…what is going on with your knee.”
No way was she lifting up her skirt while sitting next to him.
“I’m fine.”
Kane made a sound of supreme irritation that sounded ominous. She had the idea that if Montana weren’t in the car he’d be expressing himself far more colorfully, and in some small compartment of her overwhelmed brain she marveled at how he was already making adjustments. He’d never once raised his voice in the truck, and she too had been whispering even as they argued.
He shoved the truck in park but left the engine and AC blasting him, while it whispered over her. He opened the glove box and pulled out a substantial sized medical kit.
Given his profession, he probably needed it, but didn’t the bull riders have team doctors? Please let them have team doctors. She might have finished with Kane Wilder years ago but imagining him injured and trying to bandage his own wounds made her feel sick to her stomach.
“Really.” She caught his hand as he slid her skirt up her leg. “I’m fine.”
“Mama, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly.
“Mama hurt.” Her daughter’s voice hitched, and so did Sky’s heart. Kane’s beautiful, mystic pale blue eyes that turned silver during high emotion narrowed when they flicked over her face.
“I’m fine, sweetie.”
“She’s fine, baby girl.”
They answered at the same time.
“I want to see.”
“It’s nothing,” Sky insisted, trying to tug her skirt free from where it was bunched up in his hand. She pulled hard again, but no give.
Like the man.
“Seriously?” His mouth quirked. “You do remember what I hold on to for a living?”
She bit her inner lip hard to try to suppress her irritation and embarrassment. Kane reached back, unbuckled the struggling child and Montana clamored on the console, rolled into her lap, and righted herself kicking Sky’s bruised ribs. She hugged Sky hard, and Sky tried to swallow her umph of pain.
“I need to see, baby.” Kane tried to work Sky’s body-hugging dress higher even as she clung on.
“Daddy kiss you all better, Mama,” Montana said, straddling her and holding her face between her palms.
Kane stilled. Sky could feel the flush from her chest to her face. Damn her fair skin for betraying her every thought and emotion. She should have grown out of blushes after the first time she and Kane had had sex. She’d been so wanton and had only become more shameless during their summer together. The things she’d let him do to her. The things she’d done to him.
Another flush warmed her. Why did it have to be 9:30 in the morning? Midnight would have at least given her blushes a bit of privacy.
“Me kiss you too.” Montana kissed Sky’s palm and pressed it to her cheek and then kissed it again and pressed it to the other cheek. “Hold.”
Sky sucked in a breath at her daughter’s sweetness and now she hurt on a whole different level. Beside her Kane was rigid as a steel beam. Where was all that easygoing charm when he needed it—heck, when she needed it?
“Thank you, sweetie. But really I’m fine. You don’t need to worry,” she reiterated, pissed at Kane for making a big deal of her graceless public tumble.
That seemed to galvanize Kane. He opened the box and took out several small squares and ripped them open with his teeth. Ignoring her, he gently dapped at her scraped palms. They were actually worse than Sky had realized, and she tried to hold back her wince. Dirt was imbedded.
She tried to close her palms, suddenly remembering another time when Kane had stepped into medic mode. For all the years of ballet she was an astonishing klutz. She and her brother and Kane had been swimming. She’d been climbing out of the pool and had been distracted by the water sluicing off Kane’s chest when he’d paused on the edge of their diving board. She’d slipped on the pool deck, and Kane had carried her into the house, her soaking bikini leaving a trail of water across the living room.
He had treated her injury then too, but the gouge in her chin had been so bad that her brother had driven her to an emergency clinic for stitches. Kane had carried her to her brother’s jeep, wrapping her in a towel and putting his T-shirt carefully over her head so that it fell like a dress over her thirteen-year-old body. He’d sat in the back seat with her, talking, distracting her from the pain, but none of that had been necessary because sitting next to her superhero and wearing his shirt obliterated the throb in her chin and jaw and the bruises forming on her hip.
Sky was jarred from the memory when Kane pulled out a bottle of water from the middle console, which Sky realized was a cooler. It was loaded with several bottles of water and cold packs. He reached behind her and pulled out a slate blue T-shirt from an athletic bag he had tucked behind his seat. He cradled her hands on the shirt. Then he poured a little water in her hands and let it drip through. Next he dabbed at the scratches again.
He deftly picked up a small white and green tub of ointment.
“Really, Kane,” she whispered. “That’s a waste of a T-shirt. It’s not that big of a deal. And I know you’ve got to be really…angry and reeling from this so you can stop pretending that this is normal,” she finished in a whisper.
“If I even begin to stop and try to wrap my head around what you’ve done to us, we’ll really be in trouble,” he said his voice tight but otherwise without inflection. “I have to ride tonight.”
His words sent a chill through her, especially his use of us and we, as if the three of them had already merged into one. She trembled.
“Hurts or still cold?”
Of course he noticed. She met the blank pale blue of his eyes, and that chilled her even more because Kane’s eyes had always been his emotional bellwether—amusement, desire, turbulent disappointment in his performance, determination, possession—it had always been there.
Never blank. A mask.
“What’s this?” Montana lifted up the tub and stuck a finger in it.
“Tea tree ointment. It fights infection. Don’t eat it. Hungry?” Kane asked conversationally.
The care he was taking with her scrapes, and now her knee, was undoing her. She felt like all the knots of tension that had been holding her together for as long as she could remember were being untied and she would fall apart, a ball of tattered ribbons on the ground. A woman. A mother. A lover. An artist.
“Starbucks.” Montana pointed across the parking lot. “Mama likes chai.”
“I know,” he said softly.
“No food coz she’s gluten free.” Montana said the words carefully.
“Yes,” Kane said, his voice gentle now as if the earlier emotion had been poured back into the cauldron where it had boiled over. “I remember.”
He knew things about her. A lot of things. And the things he didn’t know she didn’t want him to ever find out. And now she was in his truck. And his hand was up her skirt. And their daughter was in her lap.
“Kane. Really.” She tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. Again he cleaned the deep scrape with gentle fingers and put on the tea tree ointment. She sucked in a breath, holding her body rigid. Pissed that for some reason her eyes began to sting and burn along with her palms and her knee.
“Ow ow ow,” Montana chanted, laying her head against Sky’s chest. She folded her tiny hands together as if in prayer and tucked them under her cheek. Montana stared into Kane’s eyes and he stared back. Everything in Sky stilled, even the air in her lungs. Time slowed. It was a moment. Small in time but epic in emotion and significance, and for the first time ever, Sky felt cut out of her child’s life. It was as if they were in a picture frame, and she didn’t belong and could get up and walk out and no one would know she was missing.
The story of her childhood.
The story of the life she’d been afraid she’d pass on to her child if she’d told Kane, and allowed him to do “the right thing,” as she’d known without a doubt he stoically would. He would have even been nice about it, but inside, she’d imagined that he’d die a little. Her father certainly had. And he’d let her know it in so many ways.
A tear splashed on her hand. And another. She didn’t dare move in case the dam broke. Silently she counted. It was too much. Everything just kept hitting her one thing after another.
Her daughter looked so serious. How did a three-year-old look so full of wonder and wisdom at the same time, as if she were looking through a portal at the mysteries of the universe? Sky was riveted by the expression. It hurt, but her artist’s eye once again protected her from reality, from the pain, from the moment, because it was already focused on the lines of Montana’s face, the light and shadow, the tilt of her chin, the tiny cleft there already forming like her daddy had.
Her pink lips tilted into the beginnings of a smile, and her expression changed from wonder to possession.
“Mine,” she said eerily reminiscent of Kane earlier remarks. “My daddy. Mine.”
Sky felt like Montana had just gouged out her heart and tossed it on the seat between them. Her daughter had never once indicated that she was unhappy that the daddy she’d seen in the pictures Sky collected of him from his career stats and articles and their summer together and her tween and teen years were only in a book, not real life.
“My baby girl,” Kane said softly. “Mine.”
Montana slid off Sky’s lap and onto Kane’s. She laid her head against his chest, and one of those strong arms that could hold onto a resin-wrapped rope and keep him on top of a pissed and thrashing bull held her so sweetly. Her eyes drifted shut and then opened. She reached out and caught one of Kane’s dark curls that brushed his shoulders. She speared one with her finger and pulled a little. She laughed as it bounced back and then she tugged one of her own curls.
“Daddy’s hair. My hair, Mama.”
Another punch to her gut.
“Yes,” Sky said at a loss because every moment of this day, which should have been such a triumph, just kept getting worse.
Montana stared at Sky with the same eyes as Kane’s, and it hit her then how alike they were. Not just in appearance—eyes, smile and dark curls—but in temperament. The independence. The confidence. The determination. She had none of that innately. She struggled for it all. And once again, Sky felt like she was on the outside looking in. Forbidden to enter the place that should be where she felt the most loved and safe—her family and home.
Kane’s hand remained on her bare thigh. She could feel the imprint on her bones. Her breath feathered in her throat. Instead of looking at him she stared at the dash. At the digital glow of the clock.
“Eight minutes,” she whispered.
“What about it?” He moved his hand, and perversely she missed it so she tugged the skirt of the long blue dress back down.
“You walked through the gallery door eight minutes ago.”
Eight minutes to turn her world upside down.
What else could she expect from a man who could win a championship in a handful of eight-second rides?