Chapter Four
Sky palmed her grande almond milk chai and stared at the green straw poking out. They’d gone through the drive-through, Kane letting Montana hang out the window, his hands large and protective as he held her while Montana waved at the video of the smiling barista taking their order. He’d been charming to the barista, who was blonde and cute and perky and patient with Montana as she changed her mind so many times until she’d eventually settled on a berry and yogurt parfait and a bag of dried fruit and nut snacks and a water.
Kane had remembered Sky was dairy free, conferring only with her about almond, coconut or soy milk. Her stomach twisted. They’d sounded so much like a normal family, like a couple, that tears had burned her eyes. Of course he’d noticed that. She’d seen his infinitesimal pause. His brain had kicked over, and she’d become fascinated with the skirt of her dress, the flow of blue lace that tumbled like a waterfall over her legs, while Kane had turned back to the video of the barista and finished the order.
“That’s a lot of food.” Sky tried not to sound critical, but she shouldn’t have bothered. Most everything seemed to roll off Kane’s back where all the worry, doubt, anxiety and insecurity kept sticking to her.
“It’s a six-hour drive.”
She swallowed hard.
Back on the road as the truck ate up the miles, Sky fidgeted. Tried and failed to think of something to say. She wanted to sit in the back and help Montana eat. Mostly to escape the potent masculinity and pheromones that Kane exuded. There was no escape.
“Daddy, music!” Montana sang out after a while. Sky’s heart pinched to hear the word daddy on her daughter’s lips, and also at the familiar request.
“What would you like, sweet girl?” He flipped down a mirror that was below the rearview mirror so he could see the rear seats. Jonas had one of those but he hadn’t used it the one time he’d driven Sky and Montana to downtown Scottsdale to an outdoor art festival when her car had once again been in the shop.
“You want country? Disney? I got satellite radio and anything you want on my phone.
The conversation unnerved her. One more slap in the face about how differently they lived their lives. But again, his reaction to Montana’s request made it seem like they were a normal family. Kane turned on the satellite radio. Found the Disney station. Of course the song from Frozen was playing. Of course Kane knew the lyrics. He knew everything. And he had a beautiful voice. He had a beautiful everything, she thought resentfully and hunched in the seat, but her ribs pinched and she shot up.
“Sky, I’m losing my mind here. Do you think you need an X-ray on your ribs? Let me feel…”
“No!” she snapped. If he touched her she’d break. “I’m fine. I always bruise easily.”
He’d remember that. He remembered everything. Anything with numbers he was practically a savant. He remembered every rider’s stats each year. He also knew the bulls’ stats. And facts? All stored in that computer brain and easily retrieved. She sighed. She had liked his quirky nerdiness almost as much as his devastating confidence and sex appeal.
His lips tightened. “I’m going to want to see later if not now.” He was stating a fact, but his voice was laced with threat. “Are you still taking iron supplements? What was your last red blood cell count?”
She really wanted to smack him.
Anemia. Of course that hadn’t slipped his mind. Her health wasn’t any of his business. He was so fit and healthy and bursting with energy that her food sensitivities, overly sensitive stomach and anemia had always made her feel less than.
“I’m fine,” she reiterated trying hard not to snap at him as Montana built up to the chorus in a little girl voice that was unerringly melodically on key. “Let it goooooo.”
“Let it go, Let it go,” Kane harmonized with Montana. Sky, who usually took so much pleasure in her daughter’s love of music and voice, stared out the window thinking that Kane had ruined one more simple pleasure. Being with him like this was making her question all her decisions. And she wasn’t liking the answers. And she didn’t want to listen to the stupid voice that mocked her—she’d never let Kane go, not really.
She really couldn’t take this anymore—being on the outside of her own life again.
“How do you even know the lyrics?” she demanded in a low voice as he sang out in a beautiful baritone giving the “cold never bothered me anyway” line a whole different spin.
“Disney, seriously.” She glowered. “Wouldn’t imagine too many buckle bunnies want Elsa’s theme song crooned in their ear.”
His features, tight and remote now that he wasn’t looking at Montana, shut down even further.
“You’d be surprised,” he bit out.
“Really don’t want to know about your personal conquests before or after.”
She couldn’t begin to count how many women he would have been with during the past four years. Dozens. Hundreds. Maybe even some when they’d been together. She didn’t know. She had been too afraid to ask questions. He’d been gone a lot. Sky felt more than a little sick.
“Not one word,” she reiterated.
“Not really something I brag about,” he said coldly. “But every woman after you is on you, not me.”
Every woman!
Sky spun to face him. She’d been right. Dozen. Hundreds. He was lucky his penis hadn’t broken off from the arduous work. Sky turned the music up. Predictably Montana got more excited and sang more loudly. Finally something going her way.
“How is your ravenous sexual appetite on me?” she demanded.
“You dumped me.”
How was going back to school dumping him?
“Yeah you were so brokenhearted you had your hands all over two blondes in a club that night.”
“That was work.”
“Right,” she said flatly. “That’s a hard job,” she snipped.
She was officially becoming her mother. Damn.
“You can’t claim higher ground. You dumped me for some Italian exchange student.” His voice was hard, low and fast and she had to bend closer to hear him although she really should be leaning away because the heat from his body and his citrus and faint sandalwood scent were making her feel warm and light-headed and relaxed, almost as if he were exuding some narcotic that was making everything warm and dreamy.
“You replaced me,” he reminded her. “Pretty damn fast although discovering yourself pregnant with another man’s child at the beginning of your grand love affair must have put a damper on your vive amore. Finding another passenger on board definitely cuts into the libido.”
Between the music and Kane’s low voice, Sky wasn’t catching every word but she heard ‘libido’ and yeah he had enough for five men.
“You’d know,” she tossed at him, feeling like for the first time in her life she was holding her own during a confrontation, although between the Disney love theme songs and Montana’s belting out the lyrics, it was hard to concentrate and seemed surreal.
“Bedding an Italian exchange student was cliché. Italians are notorious.”
Again Sky couldn’t hear everything clearly, but she caught the last word.
“Bull riders are notorious,” she said like she was a snotty eleven-year-old again. And Kane was the most notorious of all.
“A rebound fling with an Italian just sounds like a dumb plotline from a movie. Even his name was lame. Lorenzo.”
“Who?”
The minute she opened her mouth and saw the change in his expression she remembered the stupid story she’d concocted when Kane had shocked the hell out of her and shown up at her campus apartment and leaned on the buzzer until she’d finally been forced to answer through the intercom, terrified that someone else would eventually let him in and lead him straight to her.
She’d looked like hell. Exhausted. Not keeping much food down. Her body changing. She’d needed an iron infusion. He would have noticed. Nothing slipped by Kane. And no way would she have had the ability to resist him if he’d made it to her doorstep. Although maybe if he’d seen her, he would have run in the opposite direction.
“There was no Italian boyfriend,” Kane said flatly.
Sky flinched and turned away toward the window.
Of course there’d been no Italian. The thought of another man replacing Kane was absurd. Kane had always been the one and only. But she knew she’d just been another notch on his bedpost. The virgin. A novelty. He’d probably thought he was still watching out for her as a favor to his dead friend, her dead brother. Make the girl’s first experience in bed memorable. But then she’d had to go and fall in love. Desperately.
Humiliating.
“So why’d you dump me?”
“Not talking about this.”
“I was worried about you,” Kane said, his voice laced with frustration. “I flew across the country just to see you for one day because I was due in Little Rock the next day for competition.”
Her stupid heart quivered at the memory of the gesture, but she stomped on it. Don’t talk. Don’t engage. He’d figure it out, and he was already barely leashing his temper. They were in a truck barreling down the freeway toward Santa Fe.
Kane turned down the music to half volume. Montana pouted but compensated for the silence by singing even louder and banging her plastic yogurt spoon rhythmically on the cup holder of her booster seat.
“Why wouldn’t you see me if there was no Lorenzo?”
He sounded hurt.
Don’t let him get to you. Again.
Why was she still so susceptible? Kane radiated confidence and sex appeal and success. He’d had women proposition him right in front of her, actually elbowing her aside to get to him. And she’d been this little mouse so grateful for the crumbs of his attention. She wasn’t going to get caught up in that again. He didn’t need her. She hadn’t hurt him. No way in hell.
Theirs had not been an equal relationship. She’d adored him. He’d been her first and only, her world, moon, stars, and sun. She’d been his summer fling—a limited shelf life on their affair. A convenience. The girl he’d mostly kept under wraps in his trailer while he’d been working, attending sponsor events, interviews and then riding the hell out of bulls. He’d come back high on adrenaline ready to ride her all night, and she’d let him. She’d loved his intensity, how hot he burned for her, how hot she’d burned for him.
“You knew.”
Oh God, the calculating would start. Her eyelids fluttered shut. Of course she’d known. She’d been a month late in August. Almost two months late and nearly always nauseous when he’d dropped her at the airport curb in September with a casual kiss on the cheek, a “see ya,” and a reminder to try to eat something while waiting for her flight. He’d even stuffed a few hundreds in her hand like she was a child heading off to college and he the parent. She’d felt a little bit like a paid escort.
Sky had watched him walk away, tears spilling down her face as she willed him to turn around and he hadn’t. The pain of it. Standing there feeling abandoned and rejected like she had been so many times before by her parents. She’d wanted him to beg her to leave school and stay with him. Instead she’d stared at the long line of his back, straight and strong, wide shoulders tapering to narrow waist and fluid hips walking as fast and far away from her as he could get, one hand placing his Stetson back on his head, his tumble of dark curls barely visible under the brim.
That image of him leaving had been branded into her brain. It had been her first sculpture in her series ‘Out West.’ Kane Wilder walking away. God, he’d moved like water. His body hadn’t seemed to adhere to the same laws of physics that most of the rest of the world were stuck with. He was a bull rider. An unforgettable man and just to add to her torture, she’d sketched that walk away over and over using charcoal then pastels.
Five months pregnant and barely starting to show, she made her first bronze casting as a sculpture class project. She still had the final version in her studio only she’d added chaps—fringe flaring, his protective vest and his bull rope dangling in his hand. Back to her.
And that same night while she’d flown east sobbing and terrified—the future feeling like a gaping howl without Kane in it—he’d been photographed with two spray-tanned blondes, tits spilling out of their tight tops, garish frozen cocktails in their hands and Kane between them grinning like it was Christmas.
“Now’s not the time to talk about it,” she whispered and stared at the desert blurring by.
“You’re right. The time to talk was when you suspected. At the latest when you got a positive pregnancy test.” Each word was a rock hurled at her chest.
Yeah, well, if you hadn’t been Kane Wilder I would have.
But she didn’t want to say that. Too honest. Vulnerable. Kane had had women throwing themselves seriously in his path since he’d been fourteen, and now that he was famous, hordes of women lined up for his autograph and more. He wore confidence like his Stetson—sexy, stylish, natural. She was a mass of insecurity around that man and she wasn’t going back to living and feeling like that.
“I had my reasons,” she said stiffly, totally unable to meet the searching gaze he kept lasering her with. “And I’d prefer you keep your eyes on the road.”
The truck accelerated, pressing her deeper into the cushy black leather seat, but just as quickly he slowed back to a leisurely seventy-eight. Did he do everything fast? Duh. He was a bull rider.
“I can’t think of a single reason to justify keeping a child from her father.”
“I could name ten,” she said flippantly, hating feeling so vulnerable and exposed.
Kane’s fingers flexed on the steering wheel. His cheeks hollowed. She heard him swallow.
“Not another word, Sky. Not one more.”
“Or what? I get a time out?”
Oh God, he was making her bitchy. Her emotions swung wildly. It was like she’d kept them on such a tight leash the past four years to make a new and stable life for her and her child, but now she’d let go and they were galloping off without her. And why was she antagonizing him? It wasn’t her way at all. She was quiet. The pleaser. The one who hung back desperate for approval and acceptance, but wary of the attention.
But every time she looked at all his physical perfection, and felt his confidence and certainty and sexual potency engulf her like a sandstorm, she wanted to slap him. And then she wanted to slap herself harder for being so stupid and falling in love with him at first sight and not having the brains or the willpower or the self-preservation to get over him years ago.
Even now every nerve in her body was clamoring to touch him. She felt primitive, like a wild animal captive.
It was just lust. Just lust. Just lust she mentally chanted to herself. Nothing else. She was pathetic. Kane had probably forgotten about her the first night. She needed to hook up with a man and wipe the taste and feel of Kane Wilder from her mouth, body and memory forever.
Yeah right.
“It’s just lust,” she chanted again for good measure.
“I wish to hell it were,” he growled startling her from her throes of self-recrimination, “but you’ll just have to wait for that part of the solution when we don’t have a captive audience.” He glanced in the rearview mirror at the little girl who still stared out the window singing.
Sky slapped her hand over her mouth and nearly curled up in embarrassment. She felt the flush roll over her face and down to her collarbone.
“I didn’t say that word, did I?” she whispered mortified.
“Sky, you blurted your thoughts all the time around me.”
“I did not,” she objected. “I’ve always been quiet. Shy. I let you have your own way in everything.”
His quick, narrow-eyed glare scorched her.
“How the hell do you figure that?” he demanded. His normally low, smooth voice was rough. Tension poured off him in waves. It should have been terrifying. Her parents had been volatile and she’d spent her childhood tiptoeing around them unless Bennington was home, so why wasn’t she scared now?
“Everything was about you,” she said trying to keep some dignity and not let him know how deeply she’d loved him and how badly he’d hurt her without even trying.
“Are we even having the same conversation? Were we even in the same relationship?” he demanded. “One look in the back seat proves nothing was about me. Nothing. If it had been about me, I would have chosen to do the right thing by you and our child. We’d be married.”
The last word sounded like a curse, and it would have been. His self-righteous declaration was like a stab wound to her heart. She’d known he would have married her if she’d told him she was pregnant. But even at nineteen and completely consumed by her love for Kane, she hadn’t wanted him to do the right thing. She’d wanted him to love her, even without the baby.
The minute she’d suspected she was pregnant, she’d felt sick imagining telling Kane. Oh she knew he’d suck in a deep breath, school his features into bland acceptance and take responsibility, but he was a bull rider fast rising in the ranks. Twenty-two. Fearless. Different city every week. How would he have been a dad? How could she have asked him to give up the career and life he loved? She hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of being someone else’s burden again, of having her child grow up unwanted, but tolerated, the cause of two people’s deep unhappiness, a reminder of lost dreams.
She’d vowed to keep her mouth shut so that her daughter wouldn’t grow up with the same snarling resentment she had.
“If it had been all about me—” Kane growled interrupting her churning memories. He broke off. Sucked in a deep breath and seemed to gather his thoughts. Then his eyes flicked over her with heat though his mouth was grim. His voice deepened, and he drawled the next part. “We’d probably have another booster seat back there and we’d be getting ready to install one of those rear-facing infant seats and my hand would be resting on your swollen belly right now.”
It was so visual her heart stalled.
“Not funny,” she breathed.
“Not laughing, Sky. You lied to me.”
How was he turning this all back on her? She’d let him keep his life, his freedom. She hadn’t saddled him with a wife and kid he didn’t want.
“Take us home.” She had to get out of this truck. He was scrambling her mind and her body and weaving a fantasy of them becoming a family, and the craving for the family she’d never had—a real family that was not just a public façade—was starting to edge out reason. And there were a lot of reasons she and Kane would be a disaster.
“I want to go home. I have a whole life, and I don’t want to walk away from it.”
“Too bad. You stole my child. Without a thought.” His voice sounded ripped from his throat like Velcro separating. “Even now you don’t regret what you did to our child or to me.”
“Why would I?” she shot back. The clawing tension clashed with the memories—him holding her in the Pacific Ocean, the sun dazzling her as they kissed, her teaching him yoga and sitting on his back while he did pushups, him making love to her in the shower, in his truck, in a field, in a pool. They made her reckless and desperate to escape. The visuals of them together kept rolling through her head like a car wreck. “I’m not a genius like you with numbers and everything else, but I can add and subtract and there were more negatives in why you’d be a bad bet for a father than positives.”
The minute she spit out the words that she hadn’t even consciously formed, she regretted them. Each one. She’d wanted to hurt him because she’d loved him so much, probably still did and always would. But he was making her crazy. Kane hadn’t wanted to be a dad at twenty-two when he was consistently ranking in the top five of bull riders on the acknowledged most intense and competitive tour in the world. Still she didn’t need to rub his face in it.
It was something that her mother—fueled by drink—would have yelled.
Cruel. Sky stared at her hands in her lap. She’d never deliberately tried to hurt someone before. Her mouth felt metallic. Bile mixed with chai burned her throat. She couldn’t look at him. She wanted to say something. Form the right words this time. Kinder words.
He had been her brother’s best friend. Her lover. The father of her child. She’d known him since she was eleven and he fourteen. Kane had never been anything but kind and tender to her. Respectful. When her brother had been critically injured by a bull, Kane had sat with her in the emergency room all night at the hospital waiting while her parents had flown back from Paris. He’d held her when she’d heard the grim news, and she’d soaked his shirt with her tears.
It wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t fallen in love with her. Kane never would have slept with her if she hadn’t made it so easy. She’d practically stalked him, invented an art series she was working on. She’d pretended to be a sophisticated siren with an artistic vision when instead she’d been a naïve, lust-addled, seriously crushing nineteen-year-old with nothing more on her mind than being Kane Wilder’s girlfriend.
Sorry.
She thought the word. It was an anvil on her heart. Kane’s hurt rolled off him in waves, and she felt like she was drowning. Sorry wasn’t going to cut it.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she whispered.
She waited. Nothing. Just the engine. And Montana singing and talking to herself. And Kane staring blankly at a straight line of asphalt stretching to the horizon. God, was he even aware he was still driving? Sky gulped in air, panicked for all three of them. Her rioting emotions and finally unearthed resentment were going to kill all of them.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Kane made a strangled sound and veered off the highway to the shoulder, and then out into the desert for a dozen or so yards. He killed the engine. And sat there. His shoulders trembled. She could hear him breathe like it was hard.
“Kane,” she said after she counted to ten. Then twenty. Thirty. She reached out to touch him. He shook her off. Palmed the keys, opened and slammed the door and stalked off into the desert.
“Where’s Daddy going?” Montana asked softly, after a few beats of silence where she and Sky watched Kane create more distance between them. Sky wanted to reassure Montana, but she didn’t know what to say. Story of her life.
“Ah…I think for a little walk.” She managed to push the words out of her throat.
How was her child coping with this so beautifully whereas she was a mess? Montana’s daddy had always been a man in pictures smiling or in a video in some crazy contortion on a bull. She’d never let Montana watch the competitions live because anything could happen and a lot of it was bad, but she’d let her watch the winning rides on YouTube. And she’d shown her child pictures of her daddy as a teen with her uncle who was in heaven. And with her mama hiking, swimming in rivers, hanging on him like he was her entire life because he had been.
But she’d never met him until this morning and Montana was acting like seeing her daddy smile and swoop her out of a gallery and into a truck and away on a long ribbon of unknown asphalt was normal.
But stopping the truck and striding into the desert was not normal. Sky didn’t want to think about what that meant because Kane had always been crazy disciplined and controlled.
“What’s Daddy doing now?” Montana asked, and her voice quavered.
That snapped Sky to attention. She had to make this right. Somehow. She’d left Kane because she didn’t want to live with resentment and disappointment that would turn to hate and hurt like her parents’ marriage had. She’d vowed she wouldn’t live like that. She turned back to Montana and forced a smile, but Montana was having none of it. Her fingers fumbled uselessly with the childproof harness buckles.
“Montana. No.” Sky was stern. That was a hard-and-fast rule. “Don’t even try it. Only Mama or another adult unbuckles.”
“I want to go with Daddy.”
Her heart sunk. It was going to hurt Montana when her daddy rode back into reality on the back of a bull, his secret family out of sight and mostly out of mind. Had Kane even thought of that? He thought of everything else. Planned out and analyzed everything—his bull rides, the routes to the city, his nutritional and exercise requirements, his investments. And he’d burned through online classes like they were matches. He’d been wicked smart and most people probably thought all that intellect was wasted on the back of a bull, but oh, he was a thing of incandescent athletic and physical beauty when he rode.
“We’ll go get Daddy, okay?” Sky said snapping herself mentally and emotionally back into the truck. She watched Kane drop down into a small arroyo. Venturing out in the desert with no shoes was stupid, but it was her fault for speaking without thinking. Not like she didn’t know how much the wrong words could hurt. She’d grown up in a minefield of verbal grenades.
Sky bunched up the length of her silky skirt in her hand, trying not to think about the wrinkles she’d be creating and the deposit that Jonas had paid for the dress and the shoes despite her continued objections. She swung herself carefully out of the truck.
It was an embarrassingly long drop. The truck was big and the tires massive.
“I want Daddy.”
“Let’s go get him.” Sky infused her voice with false enthusiasm. Her brilliant daughter wasn’t fooled.
“I go get Daddy,” she said climbing out of the truck after Sky released her.
It would probably go better, Sky thought, wincing inside because in half an hour, Kane had already taken center stage in Montana’s life. And what would happen when he walked off again busy with the tour, his sponsor functions? Another busty blonde buckle bunny? Just the thought was a blow.
Worried about Cholla cactus and scorpions, Sky swung Montana up on her hip. She was probably using her daughter as armor. She winced as the hot sandy gravel ground into the soles of her feet. Damn Kane for flinging off her shoes and hurling them at the gallery. Not that they would have done her any good in the soft sand. She probably would have broken her ankle.
“Kane?”
No answer.
Calm down, she cautioned. He wouldn’t walk forever. Sky took a few tentative steps. Forget it. The pain if she stepped on sharp rocks or cactus would be her penance. And if she got a cut on the sole of her foot, at least it would be a reminder to keep her tongue controlled and to not lash out at Kane when she was really dealing with her own pain.
And then she saw him a short distance down a gentle slope. He was bent over like he’d been punched hard in the solar plexus and was struggling to suck in air. Hands on his knees, head down. Sky hesitated on the lip of the arroyo. She looked back at the truck and then at Kane. Indecision clawed.
“Are you hurt?” she called out nervously, not wanting to panic Montana.
No answer.
“Are you okay?”
Stupid question from a stupid girl who’d never known how to handle people well and Kane least of all.
She had done this. Hurt this beautiful, perfect man, and his pain seemed to manifest exponentially in her chest.
“Hey, do you see any wild flowers underneath the acacia tree?” she asked Montana and pointed to a tree only a few yards from Kane. “Maybe you could pick Daddy a flower to cheer him up?” she said, her worried gaze bounding between Kane and their child. She rushed down into the arroyo, sliding in the warm, almost hot sandy soil.
“Why Daddy sad?” Montana asked quietly.
She really was the worst mother in the world. So determined to protect her child’s delicate heart, and face it, her own, that she’d just torched all three.
“Mommy was mean,” she whispered, surprising herself with her honesty although the understatement choked in her throat.
Holding Montana’s hand, they walked down the gentle slope.
“Find a flower,” she whispered, seeing a few, but wanting to give Montana something to do and to give Kane time to pull himself together again.
“Kane.” She put her hand out. Touched his back. It was like touching one of her sculptures when she was working with them. Hot. Hard. Detailed. She could feel the delineation of each muscle group without even pressing hard with her fingers.
He’d be an exquisite model for an artist’s anatomy class. She’d certainly done an obsessive amount of sketching him while they’d been together. And she’d taken a lot of pictures.
All that strength trembled beneath her tentative fingers, which scared the heck out of her. Yelling she’d grown up with. Broken dishes, slammed doors and sometimes more. As a child, she’d been terrified. She’d hidden under her bed and later had curled up in her closet, but at least that was familiar. Kane’s tight control fraying was something scarier because she didn’t know what to expect. What if he couldn’t piece himself back together?
“Tell me what’s wrong,” she whispered, not sure if he was still dealing with what she’d said or if he’d been bitten by a scorpion or a rattler or a…
He sucked in a ragged breath, and then another. Then jerked up and spun to face her. She jumped back and cringed. He stepped closer, the tension pouring off his body in waves. Sky wanted to run, but her body had short-circuited. She was numb. Useless. His face was pale and tight.
“How can you ask that?”
“I’m sorry.” Her voice broke, and she was aware of the utter inadequacy of the words. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I need to know.” She brushed a trickle of sweat off her hairline with the back of her hand. It was getting hot as the sun climbed higher. And Montana’s life depended on Kane pulling himself together. She needed to suck up her own pain and not cause him more. “Are you okay?”
Stupid question. He was a long way from okay. Neither of them could even see okay in their rearview mirror. But she meant to drive. His eyes shimmered. He looked agonized.
“Why?” he asked taking two steps toward her, lurching in the sand a little. It was the first time she’d seen him move awkwardly in the twelve years she’d known him. “Why?” he asked, eyes and face stark and bleak.
“Why what?” Her voice trembled more than his.
“Why did you think I’m unfit to be a father?”
She hadn’t said that, exactly, had she?
“I…” She took a step back. And another, her feet sinking in the gravelly sand that poked the soles of her feet. “I…you and I are so…different.” The sun, rising higher in the sky, now felt like needles in her eyes. She had to squint against the brightness and the morning breeze whipped her long, dark hair sideways across her face making Kane blur in and out of her vision.
“Bullshit.” He knocked away that excuse. “Why did you keep me apart from my child?”
“I don’t want to talk about this now,” she said nervous about what might pop out of her mouth and reveal just how desperately she’d been in love with him, and how much fear and insecurity had once ruled her life. Once, she reminded herself. Not now.
“We’re going to talk about it until I can wrap my head around how you could do something so cruel.”
“Cruel?” she echoed. She’d loved him. She’d wanted him to pursue his dream. She’d wanted him to be free, not to saddle him with a wife and kid he didn’t want. And she didn’t want to go from one cold, dysfunctional family to another with snarling tension and broken hearts. She’d wanted better for her child, better than she’d gotten.
“How could you do that?” he demanded, his voice a lash. “How can you not understand what the fuck you did by keeping our child a secret from me?” His breath sawed in and out.
The barely restrained anger in his voice sent panic rocketing through her. Her breath reduced to tiny puffs as if by every part of her getting smaller she could escape the growling fury that was battling to get out of Kane. She’d always sucked at confrontation and was completely unable to deal with Kane like this.
“I…I…” It struck her now how appropriate that pronoun was and had been. She hadn’t even thought about Kane’s feelings. Not really. She’d been protecting their child. And honestly herself as well. “I didn’t…” She was so bad at this. Thinking under pressure. Everything just froze up and shut down. Fight or flight. What a joke. She just froze when she panicked. She would have been the first person in her evolutionary tribe to be gobbled down by the saber tooth or whatever wild animal stalked her ancient ancestors.
“I knew you wouldn’t want a baby,” she finally whispered. “It was so obvious.”
He’d always used a condom. Always. And he’d suggested she go on the pill “just to be extra safe.”
Extra safe hadn’t been safe enough. Kane should come with a potency warning. She forced herself to meet his angry glare.
The sparks that had been practically shooting out of his eyes went out like a dead battery and something invisible inside seeped out. Kane fell to his knees in front of her.
Kane Wilder on his knees in the dirt.
Her mind just spun like the Apple icon with too many open tabs. Kane was so proud. So vividly alive and on fire and now he had crumpled to the sand like a discarded shirt.
She took the long, hard three steps toward him, and her fingers gently threaded in his curls. This time he let her touch him. She stroked her fingers once, twice, letting the dark silk curl through her fingers.
“Daddy.” Sky had been so absorbed in the seething family drama all of her own selfish making according to Kane, she thought bitterly, that she had forgotten she’d sent her daughter on a mission. Montana clutched a fistful of white flowers. “These will make you happy,” she said, so sweet and innocent, Sky felt like she needed a whip or one of Kane’s spurs to flagellate herself.
He looked at his daughter, his face and his eyes softer, some of the tension drained out of his body. He took the flowers.
“Mommy’s sorry, Daddy.” She looked so serious. “Mommy won’t be mean again. She promises.” Montana’s eyes swiveled toward her clearly worried. Of the few times she’d allowed herself to imagine a reunion with Kane, it had always been joyful, never this awfully painful and awkward. She didn’t know who hurt more. Him or her, and Sky had thought she was done being hurt by Kane a long time ago.
His eyes closed. He sucked in a breath. Sky couldn’t breathe. At. All. She felt like a criminal. Worse—all the reasons she’d kept her pregnancy and her child a secret seemed all wrong. But she knew, absolutely knew that the reality of Kane’s life would not make her reasons stand out so starkly black or white. Daddy a hero. Mommy a villain.
“She’s not mean, baby girl.” He leaned forward and kissed his daughter’s sweet curls. “She’s just… just…” And it seemed like for the first time since she’d known him, Kane Wilder was out of words.