What Doesn't Kill Her (Cape Charade #2)(8)

“I’m not the person I used to be,” she blurted. “Before.”

“No, you’re not. You’re not the Ceecee I knew in Pennsylvania who was frail and fragile and needed someone to care for her. You’re tough.”

It sounded like a critique. “I like being tough.” No one can hurt me when I’m tough.

“You’re a good role model for our daughter.”

There. He hadn’t said he liked her the way she was now. Which meant he didn’t, and she guessed that answered the question about them becoming lovers.

That was fine. She didn’t want to be lovers, either. Look at the mess she’d made of everyone’s lives last time she slept with him: a shot to the cranium, a baby her body sheltered, nurtured and produced while she hovered between life and death, a year forgotten. Better to stay cool and distant, be friends, like civil divorced parents of the same child.

Yes. That was perfect.

Too bad she remembered...things. Warm hands, gentle caresses. Brown eyes, heated glances. A man’s body and her body, and nights without end... For the first time since she’d moved into his home, Kellen allowed herself that deep rare upsweep of sexual arousal Max could so easily create.

Not the time to remember all that! Not here, not now! Focus!

She didn’t sound breathless at all as she said, “I don’t know that you approve of our daughter wanting to be like me.”

“It would be good if you could explain to her in a way she understands why she needs training before she behaves like LightningBlast.” His emphasis echoed with sarcasm.

“Me explain it to her?” Kellen laughed, then grabbed her stitches and waited for the pain to subside. “She never listens.”

“You’d be surprised. She hears everything and that little mind is quick and nimble.” He leaned forward and looked into Kellen’s eyes, not like a lover, but like a medical professional accessing her condition. “This possibly isn’t the time, but we have to talk and the pain pills are cracking that clamshell you keep so tightly closed.”

“Talk? About personal stuff?” Oh, no.

“You sound like me when my sisters want to discuss emotions and feelings. I wonder if I’m as annoying as you are?”

She supposed she should be crushed instead of wanting to smack him. “What can be so important that it can’t wait?”

“Why were you crawling through the shrubs?”

“Um.” Busted! “What?”

“That day you rescued Roderick Blake, why were you crawling through the azalea hedge?”

She wet her lips. Obviously, a good plan, waiting until the pain pill took effect to interrogate her, and one she had been trained by the Army to circumvent.

She could lie or pretend not to understand.

But two things—they might not be lovers, but they were in a relationship; they were the parents of a child, and deceit wasn’t a good option. If he asked why she’d been crawling in the shrubs, he probably had unassailable evidence that she had. “Obviously, my skulking skills aren’t all I hoped.”

“My mother saw you.” He gestured out the window.

Yes, the back of the winery was clearly visible from the house, and his mother did not like Kellen. “Of course she did.”

“Three days in a row.”

Kellen took a long breath.

He didn’t wait. “You were hiding from Rae.”

She let out the breath with a whoosh.

“She comes home from school, excited to tell her new mommy about her day, you listen for a half hour, send her for a snack and you sneak away.”

“She’s a lovely child.” Kellen meant it.

He spoke softly, “But she’s not your child.”

“I know she is!” Really, she did.

“You know it in your mind. You don’t know it in your heart.”

What kind of man said this stuff? “She’s a nice little girl.”

“She is a nice little girl.” He leaned back, away from her, and wrapped his hands around one knee, and his dark eyes shone with anger.

Kellen suspected at least some of it was directed at her.

He looked at her. “What I’m trying to say is—you don’t love Rae.”

“I like her.”

“You’re her mother, but to you, she’s merely someone’s nice child.”

Kellen hadn’t understood before. Now she began to glimpse the depth of the tragedy being played out in this home.

Max hadn’t dreamed it was possible for her to return, and when he saw her again, he thought, or hoped, the two of them could once again fall in love.

But Rae stood between them.

They couldn’t create a family because Kellen didn’t feel the depth of emotion for Rae a mother would feel. Maybe if she hadn’t been in the military... Maybe if she hadn’t been so careful to do no more than form friendships... “I don’t know what to say. I wish—”

“I wish, too. I had hoped that time and exposure would begin to form a love between you, but if you’re crawling through bushes to get away from her, that’s not working.”

Kellen leaked tears. She wiped them off on her sleeves. In a tiny voice, she asked, “Do you want me to go?”

“No! No, I’m not saying that.”