Barely Breathing(33)

My heart thumped wildly. He’d mentioned drug use in his past, but hearing he might have been willing to kill over it took me aback.

“You’re not that guy anymore, though,” I said. “You own a business now. We all make mistakes, Kane.”

He laughed bitterly. “That’s not even the worst of it, Viv.”

“Then tell me. I want to know.”

“Why?”

“I want to know you.”

He shook his head, his eyes distant now. “You won’t want to anymore. You want it all, Viv? You want everything?”

His cold mocking of my earlier words made me shudder. I held his gaze and waited.

“Fine,” he said. “I have a daughter.”

I felt my eyes widen with surprise. That, I hadn’t expected.

“A daughter I’ve never met,” he continued. “She’s nine. Lives an hour away and I’ve never even laid eyes on her. I found out I’d gotten a woman pregnant when she came to visit me in jail. It was too late to do better by then. I wasn’t there when my daughter was born. I never held her. I didn’t so much as buy her a single f*cking diaper. How much more worthless can a man be?”

The hard hatred in his eyes was for himself, then. My heart ached for him. I took a deep breath and spoke softly. “What about now? How long have you been out of prison?”

“Four years. I paid all the back child support I should’ve paid Cori when I was in prison. I didn’t have the money then and had no way to get it. Now I send child support and presents for my daughter’s birthday and Christmas. I don’t have a right to more. Cori raised her alone. She doesn’t owe me shit. Probably hates my guts.”

The American Girl bag in his closet at work. My heart broke as I realized who it had been for.

“Cori is . . . ?”

“The woman I got pregnant. We’d f*cked a few times, that was it. Nothing serious. But I owed her a hell of a lot more than she got.”

“What’s your daughter’s name?”

His face crumbled with emotion. “Brooklyn.”

I took another deep breath in and out. It was cold, so I wrapped my arms around myself to ward off the chill. “Okay. What else?”

Kane scowled at me. “What else?”

“Yeah. You went to prison for armed robbery, used to do drugs . . . have a daughter. What else?”

“Are you f*cking with me? Like that’s not enough?”

I rubbed my hands up and down my upper arms to warm myself. “Is there anything else?”

He gave me a confounded look. “No.”

“How long has it been since you used drugs?”

“Ten years. Last time was the day before I got arrested.”

I nodded. “So you’re clean, you don’t plan to hold up any more gas stations and you support your daughter?”

“Yeah.”

“I can live with all that.”

He drew his brows together and studied me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that if you thought knowing those things would scare me off, it doesn’t.”

“Are you out of your f*ckin’ mind?”

“Everyone makes mistakes.”

“Mistakes? Abandoning the mother of your child and your child is more than a mistake.”

“Abandonment is willful. You were incarcerated.”

He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. “Is this because you deal with deadbeat parents in your job every day? Are you just numb to it?”

“A deadbeat parent is one who doesn’t support their child. And you do.”

“I’ve never met her.” He gave me an incredulous how am I still inside your apartment right now look.

“You should do something about that.” I reached for the fuzzy blanket hanging on the back of my couch and wrapped it around my shoulders.

Kane’s eyes held mine as I walked over to him and wrapped my arms around his neck, bringing the blanket around both of us.

“I’m glad you told me,” I said softly.

He let out a ragged breath. “I just never thought . . . you’d still want me. You’re such a good person, Viv.” He wrapped his hands around my waist and I smiled.

“You are, too. You guard your goodness like a secret. But I see it.”

He pulled me in close, his eyes brimming with emotion. My breasts pressed against his warm, hard chest just below his heart, where I saw a letter ‘B’ tattooed.

“For Brooklyn?” I whispered, tracing it with a fingertip.

He nodded and I stretched up on my toes to kiss him.

His kiss was hot and hard. Insistent. Demanding. The fire inside me roared back to life. We were hands and mouths and a tangle of desperate need. The blanket fell to the floor, forgotten. He grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled it back, exposing my neck to his hungry mouth. After just a few seconds of trying to unclasp my bra, he muttered a curse and pulled the back straps apart until they gave way with a snap.

I was breathing hard as he took in my bare breasts, flicking his tongue over one nipple before taking it in his mouth and sucking on it.

A moan tore free from my mouth as the soft hair of his beard and his warm, wet mouth turned my nipples hard and deliciously sensitive. When he tugged one between his teeth, I sank my nails into his shoulders and cried out for more.