Thin Love (Thin Love, #1)(117)

They are joined by another boy, this one younger than Keira’s boy, with Leann’s strong nose and arched cheekbones. The kids speak to Leann, ask Keira a question, but her answer is brief, hurried as her gaze sticks to Kona’s and that worried, anxious look on her face exaggerates.

Kona wonders what has Keira nervous; what about seeing him has her nodding her boy away, has her distracted when he kisses her forehead and turns from her. And then, Kona sees it. Sees himself. The cleft in his chin, the small, faint freckles on his cheeks, the same shape and color as Kona’s; the wide shoulders, the sloped nose. This boy could have been Kona at sixteen. And when the realization hits Kona, when his eyes follow the boy as he saunters off with the same, distinct gait Kona had never managed to get rid of, he feels his knees buckle and the quick burn of bile clotting the back of his throat.

The boy is his. Keira’s son. His son. He knows it without catching more than a glance at him. It is Kona’s dark, hooded eyes he sees in the boy; younger, brighter. It is Kona’s skin, just a shade lighter than his own dark complexion; it is his frame, wide and looming.

That is his son.

He has a child. He’s had a child for sixteen years and she never told him.

Kona feels the nauseous wave quivering around his gut, but he holds it off, watches the boy disappear into the Market crowd, gaze transfixed by the similarities, how familiar this strange boy is.

Finally, he turns, seeking her out and despite his shock, the unbelievable realization that has him questioning what to think, to say, to feel, he is unsurprised to find Keira standing just in front of him.

How could she not tell him? All this time and she never told him.

“Kona…” she says, a quick, forced smile tugging at the corners of her mouth as though she hadn’t completely betrayed him.





He is scared. Keira sees it in the way his eyes move around; that frightened, fearful desperation she’d seen in the mirror for years. Kona does not know what he should feel and her heavy weight of shame, of guilt doubles in size and lays right on Keira’s chest.

She thinks of reaching for him, a small touch that would calm him, but then Kona takes to raking his fingers over his face and Keira knows hers is the last touch he needs. Finally, he blinks, head shaking, eyelids shifting to narrow slits. “You did this. You… I can’t believe you did this to me.”

Keira doesn’t like how loud he speaks those words. There are too many people in the Market. Too many eyes that recognize his face. Too many people that could glance between him and her son and make an automatic connection.

Ransom knows nothing about his father. For years she’d fielded questions, put him off with vague responses about his father’s identity. He is a bright kid, of course he is, but as he grew older, the questions stopped. He didn’t want to search because, she likes to think, he’d realized the topic wasn’t one that made her comfortable. She’s kept her boy safe. She kept him guarded from his father’s tyrannical mother. She kept him in a bubble that threatened to burst right there in the Market.

Kona draws nearer and his voice doesn’t lower. Keira takes a breath and a step, enters his personal space. It was something she could never avoid doing when they were younger. He pulls her in. He always pulled her in and sixteen years later, he is doing it again.

“Please,” she says, unable to meet his eyes. She watches the quick movement of his chest, the quiver of his collar as his breathing accelerates. “Please, Kona. Not here. Not now.” She says the last word and forces her eyes up, catches the deep anger between his black irises.

She watches him guarded, trying to measure if it would return; that twisted, deadly connection they had. It was a virus, a plague on sense. He wasn’t only capable of pulling her to him, drawing him into his space like a magnet. Them, together, had been a very bad thing. It always had been. The it of them was electric; it had transformed her once. It had freed her, made her forget, for a moment, who she wanted to be. It made her forget sense and reason and logical behavior. That it of them was like a fuse flirting near a lit match; inches away from igniting fully.

His eyelids become so narrow that she can barely manage to see the whites of his eyes and she knows the it is teetering between them; a familiar, dormant danger that she has no intention of recharging.

“Please,” she says again, hoping that her voice is soft. Hoping that he can hear the desperation in her tone, that worried need for reason in this situation. It… Them… could not be contained once rekindled and she will not let things happen here. Not when her son lingers feet away. Not when every eye in the Market watches them.

Finally, Kona’s features relax and she sees the tight set of his shoulders lessen.

But when he speaks, his anger is a full bodied well of near rage. “Fine,” he says, nodding once, as though his mind is sorting through the information, the realizations and trying to calmly organize them into logic and sense. Again his head moves and his hackles go up—arms crossing so tightly that she watches the thick veins in his biceps bulge against his tan skin.

When he pulls out his wallet to retrieve a card, Keira steps back, unable to make her eyes continue to meet his.

“My cell is on this.” He extends his hand and the card trembles between his fingers. His anger she understands. Him being calm, being rational, was something she’d never seen from him. “I expect a call this afternoon.” She would have never expected him nervous.