by K. I. Lynn
What was weeks ago an empty space was filled with furniture and toys.
Anything a growing girl would need.
Mom helped me with a list of all that I needed, and I picked everything out—a convertible crib, a dresser, armoire, a night stand, and a comfortable chair that rocked and swiveled.
Above the crib in perfect rose gold script wooden letters was her name—Kinsey.
It was all so perfect and all so ruined. It felt wrong, but why? Why was my love so wrong?
I did it so we could be together more, so that Kinsey would be comfortable in my home. So that maybe one day I could convince Roe they should stay. But she didn’t even let me show it to her. For weeks I’d kept my plans a secret and everything was perfect… until it was all gone.
I took another long pull from the bottle, then wiped the back of my hand across my lips.
All I wanted was her. It was a visceral need. Like she was the air that kept me breathing. How did I ever function before her?
The answer was simple—I didn’t. I existed, but I wasn’t living. With Roe, the world slowed down and the simple act of watching a movie with her brought me more joy than anything in years.
How was I going to go on without her?
I was a fucking disaster. That was the only way to describe it. The weekend was spent wallowing in my own misery, drowning in booze until the liquor cabinet was empty.
It took everything I had left in me to take a damn shower and get dressed on Monday morning.
The elevator pinged, and I winced against the sound. I let my feet carry me to my office on autopilot. There were some whispers on my path and more when I reached the door, but I ignored them. My foot tapped something on the floor, and I looked down to find a bag leaning against my door. On top sat my purple NYU T-shirt.
“Fuck,” I whimpered, feeling my chest rip open again.
It hadn’t even been forty-eight hours and she’d cleaned all traces of me from her apartment. Almost like if there was nothing left of mine, she could forget all about me.
But I knew that couldn’t be true because the ghost of her haunted my home.
I still didn’t understand why she’d pushed me away, why she’d broken up with me and torn my heart apart.
“Thane?” Crystal’s voice floated into my thoughts, pulling my attention away from the bag.
I turned toward the sound, and she gasped when she saw me.
“Oh, Thane.”
“What did I do wrong?” was all I said as I swallowed back tears. I wasn’t the kind of man prone to tears. In fact, the last time I could even recall crying was in the elevator with my mom when I was five. But something about my situation with Roe made fighting them almost impossible.
It was the same feeling as then—complete helplessness and abandonment from the one I loved.
Crystal ushered me into my office away from the prying eyes and ears.
I didn’t tell Crystal everything. It somehow felt like telling on Roe because Roe was a private person, and I never wanted to hurt her in any way.
“Are you going to give up? Because you look like you have.”
I shook my head. “I had to let go, get fucked up to dull the pain.” I met Crystal’s eyes that were filled with such sympathy. “I love her so much, but I just don’t know what to do.”
“Well, you know where she is right now…”
I straightened at that. I did know exactly where she was, but what was I going to say to get her to listen? I had no game plan.
But I needed to see her.
The whole morning was a waste. I was a wreck trying to think of anything, any sound reasoning that she might listen to.
Around noon an email with her name popped into my inbox and I practically fell over myself to read it. The emotion quickly died out. It was just a leftover from when she worked with me. An inquiry that took a long time to get back to her.
Were there more emails out there she was waiting to hear back from? More information that hadn’t yet made its way back?
I was up from my chair and out the door on a path to the marketing department before I could even grasp a single idea on how I was going to spin it from “who else are you waiting to hear from” to “I love you, please come back to me.”
When I drew closer, I watched her slip into a cube and after taking a sip from a coffee cup, set it down on her desktop. She looked beautiful, even if her eyes were puffy and red.
“Roe.”
She froze at the sound of her name and looked up. Our eyes locked, and I could see my pain mirrored in her. She shook her head, her body trembling like she was stifling tears. With another shake of her head, she turned and slipped out of her cube and headed down the hall away from me.
“Roe,” I called, trying to get her to stop.
She turned on me, her hands up, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. “No. Just go back to your office.”
“I just want to talk.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Please,” I begged. I just needed her to stop locking me out.
“We’re done, Thane. Please, just leave me alone.”
The way she backed up, the tears welling in her eyes, told me the truth—she didn’t want to break up. She did it for some misguided fear that ran rampant through her mind, festering until it became a truth in her own head.
How was I supposed to combat that? Convince her that we should be together?
Roe was her own worst enemy when it came to her heart.
I needed help, guidance, just fucking anything to set my world right again.
I stormed into James’s office, surprised to find Lizzie there.
“Thane?” he asked, his eyes wide as he took in my appearance.
“James, Lizzie, you need to help me. What did I do wrong?” I asked as I paced in front of them. The agitation, the anger, the despair needed an outlet.
He shook his head. “I can’t help you there.”
“But you know, don’t you? Tell me!”
“Calm down.”
“I can’t! Not until I have her back. I can’t fucking stand this.” I thrust my hands into my hair. “She’s not talking to me, and I… How do I get her back? How do I get her to see I’m not going anywhere? That she can trust me?”
That she can love me.
James cleared his throat, gaining my attention.
“James,” Lizzie said, giving James a warning look.
He looked to his wife. “They’re both my friends, Lizzie, I’m not going to let the two idiots suffer.”
“Tell me,” I begged.
It was Lizzie who spoke up. “Her feelings for you scare her. She can see that you care, but she thinks you’ll get tired of playing house—”
“I didn’t—”
She held up her hand. “I know, but those are her words.” Lizzie sighed and before I could speak, she let out the hard truth I needed. “The saying is if you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was meant to be. She set you free, so you better come back with force. Prove to her you’re not going anywhere.”
“I made a room for Kinsey,” I admitted. “A room for her to grow into, but I didn’t get to show her.”
That made Lizzie smile. “That can’t hurt. She’s scared of her feelings, scared you’ll leave her.”
“I never want to do that. But if she won’t talk to me, how do I fix this? I need her.”
They looked to each other, then back to me. “The fix is different for every relationship. It hasn’t always been rainbows and sunshine in our relationship, but we got through it. You will, too, you just have to figure out how to get through her thick skull first,” James said.
I blew out a hard breath. “She thinks I’d be better off without her, but she’s so wrong. I was better with her than I’d ever been before.”
“Tell her that,” Lizzie said. “Tell her everything.”
“She won’t let me near her. How do I get her to see me? It’s not like I can kidnap Kinsey…” I trailed off,
the idea hitting me like lightning.
“No. That is an absolute no! You can’t do that,” Lizzie said, her eyes wide.
I looked between them, the answer suddenly clear. “I have to go.” I turned, not even waiting for a response, and was gone.
“Oh, shit,” I heard just before the door closed.
It was a longshot and would take careful planning and some help from Linda and convincing of Stacia, the woman who ran the daycare center.
It was a harebrained idea that could go horribly wrong, but I needed something drastic if I was going to get her to understand how much I needed her. And I definitely needed her. Always.
That was never going to change.
It’d been three days since Thane had tracked me down in the office, and thankfully he hadn’t tried again. I’d kept to myself, not wanting to talk to anyone about anything.
Which was why having an all-afternoon pow-wow with Donte drained me before I even walked into the conference room.
“Hey, are you okay?” Donte asked, waving his hand in front of my face.
I blinked at him, his deep brown eyes staring at me, his brow furrowed.
“I’m sorry, where were we?” My concentration had been shit. I was lucky I’d been able to accomplish what I had the past few days. I desperately needed to stop spacing out.
He heaved a sigh and sat back. “Have you slept at all this week?”
The puffiness of my red eyes was a dead giveaway there. “Not really.”
“Eaten?”
I shrugged. “Maybe yesterday.”
“How’s Kinsey?”
His rapid-fire questions almost made me dizzy.
“She’s fine.”
“How’s Thane?”
My lips pursed, and I blinked some tears away.
“Okay, there’s the cause. Did you two break up?”
I nodded.
“Was he just in it because you were acting as his assistant? Does he just like to bang women who work for him, then throw them away? Do I need to get a tarp and a shovel?”
I shook my head, unable to even crack a smile at his tarp and shovel comment. “I broke up with him.”
He froze and stared at me. “Why?”
“Because I love him.”
Donte leaned back and narrowed his eyes. “What kind of fool answer is that?”
“I couldn’t take it if he left me.”
“So your logic was to leave him first? That’s crazy talk.” His eyes were wide, and he threw his arms in the air in apparent exasperation. I’d be exasperated with me too.
“I didn’t have a choice,” I tried to stress, but it was closer to a whisper with little strength behind it.
“Of course you did. Not reacting like an idiot is a pretty big choice.”
“You don’t understand.”
He held his hands up. “Oh, no, I’ve never had my heart broken. No clue what that feels like.”
I huffed at him. “He deserves better than me and my baggage.”
“Listen, Roe, and I’m saying this from a place of love. I saw the two of you together more than once. Hell, everyone in the office saw you two together and some even heard.”
Heard? Oh, fuck, no. Please say he doesn’t mean what I think he means.
“That man looks at you like you are the moon and the stars. Why do you think he’d leave you?”
“Because they all leave me. Every man who has ever been in my life has left me, and I couldn’t let it happen again. Not when I feel so much.” A tear slipped out and I wiped it away.
Donte’s lips pressed into a straight line. “Were you happy with him?”
I nodded. “So happy. I’ve never had a man take care of me like that.”
“Then why would you throw him away?”
It was becoming impossible to convince anyone why when the only reason I knew was that he could do better than me.
By Friday, I was a zombie. I could count the number of hours I’d slept in the week since I broke things off with Thane, and they barely hit the double digits. Food? My stomach was in knots and my heart hurt so much that I couldn’t fathom actually eating. Personal hygiene was just enough that I could go into work every day and do my job. Although I seriously contemplated taking some personal time, I also didn’t want to feed into the rumors circulating rapidly through the office.
Thank God it was quitting time and I could grab my daughter and just go home, only I was in for a rude awakening when I arrived at the daycare.
“Kinsey isn’t here, Roe,” Stacia said in surprise when I arrived to pick up Kinsey, her eyes wide in horror.
The blood in my veins turned to ice. “What do you mean she isn’t here?” Did Ryn come and take her? Where was she?
“That man, Thane, came to pick her up. He said you got delayed.”
I blinked at her. “Th-Thane picked her up?”
Stacia nodded. “Oh, my God, Roe, I’m so sorry.”
I shook my head. There was no way Thane would hurt Kinsey, but still, my mind was in overdrive. Why did he pick her up? What was he up to?
“I told him I might be late. He probably just assumed I was and picked her up just in case,” I told her. Because even now, I trusted Thane with Kinsey.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t about to kick his ass.
“Is that true?” she asked. I nodded, and she blew out a breath. “Thank God. I was so afraid.”
“Everything is fine, Stacia. Just a miscommunication,” I assured her. “We’ll see you on Monday morning.”
“Okay, we look forward to it. Have a good weekend.”
“You, too.” I waved at her and headed back out the door.
My jaw clenched as I made my way down the street, pulling up my phone and dialing Thane. It rang, again and again, before his voicemail picked up.
I redialed, and it rang again.
“Answer the phone!” I screamed in frustration as I picked up the pace. The daycare was only a few blocks from my place, but it felt like miles. My heart hammered in my chest, stressed with anxiety.
Roe: Where is she?
I texted him in hopes he would respond that way, and he did almost immediately. Which meant he didn’t answer the phone on purpose.
Thane: With me.
Roe: Where?
Thane: Home.
Considering he didn’t have a key to my house, that meant his house. With each step, my anger grew. He knew how much I loved her, how much I protected her, so why did he go and do something so stupid?
I answered the pounding on my door to a tornado of fury blowing past me.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” she growled as she whipped through in search of Kinsey.
It was possible, but I didn’t care. She was in my home, a home I was desperate to have her in full time. I knew I was about to get my ass reamed, but I didn’t fucking care.
“We need to talk,” I said as I followed her into the living room.
“The hell we do.” She ran to Kinsey, who was happily playing on the floor.
“She’s fine,” I assured her.
Roe turned to me, her eyes alight with anger and unshed tears. “Why? What the hell were you thinking?”
“I was thinking there was only one way I was going to get you alone.”
She shook her head and packed up the few toys and snacks into Kinsey’s diaper bag. “We have nothing to talk about.” She was vibrating with anger, her fury emitting into the space between us as her head snapped toward me. “Why would you do that to me? Why would you scare me like that?”
I knelt down next to her. “That wasn’t my intent.”
“Just because it wasn’t your intent doesn’t mean it was right.”
“You’re right, but I’ve been miserable this last week.”
She paused, her jaw clenching. “Good.” Her bottom lip trembled, and I knew she didn’t mean it.
“Will you let me tell you why I did it? Picking her up today?”
Kinsey squirmed out of her grip and crawled
her way over to me, then stood. Roe watched carefully as Kinsey’s little hands patted my cheeks.
“Dada,” she cooed at me. I froze, the small word striking my heart, and looked over to Roe, who stared wide-eyed at us.
Her gaze flickered to mine. “I didn’t teach her that.”
I wasn’t sure I would ever have the desire for children again after I lost my son, but the second I laid eyes on Kinsey in Roe’s arms that night, I’d begun to change. My chest clenched, knowing the perfect little toddler in front of me thought I was her father.
And I loved it.
Visions of Roe beside me, beautiful mixes of us all around us, made me long for something I had convinced myself I didn’t want.
I was so in love with Roe. Not just her, but Kinsey as well.
I wanted to be Kinsey’s father, and the father to an entire brood of Thane and Roe Carthwright babies.
“That’s why,” I whispered as I pulled Kinsey into my arms and pressed my lips to her forehead.
Roe was frozen as she stared at us. My gaze met hers.
“What I did today was drastic, and I’m so sorry I made you worry, but it was the only way I could get you to see me.”
“You could have found another way,” she ground out.
“Could I? Would you have seen me?” I asked. The anger in her features faltered. “You had every scrap of me packed up and gone within hours of breaking my damn heart. For what?”
“To save myself. To save Kinsey.”
At least I finally had an honest answer. We were a fucking mess of abandonment issues.
“I’m going to say this now, and I will repeat it until I get it through that thick skull and the wall around your heart. Are you listening?”
She nodded.
I made certain our eyes were locked when I said the next words.
“I love you, Roe.”
Her eyes widened and watered, then she began shaking her head.
“I love you so much.”
“No.”
“I love Kinsey and I want you both to be mine.”
“Stop,” she begged, her bottom lip trembling. “You made it clear.”
“What clear?”