by K. L. Kreig
Pursing my lips, I push myself from the car and start toward the driver’s side but his low voice freezes me in place. “I didn’t cheat on you, Maverick.”
Then it fires me up. My laugh is cutting and nasty. I pivot back and practically fly into a rage, moving forward until I’m right in his face. “Is that so?”
He doesn’t move a hair. “That’s so.”
“You’re a fucking liar, Killian. Not only are you a cheater, you’re a goddamn liar, too. I overheard you and Kael in the alleyway that night. I heard every fucking word.” I stop and wipe a tear that had the audacity to wet my face.
“You don’t know what you heard.”
I shove him. Two hands on his chest pushing so hard he’s falling backward. But in a flash, he rights himself and my wrists are shackled between us. He’s squeezing so tight I wince.
“You got her pregnant.” God damn, that hurt to say.
His chest rises and falls fast. His eyes are practically feral. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You didn’t deny it.”
Silence.
“You didn’t deny it,” I repeat. In my mind, that went differently. I wanted it to be forceful, demanding. It came out weak and pathetic and all croaky instead.
“Maverick, please. Don’t do this.”
“Just say it.” I feel his heart racing beneath the palm of my hand. “I loved you, Killian. I waited for you. I wanted to marry you. I thought you wanted the same things I did. The same life I did.”
“I did,” he tells me with an impassioned plea. It’s so ripe with longing and truth, I almost believe him. “Fuck…I still do.”
My head starts shaking. It’s violent and jerky. I try to twist out of his hold before the bone-deep sorrow I feel inside unravels me. He only pulls me closer, tighter.
“Liar,” I whisper hoarsely, my muscles starting to weaken and fail. “You’re a liar. A goddamn liar,” I mumble into his chest as I let my head drop. He wraps his arms around me and hangs on as I wet his shirt with my anguish.
“The baby wasn’t mine, Maverick,” he says softly into my hair as he places his lips to my crown. “I didn’t have sex with Jillian.”
“Then why?” I ask, numb all over. What he’s saying makes no sense. Do I even care what the answer is now? It doesn’t make any difference. “Why did you marry her?” I ask again anyway.
His chest expands deep a couple of times. “The baby was my father’s.”
I jerk back. He lets me lean away but he doesn’t let me go. “What?”
“The baby was my father’s,” he says slower this time. So slow it sounds muddled.
Ohmygod. Oh my… “What—?”
“It’s true.”
Jillian was pregnant with Arnie’s kid?
“Did he…did he…” Oh my God…did he—
“No, Maverick. If he’d have raped her, he’d be rotting in a concrete cell right now. I’d have made sure of it.”
“Then it was consensual?” What the ever-loving fuck? Jillian was having an affair with Arnie Shepard? Mind. Completely. Blown.
“Yes,” he grits through clenched teeth.
“Did you know?” I gasp sharply. “Is that why you went to Florida?”
“Fuck no, I didn’t know. You think I would have let that continue under my nose?”
“No, I…of course not.”
“I went to Florida for exactly the reasons I told you. I needed to be my own man, Maverick. Make my way without either of our fathers’ interference. I was drowning here under them. I was doing well for myself there. One minute I was making plans for us and the next my whole fucking world was in ruins around me.”
I roll this all around in my head. It’s a jumbled mess and I’m still confused. “I don’t understand, Killian. I don’t understand why you didn’t just let your father’s due come to him? He stole from my father. He had an affair with a girl less than half his age. A girl who was like a daughter, for heaven’s sake. Why were you protecting him?”
“Why do you think?”
I say the only thing that makes sense. “Eilish?”
He nods. “Fuck knows my father didn’t deserve it, but I just couldn’t do that to her, Small Fry. She had a fucked childhood and my pops was all she had. For better, for worse, he was it. He was her world.”
I remember their story well. It was one Eilish told me often. How they met when Arnie studied abroad one summer in Ireland. She came from a poor family. Her dad was an abusive alcoholic. Her mother long gone. She worked three jobs trying to make ends meet but her father would drink and gamble it all away. Arnie strolled into a pub she waitressed at one night and according to them both, it was love at first sight. She told me many times over how he saved her from a life of destitution. They married six short weeks after meeting and when he returned to the states, he brought her with him. She was eighteen; he was twenty.
Killian straightens and drops his hold on me, pacing toward the river. I follow him. We stand on the bank looking down into the black waters below and I wait for him to be ready to tell me the whole story.
“Jillian called me in an absolute panic one night. Said she was in Pensacola and needed to see me. I picked her up and brought her back to my place. After a couple hours, she finally calmed down enough to tell me everything. Their affair had been brief. She regretted it. So did he. But then she missed her period and Richard found the pregnancy test because she was stupid enough to take it when she was at your parents’ house.” He stops and scrubs his face a few times with his hands. “She panicked. He demanded to know whose it was and she said the first person that popped into her mind.”
“You,” I mutter.
“Yeah, me. And you know, for all her flaws, your sister was not about to go against her beliefs and abort that baby. She was scared to death, but she wanted to keep it. I respected her for that, even if I was angry as fuck at what she did. At what he did.”
I think about Jillian having to handle that situation virtually alone. I can imagine the pressure from my father to marry and not tarnish the DeSoto name with a bastard child. He was old-school. I can also imagine how backed into a corner she must have felt not wanting to displease our parents. I find myself feeling a smidge sorry for her, even if it was her own doing.
“Anyway, I told her we’d work something out, but that I wasn’t marrying her because I loved you.”
“You told her that?” I ask, my heart beating a little faster.
“Yes.”
Empathy? Yeah…that was short-lived.
“A few days later, I get a call from Richard. They’d apparently been investigating my father for almost a year. He told me I had two choices: he would turn everything over to a federal prosecutor or I could come back to DSC, do the right thing by marrying Jillian, and he’d conveniently bury the evidence.”
“My father blackmailed you?” I ask in utter disbelief, the bile in my stomach churning.
“He pressured me, let’s put it that way.” He turns fully toward me now, addressing me directly. “I could have said no, Maverick. I could have said no and watched everything unfold. Saw my father go to jail. DSC would have gone up in flames, the scandal too much for them to handle. I was so pissed at the position your father and Jillian put me in, I almost did. I almost called his bluff. But then I thought of the fallout. How it would impact innocent people, including you and my mother and I knew I could either carry the weight of all that chaos or suck it up and just make the whole fucking thing go away with some conditions of my own.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me all of this?”
“You don’t know how many times I sat in front of your house at night wanting to bust down the door and do just that. But, fuck…I was committing a crime, Maverick. I couldn’t drag you in on that.”
My gaze falls. Reluctantly, I understand. I chew on my lip and push around the dirt pile underneath my feet. “Why didn’t she rub it in my face?”
He knows I’m asking about the pregnancy.
She certainly rubbed their marriage in my face every opportunity she got so there had to be a reason she didn’t with the baby.
“I threatened not to go through with it. I needed time to think. I wanted to be the one to break it to you. I could never find the right words. Then…”
His eyes glisten in the moonlight. They’re tears. It’s not for Jillian, though, I know that.
“When did she miscarry?” This is the part I’m not getting. They were engaged six months before they married.
“Two and a half months before the wedding.”
“Then why did you go through with it? The baby was the only reason you were marrying her, right?”
He waits for the light to go on. When it does, it’s blinding. “You were stuck.”
“Yep,” he agrees. “The paperwork was already signed. If I didn’t marry Jillian, it nullified my employment contract with DSC. If I divorced her before the terms of my contract were satisfied, it nullified it. The only way I could successfully leave both DSC and your sister was to hit that magic sales goal as fast as fucking possible.”
A memory surfaces. One I need an answer to. “So that day in the kitchen at my parents you told me you were close. That’s what you meant?”
I think he shuffles closer. I’m not sure. I know his voice drops. “Yes.”
My feet move a couple inches forward. “Then what would you have done?” I ask lowly. The headlights of a car rounding the curve briefly illuminate us. We both stay quiet as it passes and keeps going.
“I would have been free to leave DSC.”
“Would you have?”
He’s close enough now, his hand lands on my hip. His thumb starts circling around my hipbone as he answers, “Yes.”
“What about Jilly?” I rest a palm on the arm holding me.
His breath scatters over my face. It’s warm and smells of rum. “I was going to divorce her. She knew this was temporary. She’s always known.”
“Does she love you?”
“Yes,” he states matter-of-factly.
“So when my father died…”
“I already had divorce papers drawn up. Two days before his death I’d closed that deal. Richard knew I was leaving. So did Jilly.”
My head is reeling right now. That explains her sudden behavior change. I wait for the empathy to return. It doesn’t.
“And Kael?”
Killian’s body tenses. He winds his other arm around me and draws me flush to him so I have to crane my neck. “What about him?” He sounds angry, just like Kael does when I mention Killian’s name.
“Did he know you were divorcing Jilly and leaving DSC?”
Please say no.
“He did.”
My heart sinks. It falls to the ground at my feet, bleeding the whole way down. The empty space in my chest hurts so fucking much I can hardly breathe. Kael was trying to get me away from Killian before this whole thing blew up. If he had his way, I’d never have known.
I almost don’t want to ask, almost can’t stomach a truth that could bleed me dry, but I need to know how far down everyone’s deception goes. Including my husband’s. “Did he know about the baby? That it wasn’t yours?”
His lips thin out. His fingers flex against the small of my back and he briefly drags his gaze over my shoulder. With every second that passes the pins and needles I’m balanced on dig further into my skin. It’s excruciating, the wait.
Was everything I thought I knew about my husband a lie? My entire body floods with relief when he answers, “No. No one outside of me, Jillian, and my father knew.”
Killian focuses all his attention on me then. His eyes run over my face, his own softening as he studies me for so long my heart starts beating double time. Tucking an unruly lock of hair behind my ear, he cups my jaw in a tender hold. He thumbs my bottom lip and his breaths quicken, too. Love is absolutely pouring from him. It’s breathtaking, piercing, and warm. Just like it used to be: unreserved and untainted with events that poisoned it.
“I want you, Maverick. I’m in love with you. I always have been and I want us to be together. I want to marry you and move the fuck away from here and forget these insufferable years apart ever happened.”
He lowers his face to mine, giving me the time I need to turn if this isn’t what I want.
God forgive me, I don’t.
I close my eyes, let him slant his mouth over mine and kiss me for the first time in close to four years. When I lean into it instead of pulling away, he groans an unholy groan and takes my other cheek in his hand, too.
Then he’s kissing me with the same passion and fever I remember. He picks me up and carries me back to my car, laying me on the hood. He wedges himself between my legs and attacks my lips, my face, my throat. He laces my collarbone with love bites while he runs his hands up my torso and cups my breasts through my thin tank top, cursing when he finds my nipples pebbled through my unpadded bra. My legs wrap around his waist and he rocks his erection into my center. He mumbles my name so many times I lose count. I’m lost to everything but him and this familiar feeling he’s unearthed in me, never wanting it to end.
But then he stops. He leans his forehead to mine, works to catch his wind, and I’m reminded immediately of Kael. Of how he does this when his emotions overflow. Of how much he loves me. Of the fact I’m married and on the cusp of committing the most unforgivable sin possible.
Killian draws back, a pained look in the hard lines of his face. He weaves his fingers through my hair, drops a sweet kiss to my lips. “I know it’s wrong of me to ask you this. I know it will hurt Kael, and I’m truly sorry for that, but not sorry enough, I guess. Stay with me, Maverick. Divorce him and be mine. I don’t want one sordid night. I don’t want to be a dirty secret. I want forever. With you.” When I don’t respond right away he quickly adds with a quirk of his mouth, “I’m not above begging, Small Fry.”
The way he’s adoring me makes me want to bawl. He wants me. He’s never stopped. He wants to marry me and make all my dreams come true.
The conflict inside me is tumultuous and very fucking real. Either way, either decision I make, someone will end up hurt. He starts blurring under the moisture welling up. Everything I thought I wanted is looking me straight in the eye. It’s tangible. I can reach out and grab it.
All I have to do is say yes.
“Please,” he pleads thickly. “Please, Maverick. I don’t want to live without you anymore.”
His mouth finds mine again and I feel that kiss all the way through me. I wind my arms around his neck, canting my head to deepen our connection. One I’ve missed so much.
All I have to do is say yes.
Introspection is hard. No one wants to acknowledge their failings, their true feelings. Wants versus desires. Right versus wrong. It’s far easier most of the time to keep those thoughts dormant and safe where they lie. Especially when someone you love gets hurt at the end of it.
But true introspection—not just skimming the surface—is not only hard, it’s excruciating. Going way under the black and slogging through the muck, through the good, the bad, the unpleasant, takes a lot of fortitude. Turning over those moss-covered rocks, even the ones you don’t want to flip, is exhausting and gritty work.
Because what do we find when we dig that deep?
Answers, of course.
Answers to the questions we were asking all along.
And once we find them, we have to do something with them or what was the point of the entire gut-wrenching exercise to begin with?
I’ve spent the last two weeks digging and sifting through the sludge, remembering every little detail of my life with two incredible men I have always loved, just in very different ways.
Both Kael and Killian made mistakes. They kept secrets from me they shouldn’t have. But I’ve forgiven them because they also both sacrificed so much at the same time. Killian sacrificed me, yes, but Kael sacrificed everything, including his pride, to be with me when he knew I was still in love with his br
other. And that sacrifice can’t be overlooked either. Neither can the one he made four nights ago.
I think back to the conversation Kael and I had a few nights ago at two in the morning. It was heavy and heartbreaking and he did something completely unexpected. Totally selfless, as usual. He gave me an out.
“How long did you know?”
“Know what?” he hedges.
I sigh, tired of fucking games. Tired of lies, secrets, of being in the dark. Of beating around bushes with thorns that constantly make me bleed. “That Killian was divorcing Jillian.”
The quiet eats at me. I want him to tell me he didn’t know. That he wouldn’t keep something like that a secret, but then part of me can’t blame him either. He knows how Killian feels and telling me that Killian was going to be free of the drag that is my sister would have been like serving me up on a silver platter himself to his competition. I have to grudgingly admit I would have likely done the same thing if I were in his shoes.
“He told me the day he had the papers drawn up.” So two days before my father died.
“Did you do it?”
He huffs a laugh. “No. He didn’t even ask.”
That makes me feel a tad better. I guess. Maybe not.
“Maverick…” he starts, but then stops. Now the silence pushes us both down. It’s thick and hot and stifling. I feel the same foreboding I did in Saint Paul all those months ago. And now that also makes sense.
“I want you to know I’d do anything for you. I’ll never love another woman but you, Swan, but if…” He curses under his breath and that niggle in my stomach feels like knots twisting me up. When he speaks again, his voice is barely a whisper. “I know you love him. I know you’ve never stopped. And if he’s the one who makes you happy, if he’s the one you want, then I’ll understand.”
My eyes well and burn. My heart just took a thousand-foot nosedive. “You’re…” Oh my God. “You’re telling me to be with Killian?” I ask in disbelief.
His groan is filled with so much pain I feel it, even across the hundreds of miles that separate us. “Fuck no. I’m not telling you to be with him because it shreds me to fucking pieces to think of it. What I’m telling you is if that’s what you want, Maverick, then I will accept it. It’ll burn like a motherfucker, but…”