by Paula Cox
I turn, and see why.
Kade stands in the bar, arms at his sides, temples pulsing, staring straight at my pregnant belly.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lana
We ride to the coffee shop in silence, battered by rain, Kade either unwilling or unable to say anything. His reaction confuses me. Of course, it’s a shock, but he’s chilly toward me, as though I have done something to hurt him. I don’t understand; I didn’t create this child alone. But Kade flinches when I put my arms around him from my place on the back of bike, grunts when I ask him for the helmet and then gestures for me to get it myself, and then when he parks outside the coffee shop, taps his foot impatiently. I half expect him to punch the wall, the way he’s acting.
We walk through hammering summer rain toward the door. The rain came suddenly and without warning; people in the park rush to nearby buildings, cramming into bakeries and coffee shops and restaurants. A few people crowd under the eaves of the town hall.
We sit in the café, order a coffee each, and I find myself thinking about the staff-members’ uniforms before I realize I am just trying to distract myself from the baby situation.
“Look, Kade—”
I’m about to tell him that the reason I kept it a secret was because I was scared of how he was going to react, that the reason I kept it a secret was that I didn’t think he’d understand. I’ll tell him that we conceived the child that first passionate night together and ever since then I’ve been desperate for the truth to come out. I’m just upset it came out in this way. As soon as Kade came in, Scud swaggered off, hands in his pockets, and Kade must not have been watching for very long because he let the freak go.
“Is it Scud’s?” Kade asks quietly.
Oh.
I lean back and look at him, anger of my own rising now. So that’s where this chilliness is coming from. He thinks I’ve been fucking Scud behind his back. He thinks my would-be assaulter and I have been having secret meetings, that I’ve been screwing Scud in the day and then waiting for Kade at night. I grip my coffee mug so hard it burns into my palm. I don’t care. Kade doesn’t know what just happened, but that doesn’t touch my anger. The man just tried to assault me. He insulted me. He belittled me. And now Kade sits there asking if I’m fucking the man, if the child is his, if . . .
“How dare you,” I mutter.
My dark tone takes him by surprise—heightened by the crack of thunder which accompanies my words. He tilts his head at me. “That ain’t an answer.”
“How dare you,” I repeat. “How dare you accuse me of that.”
“How dare I . . .” He seems to be about to shout at me, rising out of his seat, face red. Then he swallows the anger and drops back into it. He takes a deep breath and goes on in a restrained tone, but it’s clear he would like to shout at me. Shout at me . . . as if I have done anything even close to what he is suggesting. It’s not enough to have his VP try and assault me; now he himself is going to treat me like crap. “How dare I? How dare I, Lana? You told me you were going for coffee with your friend. And I come back in the middle of the day to see you and Scud in some kind of argument. Some kind of passionate fuckin’ argument. What do you and Scud have between you that you’d ever have an argument like that? I didn’t even know you’d said two words to each other. And then I come back and . . . and what the fuck, Lana. What the hell could you be arguing about?”
“So you think that Scud and I have been having an affair, and that I am carrying Scud’s child, and that that is what we were arguing about.”
He leans forward slightly, looking closely at me. The blue of his eyes is normally alluring. Now it is like two glinting sword-points are directed at me. “Well, were you?”
“This is ridiculous.”
“You don’t seem to want to answer.”
“I don’t want to answer because it infuriates me that you’d even ask!”
“That sounds like something a liar would say.”
“Take that back, Kade. Don’t you dare call me a liar.”
“Tell the fuckin’ truth then!” he explodes.
Several people in the café turn to look at the table, but as soon as they see the president of the Tidal Knights, they turn away.
“Stop speaking to me in that tone,” I say.
What I want, I know, is unreasonable in the current situation: I want him to apologize for ever doubting me and ask me to explain in a patient tone. But there’s too much emotion in the air, too much tension. Still, sitting here and being shouted at by Kade is not how I envisioned this moment.
“You think I would fuck Scud? Scud? Really? I hardly know the man.”
“You hardly knew me,” he mutters.
I push my chair back at that, the force of the words hitting me in the chest. My heart hammers and for a second I think it’s going to hammer right out and across the room, slapping into Kade’s face. That would be good. Use my heart to show how much he’s wounded my heart. I’m going a little mad; anger can do that to a person. He’s throwing the best night of my life in my face. He’s using it against me.
“Lana, I didn’t mean that . . .”
He keeps talking. On and on, telling me how he is sorry for that, he would never mean that, he spoke in anger.
“You said it,” I interrupt him. “You threw it in my face. So I guess we know now what sort of man you really are.”
“I didn’t fuckin’ mean it.”
He growls.
“Don’t growl at me,” I say. “I am disgusted with you. I am truly disgusted. I thought you respected me more than this.”
“You’ll have to leave the club,” he says. “If you’ve done what it looks like you’ve done, you’ll have to leave the club. I haven’t so much as looked at another woman the whole time I’ve been with you, and you won’t even answer a simple goddamn question.”
“The question doesn’t deserve an answer.”
I release my coffee mug. My palm is scalded red. I open and close my hand and the raw skin aches and sends pain shooting up my arm.
“You see—saying stuff like that doesn’t make me hopeful.”
I am so tired today of men looking as me as though it’s my job to make them feel some particular emotion. Scud with his expectant make-me-happy stare and now Kade with his expectant answer-my-question stare. And I should answer his question. It’s simple enough, despite what I say. But it’s the asking of it that annoys me. I trusted this man, perhaps I still do on some level, and here he is asking me if I betrayed him, willing to believe that I did. Not giving me the benefit of the doubt for a second.
I sip my coffee, lukewarm now, and watch Kade over the top of the mug. He works the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of another, clicks his neck from side to side, and all the while stares at me with those penetrating eyes. I keep telling myself: He is willing to believe I have been fucking Scud behind his back. Each time I think it, anger surges up in my belly like razor-winged butterflies, cutting through me, making it so all I want to do is lie down, hunched up, wait for the tension to pass. A cocktail of hormones and genuine outrage deep in my belly.
“It’s not my job to make you hopeful,” I say. “It’s not my job to make you trust me.”
“Lana. Listen. Tell me whose child it is.”
“Do the math, Kade.” I sigh. I am tired. The anger is making me weary. “I haven’t been with another man since we met—since over a year before we met, in fact. You are the only man I’ve been with.”
“That means . . .” His eyes move from my face down to my belly.
“That means your swimmers are the only ones who have come anywhere near my eggs, congratulations.”
Despite the sarcasm and weariness in my voice, I would let go of my anger if Kade jumped up, walked around the table, wrapped his arms around me, kissed me. I would let go of it without a doubt. This moment is too important for that. But Kade does none of that.
He says, “So there’s nothing going on with you and Scud.”
/> When he says that, all I can think is that for the rest of my life, when I remember this moment, it will be stained with that comment.
I stand up.
“Where are you going?”
“Anywhere—somewhere away from you.”
He gestures at the window. “You’ll get drenched.”
“Then I’ll get drenched. I can’t stand to look at you. You’ve ruined this. You’ve basically called me a whore to my face and I won’t stand for it.”
I march to the door, throw it open, and step out into the lashing rain.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Kade
Goddamn it, this relationship shit is hard. For a second after Lana just walks away, I sit here trying to get my head around it all. So she and Scud weren’t—of course they fuckin’ weren’t. I was an asshole for thinking that. Which means Scud must’ve been bothering her in some way. But he’ll deny it, and it wouldn’t look too good for the president to start on his VP, especially at a time like this, on the word of a woman . . .
Fuck, my mind ain’t where it needs to be.
I jump up and follow Lana across the café, out into the rain. She paces down the street, head held high. Normally, a woman walks away like this, making me chase her, and I just let her go. I never want to be the man chasing a woman down the street. But she’s the mother of my child; my child is in her belly. I want to sit down, take a moment, process it. I want to tell Duster. I want to hold Lana. I want all of this but she just keeps walking away from me through the rain.
I jog after her, take off my leather and lay it over her shoulders.
Rain lashes into our faces.
“This is stupid,” I say. “We should go inside.”
“So you can insult me some more?”
“Goddamn, Lana. How the fuck was I supposed to know?”
“If you’d waited for an explanation, instead of accusing me of fucking Scud, you would’ve known much sooner.”
She walks directly through a puddle, drenching her legs.
She’s going to catch hypothermia if she keeps on like this. Which would be bad enough if it was only herself she had to worry about. But my child—a man has to protect his child.
I pick Lana up, holding her in my arms, ignoring the way she squeals and kicks. “Let me go, Kade!” she punches me in the chest. “Let me go!”
My leather drops from her shoulders onto the sidewalk, into a puddle. I ignore it and carry Lana up the stairs to the town hall. I set her down out of the rain. “Wait here.” I collect my leather, rain-soaked, flecked with mud, and then return to her.
She’s soaked, hair plastered to her forehead, arms folded under her breasts. Breasts which are, I realize now I look at them properly, bigger than when we first met.
“So you’re having my baby,” I say. “What was all that shit with Scud about, then?”
“Do you really want to know?” She leans against the wall. “Or are you going to accuse me of asking for it?”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“You did. Just now. You basically did.”
I swallow. “Fine. I’m sorry for that. I won’t do it again.”
She tells me what happened, about Scud coming onto her, making lewd comments, grabbing her arm and chasing her around the table.
I feel rage grip me. It makes the rage I used to feel back in the trailer park, the rage that gripped me every time I found Duster tooled up or came home to find Dad passed out with whisky spilled over the floor, look small and meaningless. This is the rage a man can only feel when the mother of his child is threatened. The rage of needing to protect your own. And yet, my rage is muddled by the reality of the club. It’s vulnerable. We’re in a crisis. If I kicked the shit out of my VP—which is what I want to do—it might push things over the edge. The men might lose faith, might start questioning me.
“I’ll kill him,” I say.
“Oh, don’t be silly!” Lana snaps, waving a hand. “It was scary, and horrible, but he didn’t actually do anything.”
“He grabbed your wrist.”
“Yes, and I scratched him and made him let go.”
“If I hadn’t come in . . .”
“But you did.” Lana steps up to me, places her hand on my chest, a wet hand against a wet shirt against wet skin, cold and yet somehow warm. She’s always warm. “He’s not the point, Kade. The child is the point.”
“I know.”
The baby is mine. The baby is mine. The baby is mine. Three times isn’t enough for it to really hit me. Hell, I don’t think three-hundred would be enough. I place my hand atop Lana’s.
And then she says it, says something I can’t say back, not now, not with the club at risk, not when I have to be strong.
She says, “I love you, Kade.”
I should say it back. It’s true. I know it’s true. I feel it in my bones. I feel it all over. But if I say it, I will be letting something in. Letting in feelings I have never let in before. Who knows what could happen? It’d make me weak. It’d make me start caring more than I should. It’d make me question everything. Maybe we’d be out in gunfight with the Italians and I’d have to be fearless but all I’d be thinking about is how I have a woman and a child to take care of. Maybe it’d turn me into a coward.
She looks at me expectantly. I should say it. I should. It’d be easier to say it if I didn’t feel it. Then I could just lie. Keep her happy. But I do feel it. And feelings get a man in my line of work killed damn quickly.
She takes a step back. “Oh,” she says. “I thought—oh.”
Say it, man. Say it. Say it!
I don’t, can’t. Not now.
The rain tap-tap-taps against the roof of the town hall. At the other side of the shelter, a group of kids stand in a circle smoking cigarettes, and an elderly couple sits on a public bench, looking peacefully out at the summer rain.
“I’m still moving to Seattle with Terry,” Lana says after a pause.
“Moving to . . .” With my child? “You’re not.”
“I’m not?” She coughs out a laugh. She’s trying to hold back tears, I realize. ’Cause I didn’t say I loved her back. I’m an asshole, that’s for sure, but I never claimed to be anything—“I am,” she snaps. “You don’t own me, Kade. Despite what you think, no man owns me. I am moving to Seattle with my friend and I am going to start looking out for myself again. That’s all I can do. I was an idiot for thinking anything else.”
“Lana,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. She’s in one hell of a mood today. Can’t blame her, but it doesn’t make it any easier. “You are not—”
“Stop fucking telling me what I am and am not doing!” she screams. The kids cackle madly from the other side of the shelter. The old couple flinches away. Lana bites her lip, and then whispers fiercely: “I am moving in with Terry, Kade. You’ve only ever seen me as property, anyway. Right from the start, you’ve just seen me as something which you can use whenever you want. And sure, maybe I’ve gone along with that. But that isn’t good enough for me anymore. I want my own life back. I’m not going to be a decoration for the clubhouse any longer. So I am going to move to Seattle with Terry and I am going to make a new life for myself. Don’t tell me what to do. I am not your bike, Kade. You can’t turn me on and off whenever you feel like it.”
“Lana—”
She glares at me and I know I’ve done something wrong. I know I’ve done many things wrong. I shouldn’t have questioned her about Scud. I should’ve been happier when she told me about the kid. I should’ve told her I loved her back. All these things, I should’ve done. But doing the right thing has never been one of my strengths.
“Don’t,” she interrupts. “Just don’t. I am done, Kade. If all you see me as is something to stick your prick in after a long day, I am done.”
She folds her arms, pouts at me.
Even now, I know I could fix this by telling her I love her. But that’s something I just can’t do. Not with all the other shit going on.
“This is my last night there,” she replies. “I’m moving tomorrow. I’m calling Terry as soon as we’re out of the rain.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lana