Thin Love (50 page)

“Mom!” he hears the kid call and Kona feels an instant wave of disappointment settle in his chest. She’s married? Had she completely forgotten him and made a life with someone else? His eyes follow the kid; a boy around sixteen. He towers over her and Keira has to stretch her neck to meet his eyes. Back to Kona, the boy speaks to Keira, moves his hands, but she does not seem to hear him. Keira’s gaze has already returned to Kona and the look of fear darkens the slight shadows under her eyes.

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.

“Okay,” she says, reaching for his offered business card. When their fingers brush and she feels the smooth zip of electricity that had first pulled them together all those years ago, her eyes move on their own, straight into his. She knows he feels it too. That, at least, had not been buried with time. The attraction, the chemistry that she once excused away as first love. “I… I—” she can’t find words sensible enough, worthy enough of this situation. How do you excuse away something like this? What reason was rational enough for keeping someone’s child from them? Nothing she says would erase the scowl from his face, would make their bodies relax.

Kona attempts a step away from her, a shuffle of his feet that he doesn’t quite manage before he turns around, before he is inches from her face. “Of everyone…
everyone
, I never thought you could be this cruel.”

“It’s complicated, Kona.”

“It’s cruel. Complicated or not, Keira, it’s fucking cruel.”

His home felt too intimate for this. He didn’t want Keira there and Kona would not meet her at his mother’s home. Those two women had always hated each other. It would be a weird, awkward meeting and he didn’t need his mother interfering. She’s was good at that, always has been. If Keira the woman was anything like the girl Kona once loved, then there would be words, anger, shouts and Kona didn’t want his mother in the middle of it.

When Keira called a few hours before, he could hear the worry, the fear in her voice. She should be worried. She should be nervous. Keira had hurt him worse than anything he’d ever done to her.

He wasn’t sure them meeting in a hotel room was exactly smart, but he knew his anger had quieted the earlier feelings of desire he felt the moment he saw her. One call and his credit card number had emptied the floor. They would have this conversation in the quiet and empty space of a hotel room. He didn’t think about the bedroom behind him. He wouldn’t need to. It would take everything in him to stop screaming.

He had a son; a nearly grown son. He shook his head again trying to recall the boy’s face. He’d known him instantly, felt drawn to him just as he had been to his mother all those years ago when she’d put on a front and threatened him not to slack on their joint project. Same as with Keira, something shouted in his subconscious that this boy was his. He doesn’t need a test to tell him the truth.

Kona walks to the bar, uses his fingers to fist out a few cubes of ice and fills his glass with Scotch. The liquor burns his throat and he craves the sensation. He hopes it will quell his anger. He hopes it will stop his hands from shaking. They’ve not stopped shaking since this morning when he watched Keira walk away with Leann yammering in her ear.

He hadn’t told anyone what he’d discovered. He didn’t know how to tell anyone. Another swig from his glass and Kona sits in the plush hotel recliner, thumb and index finger on his temples as he tries to rub away the tension there. He thinks of the life the boy had to endure. Kona had missed everything, absolutely everything. His birth, first steps, first words; how could Keira do this to him? That’s all he wanted to know. Not where she’d been or how, as an eighteen year old kid, she’d managed to raise their son on her own. There were a million questions running through his head; a million more worries.

He didn’t care about the crowd watching them this morning. He didn’t care about the gossip or the attention or what the existence of this boy would mean for his career. He only cared that she had kept him away, ignorant that he’d created something he’d longed for. He wanted children, a wife, something that anchored him; something that tethered him to a home, to comfort, to love.

He’d tried. With Simone… with Caroline Williams when he was fresh out of college, but they’d always complained Kona wasn’t giving them everything. They wanted more from him. They wanted real and he’d always seemed unable to give them that. Every face he touched, wasn’t soft enough, didn’t affect him. Every mouth he kissed, he found flaw in. Every woman that promised him tomorrow, he did not feel that same raw connection that he had as a college sophomore with the hot-tempered, blue-eyed girl. The mother of his child.

He feels sick again, dizzy with rage. But he knows he cannot stay angry. He knows that he will have to tamp down this shock, this anger if he wants answers.

Kona downs what’s left of the Scotch and sets the glass on the table in front of him, leaving a wet circle on the wood. He tries not to think about the expression on Keira’s face when she saw him watching their son. It was part shock, part fear, and he knows, because he had memorized her every expression, all those obvious tweaks and quivers that laid her emotions on her face, that she was sorry.

Good,
he thought. Feeling like shit is the least she could do.

Two sharp knocks on the door and Kona’s gaze snaps to it. He waits, it would be good for her to wait, let her stew in her guilt. His steps are slow, calm and Kona pulls his anger down, tries to breathe through his nose as he hovers his hand over the doorknob. “Shit,” he says when his fingers will not stop trembling and squeezes a fist tight so his knuckles grow white. He tries like hell not to get excited that Keira is on the other side of that door.

Three fast inhalations to get his heart back to a normal pace then Keira is standing before him and the door shakes under Kona’s grip. This would be easier if she looked like shit, if the years had not been kind to her. If she’d let herself go, gotten sloppy, uncaring about her health. But none of those things happened. She is still flawless to him; skin pale, eyes wide and Kona can’t help himself. His eyes move on their own, over her face, down to the firm swell of her breasts held together between the straps of a modest flowered sundress. His gaze dips lower and Kona blinks at those strong legs, the muscular calves, even to the painted pink polish on her toenails. He steps back, waves her in and tries not to watch the sway of her hips or the mesmerizing curve of her ass.

Keira’s the girl he pushed away all those years ago, the one he tried to convince himself he hated. She’s the same girl, aged—time and struggle maturing her with sensuality, confidence. Breaking through all that devastation and anger is the desire to pull her against him and slam his mouth over hers, but it is faint and is completely eradicated by the memory of the boy who could be his clone running through the Market.