“You tried,” she repeated.
“Yeah.” He rubbed his eyes. He’d prefer to skip right over this part, but there was no avoiding it. “She blackmailed me over my job. She’d given it to me in the first place, five years ago. She was married, we had an affair. She got pregnant.”
“You should’ve been a journalist. That was the most dispassionate retelling of a story I’ve ever heard.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to distill it to the bare bones in my head.” And he had, during the myriad nights he couldn’t sleep, both before and after Kelly.
“She had your baby.” Now she was the dispassionate one, her expression cool.
“I didn’t know if it was mine, but she lost it. By that time she’d given me her position as regional manager so she could go home to patch things up with her husband. She wanted to save her marriage.”
“So you were collateral damage.”
“I was a willing participant. I got what I wanted.”
“You wanted your baby to be raised by another man?”
He clenched his jaw. Leave it to Kelly to get right to the heart of the matter. “No. I would have wanted my child.”
“Even if it was inconvenient.”
“Hell yes. The timing didn’t matter.”
“But you didn’t push for a paternity test.”
He shrugged. “I wanted her job.”
She turned away and pulled her keys out of her purse. “When you can be honest, give me a call.”
“Kelly, wait.” She let him grab her arm but she didn’t look at him. “No, I didn’t push. She begged me to give her a chance with her husband.“
“And you loved her so you let her go.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets. “They had a good home. They were settled, stable. He or she would’ve had a brother and sister. What the hell did I have to give a kid?”
“Their father.”
“I didn’t know for sure,” he said, closing his eyes.
That, more than anything, was what haunted his nights. Had he really traded the possibility of his child for a fucking job? He almost wished he could say he had, because the alternative was that he’d loved Diana enough to want her happy at his own expense. And look at the kind of woman she’d turned out to be.
Clearly his judgment sucked.
Kelly came back to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, pressing her face against his neck. “You could have told me. I wouldn’t have asked you for anything more than the truth.”
Except those rare times he lucked into judging someone exactly right.
“The truth’s too much sometimes.” He gave in to his urge to thread his fingers through the ends of her long hair. “I didn’t feel as if I deserved you. For God’s sake, I made you suck off another guy at a sex club. Two guys, actually.”
“Made me?” She shook her head. “I know you haven’t been sleeping much so maybe you’ve forgotten some of the finer points of those particular nights.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything.” Spencer stroked her cheek. “Not one minute, Kelly.”
“Me either.” She turned her head and kissed the tips of his fingers. “I liked going to Kink. It took me time to warm up, but when I did…” She grinned. “It worked for me. I’m not saying I want to go there every weekend. But I definitely want to go back.”
“With me?”
She reached up and brushed his hair out of his eyes, drawing her hand down to cup his jaw. Her touch held the tenderness only she could offer him. “I want to do everything with you. Don’t you get that yet?”