“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 key fob 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 like I deserved you. For God’s sake, I made you suck off another guy at a sex club. Two guys, actually.”
“Mademe?” 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?”
“If the situation was reversed, if you were standing here asking for my forgiveness… I don’t know if I could do it.”
“Tell me what happened that night. With Diana.”
“My job was on the line. My own fault. I’d gotten it through dubious means so it made sense I’d lose it that way too. She wanted me to sleep with her, to see if we still had anything left between us. One night.” He wouldn’t allow himself to look away, as much as he wanted to. “If I’d walked, Marcia wouldn’t have gotten my job. I wanted you to have Marcia’s. And it turned out neither of you took those positions anyway.”
“Apparently Marcia wasn’t too keen on working for Diana.”
“Because of me.” He still couldn’t believe that. His sister had bailed on the store shortly after Kelly and had been looking for a new job for the last two months. “Marcia was in line for a promotion way before me, but I wasn’t content to wait. I owed her. Or at least I felt I did. I busted my ass to prove to everyone I was the best person to run those stores. And in the end, I didn’t even care anymore.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t care?” she asked. “The store was your whole world.”
“Just like it was yours,” he reminded her gently. “But the world stops turning eventually.”