“Then tell me!” I clenched my hands into fists at my sides. “Fucking tell me or don’t, but stop playing these games.”
“You want to know the real me?” he challenged bitterly. “The guy who did six years in prison? You want to fuck that guy?”
I swallowed hard, the silence between us heavy. “Is that it? That’s why you think—”
“For armed robbery. I pulled a gun on a gas station clerk, Viv. I would’ve done anything for a fix. Anything. You have no idea what it’s like to wonder for all these years whether you would’ve pulled the trigger if the guy hadn’t handed over the money. I think I might’ve.”
My heart thumped wildly. He’d mentioned drug use in his past, but hearing he might have been willing to kill over it took me aback.
“You’re not that guy anymore, though,” I said. “You own a business now. We all make mistakes, Kane.”
He laughed bitterly. “That’s not even the worst of it, Viv.”
“Then tell me. I want to know.”
“Why?”
“I want to know you.”
He shook his head, his eyes distant now. “You won’t want to anymore. You want it all, Viv? You want everything?”
His cold mocking of my earlier words made me shudder. I held his gaze and waited.
“Fine,” he said. “I have a daughter.”
I felt my eyes widen with surprise. That, I hadn’t expected.
“A daughter I’ve never met,” he continued. “She’s nine. Lives an hour away and I’ve never even laid eyes on her. I found out I’d gotten a woman pregnant when she came to visit me in jail. It was too late to do better by then. I wasn’t there when my daughter was born. I never held her. I didn’t so much as buy her a single fucking diaper. How much more worthless can a man be?”
The hard hatred in his eyes was for himself, then. My heart ached for him. I took a deep breath and spoke softly. “What about now? How long have you been out of prison?”
“Four years. I paid all the back child support I should’ve paid Cori when I was in prison. I didn’t have the money then and had no way to get it. Now I send child support and presents for my daughter’s birthday and Christmas. I don’t have a right to more. Cori raised her alone. She doesn’t owe me shit. Probably hates my guts.”
The American Girl bag in his closet at work. My heart broke as I realized who it had been for.
“Cori is . . . ?”
“The woman I got pregnant. We’d fucked a few times, that was it. Nothing serious. But I owed her a hell of a lot more than she got.”
“What’s your daughter’s name?”
His face crumbled with emotion. “Brooklyn.”
I took another deep breath in and out. It was cold, so I wrapped my arms around myself to ward off the chill. “Okay. What else?”
Kane scowled at me. “What else?”
“Yeah. You went to prison for armed robbery, used to do drugs . . . have a daughter. What else?”
“Are you fucking with me? Like that’s not enough?”
I rubbed my hands up and down my upper arms to warm myself. “Is there anything else?”
He gave me a confounded look. “No.”
“How long has it been since you used drugs?”
“Ten years. Last time was the day before I got arrested.”
I nodded. “So you’re clean, you don’t plan to hold up any more gas stations and you support your daughter?”
“Yeah.”
“I can live with all that.”
He drew his brows together and studied me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that if you thought knowing those things would scare me off, it doesn’t.”
“Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?”
“Everyone makes mistakes.”
“Mistakes? Abandoning the mother of your child and your child is more than a mistake.”
“Abandonment is willful. You were incarcerated.”
He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. “Is this because you deal with deadbeat parents in your job every day? Are you just numb to it?”
“A deadbeat parent is one who doesn’t support their child. And you do.”