Prologue
“Lucie, I sure as hell hope you know what you’re doing.”
Yes, she was talking to herself. Again.
Lucie Werner walked into the small restaurant close to the club where she worked, glancing around to see whether he’d gotten there first. From what she could tell, Kane wasn’t there, which was just fine by her. She needed a few minutes to figure out a plan. Well, not really a plan. More like the words to explain the horrible, deceitful secret she’d been keeping from him for so long.
Taking a seat in the back, Lucie was grateful that the place wasn’t busy. At three o’clock in the afternoon, she’d been banking on missing the lunch crowd. Considering she had selected this place because it was public, hoping Kane might take that into consideration before he lost his cool, which she knew, for an absolute fact, he was going to do.
When he walked through the front doors a moment later, Lucie suddenly felt sick. Really, really sick. She peered through the restaurant, trying to locate the bathrooms in the event that her stomach decided to revolt against her thanks to those irritating little things called nerves.
“Lucie,” Kane greeted her, taking the seat across from her as he glanced around the restaurant as though expecting someone else to show up and save him.
Nope. Not today. Today it was just her.
“Thanks for coming,” she said, but she had to clear her throat just to get the words out.
“Is everything ok?”
The concerned look in Kane’s eyes was nearly her undoing. If he only knew what she had to tell him, he wouldn’t be looking at her as though he were worried about her health.
“No.” That was the sad truth. Everything was not ok, nor was she sure it ever would be again.
“What’s going on, Lucie?”
Lucie detected his frustration level rising, which was not all that unusual for Kane. He wasn’t a patient man by any means. And since she hadn’t told him what she wanted to talk about when she’d called him earlier, she knew his curiosity was probably getting the best of him.
“I need to talk to you,” she choked out the words, looking around for the waitress. She needed a glass of water or something. Her throat was constricted by the tears she’d been shedding for the better part of the last day and a half. Ever since she made the decision to tell him.
When Kane reached out and touched her hand, Lucie immediately jerked away from him as though he’d shocked her. She couldn’t touch him. No matter how badly she wanted to. In a few minutes, she was pretty sure he’d never want to lay eyes on her again, so this only made it easier.
Fuck that. There wasn’t anything easy about this as far as she was concerned.
“Lucie.” Kane’s tone went from friendly to stern, and she knew she was just wasting time.
“I need to talk to you about Haley,” she began, feeling the tears returning with a vengeance.
“Luke already told me,” Kane responded before she could continue.
“He what?” How could Luke do that to her? Why would he? And why hadn’t Kane come to talk to her?
“Luke told me that he caught you stealing liquor. But he told me that it’s all been taken care of. He understands why you did it.”
Oh, God. That certainly wasn’t what she wanted to tell him, but the fact that Kane didn’t hate her for that alone was promising. Yes, she’d been stealing liquor from Luke McCoy, the owner of the club she worked for, but she’d had a good reason. Well, it made sense in her mind. Except, sort of like everything else, it really didn’t make any sense, she’d just pretended it did.
When she had found out that Haley needed to have surgery because of her chronic illnesses, she’d been desperate. On her salary, she could barely afford the apartment she and Haley lived in, much less the amount of money the doctor’s told her it would cost to get Haley well.
But that wasn’t why she was here. She needed to focus. To tell Kane exactly what she’d been keeping from him for the last five years.
“That’s not what I want to tell you,” she whispered, unable to stop the first of the tears from breaking free.
“Lucie, you’re scaring me. What’s going on?” Kane asked her again, but this time he didn’t sound concerned. He sounded angry.
“My daughter, Haley,” Lucie swallowed hard, but continued, “she’s your daughter.”
~~*~~
Kane didn’t move.
He couldn’t say a word. Hell, he would be surprised if he was even breathing.
Staring back at Lucie, he tried to process what she was telling him, but there was absolutely no fucking way he had heard her right. There was no way that her daughter, who was now four years old, could belong to him.