“Then let’s have it,” I challenged.

He shook his head and reached out. “Give me my motherfucking shirt, Viv.”

“No.”

“Fine.” He narrowed his eyes at me and picked up the leather jacket he’d put on the console table. “I’ll fuckin’ freeze, then.”

I jogged to the door, my breasts bouncing shamelessly in my bra. Kane scowled at me as I pressed myself against it.

“You are not walking out on me again.”

“Don’t do this. I’m not right for you. Just trust me, okay?”

Something inside me sank hopelessly. I wouldn’t be the only one fighting for this. I stepped aside and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Okay. But this is the last time. Walk out now and we will never talk again.”

He closed his eyes and sighed deeply.

“Viv . . . I just need time.”

“Time for what?” A horrifying thought took hold. “Are you in another relationship?”

“No. Fuck no.”

My eyes filled with tears. Damn him for reeling me in and throwing me back like this.

“Don’t,” he said softly.

“Just go. You’ve humiliated me enough.”

“You don’t know—”

“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.”

“I’ve never met her.” He gave me an incredulous how am I still inside your apartment right now look.

“You should do something about that.” I reached for the fuzzy blanket hanging on the back of my couch and wrapped it around my shoulders.

Kane’s eyes held mine as I walked over to him and wrapped my arms around his neck, bringing the blanket around both of us.

“I’m glad you told me,” I said softly.

He let out a ragged breath. “I just never thought . . . you’d still want me. You’re such a good person, Viv.” He wrapped his hands around my waist and I smiled.

“You are, too. You guard your goodness like a secret. But I see it.”

He pulled me in close, his eyes brimming with emotion. My breasts pressed against his warm, hard chest just below his heart, where I saw a letter ‘B’ tattooed.

“For Brooklyn?” I whispered, tracing it with a fingertip.

He nodded and I stretched up on my toes to kiss him.

His kiss was hot and hard. Insistent. Demanding. The fire inside me roared back to life. We were hands and mouths and a tangle of desperate need. The blanket fell to the floor, forgotten. He grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled it back, exposing my neck to his hungry mouth. After just a few seconds of trying to unclasp my bra, he muttered a curse and pulled the back straps apart until they gave way with a snap.

I was breathing hard as he took in my bare breasts, flicking his tongue over one nipple before taking it in his mouth and sucking on it.

A moan tore free from my mouth as the soft hair of his beard and his warm, wet mouth turned my nipples hard and deliciously sensitive. When he tugged one between his teeth, I sank my nails into his shoulders and cried out for more.

I tore open the snap of his jeans and fumbled with the zipper, wrapping a hand around his throbbing erection as I pushed his jeans down with my other one.

“Ah, fuck . . .” He groaned and let out a hard breath against my neck as I stroked him.

He shook his jeans free from his legs, cupped my bottom with his hands and picked me up. My apartment was small, and he walked us into my bedroom with no direction and set me on the bed, climbing over me. After another long, hard kiss that made me feel the opening notes of an orgasm trembling between my legs, he pulled back and sat on his knees between my legs, looking at me.

“Spread those legs for me, beautiful,” he said in a low tone. He wrapped a hand around his straight, hard shaft and stroked it.

I watched him, mesmerized. The ink of his tattoos bespoke the path he’d walked to get to me. A skull and crossbones on his hip. His daughter’s initial on one side of his chest and the words ‘Sine metu’ on the other. I’d learned Latin in college and I knew it meant ‘without fear’.

And that was how I felt as I drew my legs apart, my eyes never leaving his. In this moment, I was fearless. I wasn’t worried about heartbreak or conscious of my brazen position before Kane.