realization was stunning. He loved her. When the hell had that happened?
“How long will you be gone?” Just because he couldn’t see her face didn’t mean he couldn’t hear the sorrow in her voice. And that cut him deep.
“I’m not sure. At least six months. Probably a year.”
“Oh.”
Suddenly, he was talking. He couldn’t let that one single syllable be the end of this. He couldn’t let this be the end.
“I knew this was a possibility, I just thought we might have a few more months. The Boltons are all family men,” he explained. “Dad won’t leave the shop, anyway. Bobby would go, but he doesn’t like to be away from his wife and daughter very long and Stella doesn’t like to take Clara out of school. Ben’s a homebody and Josey wouldn’t leave her school for that long,” he explained, desperately trying to make her understand.
“So it has to be you?”
“It’s a family business. They made me part of their family.” When she didn’t reply right away, he added, “I owe them, Kate. You don’t know what it was like before they came into my life. Mom and I—we got by okay, but sometimes we were on welfare and in the winter, it got cold. She went to bed hungry so I’d have enough to eat, you know? She tried to hide it from me, always saying she’d eat after I went to bed, but I knew the truth. And I hated that she had to. I hated it.”
His voice caught in his throat and it took a few moments before he could speak again. Kate didn’t rush into the silence, though. She waited.
“I never wanted to see my mom suffer like that. And then, when Billy and Mom got together, that all went away like magic. Suddenly, we had plenty of food and I had my own room and clothes that fit—and I had a dad. I’d never had a dad before.” He could still feel the sense of awe he’d felt in court, when the adoption had been finalized. The entire Bolton clan and almost half the reservation had shown up. “I had a family.”
She sat up, although she didn’t take her hand away from his chest. He clutched it, holding her palm over his heart. “I would never ask you to give up your family,” she said solemnly. “Not for me.”
He rested his hand on her stomach. She had hardly started to show, although now that he had been sleeping with her for a month, he could see the small changes in her body. He was going to give that up, too. He was going to leave before she got to the end of her pregnancy. He wasn’t going to be there to see the baby born. He wouldn’t see how her body changed with motherhood.
No, he knew that she would never ask. Because that wasn’t who she was and that wasn’t their deal.
“Kate,” he said hoarsely, and then stopped because he couldn’t be sure what he was going to say next.
She moved then, straddling him. The faintest glimmer of starlight came in through the bare windows—just enough that he could make out the generous swells of her breasts. His body responded immediately because he couldn’t get enough of her.
He might never get enough of her.
She took him into her body and set a slow, steady pace that heated his blood all the same. Nothing stood between them now. “I will miss you,” she whispered as he cupped her breasts and teased her nipples. She sank her hands into his hair and pulled him up. “God, how I will miss you.”
She shuddered down on him, and he quit trying to fight it. He was lost to her.
What could he offer her? A nice house? Financial stability? Great sex, definitely.
But he couldn’t offer her himself. He couldn’t be there when she needed him. So instead of telling her that he loved her, that she was everything, he forced himself to say, “I will, too, babe,” because it was the truth—just not the one he wanted it to be.
* * *
“So this is it, then?” Seth asked as he looked over Bobby Bolton’s expansion plans for Shanghai.
“This is it,” Bobby said, lounging in the chair in front of Seth’s desk. “Setting up the showroom in Shanghai, training the staff, making sure everything goes smoothly for the Asia launch. In a perfect world, it’ll take you six months.”
“The world ain’t perfect,” Seth said, the sour feeling settling in his stomach. He didn’t speak Chinese. He wasn’t fluent in the local power structures. He needed to figure out his target market and the best way to reach them.
Even assuming he found the right bilingual staff who understood motorcycles, Seth was looking at a year in China.
He had jumped at the chance to go to LA for a year. He loved his family, but there was no getting around the fact that the Boltons could be overwhelming. And even then, Bobby had made a habit of stopping in every few months, unannounced, to see how things were going.
China was the ultimate fresh start. Seth should’ve been thrilled by this prospect.
“You know,” Bobby said in a kind of voice that Seth had long since recognized as manipulative, “we could send someone else. I’ve made a few contacts...”
“What? No—I’m going. I’m a partner in this company. This is my job.” He was a Bolton. He worked for the family business. He wasn’t about to shirk his duties because he’d accidentally fallen in love with Kate.
The sour feeling in his stomach got more awful.
“The museum project is barely off the ground,” Bobby went on, as if Seth hadn’t spoken. “We still need to select the architect, finalize the design, and then there’s the actual building to oversee.”
“You’re going to handle that.” Of all the brothers, Bobby was the one who traveled the most—and that wasn’t just because his wife was British. But the man practically turned into a homebody from September to May while Clara was in school.
Bobby stared at him flatly. Seth heard himself continue, “This was the deal, man. I promised to do this and I’m not going to go back on my promises to you guys. We’re family.” Bobby didn’t respond, and an odd sort of dread churned around with the sourness. “Aren’t we?”
“Have you ever spoken with your dad?” Bobby asked unexpectedly.
What the hell kind of question was that? “I talked to him this morning when I came into work. Why?”
“No, I mean your birth father. Have you ever talked to him?”
It shouldn’t have hit Seth like a sledgehammer to the chest—but it did. “No. I don’t even know who he was. All I know is that he left. Mom was pregnant and he left her alone.”
He did not like the way Bobby was looking at him. The man was perhaps the most intelligent of the three brothers, but he hid it behind a veneer of playboy charm. There was no getting around the fact that Bobby played a long game. “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”
The hits just kept on coming. “I’m not the father.”
There was no need to ask who had figured it out. Kate had come to Julie’s championship game—the Mustangs had easily won. And if no one had asked her
