Skye #2
“What else you been sitting on, Skye?” he said, his voice low, though I could feel exactly how much he was holding back. My pulse hammered under his palm. “You kept my child from me.” His thumb pressed lightly under my jaw, lifting my face.
“Tell me you didn’t do that.”
“I did.” I didn’t hesitate or soften it because that's exactly what I did. “I have no regrets.”
His brows pulled together. He was working out how I could say that and still mean it.
“No regrets?”
“None.” My voice stayed steady, even with his hand still on me. “Not after your father called me nothing. Not when I knew the pressure that would’ve been put on me. Not when I could have been forced to make a different decision about my child.”
I held his gaze.
“Our child, Skye. Our.”
“I don’t regret protecting her.”
He let me go and stepped back. Ducane ran his hand through his beard, slower this time. Then he nodded once.
A short breath left him, almost a laugh, but there was nothing funny in it. He turned away from me, walked a few steps, and stopped with his hands braced on his hips, staring out at the water.
“I missed everything.” He said it slowly, now adding it up. “Her first word.”
A breath.
“Her first steps.”
Another.
“Her first birthday. Six of them.” His head dropped. “I wasn’t there for one.”
Each one cut me too, even though I’d been there for every single one of those days. I’d just never had to watch somebody else find out they’d lost them.
“I was trying to protect her,” I said. My voice held steady even though my hands shook.
He turned his head, not all the way, but enough.
“From me?”
I hesitated. But not for the reason he thought.
“Not you.” I made myself say it clearly. “Your father.”
He went quiet, the muscle in his cheek ticking once before he caught it.
“You want to act like you didn’t know what that man was capable of.
But you did. You’re his child, Ducane, raised in that house.
And you’ll never fully admit what he is, because some part of you still loves him.
I watched you give him chance after chance he never earned.
” My voice held. “You underestimated him your whole life. I couldn’t afford to do that. Not with her.”
He looked at me like I’d struck him, because I had, with the truth. But I had to.
“You think he’d have let me keep her? A girl from nothing, carrying the heir? With his money and his lawyers and his reach?” I shook my head. “I made a choice. Maybe the wrong one. But I made it knowing exactly who her grandfather was, even if you couldn’t.”
“That’s crazy,” he said, softer this time, more to himself than to me.
He let out a slow breath, shaking his head.
“Prove it to me,” he said. His voice wasn’t raised. It didn’t need to be. “I need to see her. Right now.”
I stepped past him, grabbed my phone, pulled up Cadence’s contact, and called her iPad.
“Mommy, how was the beach? Do you miss me?”
“Oh, Sugar, you know I do. I miss you so much.”
“I know. When do you come back home? This was a long flight. Did you go around the world or something?”
Ducane was sitting in the beach chair when I came back outside. I sat beside him.
“Yeah, baby, it was. But I also had to do something important.” I looked at Ducane beside me. “Cadence, look.”
She bounced off her bed, curls bouncing with her, and leaned into the screen.
“Daddy?”
Premier Wings had us on a flight within two hours of Ducane making one call. That was the thing about moving at his level. The world rearranged itself. I had expected him to want to leave immediately when he found out, and I was right.
I packed in twenty minutes. He packed in ten. We moved through the resort checkout so efficiently that it felt like the calm before the storm. I heard him on the phone a few times, most likely with his assistant. There hadn’t been much conversation after we hung up from an over the moon Cadence.
I was selfish and protective, but a monster I was not.
I never pretended Ducane didn’t exist. When Cadence started pressing a few months ago, I told her what she could understand.
And I’d meant to tell him, for years. But by the time I worked up the nerve, he was engaged to Bianca, and I took that as my answer.
He’d moved on and made it official. That turned my silence from a choice into the only thing that made sense.
It was best this way. I needed it to be.
I’d just finished making sure we had everything when his footsteps stopped in the bedroom doorway. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him.
“We should get going. Car’s outside.”
We made it to the airport in no time. My nerves rose right along with the airplane. Every so often, softness would crack through, and just as fast, he’d shut it back down. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Ducane, we have to talk.”
“No, we don’t, Skye.”
I didn’t like that answer. He knew it. But his stance didn’t change and I couldn’t help poking the bear.
“Maybe we should hold off on the meeting until we talk. I don’t want Cadence to feel any tension between us. I want it to be right when she meets you.”
He took a slow sip of his drink. Turned his head and looked at me with his brows touching.
“Skye, why you want to play with me? You need me to take my belt off?”
I gave him a long, unbothered look, daring him to try it. Those amber eyes were steady and unreadable. I’d known that look long enough to know better than to keep pushing it. I’d hit the end of what he’d let slide. For real this time.
I turned back to the window. I was in big trouble. I knew it, so the smartest thing I could do was be quiet and let him get to wherever he was going in his own time.
So I was quiet.
That lasted about ten minutes, until the silence became too much and I needed a second to myself. I’d been managing his feelings and neglecting my own, and as much as I cared, I was two seconds from losing my shit and getting labeled a flight risk.
“I’m going to the restroom.” I unbuckled and stood.
His hand caught my wrist, gently, and our eyes connected. The fight went out of me. As long as we kept finding each other’s eyes like this, I believed we’d make it through. That was the thing we had to hold onto. Cadence needed us to be anchored, not floating apart.
“Don’t steal a parachute and find yo ass off my plane, Skye. We clear?”
I rolled my eyes, but the corner of his mouth twitched, the first almost-smile I’d gotten out of him since he found out, so I let him have it.
“Boy, let me go pee, I said, and scurried off.
I made my way to the back, slipped into the bathroom, and pressed my hands flat on the counter, staring at the woman in the mirror. Tears filled my eyes.
“Get it together, Skye.”
But I couldn’t. All this time holding it back, bracing for it, and it still managed to gut me when it finally broke open.
On a beach. With Bianca Morris of all people lighting the match.
I never got to do it on my own terms, the way I’d planned it a hundred times in my head.
I chickened out every single time. He found out in the worst way there was, and I’d done that. I’d put that pain on the man I loved.
“You knew better,” I whispered to my reflection. “You knew, and you did it anyway.”