She looked grea
t in a pair of black jeans and a white angora sweater, her feet clad in suede boots with the requisite high heels. She didn’t meet his eyes as she sat down—as far from him as she could get on the small love seat.
“I know who you are.” The words were ominous. He felt them with a force that was as familiar as it was debilitating. It was the same way he felt every single time he thought of his daughter. Fear, guilt, grief…
“You’ve always known who I am,” he said, attempting to buy time even realizing it was up.
“I know about your past. You’re Susan Douglas’s ex-husband. Alicia’s father. Owner of the now-defunct Chandler Acquisitions.”
Walls of ice slid around Kirk. He sat back, leaving his coffee on the table. Hot though it was, it wouldn’t thaw him. “You’ve got good sources.”
“My husband, Blake and Brian’s father, was the drunk who killed your daughter.”
Heart jerking out of rhythm, Kirk stared at her. They were in a coffee shop, for God’s sake. You didn’t just blurt out something like that.
“He was?”
He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
She nodded. And, white and pinched, looked as sick as he felt.
Weren’t they just a pair, a mass of mangled emotions, of mistakes and regrets and unfixable pain.
Shock was a good thing. It numbed.
“Small world.”
She didn’t acknowledge the statement.
“I guess you don’t see what you don’t want to see,” he said a few long seconds later.
Still nothing from her.
“How long have you known?”
Have you been lying to me as long as I’ve been lying to you? Not that it mattered. It was over.
Just like the rest of his life.
Except Colton. He’d have his son. Which was more than he’d ever dared hope. More than he deserved.
“Since Monday.”
Which certainly explained why she’d blown him off the other night.
She hadn’t been lying nearly as long as he had.
She’d been married to the man who’d killed Alicia. A man Kirk hated with every part of him. A man he hated almost as much as himself.
Watching Valerie, wondering distantly, if she hated him now as much as he hated himself, he hoped she didn’t feel any responsibility for the accident. Even while he knew she did.
He wondered, too, from an even greater distance, how much she regretted sleeping with him.
Rocking forward, her torso leaning over her knees, she stared at the space between their table and the floor. “I’m sorry.”
For what? That she’d slept with two bastards? That his daughter was dead? That her husband was?
Sorry their relationship, whatever it was, had ended?