Malta with My Best Friend’s Dad by Flora Ferrari
Chapter Twenty-Two
Kane
I wish we could lie here forever, intertwined on the bed, with the scent of our sex filling the air around us. Moving my fingers through her hair produces a symphony from my woman, causing her to shift and let out gorgeous song-like sounds.
But there is a specter in the room.
My daughter.
She watches over the moment with grim-set eyes, with her lips twisted into a grimace, with her hands balled into tight fists at her sides. She’s a ghost who won’t leave us alone, and I can tell by Kelly’s shifting that she feels the same.
“We’re going to have to tell her,” I say into the silence.
“I know,” she says, letting me know she’s been thinking about it as well. “There’s no other choice, is there?”
“No, there’s—”
My cell phone rings from my pants – bunched up on the floor – interrupting me. I bolt upright and dart over to it quickly, leaning over the edge of the bed and scooping it up.
Dark thoughts surge through my mind, vignettes in which my daughter and Jocko have had a destructive confrontation with Sergey and his men… and I wasn’t there to save them. The thoughts crash and thunder, the same way our sex did, the way Kelly pushed back against me and made those gorgeous whimpering noises that even now bounce around my head.
Grabbing my phone, I answer it quickly. “Jocko?”
Lena is laughing in the background. Some of the tension drifts out of me, but I can’t afford to let my vigilance go completely.
“Relax. It’s good news. I’ve just had word that Sergey has been picked up by Interpol.”
I let out a long breath, relief moving through me. “The fucking idiot. How did he get himself into that situation?”
“I think you wrecked something in him when you told him no. I think it’s the first time he’s ever heard it. If you can believe it he got shitfaced and started a fight at a local bar, and the local police had no option but to pick him up. His men have already fled and he’s going to be extradited and tried for all his international crimes, the stuff he was too insulated for back in the States. But the bottom line is… he’s gone, and we can go home. You can go home.”
I look at my woman, so gorgeous as she sits up in her bed, her dark hair spilling around her and tempting me to leap on her all over again. Hot fire rushes through me at Jocko’s words – home, a family, a future with my woman.
But then Lena’s laughter hits me again.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
“There’s a medieval show at the silent city. Lena’s having the time of her life.”
I swallow and my stomach rolls, more dark thoughts moving through me now. “That’s good. I want her to be happy.”
Because pretty soon she’s going to be anything but,I don’t add.
“Alright. See you soon.”
I hang up and tell Kelly the news, watching as her face goes through the same emotions I just did. From happy to hopeful and then to apprehensive, it all crashes into her, as the full magnitude of the news slams into her.
“So you can come back to the States?” she asks quietly.
I drop down onto the bed and pull her close to me, kissing the top of her head, smelling our sex and her shampoo and her just-Kelly scent, the most perfect one there is. “Yes.”
“We can have a life together.”
“Yes, and it’s going to be the best goddamn life there’s ever been,” I tell her.
“But first…”
I swallow as something grim moves through me, darkening the moment, as though a rancid cloud is cloaking the glittering Maltese sun.
“We have to tell Lena.” I sigh heavily. “There’s no way around it. We can’t spend the rest of our lives living in secret.”
I smooth my hand over her belly, sure I can feel our child in there, our future.
“Especially not when you get pregnant.”
“Yeah.” Kelly laughs, but there’s an unhinged quality to it, as though inside she’s spinning as frantically as I am. “I guess that’d be pretty hard to explain.”
