Page 7 of Reckless Curves
And he’d succeeded.
So he could not blame her entirely.…
“Kendra?” he prompted.
She was playing with a small hole in her jeans. Tom still thought it was ridiculous how ripped pants were fashionable, but Kendra was concentrating on pulling them apart just as she started talking. “I haven’t had a lot of experience with men. You’re the second man I ever slept with. I hadn’t been with anyone for about four months before we slept together. I found out I was pregnant around seven weeks later. I called and emailed you right away, but you didn’t answer. I kept trying, but I never heard from you. So, after Dad threw me out, I had Connor by myself. My friend Stella helped me too.”
“What about your mum?”
Kendra scoffed. “She does whatever Dad says and he forbade her to see me.”
“You could have told Marcus. He would have let me know immediately.” With his fists, Tom thought darkly.
“I didn’t want to drag Marcus in to this. At the time he had a real chance of winning the formula one driver’s world title that year. His first ever chance. I knew if I told him it would tear you two apart and destroy the team. I could not do that to him. Thank God I didn’t, as bloody Jason Colter ended his career not a year later. It had been Marcus’s one and only chance.”
Tom’s gut clenched. He couldn’t deny Marcus’s only shot at winning the title could’ve been ruined if all hell had broken loose over Kendra being pregnant… by him. “A part of me understands, but the other part, the part that has missed out on my son’s first three years is pissed. What about after his accident? You could have told me then.”
“Marcus crashed. You were his head mechanic, and Marcus always said only you could feel the car like he could. I thought you’d be blaming yourself for the car spinning out and I couldn’t intensify everything with blurting out you were a father too.”
She had a point. He had wondered if the crash was his fault, and he’d not left Marcus’s side until he came out of ICU, but a replay showed Jason Colter had clipped Marcus’s car. “But once he was better.... You could have told him then. He could have got hold of me and told me. I would have—”
“What would you have done? Come home? I don’t think so. The circuit was your world as much as it was Marcus’s. By then I was coping okay on my own, and I didn’t want to be the one to bring Marcus’s world crashing down around him. I still don’t.”
He closed his mouth, unable to deny that racing carshadbeen his world—both their worlds. “I don’t know what I would have done, but now we will never know. You decided for me.”
She looked like she might cry. “I did what I thought was right at the time. And when you came home… I assumed you had read the emails and didn’t want to know your son. I must admit, I’ve never pictured you as a family sort of guy.”
Kendra rubbed her palms down her thighs, and he remembered the way her fingers felt on his skin. “I’m sorry but... Thinking you were rejecting us made me hesitate to confront you. Rejection is difficult to take.”
Tom’s jaw clenched. “So, you let your parents disown you and kick you out so you didn’t screw things up for me? Even after you thought I didn’t give a shit that I got you pregnant?”
Kendra sat back a little on the couch. “What would you have done if you’d known about Connor?” She held up a silencing finger and answered her own question. “You would’ve come back and tried to be a family, which would’ve been a disaster. Neither of us was ready for that. That’s what. And you would’ve wound up hating me for keeping you from reaching your dreams.”
Tom propped his right ankle up on his left knee. “Hell, we’re older and supposed to be wiser. Sometimes dreams change, Kendra. I mean, look at Marcus. He can’t race anymore since he hurt his back in the crash, so he’s making a different dream come true. So am I. It wasn’t as much fun out on the circuit without Marcus, and we’d always talked about opening our own custom shop. It was the right time to make the move for a lot of reasons.”
Kendra shook her head. “You deciding, on your own, is far different from being forced to come back to LA because you found out you got a one-night stand pregnant and that you had a kid.”
“I never thought of you as a one-night stand.” He could feel a muscle in his jaw jump as his right fist clenched. “What if I hadn’t come back? Were you ever going to tell me, or were you going to keep my son from me forever? What made you tell me now?”
A look of such fear and sadness swept her beautiful face that for one terrifying moment he thought her cancer had returned. The idea of her being sick again made his insides churn and all thought of blame vanished.
She sighed. “Don’t look like that, I’m not sick. But my friend was in remission with me and now she’s sick, and it’s terminal. What if that happens to me? I owe it to Connor that he has at least one parent in his life.”
Tom’s mouth dried as the idea she could get ill again after being well for so long, hit him like an out-of-control car. “It won’t happen to you.”
She gave him a sad smile. “I hope not, but there are no certainties in life.”
“So what do we do now? I want to get to know my son. I want to be in his life.” He watched her for any signs she would stop him. “And I’ll have to tell Marcus.”
