He shook his head. “You didn’t know my mother. She would be disappointed in me today. But at the time, I was determined to keep my promise. So I proposed to Lila, and we went to work for my dad’s firm. After a year, we started planning my first campaign. State senator. We began fund-raising, and for a while we were really a team. I thought we were happy. I wanted to have kids, but she put me off at first. She agreed it would be great publicity for me to campaign with a pregnant wife, but she wasn’t ready.”
Belle’s little gasp said it all.
“I wanted kids. Having them wasn’t just about the campaign for me. Please understand that. I wasn’t some party guy. I worked eighty hours a week and I was married. I wanted a family to come home to. For months after the wedding, Lila resisted even discussing trying to conceive. She didn’t want to lose her figure in her twenties. She wanted to establish her career. She wanted time with me. That last one was a lie because she was always working. But she had every excuse to avoid becoming a mother. Then suddenly she was ready to throw away her birth control pills. I should have known something was going on, but I chalked it up to her simply coming around to my way of thinking.” He snorted. “And I was a bit behind in the poll numbers.”
Her brows came together in a puzzled frown. “What do you mean ‘going on’? You two were practicing together at the same firm. Didn’t you practically trip over one another all the time?”
He could see where she would have a few misconceptions about their careers. “You’ve only worked in a very small office. You don’t know how easy it is to get lost in a big, corporate firm. We didn’t work in the same division. We were both heading large portions of the busy practice and we were starting to campaign locally, each with different responsibilities. It’s a lot of work. There are a ton of distractions, and one day I looked up and realized we didn’t spend time together anymore. And I hadn’t missed her as much as I should have. One Sunday, I sat her down and told her that she felt too much like a stranger to me and that we needed to make time to be together. She started crying and said she really wanted to have a baby.”
“Some people think having a baby will save a marriage. It rarely does, but…” Belle sounded as if she was making excuses for Lila’s behavior because she knew something bad was coming. “Maybe she didn’t know?”
“I wish she would have told me how she felt about us before I started the campaign, but I think she was hedging her bets. Turns out, she’d been having an affair for the past year. She’d gotten pregnant.”
Belle’s mouth gaped open. Shocked didn’t begin to describe her expression. “And she wanted to pass the baby off as yours?”
Kellan gave a resigned shrug. Spilling all this to Belle actually felt odd because his gut wasn’t churning the way it normally did when he thought of Lila. The guilt and self-loathing still felt toxic in his veins, but the mad rage was muted by Belle’s soothing presence, by her hand in his.
“It would have likely been easy to do. I was just happy to have everything falling into place. I would have smiled and never questioned it. I like to think I would have been a good dad, but mine was pretty awful, so I have no idea.”
“When did you discover the truth?”
“Three weeks before the election. That was when a staffer came to me and showed me the proof that my pregnant wife was having an affair.” He rubbed at the back of his neck again. “With my father.”
That day was still vivid in his memory. He could see the photos of his wife and father making love in the swimming pool where he’d played as a kid, where his mother had taught him how to swim. They’d had barbecues and family gatherings in that backyard, filling the expansive space with their big personalities. All of those memories had been burned away by a handful of photographs featuring his dear old dad happily plowing his beautiful bride.
“Oh my god, Kellan. That’s terrible.” Belle clapped her hand over her mouth and looked at him with an expression somewhere between horror and pity.
Once, he would have pushed her away, but now he realized this was as close as he could allow himself to be with her emotionally. Sex… Now that was different. He could have sex with her all fucking day and night, but taking her comfort pushed at his very firm barriers. Allowing her soft empathy meant she could sneak behind his walls, and he couldn’t allow anyone to do that again. He couldn’t give her what she deserved, and letting her indulge in the fantasy that he was a whole man would just hurt them both.
Still, he gave himself one moment—just this one—to sink against her and feel her gentle caring.
“My pride was shredded, but worse than that, my campaign was over and not for the reason you’d think.”
“Did someone leak the pictures?”
He huffed out a bitter laugh. “No, my father bought them. Then he sat me down and told me I was a disappointment, but he’d long known I would be. I hadn’t been man enough for my dad and I’d proved it by not being able to take care of my wife.”
Hell, son, I even had to get her pregnant for you. Maybe this kid will have some guts.
“Oh, Kellan, he was wrong.” Belle put an arm around him and looked into his eyes as if willing him to believe her. “You have to know that.”
Fuck if he didn’t want to wrap himself up in her warmth. But all he could allow himself was to let her touch him—and steel himself so that her comfort didn’t sway him. She really didn’t know the whole truth, and Kellan decided to skip over the part where he’d nearly killed his father that night. After his dad had goaded him and told him how pathetic he was, he’d finally seen red and showed the old man that he could, in fact, fight.
“That Monday, Lila filed for divorce. The ink had barely dried on the decree when she married my dad. She runs Kent and Associates to this day. Dad is still a judge, and they have a son they’ll ship off to boarding school about the time he turns four. He’ll be given the best of everything with the singular exception of any kind of affection because Lila isn’t my mom.”
When he looked back on his childhood, his mother had been his only nurturer. He’d been shipped off to the same boarding schools his half-brother would one day attend because Kents always had prestigious educations, but at least he’d been able to come home for summers and make some awesome memories with his mom.
“I feel for the kid,” Belle said, an ache in her voice. “And you, Kellan. You were the wronged party. Why did you have to leave everything behind? You could have exposed the truth and ruined them.”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand how politics work. My father had been playing this game a long, long time. He was appointed to the bench by the president. He has power and influence. Once Lila filed for divorce and Dad put an engagement ring on her finger, it made me look weak. The party forced me to drop out of the race in favor of someone who could win. Everyone loves a winner, you know.” That humiliation still stung just under his skin. “I lost everything, including my ability to make a living. No one wanted to hire me, and if I had started my own firm, I would have been utterly without clients. I was done in DC.”
“So you came to Chicago?”
“Yeah.” He let out a long sigh. “I didn’t know where else to go. Eric and Tate had been my friends in law school until Lila decided they weren’t the type of friends ‘we’ needed. It wasn’t like I dumped them. Lila just made it harder and harder to see them. When we graduated, we drifted apart. Eventually, I let their calls go to voice mail because I wasn’t sure what to say. They moved to Chicago, and I settled into DC…and life went on.”
Belle eased her arms from around his body, but remained close. “You know, I’ve always thought you three were an odd mix, but somehow you work.”