Kitty French - Knight and Day

Kara was here. He’d worked hard on resigning himself to the fact that he’d never see her again, but she was actually here, right now, here on his deck, cowboy boots and all, and he had no idea how the hell to play it.

He unfolded a second chair on deck a few minutes later and sat down alongside her. The answer was simple. He would play it straight. He owed her that at the very least.

“Why are you here, Kara?”

His question held no trace of confrontation, more a resigned sense of defeat.

“To hear the truth from you, I guess.” Kara shook her head, her eyes on the horizon. “I need to know why. Was it all a big game for you?”

“Kara, no…”

“I wake up every day and wonder how I could have been such a monumental fool. I thought I knew better, but it feels like I’m the girl who never learns her lessons. My father. Richard. You. Is there something about me that marks me out as a pushover, Dylan? Something pathetic, needy?”

Deep frown lines creased his brow.

“I lied, Kara. I lied and you believed me, which makes you a good, trusting person, which is a fucking miracle given the number of people who’ve let you down. That I’m the latest name on that damn list kills me.”

“I hear you’re planning to disappear,” she said tonelessly. She’d come here to reclaim her self-respect, even if it meant stripping him of his. “That makes you a man who lies and then runs from his problems. Not exactly daddy of the year material. I should know, I grew up with a father like that, remember?” Anger made her harsh, and she twisted to look him directly in the eyes. “I don’t envy your child.”

It was a lie. She did. She envied the baby that he’d get to spend every day with Dylan.

But every one of her words hit their target, and he took her arrows because she had every right in the world to hate him.

“Can I tell you the truth?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s funny, coming from you,” she said. “You mean the sob story about your evil ex-wife dumping your newborn baby on you? Don’t bother, I’ve had it all relayed second hand already.”

Dylan nodded. “I figured you would have heard.”

“So what else is there I need to know?”

He sighed heavily, his head leaned against the wooden sidebar of the seat as he looked at her. 
“I’ve apologised to you a million times over in my head, Kara. For not finding the right time to tell you all my fucked up, ugly truths, for not giving you the choice to walk away from me, for the fact that you had to find out in such a cruel, humiliating way.”

“You should have told me yourself,” she said quietly. “I’d have believed anything you told me.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s not a pretty life back home, Kara.”

“You think I’m that shallow?” she said. “I’d rather have ugly truths than pretty lies.”

He nodded. “That’s the thing, Kara. The lies weren’t for your benefit. They were for mine. It was a fairytale. My fairytale. One where my brother hadn’t died, where I hadn’t married a woman I didn’t love, one where I didn’t lose everything I ever owned.” The fierce longing in his eyes held hers. “I needed a holiday from my real life, but I didn’t count on you. You were so much more than a holiday romance. You made me want to be Dylan Day forever.”

“I wanted you to be him too,” she whispered, her tears threatening again. She’d loved him so very, very much.

He looked at her, brittle and broken, and he knew that the moment had arrived, finally, to do the right thing by the woman he loved.

“Kara, I miss you every day. Every morning. Every night. All of the time.” He badly needed her to know how very much she meant to him.

“I know it doesn’t matter now, and I know you can’t come back to me, because it isn’t just me any more. It’s me and Billy. Billy and me. ” The river deep conviction in his voice made her envious of the baby for the second time that evening. “I’m a father, Kara. I have a son. I’ve been all kinds of stupid, but you’re wrong about one thing. I’m not going to be a bad father to Billy. Maybe I suck at it right now, but I’m learning. He stops crying when I hold him, so I figure I must be doing something right. And I’ll get better. I won’t lie to him, or let him down. I’ll do the best I can and hope like hell that it’s enough.”

It was the speech of his lifetime, the protective words of a new father who loved his child, and for a few seconds they stared at each other, shell-shocked. She made his heart ache. He made her heart break.

“Go home Kara. Go home and be happy, because you deserve to be more than anyone else I know. Go home knowing that I truly fucking loved you. You didn’t get it wrong. I didn’t fool you, and the next man who loves you won’t automatically be lying to you. He’ll be the luckiest guy in the world.  Don’t run away from love because of what I did. I lied about many things, but never once about how I felt about you.”

Kara stopped trying to hold her tears in. It was a battle she’d never win, and Dylan was barely hanging on himself. He reached out and brushed the back of his fingers over her damp cheek.

“Go home knowing I love your huge fucking heart, and your laugh, and the way you do everything full throttle even though there’s every chance you’ll break your neck. I’m not going to ask you to stay. Not because I don’t want you, or because I don’t love you, or because I don’t need you. I do. I love you, and I want you, and I need you so much it hurts to wake up in the morning without you.” His voice cracked. “Let that be my liar’s penance.”

He stood up, and she took the hand he held out and stood up with him beneath the Ibizan stars, back on the deck where it had all begun. He settled his jacket around her cool shoulders, then pulled her close and kissed the top of her head for a long time. When he stepped back and held both of her hands tight in his, Kara never wanted him to let go.

“You are the fucking coolest girl I’ve ever met, and the craziest, and the kindest,” he said softly. “Go home, English. You’re out of my league. You always were.”

She left him standing there, knowing he was right, wishing he was wrong. She couldn’t stay. Everything had changed, yet he’d given her so much more than she’d come for. He'd restored her self-respect, and he’d set her back on her feet as a woman. So why didn’t she feel whole again?

The thing he hadn’t given her back was her heart. Dylan Day was a man who was going to take a lot of getting over.

Kara sat at a small, scrubbed pine table inside the Happy Days Beach Bar nursing her second cup of coffee of the morning, her eyes scanning the sand. The summer crowds had left the island now, leaving the beaches to a different clientele who took Ibizan life at a gentler pace. It was still early as she watched the sunbeds being laid out in ranks across the sands, their padded cream cushions a touch of luxury for the well-heeled off-season crowd.

She couldn’t see the Love Tug from her vantage point, but that was okay. She wasn’t in any hurry.

Dylan strapped Billy to his chest in the cotton baby-carrier that one of the boutique staff from the club had donated to him, along with a box of sleep suits and baby clothes. He’d been astounded by the power of the baby to melt hearts at twenty paces: one look at that shock of hair and big brown eyes and he had them in the palm of his little hand. Dylan hoped for Billy’s sake that his power over the opposite sex never dwindled.

“Come on, small guy. Daddy’s hungry.”

He made his way around the rocky path towards the beach, his path set for the bakery at the far end, his mind set on Kara.

Where was she this morning? Had she gone back to the villa? Lucien was due to go home to England over the next day or two, he’d have been around for her last night. The thought gladdened him. If there was any man he trusted to look out for Kara, that man was Lucien Knight.

Kara tensed as Dylan appeared on the beach. Her breath caught in her throat as she watched him walk by the cafe, barefoot and bare-chested aside from the baby carrier. Even from a distance she could see the baby’s startling shock of hair, and a smile touched her lips.

Dylan walked the beach with the ease of a local, pausing briefly to pass the time of day with the guy who dragged the sunbeds across the sands.

She saw him smile, and wanted his smile to be for her. She didn’t get up. Just watched him, sure of where he was heading.

She caught the eye of the waitress cleaning a nearby table and ordered another coffee, this time to take away.

Dylan walked slowly back along the beach, the warm, scented pastries in a brown paper bag in his hand. He’d visited the bakery as much out of habit as out of hunger; the familiarity of routine had become important in these most unsettling of days.

He chatted inanely to Billy as he walked back towards the boat, even though the baby couldn’t understand a word he said and was half way towards his morning snooze. He didn’t even notice that someone was walking towards him until she fell into step beside him on the sand.

“Hey, Sailor,” she said softly. “You forgot your jacket.”

“You’re supposed to be someplace else,” he said, gladdened beyond belief that she wasn’t. “Anywhere but here with me.”

“I have coffee?” she said, knowing that there was nowhere else in the world she'd rather be.

He held the bag up. “And I have pastries.”

She moved towards a sun-bed set beneath a thatched umbrella close to the azure shoreline and sat down. Dylan sat alongside her, Billy fast asleep on his chest. Kara looked down at him for a few long, silent seconds.

“That’s some hairstyle.”

“I know. I kind of like it.”

“Me too.” She reached out and touched a soft strand of it. “He has a good name.”

“The best,” Dylan said without missing a beat.

She nodded. “Can I still call you Dylan?”

He stroked the baby’s hair and sighed.

“It’s just a name, Kara. I’m still the same man, and for what it’s worth, I was more myself with you than I’ve ever been with anyone else.”

She reached for the pastry bag he’d placed down on the sunbed between them and ripped it open.

“I know that now.” She passed him the coffee, and then teased a warm pastry apart in her fingers. “I couldn’t get on the plane back to England. I tried, I really did. I queued, but when it came to my turn, I couldn’t get on the damn plane.”

He sipped the scalding drink from the tiny hole in the lid, leaning sideways so as not to hold it over Billy’s head.

“You should have.”

“Should I?”

Dylan placed the cup down and accepted the chunk of pastry she held out.

“It would have been the sensible choice.”

“I don’t do sensible. I do full throttle, even though it might break my neck,” she said. “Or my heart.”

“I never wanted to break your heart, English.”

“You put it back together again last night.”

“I broke my own heart too, if it’s any consolation.”

They sat in silence then, man, woman and child.

She screwed up the empty pastry bag, set the coffee cup down in the sand, and sank back against the sun lounger. “Lie with me for a while?”

Dylan swallowed hard. He wanted to lie there with Kara so much that he feared his banging heart might wake Billy. He lay back slowly beside her and offered her the crook of his shoulder. She met his eyes for an uncertain second and then accepted, settling herself against the warmth of his body.

He was so warm. So warm, and vital, and so intrinsically, basically right that she sighed heavily. His arms felt like her home.

“Dylan…” she said.

He stroked her hair. “Ssh. Just for one minute. Don’t say anything.”

And so she didn’t. She closed her eyes and let him stroke her hair, her arm flung across his midriff beneath Billy’s tiny toes.

Little by little she tilted her face, and little by little he dipped his, until his mouth was a breath away from her own.

He opened his eyes, and in hers he found absolution.

She opened her eyes, and in his she found devotion.

“How are we gonna play this thing, English?” he said, cupping her face with his palm.

“One day at a time,” she whispered. “Kiss me?”

His gaze fell to her lips, and then back up to her eyes. No kiss had ever felt so important.

Her gentle sigh of longing filled his head when he lowered his mouth over hers. “Kara,” he whispered, her name his prayer as he closed his eyes and let his feelings take over. Her mouth opened and invited him in, let his tongue slide over hers, into her heart, her everything. He buried his hand in her hair and held her head to his. “I love you so very much,” he breathed, and then he kissed her again, aching all over with how much she meant to him.