KAEL
Her hands flew to her stomach without thinking. For a split second, I saw the soft, exposed woman who had been in my hotel room. Then it vanished. She turned her body away from me, shoulders stiff.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
There it was. The lie. The same one that had fooled me before.
When her father had sat across from me and told me who his daughter really was, shame had burned deep. Cheating was bad enough. Learning she had planned the whole thing made it worse. I had played the fool, and I hated it.
“Your father said you were just like your mother,” I said. “He said one day you would get pregnant on purpose to trap a man into marriage.”
Her eyes went wide. “Did you tell him?”
“That we slept together? No.” A short, dark laugh escaped me. “I was there as a k
