Free Kane (BBW Billionaire Romance) by Christa Wick Page A

remembered his first attempt to save the photos.
    Reed had punched him.
    It wasn’t the first, nor the last, not even the hardest punch the man would ever throw at Kane. But the force and Reed’s expression as Kane tried to dig the photo boxes out of the garbage on trash day had been enough for Kane to beat a temporary retreat, find the garbage truck and bribe the driver to stop at Reed’s house last and not run the compactor.
    Their wedding photo appeared onscreen, Reed stiff in his tuxedo while Katherine was resplendent in the designer gown her parents had paid for. A bossy princess, Katherine was accustomed to getting what she wanted. Reed had somehow fallen madly in love with her despite the conflict between his working class roots and the woman’s overbearing sense of entitlement.
    Kane’s finger hovered over the ESCAPE key, ready to exit out of the slideshow of another man’s memories—another man’s life.
    He still had nightmares about the day that, ultimately, was the beginning of the end of Reed’s marriage.
    The damage to her body, the wait for emergency medical care and the infection that had followed left Katherine infertile.
    She placed the blame on Reed, not on herself for insisting on coming when he had told her over and over it wasn’t safe, not on her rich daddy for pressuring a friend who worked for a senator on the Armed Services Committee, not the friend who was willing to trade her safety and the life of her unborn child for the chance to keep a campaign donor happy.
    No, she blamed her husband because he couldn’t bear the weight of a crumbling building on his back.
    Even with the bitter accusations Katherine flung, Reed had loved her.
    The idiot probably still loved her.
    With a rough swallow, Kane hit the ESCAPE key.
    The images disappeared from the monitor but lingered in his mind.
    The experience had changed him, just as it had changed Stark and Reed. All three men came to view that moment as their biggest failure. As far as Kane knew, Reed hadn’t been with another woman since. Collin had turned toward bondage and domination. He might as well have had “you can’t protect what you can’t control” tattooed on his dick.
    Kane, the youngest of the three, had twisted Stark’s mantra into “you can’t love what you can control.”
    The women he had sex with weren’t allowed to touch him, weren’t allowed to gaze into his eyes. Their mouths might wrap around his cock, he might press his lips to their pussies, but he never kissed them. And he never, ever, ever, put his cock where it might make a baby.
    Mouth?
    Yes.
    Ass?
    Fuck yes!
    But, even wrapped in a condom, he never so much as dipped into the hot, wet hole of a woman’s pussy.
    Not until Dani.

Chapter Ten
    D aniella and Christine remained in the penthouse. Reed brought the promised clone of her phone early Monday and stayed an hour asking her questions about Lynn and any of the dead girl’s acquaintances.
    He nearly fell out of his chair when she told him she had all of her sister’s social media and email passwords. The Facebook profile was just a memorial now, but even that was enough to have Reed salivating because Daniella hadn’t deleted any of the private messages despite their disturbing nature. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to read more than a few of them, but she also hadn’t been able to force herself to delete them.
    When Reed left, she was a little more hopeful that she wouldn’t have to stay in the penthouse much longer and that she would never have to see his boss again.
    With the phone and a laptop Reed had loaned her, Daniella spent Monday and Tuesday working on putting her life back together. She cried on the phone with her boss at the school district after telling the woman she had to resign. She was hoarse by the time she contacted her insurance agent about the house.
    By Tuesday, she was mostly trying to decide where she should raise Christine once she was free to go. She looked at housing,