A few seconds passed before I went on. “I’m sorry, Connor, I—” I set my coffee cup down, afraid my unsteady hands would drop it. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
“There isn’t much left to say, is there?” Every word was carved in ice.
“Connor—”
“I mean, what’s changed?” he said. “Did you suddenly remember how much you want to leave this place and decide to come back to the one offering you a way out?”
“No, no, it’s not like that at all,” I said.
“Sure about that?”
“Yes, I am.” I took a breath. “It has nothing to do with this place or that place or anything like that. I just figured out that I want to be wherever you are.”
He sniffed sharply. “Little late in the game for that, I’m afraid.”
His sarcasm set my teeth on edge and before I could stop myself, I growled, “Not a believer in giving second chances, are we?”
“Not when I’ve already given entirely too much to begin with,” he snapped. He slammed his coffee cup down on the counter. “Dani, I offered you everything I could think to give. I offered everything I could give, but that wasn’t enough.” He snorted bitterly. “I guess I should have taken my own advice about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” He looked away, releasing a breath through his teeth, and when he spoke again, his tone was gentler. “I offered you the rest of my life. That’s not something I offer lightly, nor is it something I’m willing to have turned down twice.”
“Yet I’m not the first woman you’ve offered it to, am I?”
He flinched and dropped his gaze.
“What am I supposed to say, Connor?” I tried to keep my voice gentle and steady. “You were engaged to another woman a few months ago, and now I’m supposed to believe you want—”
“You know nothing about what happened with Olivia,” he said.
“You’re right, I don’t know a damned thing about her,” I said. “I hardly know a thing about how your last relationship ended, so how am I to know you’re over her? That you have any business even thinking of marrying me so soon after you were engaged to her?”
“Okay, fine.” He narrowed his eyes. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I haven’t told you enough about my past. I guess I was too busy being with you to want to spend any more time wallowing through history, but maybe I should have if you can’t take me at face value.”
“That’s—”
“I mean, I could have spent an evening telling you about all the fights she and I had over stupid shit,” he said. “But that would have cut into the time I was enjoying with you, and given that we were so limited on time, it just didn’t seem like a priority.”
I started to speak again, but he wasn’t finished.
“Maybe the other night, I got off on the wrong foot.” He laughed bitterly. “Or the wrong knee, I guess. Maybe, before I proposed to you, I should have stopped to tell you that I never asked Olivia to marry me.”
I blinked. “What?”
He swallowed hard, the anger suddenly fading when he looked at the floor. “I never proposed to her.”
“But you—” I swallowed. “You were engaged, weren’t you?”
He nodded, rubbing the back of his neck. “Yes, we were. Because somewhere along the line, we decided we’d been together long enough, we might as well get married.” He met my eyes again. “Never mind the fact that we were miserable together. Or the fact that she wanted kids and I didn’t. She was the last person in the world I had any business marrying, but she was there, I was there, and for whatever reason, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
I bit my lip. I had no idea how to respond.
He let out a breath. “Dani, I never laid awake at night staring at the ceiling and wondering what it would be like to be married to her. I never spent a solid week trying to find just the right time to ask. We were getting married because it seemed like the right thing to do. I asked you because—” He dropped his gaze again and exhaled. “It seemed like the only thing to do.”
I ran a hand through my hair, avoiding his eyes. “I guess I thought—” I swallowed. “I thought you asked in the heat of the moment.”
“It wasn’t the first time I’d asked you to come with me.”
“It was the first time you mentioned marriage.”
“What made you think it was the first time I’d thought about it?”
“You didn’t have a—” I hesitated. There was no way to say it without sounding shallow and materialistic.
“A ring?” An angry edge crept into his voice.
I exhaled, then nodded. “Look, I don’t care about a ring. I honestly don’t. I just thought, if you—” I sighed. “It just made me wonder if it was a last second thing to get me to come with you.”
Staring at the floor, he chewed his lip and drummed his fingers on the counter.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “The ring doesn’t matter. Honestly, I don’t care about—”
“Do you want to know why I didn’t have a ring?” he said suddenly, meeting my eyes with a look so intense it turned my blood to ice.
I held my breath. Then, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I was prepared for whatever revelation it would bring, I nodded.
Looking anywhere but at me, he said, “I looked at rings. A few times. Found one in particular that I wanted to give you.” He moistened his lips. “But if I’d bought it, then…” He looked up, then closed his eyes and took another breath.
Barely whispering, I said, “Then what?”
When our eyes met again, my heart almost stopped. I’d never seen someone so deeply hurt, particularly not at my own hands. I knew the night I walked away that I’d hurt him, but only now did I understand just how much.
He swallowed hard. “If I’d bought that ring,” he whispered, “then I wouldn’t have had the money to move your horses to California.”
My hand went to my mouth in a futile effort to hold in the breath my lungs forced out. My heart fell to my feet and a lump rose in my throat.
“I tried to tell you that last night,” he said. “But then we… I tried to tell you, but things just went downhill, and…” He sighed, making a gesture that was equal parts dismissive and frustrated.
“Connor…”
He gripped the counter and looked at the floor. “I thought it through, Dani. I thought about it constantly. When I asked you to come with me, I meant it. When I asked you to marry me, I meant it.”
I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw, trying to keep myself together. “Connor, I am so, so sorry.” It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. Nothing I could say could ever scratch the surface of enough, but it was all I could give. It was all I had.
“You’d said no whenever I asked you to come to California with me,” he said. “And I thought it was because you didn’t think I was serious. That you thought I was just flippantly asking you to do it, without thinking at all about the future. About anything but what I wanted.” He took a breath. “I asked you to marry me because I wanted you to know just how much I meant it. That, and…” He closed his eyes, his cheek rippling when he set his jaw. Then, taking a deep breath, he looked at the floor and said, “…everything else aside, I asked because I wanted you to marry me.”
And the more you tell me, the less I deserve you. I released a breath that nearly came out as a sob. “Connor, I—” I shook my head. “This all just happened so fast, and I… it…”
“I know we were moving fast,” he said. “When we started out, I had no idea we’d be in this situation. I mean, I knew I was leaving soon, I just didn’t think I’d meet someone I didn’t want to leave.”
Without meeting his eyes, I said, “Would you still have asked if you weren’t leaving?”
He said nothing for a moment. Denim scuffed against a cabinet and the fabric of his Stanford sweatshirt rustled. Barely whispering, he said, “Maybe not so soon, but yes. This isn’t something I would ever rush, but it c
ame down to now or never. If there had been more time. If we—” His voice caught.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as whispered words from our past thundered through my consciousness. My composure crumbling, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “‘If we had world enough, and time…’”
“‘…this coyness lady were no crime.’” His voice tried to crack. He cleared his throat and I thought he’d say more, but he didn’t. Stillness descended around the echo of those two simple lines of poetry.
“Dani, look at me,” he said finally, his voice gentle.
I did, blinking a few times until the tears cleared enough for his face to come into focus.
He took a breath. “If you’d known at the time that I wasn’t asking in the heat of the moment, if you knew how much I’d thought it through and why I didn’t have a ring…” He exhaled hard, then set his jaw. “What would you have said?”
I chewed my lip and focused on the floor between us, not sure what to say.
After a moment, he growled, “That’s what I thought.” I looked up as he gestured toward the door. “Why don’t—”
“Connor, wait.” I put my hands up. “I’ll be honest. That night, I probably would have said the same thing.” He started to speak but I cut him off. “But I guarantee I’d still be here tonight.”
He eyed me, then relaxed a bit against the counter, adopting a slightly less hostile posture that suggested he was willing to hear me out.
“The thing is,” I paused. “You know why I came to Seattle in the first place. I uprooted my entire life to follow someone I thought wanted me. And ever since then, I’ve been afraid of planning my life around someone else.”
“I wasn’t asking you to plan your life around me, Dani,” he said, his voice soft. “I was asking you to plan your life with me.”
Fresh tears stung my eyes. “And I see that now. But you understand what I was afraid of, don’t you?”
He chewed his lip, then nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
“I can’t apologize enough. For walking away, and thinking you were asking on impulse, all of it.” I wiped my eyes and sniffed, struggling to keep what was left of my composure. “Jesus, all this time I thought you were asking me to give everything up for you, and you…” I slumped against the counter and covered my face with my hand. There was no hiding how fast I was breaking down, but at least I couldn’t see him.
Taking a ragged breath and choking back the tears as best I could, I finally forced myself to look at him again. “All I can say is that I’m sorry and I love you. I never meant to hurt you. I—”
“What would you say if I asked you now?”
I stared at him.
“If I asked you again.” He held my gaze even while his voice shook. “Right here, right now. Yes or no. What would you say?”
My throat tightened around the words. Around the single word. I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was stare at him in disbelief.
He took a step toward me. Then another. When we were little more than an arm’s length apart, he spoke so softly I wouldn’t have heard him if he was even a few inches further away. “Dani, if I asked you to marry—”
I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him into a kiss. He stumbled, but caught himself with one hand on the counter, his other arm wrapping around me. He quickly found his footing and his hand went to my neck, then into my hair.
When he broke the kiss, he didn’t pull away. Our foreheads touched and every breath he drew rushed past my lips. With the pad of his thumb, he brushed a tear from my face and caressed my cheek.
“Would it be safe to assume that’s a yes?” he asked.
I laughed, quickly wiping away another tear. “It’s a yes.”
He smiled and took his glasses off, setting them on the counter behind me, giving him the perfect opportunity to pull me even closer before he kissed me again.
“I promise,” he said. “I will get you a ring someday.”
“I don’t care about a ring.”
“I know, but—”
“Really. I don’t. We’ll just get a couple of gold bands and call it good.”
A playful grin tugged at his lips. “So would you be upset if I did get you one?”
“Furious.” I kissed him, letting it deepen and linger for a long moment while every touch and taste said yes, this is real, yes, he’s still here, yes, we still are.
When we looked at each other again, his humor faded a bit and he tenderly smoothed my hair. “I’m glad you came back.”
“Me too.” I smiled. Then I let out a breath as reality crept in. “Moving on such short notice is still going to be a headache. I mean, I’ll have to find a job down there, and figure out where to keep the horses, and—”
He kissed me gently to silence me. “None of that has to be ironed out tonight. We have time.” He ran his fingers through my hair and grinned. “The only question we need to worry about right now is what do we do with the rest of tonight?”
I smiled. “Well, in the immortal words of a cunning linguist I know,” I said, pulling him closer. “Life’s short, let’s fuck.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lauren Gallagher is an abnormal romance writer currently living in the wilds of Omaha, Nebraska. She and her husband, along with a coyote-iguana hybrid and two and a half cats, are thought to be in hiding from the Polynesian Mafia and a debt collector in search of a fine for an overdue book from the Library of Alexandria. Lauren continues to skillfully, if somewhat clumsily, elude them, but continues to have run-ins with her arch nemesis, M/M erotic romance author L. A. Witt. The implementation of Operation: I Don't Think So is expected to resolve that problem soon enough.
www.loriawitt.com
Twitter - @GallagherWitt
Blog – http://gallagherwitt.blogspot.com
~*~
Additional Titles
Between Brothers
Light Switch
Reconstructing Meredith
From Loose Id, LLC:
Damaged Goods
From Samhain Publishing:
Who's Your Daddy?
All The King's Horses
The Princess and the Porn Star
Preview: The Princess and the Porn Star
~*~
“You’ll be fine, babe.” Quinn waved a hand. “You just haven’t worn heels in a while.”
“Right, so should I really be wearing these”—I pointed at my feet—“when I haven’t worn anything above two inches in like three years?”
“Just be careful. You’ll be fine.” He shifted his gaze to his iPad. “Especially once you see what you’re dancing with today and tomorrow.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Mm-hmm.” He moved his hand rapidly over the screen. “And thanks to your darling assistant’s third degree black belt in Google-Fu, you may now feast your eyes on your dance partner. I present to you”—he turned the iPad around—“the one and only Buck Harder.”
“Buck Harder,” I muttered as I took the iPad from him. “What a name.”
“And what a body,” Quinn mused.
Staring at the screen, I said, “Can’t argue with that.” And I couldn’t. Wow. He was… Well, I could see why he’d apparently done so well in his line of work. He was broad-shouldered, tanned, with flawlessly defined, hairless abs. He obviously spent a good chunk of his time at the gym, but he wasn’t huge. Not a bodybuilder or a steroid junkie, just fit. Very, very fit.
His thumbs were hooked in the pockets of his jeans, his hands angled just right to direct my attention to his crotch, where the skintight denim clung to at least one reason he’d gone into porn. My God.
I made myself quit staring at his package and instead looked at his face. His sandy blond hair was neatly trimmed and perfectly styled, and those vivid green eyes might have been mesmerizing and knee-weakening if not for the arrogance radiating from them as well as that smarmy grin. Forget what he had in his pants. Something told me his ego was his largest appendage.
“Cute.” I set the iPad down. “Looks like he knows it too.”
“Of course he does.” Quinn scoffed. “He gets to have sex for a living, even if it is with women”—he stuck out his tongue—“and he’s one of the most popular and highest earning out of all the other men who have sex for a living. Of course he knows he’s hot!”
“Can’t wait to work with him,” I muttered.
A knock at the door turned both our heads.
Rich opened the door and leaned in. “You ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
He tapped his watch. “Ten minutes.”
“I’m on my way.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.” Quinn held up his phone. “After I make your appointment.”
“Thank you, sweetheart.” I started toward the door, still wobbling a little on those ridiculous shoes. “I think I’m going to need it.”
“The way you’re walking?” He snorted. “Honey, I’d better get the paramedics on standby.”
“Oh, shut up. I can walk.”
“Uh-huh.” He snickered. “Have fun with Buck Harder, darling.”
“Shut. Up.”
By the time I was out in the hallway outside my dressing room, I was mostly balanced on the shoes. I’d walked in higher, skinnier heels before, and they just took a few minutes to get used to.
All the way to the room where we were rehearsing, I was still sure I’d need that cortisone shot later, but no longer afraid of breaking my neck. Or re-breaking my ankle. All I had to do now was get through this rehearsal, a day or two of shooting and hope the press didn’t go psycho on me for being on-camera with a porn star.
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