by Violet Duke
Shit. He made a mental note to hose that down before Skylar got home tomorrow.
Stumbling over the broken shards, he reached for another, and saw a flash of movement in the house. Laughing in his head as he did it, he called out to the fleeting shadow. “Beth?”
Damn, he must be really drunk off his ass if he was seeing the ghost of his dead wife.
He let go of the fresh bottle he’d picked up and dragged himself back into the house.
Maybe if he went to sleep now, he could chat with his dead wife about Abby. Maybe Beth would know why it was that the women he fell in love with couldn’t stay with him.
ABBY TUCKED HER CHIN atop her knees and gave Connor her CIA stare. It was less menacing than her FBI glare but it packed a lot more hidden ammo. Usually, it preceded a full interrogation, not unlike the one she was about to unleash on Connor.
“Tell me what’s wrong.” She lowered her brows down even more. The look of sorrow that had blanketed Connor’s face shortly after the concert had haunted her all night.
And clearly, Connor was positively shaking in his boots, based on the way his eyes crinkled at the corners as he repeated for the third time, “Nothing. I told you, everything’s fine.”
She was just about to switch to her FBI glare when he added, “Hey, before I forget, my assistant Laura is going to call you with some info I think you’ll be really interested in.”
Well that was a blatant evasive maneuver. And dangnabbit, was it an effective one. She pouted. “Okay, I’ll bite. What info?”
His tilted his head, an excited little smile brewing. “I know you’re not thrilled about your Plan B options in California—and as I’ve told you, I’ll support you whether you go to the West Coast or Timbuktu—but there might be one other option for you to consider.”
“There aren’t any more full-time teaching positions available, Connor. And believe it or not, I’m over-qualified for many of the other positions. They won’t even consider me. I could stay on as a lecturer and wait until another tenure-line position opens up but honestly, my department has already told me they aren’t expecting another opening for a few years.”
“What if you did something more in line with your degree?” he asked, eyes dancing.
“Any positions like that would be filled with doctoral students—”
“No, I mean what if you focused on academic research for a bit first. That’s the other half of being a professor, right? You could do research, work on getting published, and lecture some of those courses you were talking about on the side if you find yourself missing teaching. Then, when a tenure-line position does open up in a few years, you’d be in a really strong position.”
Abby was at a complete loss for words. Not just because Connor had presented her with a great plan that she really should’ve widened her focus to consider, but because of what he was offering with this option.
A chance for her to stay here with Brian and Skylar.
“Doesn’t your firm have a location in California?” she asked then, locking her gaze on his.
“Yes.”
“Would it be hard for you to transfer over there?”
“With my seniority and trial history, no, not at all.”
She chewed on her lip. “Tell me the truth. Have you already checked to see if you could relocate to the California office?”
He hesitated for a beat, and then replied, “They have a corner office ready for me, along with a list of potential homes for me in the area as well.”
The air in her lungs suddenly felt thinner. “And the reason why you haven’t told me this is…”
“Because moving isn’t an option for my brother. It wouldn’t be fair to him if this became a determining factor on your decision.”
Abby slapped both hands on top of her head and rolled off the couch, falling to the carpet in a heap. “Bad boy, my ass. You, Connor Sullivan, are as much of a hardcore goodie-goodie as I am.”
Chuckling, he crouched next to her and helped her up. “For one, don’t talk about your ass again unless you mean business. And secondly, I’m not doing this to be good, I’m doing this because you deserve to make the decision that’s best for you, with as little external factors forcing your hand. If you ended up choosing to be with me because of something like geography, and I wasn’t the one you really wanted...I wouldn’t want that for you, or for me.”
Trying not to get her hopes up too much, she finally dared to ask, “What’s the research position entail?”
“If you get it, you’d get to keep working with writing, specific to different native reservations that choose to participate. There are a few grander scale projects as well, and maybe even some statewide duties. The position involves some field work in the classroom, teacher training, curriculum planning, professional development modules, and work with standards and assessments.”
Whoa. It sounded like an amazing opportunity. She was brimming with excitement, and for the first time in the past few months, she wasn’t thinking about the position in context to its location in Arizona. “Connor, I couldn’t have custom built a more ideal position for myself. How did you find this?”
He looked like a kid at Christmas. “I thought you’d like it. It wasn’t me though. I asked Laura to do some digging. It helped when she worked her way backward with the native reservations focus. So you have her to thank, not me.”
He kept doing this, she realized—giving her opportunities she couldn’t imagine were within her scope. Allowing her not just to dream but to extend those dreams beyond even the farthest reaches of everything she dared to wish for herself. With Brian and Skylar, with work.
With love.
Even though she knew it was treading on dangerous waters, she crawled over and wrapped her arms around him, and held him tight. His arms snapped shut around her just as securely.
“I’ve missed this—having you in my life, being a part of yours,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Me too,” she admitted out loud. Finally.
That was when she knew…and what he said next just confirmed it for her.
“Brian and Skylar are your family. And I know this position isn’t a professorship but it combines so many of the things you love. If this position can help you stay here and be with them…well, I just wanted you to have that option.”
“You’re always doggedly seeking the most options for me. Why?”
His tone hardened. “You had your options ripped away from you by that monster from your past.” Tension vibrated his frame. “You deserve every option for your every happiness, Abby. No matter whether you choose me or Brian, or god forbid, some other man. I want you to have every choice afforded to you so the dreams that you make into your reality are the biggest and best ones you could dream up.”
He pulled back and gazed down at her, his emotions all laid out on the line for her to see. “Because before I met you, Abby, I couldn’t have possibly dreamed up the future I’ve imagined since…the one with you in it.”
A storm of emotions hit her from all sides and she just stared at the amazing man before her. Afraid that what she was about to say would change the way he was looking at her in this moment. “Connor, there’s something you should know.”
She felt the tensing in his arms, the possessive way he cradled her closer. And she let herself dare to dream that he wouldn’t see her differently, view her as damaged goods.
“Whatever it is, we can work through it, sweetheart.”
“I-I should’ve told you—and Brian, for that matter—about this before you two went through the whole joint custody thing over me. Maybe it would’ve had you guys reconsider.”
“Not freakin’ likely, honey.” He pressed a soft kiss to her temple and asked her quietly, “Do you want to tell me about it now?”
The words wouldn’t come out. A whole night she’d spent rehearsing this, ignoring all the images of Connor calling out, “Honey, I’m home,” like he had that one night months ago. Images she wanted to hold on to w
ith hope, not fear.
“I didn’t tell you the whole story about what happened to me in high school, Connor. About what happened…afterward.” The storm of memories crashed into her, stole her ability to speak, to breathe. Tears burned the back of her eyelids as it always did whenever she allowed herself think about it.
“Honey, don’t cry. It’s okay, you don’t have to talk about it if it’s too painful,” he whispered into her hair, drawing her tight into his arms. “...I already know.”
She jerked her gaze up to his, jaw agape in shock. “That’s impossible. Besides my parents, no one knows. How could you—” Her eyes narrowed in anger. “It was that investigator of yours again wasn’t it? He got a hold of my medical records?”
“Jay is very good at what he does.”
She cursed under her breath.
The annoyance helped. It gave her the tiny burst of strength she didn’t think she possessed to say the words aloud. “I told you my parents and I moved out of our home all those years ago after they found me that night, but really, we didn’t move until later…nineteen weeks later, to be exact,” she whispered brokenly, as she thought of the one word that still held the power to bring her to her knees in helpless anger, jagged pain.
Fetus.
The only term the hospital would use to refer to the life that had died in her womb that May.
In their eyes, she’d ‘lost a fetus.’ Not a baby, not even a stillborn.
And every question they’d asked her regarding the group hospital funeral plans were phrased in terms of what she’d like to do for ‘it’ and never ‘him.’ Even though she’d lain on that hospital bed and pushed, watched this perfect, beautiful little boy come into this world with ten fingers and ten toes.
But not a single breath in his lungs.
He was so small she’d been able to cradle him in her two hands while they kept telling her they needed to take the ‘fetus’ away.
“They never once called him my son.”
The icy daggers of those memories speared through her heart over and over again, drowning her, filling her with the same hollow pain she’d spent years thrashing her way through only to just barely survive it.
“It was a different time then.” Connor’s voice was shredded with sympathy. Grief for a baby he never got to meet. “We didn’t have the laws we do now.”
Abby had actually already been here in Arizona when they’d passed the MISSing Angels bill. And she’d cried through the news as the first set of birth certificates for stillborn babies were issued. “The bill wouldn’t have helped my son. He missed the twenty-week mark by two days.”
“I’ve heard of some states making exceptions,” he began quickly, resolutely. “I’ll draw the paperwork up right now, Abby. We’ll get you that birth certificate with his name—”
“No.” She put a hand on the side of his face and smoothed away the pain etched in his features. “I admit that it was all I’d been able to think about at one time. It took me years to find peace with all of it, but I did. I don’t need to petition any state organization to classify the child I’d had to bury as a baby. And though a part of me will always ache for the injustice it is to him not to have it, I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me that he’d had a life worth remembering.”
“Sweetheart, I am so sorry you went through that.”
The exact phrasing of his words brought the next fresh wave of heartache pummeling through her. “It’s not just something I ‘went’ through, or something I’ve laid to rest in my past,” she revealed quietly, raising her gaze up to meet his. “It’s an inevitable part of my future, too. I have uterine abnormalities that would put every baby I tried to carry to term at risk.”
Breaking her gaze away, she whispered softly, “I’d understand if you…” She squeezed her fists and forced herself to say it. “I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted someone who could give you a child. Because you’d be such an amazing father, Connor. You talk about always wanting me to have everything for my happiness. I feel the same way for you. You deserve to be with a woman who you’re able to have a family with.”
He cradled her face in his hands and kissed away the stray tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m not going anywhere, Abby. All of this just proves to me how strong you are, makes me know you’re an even more amazing woman than I already thought you were.”
“But don’t you want kids? A family you could come home to and have all those classic American meals with?” Though he never said it aloud, she knew that was a part of why he gravitated toward those meals as his favorites—because it was the furthest thing from what he’d had growing up, all of it.
“Honey, you and I both know that parenthood isn’t dictated by birth, or sometimes even by family. A child doesn’t have to bear my gene for me to want to be his or her father.” He slid a hand over hers. “I’ll do everything in my power to be even half as strong as you. We can try for a child as many times as you’re willing. But if it’s not in the cards, or even if it is, there are a lot of great kids out there who need parents that will love them. No matter what, you’re going to make an incredible mom to some very lucky kids in the future.” Twining their fingers together, he added in a voice rough with emotion, “And if you choose me to be the one right there beside you throughout it all, I’ll consider myself among the lucky ones as well.”
She fell back into his arms again. “It all sounds so perfect,” she said softly.
“You bitch!”
Gasping, Abby spun around and saw Skylar standing not ten feet away, confused and hurt, eyes red with angry tears.
Connor shot off the couch and went over to her. “Skylar, did you walk over here from Becky’s? Does your father even know you’re here?”
She swung her betrayed gaze over to him, and held the keys in her hand like a weapon. “Don’t pretend like you care about my dad! You’re here stealing Abby away from him behind his back.”
Abby approached her slowly. “Sweetie, that’s not what’s happening here.”
“No?” she shot back bitterly. “So you’re not here dreaming up a new family when dad and I have been doing everything we can to show you how much we want you to be a part of ours?” She backed up, eyeing them like a caged animal. “Becky’s sister drove me back home because I forgot my overnight bag and I saw him. He was outside drunk and sad and breaking beer bottles in the orchid shade house we built for you. Because we love you. But here you are with Uncle Connor, cheating on my dad and dreaming up a new kid.”
Her voice broke and Abby felt her heart breaking as well.
“Why don’t you want us, Abby? Aren’t we good enough for you? I thought you loved my dad…” A shattered sob racked her tiny frame. “I thought you loved me.”
“Skylar, of course I do. I love both you and your father so much.”
“Liar!” Skylar was shaking uncontrollably now and Abby was on the verge of losing it. Something wasn’t right.
“You’re a lying bitch who just wants Uncle Connor now. You don’t want us! You don’t want to be my mom! I hate you! I wish you’d never butted into our lives!”
Before they could stop her, she turned and ran off down the driveway.
CHAPTER NINE
SHE WAS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND.
Skylar had ducked into a neighbor’s yard and disappeared into the night. Abby and Connor had scoured the neighborhood first by foot and then by car. They’d called Becky’s parents and when they found she hadn’t returned there either, they’d picked up Brian and immediately went to all of the girls’ favorite hangout spots.
Abby was a wreck.
After four hours of searching, the police regrouped everyone who’d joined the search party and advised them to check their phone messages and their homes once again. Abby refused to stop looking. She tossed Connor her house keys and took a flashlight out to go search every nook and cranny of the houses in the area, waking up every single neighbor in a one-mile radius.
She’d just begun pounding on the
door of a neighbor she hadn’t yet spoken to personally when she heard Connor’s Dodge Charger come rumbling down and screeching to a stop in the driveway beside her.
“We found her, sweetheart,” he left the car running and sprinted toward her. “She was curled up—safe and sound asleep—in your guestroom.”
Abby dropped to her knees on the graveled ground and simply broke down, crying gibberish and clenching the gravel so hard her hands bled.
When Connor could finally get her to stand, he drove her straight back to her house.
Only, Becky’s parents had picked up Skylar and taken her and Brian back home before Abby got a chance to see her. To see for herself that she was okay.
Once inside her home, she ran straight to the guestroom and ran her hand over the comforter.
“Was she still upset when you found her?”
Connor shook his head. “I didn’t think I was the first one she’d want to see so I waited in the living room and Brian was the one who woke her up.”
She nodded and dropped onto the ground at the foot of the bed.
He asked quietly, “Do you want me to stay here with you tonight?”
Abby no longer knew what she wanted. No longer cared what she wanted. Skylar had been hurt beyond measure tonight and Abby had only herself to blame. “I think you should go, Connor.”
“None of this was your fault, sweetheart.”
She turned away from the words of comfort.
She didn’t deserve them.
All night, Abby sat on the guestroom bed and stared at the clock, listening to the ticking to make sure her own heart was still beating.
At five o’clock sharp, the dam in her heart burst, and galvanized her to action.
She pulled into Brian’s driveway minutes later, reckless speed a definite factor.
Brian opened the door before she could knock and dragged her into the hug they both needed.
“Brian, this was all my fault.”
“No, honey. Irrational, compulsive behavior like this is a classic pre-symptom of Juvenile Huntington’s. I’ve already talked to her doctors and we’ll be starting the process of genetic testing as soon as she’s gone through some therapy.”
