Conquering Conner

by Megyn Ward

  “That’s handy.”

  “I told you…” He runs a hand up my thigh, his thumb skimming the place where we’re still joined. “I spend a lot of time in here.”

  I think of all the things that could mean. All the ways a guy like Conner could kill time in a shower like this. All the women who’ve been on their knees in front of him, exactly where I was only minutes ago.

  Women who aren’t me.

  What I’m thinking must show on my face because his jaw goes tight and he drops his hands before pulling away from me completely. “That’s not what I meant.”

  Me either.

  “I’m sorry.” I shake my head, not sure how to explain how I’m feeling. “It’s just…”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He fits his hands around my waist, lifting me from the ledge to set me on my feet before stepping under the spray.

  Shit.

  “Conn—”

  He bends down to retrieve a bar of soap off the shower floor. “I said don’t worry about it.” He rubs the bar between his hands, working up a lather. “Towels are above the toilet,” he says, turning into the spray. That’s all he says.

  “Conner.” I try again because I know that I hurt him. That I keep hurting him, even though I don’t mean to. He doesn’t answer. Won’t even look at me.

  Like before, it’s like I’m not even here.

  Twenty-six

  Conner

  Okay. So, this is real.

  Henley is here. I’m wide awake and not so whacked out of my fucking mind that I’m hallucinating.

  No, she’s really here. I can hear her moving around in my kitchen, on the other side of the wall.

  Which, considering what just happened, should be freaking me out.

  No oral.

  No kissing.

  No bareback.

  No repeats.

  Those are my rules.

  She’s the reason you made them in the first place. Stands to reason she’s the one you’d break them for.

  But thinking about it, even now, I can’t seem to work up anything past mild curiosity.

  I want to ask her if she’s on birth control. Not because I’m worried, but because I want to know if it’s possible. I want to look at her and know that I might’ve gotten her pregnant.

  By all rights, I should be dragging her down to the pharmacy and figuring out our post slip-up options. There are ways to fix it.

  That’s not what I want to do, though. The only place I want to drag her to is my bed and the only thing I want to do is fuck her some more, so I can come inside her all over again.

  Which pretty much makes me the biggest asshole that ever lived. I’m the one with the experience. I’m the one who should know better. Instead of protecting her, I’m standing here thinking about what she would look like with my kid in her belly.

  Fuck me.

  I’m the last person who should be thinking about having a kid. Cap’n, sure. He’d make a great dad. Hell, even Declan would be better at raising a kid than me. He may be a raging fuckstain but at least he’s normal. Me? What do I have to offer a kid? A grease pit that’s barely braking even and a better than average chance of inheriting my fucked-up brain. What could I teach them? How to get a girl to drop her panties in thirty seconds flat or the finer points of pretending to be a real, live boy?

  That’d make me Father of the Year, for sure.

  Giving myself a quick rubdown, I throw a towel around my waist and step into the hallway. I can see her from here, standing at the kitchen counter, making sandwiches with the groceries she brought with her.

  She’s wearing one of my T-shirts and nothing else, the hem of it skimming the top of her bare knees. Her hair is drying frizzy around her freckled face—probably because she used my cheap shampoo and has no choice but to let it air dry.

  She looks so goddamned good—so real—that for a moment I can’t make a sound. Move a muscle. Don’t want to because I don’t want to lose her. I don’t want her to disappear again. But I can’t just stand here and stare at her for fuck’s sake, so I clear my throat and try.

  “Hey.”

  As soon as she hears me, she reaches up and touches her hair. It makes me wonder what kind of shampoo she uses. Where I can buy it. If I can even afford it.

  “I hope you still like chicken salad,” she says, shooting me a quick smile, her gaze drawn to the tattoo on my chest. The one on my neck. My arm. “Mine is nowhere as good as your mom’s, but—”

  “Look…” I scrub a hand through my damp hair, careful of the place where I brained myself with a car hood while I try not to squirm like a worm on a hook. I don’t want her to look at them. At me. For a split second, I feel exposed. Torn open. “We need to talk about what happened.” I cock my head toward the bathroom. “In there.”

  “What about it?” she says, trying to sound casual but the full-body flush that erupts over her skin says something else.

  “I didn’t use a condom.” I drop my hand, letting it flop against my thigh, my gaze drifting past her to settle on the heavy-duty magnet I use to secure my collection of take-out menus to the side of the fridge. “I’m clean. I got tested again a few weeks ago, just to be sure, but I should’ve—”

  She laughs. “You already said that.”

  I feel my pulse tick through my jaw. “Okay...” The I’m clean speech is my automatic go-to. It bothers me that she seems to know it. That she finds it amusing. “But I still think we should talk ab—”

  “I’m on the pill.”

  Her declaration jerks my gaze back to her face.

  “You are?” The thought balls itself up in my stomach, hard and heavy. “I thought you and… I mean that’s good, I just…” I let the statement trail off because I don’t know how to finish it without putting my fist through something.

  “We don’t,” she says, holding half a sandwich out to me like a peace offering. I take it because I don’t know what else to do. “But we faked a pregnancy scare when I was eighteen. I’ve been on birth control ever since, to keep up the pretense.” She leans against the counter and rolls her eyes, lifting her own sandwich to her mouth. “When I told my mother I wasn’t pregnant, she locked herself in her room and cried for two days.”

  I’m sure she did. I’m sure the thought of her only daughter, barely out of high school and knocked-up by the son of a billionaire was the proudest moment of her life.

  Instead of saying so, I make an affirmative sound in the back of my throat before taking a bite of my sandwich, chewing and thinking about what it means, this dizzying mess of disappointment a relief that’s tumbling around in my gut.

  It means you’re one fucked-up individual, genius.

  The sound of clinking glass pulls me out of my own head long enough to focus on what I’m doing. The sandwich is almost gone, and Henley is rooting around in the fridge. She pulls out two bottles of Trillium and offers me one.

  I look at the beer she’s holding out to me and shake my head, shoving what’s left of my sandwich into my mouth and chew, my jaw tightening with each revolution.

  One of them went to her.

  Tess.

  My dickface brother.

  My can’t-mind-his-own-goddamned-business cousin.

  Told her how fucked up I am. That I need the drinking and the fucking more than I like to admit. That I stopped both because she asked me to and that I’ve gone totally banana-balls as a result.

  That’s why she’s here.

  Guilt.

  Holy Christ.

  I’m a goddamned pity fuck.

  I don’t know if I want to laugh or break something.

  The fucked-up part—the part that makes me want to take a baseball bat to every motherfucking thing I own—is that I don’t care.

  I don’t care why she’s here.

  I don’t care if she came here to fuck and feed me out of some misguided sense of responsibility. I don’t care that she’s looking at me like I’m stray dog, injured and sick. Like I need saving.

/>   I don’t care about any of it.

  As long as she’s looking at me.

  As long as she’s here.

  “It’s okay.” She rolls her eyes when I keep shaking my head and sets her own down before twisting the top off the beer she offered me. “The last time I was here, I saw…” She trails off, her gaze darting to the now empty sink. I know what she saw. What she thought. What she thought about me. That I’m just like her father—a useless drunk. That when I drink, I might get mean. I might hurt her. “Anyway, I’m okay with it. I understand.”

  Never mind the fact that, drunk or not, I’d cut off my own arms before I even thought about raising so much as a finger at her. She has no way of knowing that. She doesn’t know me. Not really. Not anymore.

  I pick up the beer because she gave it to me and I take a drink because she wants me to. When I lower it, she smiles, twists the top on her own and clinks the mouth of it against mine before she takes a drink.

  She makes another sandwich and we spit that one too. We eat in silence, neither of us really looking at each other. Afterward, she starts to clean up, putting the container of chicken salad in the fridge and wiping up crumbs. She doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t try to talk to me. Just quick, nervous movements that give me the feeling she wants to leave but doesn’t know how.

  And now I know what it’s like to watch someone plan an extraction after a booty-call.

  It sucks balls.

  “Look, Daisy…” I put down the beer and shake my head. “Thanks for the help but I’m gonna try to get some sleep, and I know you have work in the morning, so…” I’m no closer to sleep than I was an hour ago. I’m just trying to make it easier for her, but I know I come off sounding like a dick. I’ve never been good at censoring myself. Most of the time I don’t care. Right now, I want to punch myself in the face.

  As soon as I say it she goes still, her hands clasped around the loaf of bread she’s putting away like someone unplugged her. “Oh.” She nods, tucking the tail end of the bread bag under the loaf before setting it down. “Okay.” She nods again, smoothing her hands down the bottom half of her borrowed shirt like it’s a couture ball gown. “I’ll just gather my things.” She gives me a polite smile before skirting her way around me, still nodding as she disappears into the bathroom.

  A few seconds later she comes out of the bathroom with several thousand dollars’ worth of wet delicates and rumpled designer labels. I watch her hurry past me to dump her haul into my reading chair in the corner of the room. I expect her to start throwing on her clothes. Find her shoes. Rush down the stairs to get away from me.

  But she doesn’t.

  She just stands there and stares at my chair.

  “Can I stay?” She finally looks at me, her dark eyes wide, teeth practically chewing a hole in her bottom lip. “Tomorrow is Friday and I don’t have to be to the library until noon and I …” she looks away from me, her gaze straying to the wide, floor-to-ceiling book shelf on the other side of the room’s only window. “I don’t have any books at my place and I’d like to read for a while.” She shifts her weight from foot to the other when I don’t answer her. “I won’t make any noise. I’ll let you sleep. I just—”

  “You want to stay?”

  She nods.

  I don’t think about what she’s asking me. About how she practically cut me open and played with my guts when I asked for the exact same thing only a few weeks ago. About what waking up next to her is going to do to me later.

  She wants to stay.

  That’s all I can think.

  All that matters.

  “I pick the book and you read it out loud.”

  She opens her mouth and closes it before opening it again. “You want me to read to you?”

  I think about lying with her in the hammock in my parents’ backyard. Her bare feet on my chest while she read to me out loud and I counted the freckles on her ankle. Of the two of us curled up in the chair behind her, her head resting on my shoulder and my ring on her finger. “It’s what I want,” I say, my voice rough. Uneven. “Yes or no?”

  She nods again, her fingers twisting the hem of her shirt. “Yes.”

  She takes a seat on the edge of the chair, watching me while I choose a book, handing it to her on my way to the bathroom. There I hang up my towel and brush my teeth. When I emerge from the bathroom, she’s looking at the book I gave her, her hand pressed against the Celtic love knot engraved into its leather cover.

  When I’m lucky enough to sleep, I sleep naked. The feel of fabric against my skin is distracting. Almost irritating sometimes. Makes it impossible for me to unplug my brain long enough to drift. Because I don’t feel anywhere near numb enough to even manage to close my eyes, I dig a pair of sleep pants I’ve never worn out of my dresser and pull them on.

  Slipping between the sheets, I settle into the bed, stacking the pillows, trying to get comfortable. These fucking pants are helping matters but I’ll be damned if I’m taking them off. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea about why I said yes. Why I want her to stay.

  I just want to be with her.

  I finally manage to find a position that doesn’t make me want to jump up and rip my pants off. When I look at her she’s watching me. Waiting.

  “Come here, Henley.”

  She doesn’t answer me, and she doesn’t hesitate. She just stands and crosses the room to sit on the edge of the bed. Scooting back until she’s sitting up in bed beside me, she opens the book to a place she’s marked with her finger. “My Gaelic is rusty,” she whispers.

  I taught her to speak it when we were together, so she could understand what I was saying to her when I read to her from the book of Celtic poetry she has in her lap.

  “Then you need the practice.” I turn into her, leaning over to press my lips to the top of her bare thigh before pressing my cheek against it.

  She looks down at me and smiles. “You asked for it,” she says before she starts to read.

  If now you hate me as you say

  Can you forget so soon

  How you and I, the world away,

  Once lay and watched the moon?

  Can you forget the day when cool

  Seemed to our love the sun,

  The day that we-? But I’m a fool,

  Besides, that day is done.

  I close my eyes and listen to her. Her voice as soothing and beautiful as I remember. The warm weight of her against me like an anchor, holding me down. Keeping me solid. Making me real.

  I close my eyes and drift.

  Twenty-seven

  Conner

  Finding her was the easy part.

  As simple as hacking into the New York DMV database. It took all of five minutes.

  Once I cut through ribbons of red tape and dug through all the bullshit—the corporate accounts and fleet registries—it boiled down to one name.

  Spencer Halston-Day.

  My family has money. A lot of it. It’s not something we really talk about. We don’t rely on it. Don’t use it. Normal house. Regular cars. Occasional trips to Disney World. Nothing we couldn’t afford without it.

  The way my dad explains it, it’s not really his. My grandda left it to him when he died, and it caused a rift between my dad and uncle. He’s all but ignored it since.

  But I know it’s there.

  Henley’s new stepfather makes my family’s money look chump change.

  Billions. The man has billions.

  We’re talking Scrooge McDuck money.

  I’ve had the address to his private residence for a while now—some super swank brownstone on the East River. Close enough to Manhattan to be considered fashionable but far enough away from the riffraff to remain untouchable.

  He bought the place three weeks before Henley’s mother walked out on her dad. I’d bet my left nut he bought the place, just for her.

  Yeah, finding Henley was easy. The hard part was convincing myself to make the trip. I told myself it was because I wanted to give h
er a chance. She’d call. She’d write. Come back. Even if it was only long enough to say goodbye.

  I scribbled her new address on a scrap of paper and carried it around for two-hundred twenty-eight days.

  A lot of shit happened between then and now. I stopped going to high school. Fall semester started and I just never went back. Without Henley, it seemed pointless. A lot of things did.

  So I dug myself in. Finished my last year of law school in six months. I’ll take the BAR the day after Ryan leaves for the Army.

  It was a court-ordered enlistment. Join the army or go to prison. I thought shit like that only happened in the movies, but it’s a real thing. The judge gave him a choice.

  Soldier or Inmate.

  He took option A.

  I’m not sure why today is different. What happened. All I know is that the sun came up, and I was done waiting.

  I need to see her. I have things to say that can’t wait. Not anymore.

  I tell my mom I’m going to the library to study for the BAR and that I won’t be back until later tonight. I’m fairly certain she knows I’m full of shit, but she doesn’t say anything. With what’s been going on with Declan lately, I’m barely an afterthought.

  I haven’t talked to my brother in five months. my last words to him were, you’re a selfish, asshole who destroys everything he touches.

  He didn’t disagree.

  I buy a train ticket and find a seat, passing the four-hour trip by staring out the window, lost in my own head until the conductor’s voice booms over the loudspeaker.

  Final stop, Union Station.

  Stepping out onto the sidewalk, I flag the first cab I see. “Take me here,” I say, plastering the scrap of worn paper with the address on it against the clear plastic partition.

  As soon as he sees where I want him to take me, he bumps his gaze up to meet mine and scowls. I don’t look like much. T-shirt. Jeans. Light-weight jacket. No luggage to speak of. Just a paper-wrapped package on the seat next to me. “That’s a sixty-dollar one-way, kid.” He shakes his head. “Unless you got a credit card to swipe—”