It looked like he hadn’t cut his hair since the last time, just a day before Damon’s funeral. Now a lock of it fell over Connor’s forehead, and he had it pushed back behind his ears. He wore a dark gray button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, showing tanned forearms. Apparently he hadn’t been wasting away in his studio, mooning over me. Then again, even in the depths of winter, his skin tone had always been warm, quite a bit darker than mine.
Mouth dry, I somehow managed to say, “Hi, Connor.”
“Hi, Angela.” Calm, casual…just the way he’d been when I first woke up in his apartment. Back then, I hadn’t known quite what to make of such behavior.
Now I knew it was his way of covering up what he was really feeling.
“Thanks for coming.” Oh, Goddess, that sounded terrible. I might as well have been thanking him for showing up at a business meeting.
The tiniest lift of his shoulders. “Since I hadn’t heard anything from you before this, I figured it must be important.”
Hadn’t heard anything from you before this. Well, that was rich. Since he was the one who’d thrown me out, I sort of thought he should be the one making the conciliatory gestures. But this was going to be hard enough without me tossing accusations around. “I — I was trying to give you your space,” I replied.
Another shrug. That green gaze seemed to slide past me, toward the water. “Thanks,” he said at last.
I’d known this was going to be hard, but somehow I hadn’t thought it would be quite this hard. Even though I knew Connor had a tendency to clam up when he was upset or nervous, in that moment I felt as if I were talking to a brick wall. But now that I had him here, I knew I had to go through with this, even though I found myself wishing I’d never sent him the text to meet me.
Just get it over with, I thought. Tell him. No matter how he reacts, it can’t be any worse than this.
Lifting my chin, I looked up into his face, practically forcing him with my gaze to meet my eyes. At last he did, and without flinching. Good. That was better.
“I asked you to meet me because, well” — I pulled in a breath, forced the words out — “I’m pregnant.”
Immediately the cool mask was gone. I saw fear, true fear, flare in his eyes. “Oh, God,” he murmured. Then he shook his head. “You can’t keep it, Angela. It’ll kill you.”
How he’d known what my decision had been, I couldn’t guess, except that he knew me. We were bonded, even if he’d tried to ignore that bond. Or maybe he thought that if I’d decided to quietly get rid of the baby, there would be no need to ever say anything to him.
“That’s what everyone’s been telling me,” I replied, actually relieved to see the worry and dismay in his eyes. If he truly didn’t care about me anymore, would he be reacting this way? “But this child is ours, Connor. I want it to be born, no matter what happens.”
He didn’t reply at first, only continued to stare down at me as if he’d never seen me before. Finally, “You’d really do that? Even knowing what’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I told him. “Neither do you. Not for certain. But I’ll tell you what I told my clan elders — I will find some way to break this curse. I want to see this child grow up. And — ” For the first time I faltered, because my next words weren’t about our unborn baby, but about us, and that felt like much more dangerous ground. “ — And I really hope we can experience that together.”
I’d been expecting a dismissal, or at most another one of those infuriating shrugs. What I hadn’t expected was for him to reach out and pull me against him, to feel his arms go around me in an embrace so fierce it almost suffocated me. Not that I minded, of course. What was a little missing breath when the man you thought you’d lost forever takes you in his arms like that?
His lips brushed the top of my hair. “I want that, too,” he murmured. “I want that more than anything.”
Even as my heart leapt at those words, I couldn’t help pulling away slightly so I could cast a quizzical glance up at him. “Not that I’m not totally thrilled to hear that, Connor, but if that’s the case, why the radio silence? I’ve spent the last few months thinking you never wanted to see me again.”
He did look shamefaced at that remark. “I know, I know. It’s been killing me.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I mean it, Angela.” A pause, and he added, “That is, I did feel that way for the first week. I was furious with you — and with myself — thinking there must have been another solution, some way to save Damon. And I was having to deal with that while finding myself suddenly primus of my clan, and settling Damon’s affairs, which weren’t trivial, either, and — well, I was in a bad place.”