For Her Protection(71)
She exhaled deeply. “What I’m saying is—it’s not always effective. Last night at the awards when I threw up what Bob gave me, I realized it might be something else making me sick.”
Connor hit the turn signal and the tires screeched as the car pulled to a space at the side of the road. He yanked up the handbrake, switched off the engine, unbuckled his seatbelt and turned to her.
Her chest fluttered as if she’d been running after a coffee-drinking contest. His eyes, his attention centered on her. She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t watch them change when she told him the truth.
“If you’re saying what I think you are, you can just tell me, Charlize. It’ll be okay.”
She blinked, a screen of tears blurring her vision. “No I’m not, and if I were, it wouldn’t be okay. But I thought—I was terrified actually—that I might be.”
Silence blistered through the car. Connor spoke, his voice a broken whisper. “And that’s it? The horrific possibility of carrying my child?”
“I’ve seen your house. I’ve seen you with kids. I know you want a family.”
“Is that so awful?”
She flinched at the undisguised hurt in his voice. “No,” she whispered and reached for him, took his big hand in hers. “So do I but I’m not ready. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to give up my job and everything I’ve worked for to do the house and kids thing.”
His fingers tightened over her knuckles. “Is that what you think? That I fell for you because I think you’ll look hot in an apron?”
She forced her gaze to meet his. The look in his eyes reflected a hundred pained emotions all wrapped up in affection. It freaking killed her. “So you’re not going to want that? Because I can’t live with your future not being everything you dreamed it would be because of me.”
He leaned closer, studied her. “Charlize, one day, if you ask me to put my kid in you, I’ll fucking be ecstatic and we’ll work it out. You won’t have to give up everything to do it.”
Her blood pressure rose to explosive levels. His words created such a tempting fantasy, worming its way under her skin, beckoning her to dream it with him. “That’s optimistic but I want to be realistic. I was raised by a mother who left because she wanted more and then by nannies who just wanted to be paid. I want more for my kids. I want them to have parents who are around to raise them and I honestly don’t know if I could cope with being completely absent.”
Connor scooped her face in his hands, his thumbs brushing her cheekbones. “Then they will. Who said it had to only be you? Who said we couldn’t do it together?”
“So you’d take time off from Crowe Security for daddy duties?” Her eyebrow twitched up. Absurd. No way would this big, domineering, made of testosterone man submit to domestic obligations and give up the pride of being breadwinner.
“I’ve managed to look after you, haven’t I? Crowe’s designed to survive without me in the office every day.” He released her face and settled back into his own seat then strapped his seatbelt back into place. “A man’s job is to protect his family, give them what they need. What they really need from him. That’s not something that can be offered in dollars or muscle mass.”
By the time he finished speaking, Charlize’s world had tilted. All the things she thought she knew, the things she’d decided, the things she believed got tipped out and shaken, put back in and rearranged into something more spectacular than she could have envisioned on her own.
“And you want to be my family?”
He looked at her, a brief glance before gazing back at the road and starting the engine. That one expression, eyes storming with emotion beneath scrunched brows, lips pressed together as if he feared what they might say, told her even more than his words had.
Words like love were easy, lazy…she’d heard them before. They could be empty, hollow sounds or mean one thing to one person and something else to another. But that look, that raw, pregnant need, that exposed yearning that seemed to say, “Here, take my heart”… There was no mistaking that kind of look.
He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and pulled onto the road. He glanced her way again but didn’t touch her. They couldn’t touch right now, not with the air laced with emotion like an electric current. He turned into the road around the block from her house. The car filled with the sound of their breathing, growing faster as they rolled into the street where she lived.
The car pulled up and Connor turned off the engine. His hands slid into his lap. He turned and their gazes locked. She knew her feelings poured into her face. She knew what her expression said—you have all of me.