* * *
You know what my plans are...
The words pounded through Connor’s skull as relentlessly as a jackhammer, over and over again, until now, hours after Megan had ended the call, he felt the reverberation of them through every cell in his body.
He’d known from the start Megan had a path laid out for her future. A family without the complications of a marriage or a man. And he’d been fine with it. Because he believed it would never come to pass.
He was supposed to have time. Time to win her back. Time to figure a work-around Megan wouldn’t be able to resist.
She’d fallen in love with him. Which meant she was capable of the one thing that, previously lacking, had led her to consider artificial insemination.
She’d fallen in love with him. So she was supposed to believe it would happen with someone else. Eventually. And wait.
Only now she was going to go through with it.
Nothing’s changed...
Uh-huh. Not one damn thing. Except he was physically sick to his stomach thinking about Megan with another man’s child. Thinking about that unbreakable connection, that intimacy of union —even if the donor never knew she existed, the idea alone was enough to put him into a near rage.
And what about all the months to come? Her relationship with her mom was tenuous at best. Who was going to be there to help her through the tough times? The times when she was sick, weak, hungry...or scared.
Hell. He hated that almost more than he hated the idea of some piece of another man mingling with the very essence of who she was.
His mother hadn’t talked a lot about what it was like raising him on her own. She hadn’t wanted him to feel like a burden. But he could remember a night when she’d been crying, talking to his father. Asking him if he’d any idea what it was like for her—waking up in labor by herself. Not understanding what was happening. Having to get to the hospital and spend all those hours waiting for a man who had made promise after promise, but never came to her. A man who let her deliver his child, scared and alone, while he’d hosted a Christmas party with his wife.
Megan wouldn’t even have the hope someone might come.
Damn it, why couldn’t she just let him be with her?
Pushing out of his chair, he walked over to the bar and poured a glass of scotch, threw it back in the hopes the burn would dull the gut-wrenching ache with all the what-ifs and why-couldn’ts constantly swirling around Megan’s name in his belly.
It didn’t help. So he poured another, figuring if he couldn’t kill the pain in his gut, maybe he’d at least be able to numb the pounding in his head.
An hour later, he was thinking more clearly than he ever had before. Pushing the empty bottle aside, he reached for his phone.
“I need you...”
* * *
Connor woke with what felt like the better half of a landfill in his eyes and the near certainty that somehow through the course of the night he’d ended up on a cruise—the gentle rock and loll of the space around him doing things he didn’t entirely love to his stomach. Only, then the mattress beneath him sagged with a shift of weight that wasn’t his own.
Not. Alone.
Elation ripped through him as he tried to pry his eyelids open, experienced a stab of pain at the intrusion of light and clamped them closed again.
It didn’t matter.
If he wasn’t alone, then somehow, someway, he’d gotten Megan back into his bed. God bless whatever he’d been drinking last night.
Blindly reaching across the sheets, he encircled the first warmth he encountered and pulled it close. Or tried to, except—
“I don’t know what you heard,” said the octaves-too-low voice from considerably too close, “but I’m not that kind of girl.”
Jeff.
This time Connor wrenched his eyes open, forcing them to withstand the searing pain of daylight and the utterly confusing sight of his hand wrapped around Jeff’s jeans-clad thigh, where it rested atop the comforter on his bed.