He’d come back.
Again.
* * *
Connor shoved his free hand through his hair, acutely aware of the ass he was making of himself and yet unable to walk away as he should.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her words barely a whisper.
He opened his mouth to answer, but then all he could do was stare. Soaking in the sight of her smattering of freckles and gorgeous mouth he hadn’t seen smile for too damn long.
Her face seemed thinner and he didn’t like the shadows beneath her eyes, and yet no one had ever been so beautiful as she was right then.
Clearing his throat, he looked down into the eyes that had been haunting him for weeks, and then to the hand that had come to rest defensively across her belly.
“Why did I wait so long?” he asked himself, keenly aware of the futility of the question.
Megan blinked, confusion and hurt and a thousand other things shining too bright in those beautiful eyes. And then resolve. “You need to stop this, Connor. What you’re doing, calling, showing up. It’s—” she swallowed, looking as though even that simple act took monumental effort “—it’s hurting me.”
He hated knowing it was the truth. Wishing he’d been smart enough from the start to make it so neither one of them would have had to go through this kind of pain. “I’m sorry.”
“Then leave,” she whispered. A single fat tear spilled over her bottom lid, and his heart twisted with a pain he’d never experienced before. “Please. I can’t be what you wanted me to be. I’ll never be able to be that for you. Let me go.”
“No.” He shook his head solemnly. “I tried. I did. But I can’t.”
“You have to—”
“I’ll never let you go!” The words had ripped past his throat before he’d had the thought to temper them. But they were the truth.
Megan froze in her spot, her gorgeous mouth parted in midprotest, brows pulled high together in an expression that was pure, helpless disbelief.
But not elation. Not blissful surrender.
At the first blink, the sign she was breaking out of that stunned state of suspension, he panicked. He hadn’t said enough, hadn’t explained, couldn’t risk her response before he told her everything she needed to know.
So he pulled the lowest trick he had in his arsenal. This was too important to him—she was too important to him—to risk playing by the rules. And for the first time in his life, he didn’t damn his father for that bit of unscrupulous DNA spiraling through the darkest parts of who he was.
He embraced it.
Stepping forward, he caught Megan with one hand beneath the fall of her hair, silencing any denial she might have made with a kiss bursting with every bit of aching, unfulfilled longing, heartbreak, desire and need he’d suffered since the moment she left. He told her with his lips how he missed her, with his tongue the way of his want. Gentle bites hinted at the hold she had on him.
And when her fingers were wrapped in his shirt, her breath rushing across his lips and cheeks, her eyes again locked with his—he went on. Telling her what he’d only discovered for himself.
“Megan, I never wanted love. I saw what it did to my mother and didn’t want any part of it. All my adult life I avoided that kind of intimacy, holding myself at arm’s length and making unbreachable boundaries a part of every relationship. It was easy. Until I met you. In the span of a few hours, I’d married you and all the rules I lived by were a thing of the past. I swore up and down we’d have the kind of controlled marriage where no one could get hurt, but I couldn’t even control myself. Nothing halfway was enough with you. I made every excuse in the book, but I couldn’t admit what was really going on.”
“Connor...” His name passed her lips on a breath that barely dared to take voice.
“I said I didn’t want to be your friend, but it’s not true. I want to be your friend and your lover and your husband and the father to your children—” He broke off, swallowing past a well of regret without limit. “I know you’re going to tell me it’s too late, but Megan, it’s not.”