NICE GIRL TO LOVE (THE COMPLETE THREE-BOOK COLLECTION)(2)

CHAPTER ONE


GLANCING ACROSS THE ROOM at his guests, Connor Sullivan was pleasantly shocked to see his brother Brian arrive at the party with a date on his arm. As most everyone in his house tonight could attest, Connor wasn’t used to failing. He was one of the most sought-after corporate attorneys in the Western U.S. with a courtroom reputation even his friends referred to as notorious—due in part to the impressive number of times and ways he’s been held in contempt for his clients.

So sue him, he enjoyed the rough and tumble victories.

He fought hard for his wins, and he did it well. But when it came to helping his little brother cope with being a widower at the age of thirty, Connor had no clue who to fight, or how to win. Aside from paying off a decade’s worth of hospital and care facility bills from his sister-in-law’s battle with early-onset Huntington’s, and creating a scholarship in Beth’s name for youths plagued with the debilitating disease, Connor had felt useless to Brian after her death. All he’d been able to do was give him space, the only thing Brian insisted he needed.

For nearly a year.

So, when Brian called a few months back to ask for a favor, Connor had all but tripped over himself to give him a blind take-any-organ-you-want yes.

Turns out, Brian just wanted his daughter to have somewhere to hang out every day afterschool until he could pick her up in the evenings throughout the fall term. It was hardly even a favor. Connor adored his niece Skylar and since he lived so close to the middle school she’d just gotten a boundary exemption to attend, walking over to his home while he was at work was the perfect solution.

Not that Brian wouldn’t have simply quit his side coaching job to be there for Skylar had Connor said no. Brian would move mountains for that little girl. In fact, with Skylar’s best friend moving away not long after her mom’s death, Brian had done everything short of stalking the educational board to get district approval so the two best-friends-since-daycare could at least be in the same school again this upcoming year.

Thank God it had worked out. Connor couldn’t imagine what it was like for an eleven-year old to lose her mom the way she did. She’d barely said one word throughout the entire holiday season last winter. Really, the school transfer was the first thing she’d seemed truly happy about all year.

Ditto for her dad.

By all accounts, Brian was clawing back from the edge of the cliff he’d been hanging onto by his fingertips for far too many years. But it was slow going. Logically understanding that Brian had to tackle this on his own didn’t make it any less of a bitch for Connor; it just made him craftier about how he snuck in the big brother thing. Luckily, it was summer in Arizona and he had a pool. Simple as that. Even with the endless hours he now kept as an equity partner at Caldwell, Sullivan & Phillips, squeezing in poolside barbeques for Brian and Skylar had become a weekly priority. Which paid off big time. After a month of regular cookouts, it was no longer uncommon for Brian to show up at the house unannounced, grab an unoffered beer, and plant himself on the couch to catch a game uninvited.

It was nice having his brother back.

For the better part of a decade, Brian’s singular mission had been to give his wife a lifetime’s worth of happiness every day, while hiding his own anguish over her heartwrenching physical and psychological decline. Connor knew it used to kill Brian to watch Beth gradually give up raising her own child the worse her motor functions became. Even before she’d become bedridden. That’s when Connor had begun jumping in to take Skylar as much he could, mainly since the eldest Sullivan matriarch had about as much experience being a warm grandma as she’d had being ‘mom’ instead of ‘mother’ when he and Brian were kids. In fact, she’d asked to be third in the caretaker line-up, following Brian’s best friend from college—a nice girl Connor vaguely recalled meeting years ago. So basically, it’d been a nonstop two-person job to shield Skylar from what was happening to her mom.

There had been no shielding Brian, however.

Beth had been Brian’s world, his high school sweetheart, the girl he’d come home vowing he was going to spend his life with the day he’d met her.

Receiving the devastating news that Beth’s time with him would be far shorter and infinitely rougher—mere weeks after their unplanned child was born—simply prompted Brian to love and live every day following like it was their last.

And he’d only been nineteen at the time.

Truth be told, while Connor had always admired Brian’s extraordinary, absolutely nonhereditary capacity for love, he’d been a little glad to see the tragic love story finally came to an end. Awful as that sounds. He’d adored his sister-in-law, really. But the time was long past for Brian to move on with his life.

Tonight, it looked like he was finally starting to.

“I’m going over to say hi to my brother. Do you want to come along or are you good here?” Connor asked his date for the night, the always stunning Victoria, a divorce lawyer from a rival firm who just happened to be between men this week.

“Brian’s here tonight? How wonderful,” replied Victoria with her token radiant smile, the most effective tool in her arsenal to detract attention from her constantly wandering eyes. “Give him my best will you? I’m going to mingle. The Adonis in the gray pinstripe is looking mighty lonely there in the corner.”