NICE GIRL TO LOVE (THE COMPLETE THREE-BOOK COLLECTION)(46)

“Then let me go. Because staying here for any more of your goodbyes is going to hurt me.” She dropped her head to his chest. “You were right. Are you happy? It is more humane to walk out like a thief in the night without saying goodbye. Because there is no way that could hurt any more than what I’m feeling right now.” Hands fisting against his shirt, she whispered in anguish, “It didn’t have to be like this. You didn’t have to start pushing me away. We could have had our one last beautiful night together and gone our separate ways. Didn’t you believe I could do it?”

“You weren’t the one I was worried about, sweetheart,” he said quietly. His arms wrapped around her and pulled her in close. “Even knowing that tomorrow is going to be the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do, even knowing that I was a total ass who doesn’t deserve to spend another minute with you, even knowing that you make me want to be the man that’ll do what’s right and just let you go…I can’t. Not yet. If all I get are these last few hours with you, I still want them. God help me but I do.”

She couldn’t keep hearing him torture himself like this, denying them both the fantasy of a painless goodbye.

“I want those last few hours with you too, Connor.”




AS HE KNOCKED ON THE DOOR of his childhood home, it occurred to Connor that he didn’t have the vaguest idea if he still had his old key to the house. There was a good chance he hadn’t even taken it with him when he’d moved away to college. An even better chance that he had taken it, and then thrown it out with the trash one day.

“Connor? To what do I owe pleasure this early in the morning?” A surprised Helen Sullivan pulled her front door open wide and flashed the bright, formal smile she reserved for only her welcome guests. Oh, and her sons.

Connor grimaced. “Can’t you just say hi to me like a normal mother for a change?”

She flinched.

Scrubbing a tired hand over his face, he tilted his head in apology. “I’m sorry mother, I’m just—”

“Can I help you with something?”

Her now utterly detached tone almost stopped him. But for some reason, he still managed to force out a quiet, “Actually…yes.”

That brought her gaze swinging back. “Really?” She looked so surprised that Connor racked his brain to try and recall the last time he’d asked her for something. Not a single memory came to mind.

“I want to know why you’re getting a divorce.”

Her face became a cold mask. “You’re the last person I thought would wonder over that. You know as well as I do that your father is a cheating bastard. A heartless bastard even without the cheating part.”

He studied the first signs of life he’d seen in his mother in a long while. “How long have you known?”

“Since the beginning.” She shook her head bitterly. “Your father made certain that I knew from day one. He wanted me to know exactly who and what he was, who and what I had contracted my life to.”

For the first time ever, Connor felt something other than pity for his mother. He felt empathy. For a woman who hadn’t felt strong enough to leave a marriage that was anything but, despite every cruelty her husband threw her way.

“Did you know going in? He says you knew. That it was all a part of the agreement.”

She twisted her fingers around her now bare ring finger. When had she taken her wedding band off? How long ago did she file for divorce? What kind of son is callous enough not to know these answers?

“I knew it was all business for him, yes, but I never knew it would be a life sentence of pain for me. One filled with loneliness, humiliation. Apathy.”

“You didn’t have to be lonely,” he said quietly. “You had me; you had Brian.”

His mother reeled back as if he’d slapped her. And in a way he had. Because before this, they’d never spoken about her lack of a role in his and Brian’s lives. “It wasn’t that easy! Yes, of course I wanted to be there for you and Brian, shower you both with the love your father never cared to give. You were both my perfect miracles, both so strong and good—everything I wasn’t. But living with your father, getting through each day in this sham of a life...I couldn’t survive it without turning off my emotions. All of them. Because I couldn’t just pick and choose certain parts of my heart to reserve for you and Brian, and not risk the rest of it to get slaughtered and stripped away by your father.”

She gripped his forearm almost desperately. “You remember, Connor. How he always used to make us feel like we weren’t worth caring about? It was a reminder he doled out daily, in a hundred different ways. Even more so for me than for you two. And that was to keep me tied to him, a shell of a woman, too empty and broken to leave him.”

“So what’s changed?” He had to know. Needed to know what could cause such a drastic change in a woman who’d made the choice every day for over thirty years to remain in her own personal hell.

“I fell in love.”

Connor blinked. That he had not been expecting. Throughout his entire life, where his father had always been disparaging about love, his mother had seemed incapable of it, oblivious to it. And why wouldn’t she be? With a man like his father emptying her heart and making sure it remained that way.

After a long, cleansing breath, his mother began describing him then—her friend, the man who helped heal everything her husband had broken. The man who was waiting for her, apparently had been waiting for years.