Choosing the Right Man (NICE GIRL TO LOVE Book Three) (5 page)

Long, huffed out moments later, Abby conceded. “Fine. But if we’re doing this, there will be absolutely no sex, obviously,” she made a face, “and no kissing or anything of the sort, either.” She frowned, looking like she considered herself crazy for even contemplating it. “We’ll just hang out. Treat it like a blind date.”

With his lawyer rebuttal face on, Connor opened his mouth to say something and Brian nailed him again in the chest. “Shut. Up.” Between the three of them, they were well aware that Connor’s boundaries for a blind date far differed from Abby and Brian’s.

Quickly turning back to Abby, he nodded. “Those terms sound acceptable.”

Abby spun on her heel and stalked back over to the house, muttering under her breath. “I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this.”

Brian stood there for a second watching her stomp away, looking quite adorable in all her fiery annoyance.

When he looked over and saw Connor doing the same, he shoved him off balance. “Stop staring at her.”

Connor swung his foot around and took out both of Brian’s knees. “I will if you will.”

“There now, I knew you two could work things out,” called out Helen from the patio. “I’m taking Abby and Skylar shopping. Try not to kill each other.”

“...At least not before you move that table I asked you to.”

“
W
HAT WERE DAD AND UNCLE CONNER
doing outside in the yard for so long?” asked Skylar, climbing in the backseat of Helen’s car.

Abby exchanged a look with Helen. She couldn’t possibly tell Skylar about this whole joint custody dating thing. It was just be too weird.

“Ohmigosh, were they working on your SUV?” guessed Skylar bouncing in her seat, clapping excitedly.

What?

Abby knew her SUV was the butt of most of her friends’ jokes, mostly since it was held together with more duct tape than metal by now. Still, she was madly attached to it. Fiercely protective of it. She had no intention of replacing it until it had taken its last quart of oil and needed to be towed off her driveway.

“They’re going to do something to my SUV?” She was seriously contemplating having Helen turn right back around.

Skylar giggled. “Geez, don’t freak out. It’s nothing bad. Dad just found you another soft-top for your SUV at the junkyard and he needed Uncle Connor’s help to install it since I’m too short. You had him so worried after the last dust storm that he’s been calling every junkyard in Arizona since to find one.”

“Your dad did that?” Abby felt her lungs grow weightless.

“Yeah, most of the junkyards just laughed when he told them the make and model of your SUV. The last junkyard we found was the only one that had it. It was so cool, Abby. The junkyard was this massive place with piles and piles of cars all shoved together. They told us the SUV that had the soft top compatible with yours was blue. And that was it. They pointed us to one section of the junk yard that was as big as a football field and told us to go find it. Crazy, right?”

Helen gasped. “You can’t tell me you went out there with him.”

Skylar nodded vigorously. “It was fun! We had to shimmy our way between most of the cars and it took us like two hours to find the right one. Dad had to climb over a bunch of cars and trucks to even get to it but he was like on a mission the whole time.”

Abby smiled. That sounded like Brian. He was as doggedly loyal to her SUV as she was. Not because he loved it like she did. In fact, he hated it. Worried about her driving it farther than a few miles, or at speeds higher than thirty-five miles per hour. But instead of telling her to dump it like everyone else did, he’d just show up every few months to keep changing its oil or tuning up the engine.

“It’s no big deal, Abby,” he’d always say.

But it really was.

Brian got her in ways no one else did. Always had, always would.

It was in the little things. Like when the electricity would go out in her house, Brian was the only one who knew her house’s ‘time zones.’ She always set her bedroom clock ten minutes fast because she was horrible about getting up, her bathroom and kitchen clock were five minutes less than that because she always lost track of time when she was cooking, and the old clock in her dining room—the one that used to belong to her grandfather—needed to be set ahead three minutes upon any reset for it to read the time accurately a few hours later.

In every way that resonated in her heart, Brian really was the perfect man.

He just…wasn’t Connor.

S
O WHAT’D YOU HAVE TO DO
to get me this week, win a coin toss against Brian?” Abby asked without thinking as Connor’s hand accidentally brushed hers across the table, causing the equivalent of a power surge in her brain.

At Connor’s now innocently-whistling focus on his glass of water, her hackles rose, and all nervousness over this ‘first date’ was quickly forgotten. “Are you freakin’ kidding me?!”

“Even the Super Bowl is started that way!” he defended, the tiny crinkling at the corner of his eyes his only tell. “Besides,
Brian
wanted to rock-paper-scissors for you but I told him that was just downright insulting.”

She smothered the smile that was threatening to make itself known. “You haven’t changed one bit.”

Then all at once, the humiliating reminder of how she’d spent months waiting for him to return extinguished her good humor in a flash.

He noticed.

“I didn’t mean to stay away for so long, Abby.”

This time, it was her glass of water that was the star of the show. “Then why did you?” she asked quietly, doing everything she could to convey a casualness she certainly didn’t feel.

“I didn’t think Brian was going to take so damn long to try and sweep you off your feet. Hell, I wouldn’t have.”

Scowling, she looked up, utterly confused. “Wait, what?” Understanding tumbled over her like a twenty-foot wave. “You two talked about this before our month was over. You
told
Brian to pursue me?” She shoved away from the dining table. “And now, what? You’re back because you don’t like that your brother is playing with your toy? Was this all some big game to you?”

“Dammit, you and Brian really do think alike.” He clamped a hand on her wrist to prevent her from running out of his house. “Do you honestly think that little of me?” His eyes drilled into her, pinned her to the spot.

No, she didn’t.

Dropping back down into the seat, she watched his hand slide from her wrist down to her fingers, and she did her best to swallow back a shiver when his thumb trailed over her palm.

“Then what was the whole point, Connor? Or did I decode your gift and letter wrong? If you were always planning on coming back, why push me toward Brian in the first place?”

“I didn’t know what else to do.” He pulled back and scrubbed a frustrated hand over his face. “Nothing about what you and I had was planned. My whole life, I’ve planned absolutely everything. Until you came along. Instead of planning my life, you made me want to simply live it.” Searching her gaze he added, “More and more, I found myself never wanting to let you go. Not after a month…not ever.”

None of this made even a lick of sense. And her instant, melting reaction to every paradoxical thing he was saying was the most illogical part of it all. “So why—”

“Because you two are perfect for each other,” he cut in almost bitterly. “And because you’re both so goddamn good and nice, you were each just ignoring what was plain as day between you two.” His jaw ticked. “So I stepped aside. Even though all I wanted was to hold on to you and keep you as mine forever, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not without letting you two figure out if there really was something there. I didn’t want to short either of you that, and frankly, I didn’t want to wonder over it my whole life.”

Every long term phrase spilling from his lips was effectively tangling her thoughts, confusing her heart, rebinding what she thought was all but lost.

“Of all the things I’ve had to give up in my life, you were the only one I couldn’t bear to lose, Abby,” he whispered roughly. “But it was killing me to think there would always be that possibility that I could lose you anyway if I held on. If I didn’t give you two a chance to see if the kind of love you had for each other was more than you thought it was.”

“Because that kind of thing never goes away. So I told myself that I’d give you both one month, just like you and I had...”

To fall in love.

It hung there silently between them though neither had ever said it aloud.

“I allotted one month for Brian to see if things would’ve worked out for you two without Beth being a factor.” He lifted his gaze to snag hers. “One month for you to see if he’s the one you really want.”

Abby rewound her time with Brian. Had it really only been a month? It felt like longer, like there’d been no real start date to her feelings for him. “Did Brian know about all this? About your one-month plan for us?” He’d let her believe that Connor wasn’t ever going to come back.

“Not about the one-month, no. And not about my feelings for you either, not really. At least not until that morning at the house.”

Right, Helen’s house. His spy. “So your mother was the only one who knew the whole story.” Abby sat there for a few minutes and attempted to make sense out of all this information. To make sense of Connor.

An improbable feat.

When she eventually looked up from her food, she saw him eyeing her like he was about to face a firing squad.

Good.

Leaning forward, she steepled her hands and asked the only question that hadn’t stopped echoing in her mind for the past few minutes. “When you said you waited one month, how many days exactly did you wait?”

He blinked at her, startled, and then seemingly pleased, before answering with a head-shaking smile, “Twenty-eight days. I waited exactly twenty-eight of the longest days of my life.”

Abby sat back with a nod wondering how it was that even though her brain seemed not to know what to do with that information, her racing heart was reacting like it had gotten the answer it was searching for.

C
ONNOR FELT HIS HEART
pounding in his chest. Count on Abby to ask the most unlikely question—a question that looked deeper into him than most people knew how to or cared to...a question that gave him hope.

“So am I forgiven for leaving you?”

“Of course not,” she replied before biting into the summer roll she’d been turning into a voodoo doll for the past ten minutes.

Well, it was worth a shot.

“But,” she conceded, “you are forgiven for the length of time you left me.”

That was more than he was expecting, and truthfully, more than he thought he deserved.

“Gabriella mentioned you’d started seeing someone,” she said then from straight out of left field.

What
? “When on earth did you talk to
Gabriella
?”

She paused in thought for a second and then answered as if surprised by her own answer. “About a month ago.”

Ah, and another piece of the puzzle in the Abby and Brian saga was revealed. “I haven’t dated anyone after you, sweetheart.”

“What about the woman you were with at the hospital?” Her voice was bolder now and hot damn if that wasn’t a spark of jealousy firing those sweetly sexy brown eyes of hers.

“She’s a friend, nothing more.”

Her eyes narrowed in naked disbelief. “You don’t have female friends. Besides Victoria, that is, and we both know that friendship will always be partly a get-into-bed-free card on her end.”

Another flare of jealousy. Along with a small smile she hid behind her napkin.

Funny, he never thought such a thing would ever factor into his feelings over a woman but the fact that Abby could see the good in Victoria meant a lot. He remembered now feeling the same way when she’d actually been complimentary about her, seemed to have liked her a bit even, after their first train wreck of an introduction to each other months ago.

Even though that hadn’t been a test, Abby was the only person in his life, man or woman, who’d ever aced it.

“The woman from the hospital is helping me with a few pro bono cases I’m working on,” he explained. “She’s one of the major representatives of an organization I care a lot about. And she’s a hell of a grant writer as well. The night you saw us, we’d been preparing for a trip the following day to the east coast for a day-long set of meetings we had regarding a series of cutting edge clinical trials she’d found and researched.”

A twinge of respect colored Abby’s expression. “She sounds incredible.”

None of the other women he’d been with in the past would’ve given the qualities he’d just listed the proper respect they deserved. Another aced non-test. “She is incredible. I admire her a lot, which was why we became friends so quickly. Nothing more. I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”