“Good,” Connor said, beginning to attack his huge piece of cherry pie à la mode. “No point wasting your time on losers like that.”
She made a face and leaned toward him sadly. “Are they all like that? Is it really hopeless?”
“Yes.” He smiled at her. “Erase all thoughts of other men. I’m here. You don’t need anybody else.”
“Right.” She rolled her eyes, knowing he was teasing. “You’d think I would have learned my lesson with Brad, wouldn’t you?”
There was a catch in her voice as she said it. He looked up quickly and she knew he was afraid she might cry. But she didn’t cry about that anymore. She was all cried out long ago on that subject.
Did he remember what a fool she’d been? How even with all the evidence piling up in her daily life, she’d never seen it coming. At the time she was almost eight months pregnant with the twins and having a hard time even walking, much less with thinking straight. And Connor had come to tell her that Brad was leaving her.
Brad had sent him, of course. The jerk couldn’t even manage to face her and tell her himself.
That made her think twice. Here was Connor, back again. What was Brad afraid to tell her now?
She watched him, frowning, studying his blue eyes. Did she really want to know? All those months, all the heartbreak. Still, if it was something she needed to deal with, better get it over with. She took a deep breath and tried to sound strong and cool.
“So what does he want this time?”
Connor’s head jerked back as though what she was asking was out of line. He waved his fork at her. “Do you think we could first go through some of the niceties our society has set up for situations like this?” he asked her.
She searched his face to see if he was mocking her, but he really wasn’t. He was just uncomfortable.
“How about, ‘How have you been?’ or ‘What have you been up to lately?’ Why not give me some of the details of your life these days. Do we have to jump right into contentious things so quickly?”
So it wasn’t good. She should have known. “You’re the messenger, not me.”
His handsome face winced. It almost seemed as though this pained him more than it was going to pain her. Fat chance.
“We’re friends, aren’t we?” he asked her.
Were they? She used to think so. “Sure. We always have been.”
“So...”
He looked relieved, as though that made it all okay. But it wasn’t okay. Whatever it was, it was going to hurt. She knew that instinctively. She leaned forward and glared at him.
“But you’re on his side. Don’t deny it.”
He shook his head, denying it anyway. “What makes you say that?”
She shrugged. “That day, the one that ended life as I knew it, you came over to deliver the fatal blow. You set me straight as to how things really were.” Her voice hardened. “You were the one who explained Brad to me at the time. You broke my heart and then you left me lying there in the dirt and you never came back.”
“You were not lying in the dirt.” He seemed outraged at the concept.
She closed her eyes and then opened them again. “It’s a metaphor, silly.”
“I don’t care what it is. I did not leave you lying in the dirt or even in the sand, or on the couch, or anything. You were standing straight and tall and making jokes, just like always.”
Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to relax a bit. “You seemed calm and collected and fine with it. Like you’d known it was coming. Like you were prepared. Sad, but okay.” He shook his head, willing her to believe what he was saying. “Or else I never would have left you alone.”
She shrugged carelessly. How could he have gotten it all so wrong? “And you think you know me.”
He pushed away the pie, searching her eyes, looking truly distressed. “Sara was with you. Your sister. I thought...”
He looked away, frowning fiercely. He remembered what he’d thought. He’d seen the pain in her face and it had taken everything in him not to reach out and gather her in his arms and kiss her until she realized...until she knew... No, he’d had to get out of there before he did something stupid. And that was why he left her. He had his own private hell to tend to.
“You thought I was okay? Wow.” She struck a pose and put on an accent. “The corpse was bleeding profusely, but I assumed it would stop on its own. She seemed to be coping quite well with her murder.”
He grimaced, shaking his head.
“I hated you for a while,” she admitted. “It was easier than hating Brad. What Brad had done to me was just too confusing. What you did was common, everyday cowardice.”
He stared at her, aghast. “Oh, thanks.”
“And to make it worse, you never did come back. Did you?”
He shook his head as though he really couldn’t understand why she was angry. He hadn’t done anything to make her that way. He’d just lived his life like he always did, following the latest impulse that moved him. Didn’t she know that?
“I was gone. I left the country. I...I had a friend starting up a business in Singapore, so I went to help him out.”
She looked skeptical and deep, deep down, she looked hurt. “All this time?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, feeling a bit defensive. “I’ve been out of the country all this time.”
Funny, but that made her feel a lot better. At least he hadn’t been coming up here to Seattle and never contacting her.
“So you haven’t been to see Brad?”
He hesitated. He couldn’t lie to her. “I stopped in to see Brad in Portland last week,” he admitted.
She threw up her hands. “See? You’re on his side.”
He wanted to growl at her. “I’m not on anybody’s side. I’ve been friends with both of you since that first week of college, when we all three camped out in Brad’s car together.”
The corners of Jill’s mouth quirked into a reluctant smile as she remembered. “What a night that was,” she said lightly. “They’d lost my housing forms and you hadn’t been admitted yet. We had no place to sleep.”
“So Brad offered his car.”
“And stayed out with us.”
“We talked and laughed the whole night.”
She nodded, remembering. “And that cemented it. We were best buds from that night on.”
Connor smiled, but looked away. He remembered meeting Jill in the administration office while they both tried to fight the bureaucracy. He’d thought she was the cutest coed on campus, right from the start. And then Brad showed up and swept her off her feet.
“We fought the law and the law won,” he noted cynically.
“Right.” She laughed softly, still remembering. “You with that crazy book of rules you were always studying on how to make professors fall in love with you so they’d give you good grades.”
He sighed. “That never worked. And it should have, darn it all.”
Her eyes narrowed as she looked back into the past a little deeper. “And all those insane jobs you took, trying to pay off your fees. I never understood when you had time to study.”
“I slept with a tape recorder going,” he said with a casual shrug. “Subliminal learning. Without it, I would