"Yes."
"I'm not sure how I feel about you, Connor," she admitted as she stood up and stepped away from him.
"Do you hate me?" he asked, gripping his knees as he struggled to stay where he was and not do something foolish like beg her for a chance, a chance that he probably didn't deserve, but wanted desperately.
"No," she answered, walking away from him and heading for the patio. "I need some time to figure this all out, Connor. I have a lot of things to think over."
"Take as much time as you need. I'll be here when you're ready," he said, knowing as soon as the words left his mouth that he'd just lost her for good.
Oh fuck that.
* * *
Time.
She needed time to think and sort through everything, she reminded herself as she fought the urge to run back inside and throw herself into Connor's arms. A couple of hours ago, she knew where she stood with him. It hadn't mattered that she'd been falling for him, because she'd known that she would never be able to get over what he did.
Now..........
Now she didn't know what to think about him. For the first time since he came into her life she didn't think that she hated him, at all, not even a little bit. Actually, she was terrified that she wasn't just falling for him anymore, but was more than a little in love with the man. Before she did anything that she might regret later, she needed to be sure that what she felt was real.
She should kick his ass for confusing her, she thought as she opened the sliding glass door and stepped into her room. Why couldn't she just hate him? It made everything so much simpler to-
"Veto," Connor said as he scooped her up in his arms, took her out of the house and placed her bottom on the patio railing before she could put up much of a protest. He settled himself between her legs just as quickly, placing his hands on her hips to steady her and hopefully stop her from falling over the side. She’d never been afraid of heights before, but after falling into that cellar and breaking her arm, she could now say that she had a very healthy respect for heights.
"Veto what?" she asked absently, reaching up with her good hand and placing her hand on his bicep to help steady herself as she fought against the urge to look down.
"Space, time, a break, whatever the hell you want to call it, Rory. It's not happening. I've waited too many years to have you in my arms and I'm not about to let you go over some bullshit."
"Wait a minute," she said, frowning up at him as his words registered in her mind. "You can't veto a break!"
"Yes, I can," he said, leaning in and brushing his lips over hers in that soft, fleeting gesture that she both loved and hated. Loved, because it made her feel precious and hated because those kisses always left her wanting more, a lot more.
"Since when?" she demanded, resisting the urge to hit him with her cast when he pulled his mouth away.
"Since now, Rory. You're not allowed to run away, because you're too afraid to face what's going on between us."
"I'm not afraid of anything," she said evenly, using the same response that she used to use when they were kids and he tried to taunt her into doing something asinine, kind of like now.
Taking a chance, a real chance, on him was a huge risk not only because they could wind up killing each other, but if things didn't work out between them, which was a real possibility given their history, she could wind up hating him for breaking her heart. This was a really bad idea, she berated herself inwardly as she looked into his beautiful emerald eyes and worried her bottom lip between her teeth. She should just push him away and end things right now before she got in over her head, but really, when had she ever done the smart thing when it came to Connor?
"I don't think this is such a good idea," she said, needing to at least pretend to show good judgment and think it over, but unfortunately common sense and good judgment were usually never around when it came to Connor. At least this time she wouldn’t have to worry about ending up in jail. Well, she hoped that she didn’t.
“I think it’s a great idea,” he said, pressing a kiss against her forehead before he leaned back and focused all of his attention on her broken hand. When he gingerly picked up her hand and pressed something onto her ring finger, she couldn’t help but frown as she looked down, but between the man’s head and the lack of decent light, she couldn’t see much.
“Um, what the hell are you doing?” she asked when she felt him slide something onto her finger.
“Nothing much. Just decided that you and I are getting married that’s all,” he announced with a careless shrug of his shoulders as he turned his head and pressed a swift kiss against her stunned lips.
“I’m sorry, what the hell is this now?” she demanded, sure that she’d misheard him.
“I’m thinking a November wedding. It will give you plenty of time to plan it and get used to the idea,” he explained as if it wasn’t a big deal when it was a very big freaking deal.
“I can’t marry you, Connor,” she blurted out, really not knowing what else to say and wishing that she’d said it with a little more finesse. Then again, she should have known that Connor wouldn’t take it personally.
“Yes, you can. All you have to do is show up, sign the license, and say ‘I do’” he mused as he leaned in to steal another kiss.
“No, I can’t,” she stubbornly said, leaning back away from him, but it wasn’t all that far considering that he had her sitting on a narrow railing.
“I tell you what, Rory,” he said, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close until she had no other choice but to put her hands on his shoulders to help support herself and when she did, her breath caught in her throat as her eyes landed on that tiny diamond decorating her finger.
It was so beautiful.
“You give me until November to prove that we belong together and if you still don’t want to marry me by the time the manor is done then we’ll call it off.”
“Oh?” she asked distractedly as she grudgingly accepted the fact that she never wanted to take the ring off her finger. “And how exactly do you plan on convincing me to marry you?”
“I plan on making you fall in love with me, Rory,” he said softly as he leaned in and kissed her in a way that wasn’t fair.
“Wear the ring, Rory and if you don’t fall in love with me by November then we can call the whole thing off and I’ll never bother you again,” he swore against her lips.
After more than two decades of being tormented by this man, the idea of never seeing him again should make her happy, but it didn’t. She honestly didn’t know how she would be able to function without him in her life. But did that mean that she was ready to give him forever?
Everything in her world had changed in such a short period of time that she didn’t know if she was coming or going. The smart thing would be to get some space and ignore his veto, but she didn’t want to do that.
“You really think that you can make me fall in love with you in less than five months?” she asked, trying not to smile and failing miserably when she felt his lips kick up into that grin that she loved.
“I know that I can,” he promised as he stepped away from her only to scoop her up in his arms, turn and head for her bedroom, but he didn’t get far.
“It’s been more than ten minutes,” Trevor announced dryly as he leaned back against the door frame, startling Connor, but thankfully he didn’t drop her and she truly appreciated that.
“And we’re hungry!” Jason yelled from what sounded like her bathroom.
“Who the hell are you?” Connor demanded as he stood his ground, holding her tightly in his arms as he glared at her cousin as if the man didn’t have several inches and fifty pounds of muscle on him.
Trevor’s curious expression turned amused when his eyes zeroed in on her left hand. “Oh, by the looks of it, I would say one of your future in-laws.”
Chapter 30
“Why are you glaring at me?” Rory asked, giving him a sweet, too sweet, smile as the two men, no corr
ection, his future in-laws from hell periodically sent him killing glares as they tore through his kitchen and ate every last morsel of food.
“Tell me that you didn’t break the ban, Rory. Tell me that there aren’t two Bradfords beating the shit out of each other over the last slice of cheese in my kitchen,” he pleaded, already knowing and dreading the answer.
It had been a good fifteen years since he’d last seen a Bradford, but that was one experience that he would never forget. He’d been sixteen, pissed and looking for a little revenge against Rory for the bullshit she’d pulled on him the night before at the drive-in. Normally, he would have waited until she came home from her family’s annual summer vacation, but that day he refused to wait to get his revenge. Well, that and his sixteen year old hormone driven mind was hoping to see Rory in a bathing suit.
It was the latter that had him climbing into the back of Mr. James’ truck and hiding beneath a pile of gym bags in ninety degree weather, risking an ass whooping by the James boys if he was caught. Somehow he managed to make it to their destination, a campsite, without getting caught or passing out from the heat. As soon as he felt the truck come to a stop and heard Mr. James order his kids to unload the truck, he jumped out, darted across the rocky dirt parking lot and dove into what unfortunately turned out to be a bush concealing a large briar patch.
Once he managed to untangle himself from the thorns, he followed after Rory, who trailed behind her brothers. It pissed him off that her brothers hadn’t bothered to even offer to carry her bag for her and he made it a point to get back at them later that night by stuffing poison ivy in their bags. He trailed after them in the woods until they came to a small clearing on the pond. While they set up, he went and found himself a little hiding spot. Once that was done, he came back only to get the surprise of a lifetime.
The once peaceful campsite was filled with men, very large men and everywhere he looked there was food, massive piles of it. The tents weren’t up, but they had tables set up with food everywhere. None of them, not even what he suspected should have been little boys, were small. He’d always thought that the James boys were freakishly large, but the men that were beating the shit out of each other over food had been much, much bigger. Most every single one of them had been shirtless and all had been buff, making him feel scrawny and making him wonder if Rory thought he was scrawny.
Even though he’d never met them before, he knew that they were Bradfords. The tales of the other side of Rory’s family were well known. They were often used to scare little children into behaving. If they didn’t, they knew the Bradfords would come and eat them. He was ashamed to admit that it worked on him when he was a kid. He’d even been warned away from Rory on his first day of preschool by all the other kids. They knew who Rory was. They’d been warned away from her because of the Bradfords and because her brothers would beat up anyone that messed with her, but he hadn’t cared. She’d been the prettiest little girl that he’d ever seen and he just had to push her and pull on her pigtails.
“Look, if you expect us to get in a decent day’s work then you’re going to have to feed us more than scraps,” the larger of the two men said as he tossed an empty cereal box on the counter with the rest of the empty packages.
“Scraps?” he repeated numbly. “The kitchen was full of food not even twenty minutes ago!”
“That was twenty minutes ago,” the other one said with a shrug as he pressed a hand against his stomach and headed for the door.
“Learn to keep up with the times, Roomie,” the larger one said with a mocking smile and a wink as he headed for the door, leaving Connor to process what he’d just said and when he did, he turned a glare back on Rory.
“What exactly does he mean by ‘Roomie’?” he demanded as Rory gave him another cute smile that set off warnings signals in his head.
“Well, while you were grabbing a shirt we talked it over and decided that it would probably be better if Trevor and Jason stayed with you,” she explained, looking at him, but not quite meeting his gaze.
“Why is that exactly?” he asked with his jaw set and his hands clenched tightly into fists as he patiently waited for the woman that he loved to explain why she just screwed him over.
“If they stay with me then everyone will figure out who they are and we’ll lose the extra help.”
“And we’ll also face a night in jail, a large fine and community service,” he said, dryly, noting her wince.
“I’d actually forgotten about the community service part,” she admitted with a frown, but it quickly disappeared as she waved off what he said. “Don’t worry about it. No one is going to figure out who they are. We’ll get the help we need and everything will be fine.”
He cocked a brow as he looked pointedly around his now barren kitchen. “How exactly do you propose that we hide this little problem of theirs?”
She worried her bottom lip as she followed his gaze. “It will be fine,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she believed it. “We’ll just keep both houses filled with food and avoid taking them out to eat in public. As long as they don’t get hungry, we should be fine.”
“How exactly do you propose keeping one Bradford, never mind two, full?”
Her answering smile nearly undid him, but her next words had him cursing up a storm.
“Sam’s Club.”
* * *
“So, you think you’re good enough for our cousin?” Jason asked, offhandedly as Connor pulled his truck into the parking spot of the wholesale food store, wondering how exactly he let Rory talk him into this bullshit.
He remembered putting his foot down and telling her that there was no way in hell that he was going to harbor Bradfords when the kissing started. He barely remembered the rest of their conversation, but he definitely remembered the way she yanked his mouth down to hers and kissed him until he forgot about her cousins, his empty refrigerator and everything else that no longer mattered. He would have made love to her on his kitchen table if the bastard sitting next to him hadn’t stormed back into the house and demanded that they feed him.
“Yes,” he answered, deciding to be honest and noting twin looks of surprise on her cousins’ faces. No doubt they thought he was going to give them a kiss ass answer, but he didn’t play those games and never would.
“Why exactly is that?” Trevor, the larger of the two, asked, looking seriously pissed off by Connor’s answer. Well, that was too fucking bad because it was true.
“Because I piss her off,” he said with a shrug, shutting the engine down and grabbing his keys.
Instead of getting angry and tearing into him like any sane relative would have done, her cousins’ glares turned into shit eating grins. They shared a quick look, nodded and focused back on him which was kind of unnerving and he really wished that they’d rode with Rory instead. They’d insisted on riding with him and he’d just assumed that they were going to try and kill him. He’d been fine with that, expected it even.
“You’re that scrawny kid that crashed our family reunion, aren’t you?” Trevor asked, chuckling as he leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees while he considered Connor.
“I wasn’t scrawny,” he bit out tightly.
Jason shrugged. “Compared to us you were.”
“Point taken,” he sighed with a nod.
“You know, you were lucky that Grandma Beth showed up when she did, don’t you?” Trevor asked, and Connor couldn’t help but wonder if either one of these men was one of the large boys that had been ready to tear him apart with their bare hands all those years ago. A couple of them got in a few good punches before this sweet little old woman put an end to it. She swatted the much larger boys away and even demanded that they help him to his feet. Of course when the boys explained why they wanted to kill him, the sweet little woman reached up, grabbed him by the ear, twisted it and dragged him the half mile back to their campsite where Mr. James and a very pissed off and embarrassed Rory waited.
By the time s
he released his ear, it had been numb, but at least he’d managed to tell his side of the story. It probably stopped Mr. James from killing him, but it didn’t stop the man from grabbing a few of his large relatives and hunting down the real culprits. They hadn’t believed that he wasn’t the one spying on Rory as she changed out of her bathing suit. When he showed them that his hands were bloody and raw from beating the shit out of the two men that he’d caught watching her, they believed him.
“You really should have told us why you were there,” Jason said around a bored yawn. “We probably wouldn’t have made you cry like that if we had.”
“I wasn’t crying, asshole!” he snapped back, still pissed after all these years about the ten hours he was forced to wait at the campsite while every single Bradford and James taunted him for crying.
“Really? Then why were tears streaming down your face?” Trevor asked as his attention went to searching the glove compartment for something to eat.
“Because one of you dumb bastards shoved my head in the pond! That was pond water streaming down my face!”
“Are you sure? Because I could have sworn that I heard you sobbing,” Trevor said, letting out a disappointed sigh when he didn’t find anything to eat in the glove compartment.
“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Jason agreed, gesturing for Trevor to get out of the truck.
“I was embarrassed for you,” Trevor admitted, his tone laced with pity as he opened the door and jumped out.
“I wasn’t sobbing, you asshole! I was choking on the slimy pond water one of you forced down my throat!”
“Wow, this is just getting sad,” Jason said, shaking his head in disgust as he followed after his cousin. Before Connor could tell both men where they could go, Jason shut the door and headed for the warehouse club, leaving Connor to curse and move his ass as he resigned himself to spending a night in jail.