I knew it was coming. I’d been able to dance around any personal questions related to my love life, but we’d now been in each other’s company long enough for Connor to notice I hadn’t given him any type of answer. I knew all about his love life, naturally, but he knew nothing about mine. Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to answer him.
“Who knows?”
“I don’t believe that for one second. You should have a string of men wanting to have you. There’s something else.”
He smoothed a thumb over my cheek and I tilted my head against his palm. Was I really going to open up to him, let him know about my past, my vulnerabilities? His green eyes flashed, imploring me to share.
“I don’t date anymore. There’s no point. But I haven’t always been single,” I said with a sigh. “I was actually engaged once.”
“What did the bastard do?” he asked, surprising me. Was it that obvious that I had been hurt? I thought I’d hidden it well, throwing myself into my work and avoiding the chance of it ever happening to anyone else, with the exception of my most recent job, including the man next to me, a man that I was intimately cuddled up to. He must have noticed my tenseness because he forced me to look at him again, his beautiful eyes tender as I stared at him. “Hell, any man would be an idiot to leave you, April.”
His words made my heart race and I turned away. “It wasn’t his fault, not really. My parents had just died,” I started again, my voice thick with emotion. “We’d been dating forever so it was only natural for us to talk about our futures. He proposed not long after the funeral and I threw myself into the wedding planning to hide my grief. I think he was, in his own way, trying to make me happy.”
“You don’t have to tell me this,” Connor said quietly, his grip on my waist now like a vise, but safe. I shook my head and looked up at him, seeing his troubled expression.
“No, it’s good to talk about it again. I’ve made peace with this part of my life.” Though, I didn’t tell him that his presence was making me feel things I had also buried long ago. “It was going to be a beautiful wedding, in the same place my parents got married in. There was this cute little wedding chapel not far from my hometown, situated on a lake where the most gorgeous sunset was going to be shining through the windows as we said my vows.” I thought back to that day, back to the man I hadn’t given much thought to in quite a few years. “Derek was my high school sweetheart. I was so proud at the thought of becoming his wife. My wedding day was the perfect everything: weather, time, simplicity. You name it, I couldn’t have asked for anything else.”
Connor shifted and pulled me with him, content to keep me glued to his side. “What happened?” he asked softly, reaching down to grasp my hand that was lying on his thigh. I took a deep breath then, surprised to not be seized with overwhelming pain like I had in the past.
“He came to the door of the room I was getting ready in and asked to speak to me.” I gave a little laugh, thinking of how my bridesmaids had insisted that it was bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding. Looking back, we didn't know exactly how bad that luck was. “He broke it off minutes before we were due to say our vows. He’d gotten cold feet… but there was more to it than that. Said I’d changed after my parent’s had died, actually said I was a shell of a person, and I guess he was half right, cause I felt lost… though I thought I had him to support me, when it was nowhere near the truth. I found out later that he’d cheated on me, met someone else.”
“Bastard,” Connor muttered, clutching my hand. “Why the hell did he wait until the wedding day?”
I looked up and met his eye, feeling the air shift around us. “I don’t know,” I said softly. “Why did you wait to tell Crystal?”
“Hell, don’t compare me to him,” he said darkly, his eyes blackening in anger. “My situation is different.”
I sighed and untangled myself from his grasp, ignoring him as I pushed myself off of the floor. “How is it any different? You abandoned your fiancée practically on her wedding day, the most special day of her life. All of that work, all of that time spent planning that day to have it ripped from you because someone decided after promising themselves to you that they weren’t ready.”
“Come on, that’s not fair,” Connor challenged as I opened the door to the shack, glad to see that the storm had cleared for the most part. “You can’t compare my situation to yours. He’s an asshole, a bastard for doing that to you.”
I looked back at him sadly, knowing that he wasn’t seeing the correlation. It was there, he just didn’t want to admit it. “I’m no different than any other woman.”
I slipped out. It didn’t matter that it had stopped raining, tears were blinding my eyes anyway as I calmly put distance between us. It was then that I knew Connor was going to break my heart.
Maybe he had already.