His Brother's Baby

Conner reached for the message slips she handed him, then halted momentarily as the violin’s melody soared. “Thanks,” he said, but in his voice she could hear a thread of tension. “What’s that?”

“I can turn it down,” she offered. Maybe Con was one of those people who couldn’t think with noise in the background, but the sound wasn’t loud enough to disturb Emma. “Or do you just not like music?”

He hesitated, and she saw his knuckles whiten as he tightened his grip on the messages. “It doesn’t bother me,” he muttered. “It’s just… Do you have anything else?”

“Practically everything,” she told him. “You should know, it’s your family’s collection.” But now that she thought of it, Lucy realized, over the past few days she hadn’t noticed him anywhere near the cabinet of jazz, big band, classical and contemporary CDs in the living room. “Are you sure you don’t mind music?”

Conner squared his shoulders, picked up the portable phone from the dining room table and then met her gaze straight on. “I’ve been on the board of the Philadelphia Orchestra First-Nighters,” he answered gruffly, “for the past six years.”

That didn’t really answer her question, but she sensed there was no point in asking anything more. Whatever bothered Conner Tarkington about music, it wasn’t something he intended to share with her.

“Good for you,” she told him instead, and noticed the slight relaxation of his neck muscles…as if he hadn’t expected such matter-of-fact acceptance of that curious tension. “That’s one more nice thing,” she offered, “I can tell Emma about her family.”

If he appreciated how easily she’d switched the conversation to neutral ground, he didn’t show any sign of it. “What, the Tarkingtons?”

“Well, you know, kids need to hear good things about where they came from.” Which meant never saying their father had been a scumbag…not that she could say such a thing to Conner, in any case. He seemed like the kind of person who believed in family loyalty, and that was all the more reason to remember her vow of speaking well about Emma’s dad. “I already saved the articles that talked about Kenny in the Phoenix Open.”

Crumpling the message slips onto his side of the desk, he set the phone down harder than necessary. “No kidding.”

“For when she’s older, I mean.” Emma would grow up hearing only the best about a talented golf pro who needed to travel the world…the same reassuring generalities Lucy’d heard about a guitarist who had played twenty-six years ago at some festival in Santa Fe. “She needs to know I—” Lucy swallowed, wishing the statement didn’t take so much effort. “I fell in love with him the first time we met.”

Conner stayed very still for a moment, then flexed his shoulders under the white broadcloth shirt that made him look like an ad for some old-money tailor. “Right,” he said abruptly. “I figured that.” With a quick gesture, he grabbed his stack of letters from the printer and sat down across from her at the dining room table. “So how come you won’t take any help from him?”

She’d been prepared for doubt, but not for such a challenge. “We had this conversation already,” Lucy protested, trying not to notice the hard muscles of his shoulders as he reached across the table for his pen. She didn’t want any more Tarkingtons in her life, but sometimes watching Kenny’s brother made it difficult to remember that.

“You want Emma to have the best of everything, right?” he persisted, picking up his monogrammed silver pen as if it were an ordinary felt-tip. “You want her to hear good stories about her father….”

“She will!”

Con drew the first letter into position and fixed her with a challenging gaze. “So why do you want your daughter to have stories, but not child support?”

He made it hard to argue with him, Lucy realized, hard to think why he might be wrong. But he was wrong about Emma needing anything from Kenny’s family. “Because,” she answered, “I can support her myself.”

Conner signed the letter with his usual swift, almost illegible scrawl, and folded it into the envelope she’d left beside him. Only then did he offer a flat objection. “Not like the Tarkingtons can.”

Maybe not in terms of money, but… “It’s not about money, all right?” she protested. It was about love, about family, about building a home where children were cherished. “If Kenny doesn’t care about her, then why would your family? I mean, from what he said, it doesn’t sound like you’re all that close.”

Con closed his eyes for a moment, as if weighing a series of potential arguments and rejecting each one. “We aren’t,” he admitted finally. “But it’s not like we fight or anything. I mean, we get along whenever we see each other.”

“When was the last time your whole family saw each other?”

His expression didn’t change in the slightest, but she saw his shoulder muscles tighten as he signed the next letter. “My mom’s wedding, I guess,” he answered while folding the pages. “She remarried a few years ago.”

Kenny hadn’t mentioned that, although if he’d tried to share life stories about their mothers she would have quickly changed the subject. “Is your dad…” she began, and Con answered before she could finish the question.

“He died when I was twelve.”

She had learned firsthand how amazingly hard it was to lose a parent, but there was a world of difference between such a loss at twelve and at twenty-three. “Oh, Conner, I’m sorry.” Lack of family was even worse at this time of year, as the calendar moved from November to December. “So on holidays, you… What are you doing for Christmas?”

“Nothing.” He must have heard how stark that answer sounded, because he offered a quick amendment. “Working. But you don’t need to stick around.”

Darn right she wasn’t going to stick around—she’d already made her plans for the holiday. But nobody should be alone at Christmas! “Emma and I are spending the day with Shawna and Jeff,” she offered. “You’re welcome to come, if you’d like.”

Although he smiled in response, she suspected Conner had no intention of accepting such an invitation. “Well, thanks,” he said noncommittally, handing her the stack of envelopes. “Anyway, these need to get out.”

Okay, fine. Maybe he really didn’t want anyone in his life, even during the holidays. After all, not everybody enjoyed the kind of close relationship that Lucy wanted for herself and Emma. Yet still, it troubled her that Conner seemed so detached from not only his family, but from the rest of the world as well. Because, although she’d taken calls from acquaintances suggesting a round of golf, a lunch or dinner when he had the time, even a Riverdance performance that Lucy would have shrieked to accept, he declined them all with impersonal courtesy and concentrated on his work.

Even on Saturday, which appalled her. “It’s the weekend!” she protested when she found him at the computer shortly after sunrise the next morning. “Don’t tell me you work Saturdays, too.”

He gave her an unapologetic glance. “Yeah, pretty much. But if you need the weekend off, take it. I just need to finish some planning while there’s nobody calling in.”

Her own plan was to take Emma shopping—well, window-shopping, because she couldn’t justify buying any gifts—but even so, they spent a pleasant few hours strolling the shops at Scottsdale Fashion Square. When they came home and found Conner still in the office, Lucy gazed in disbelief at the untouched stack of folders beside him. This was getting way out of hand.

“Conner,” she announced, tweaking the lid of his laptop computer, “it’s time to take a break. I mean it. Come to the park with Emma and me.”

He looked at her strangely for a moment, as if returning from an impenetrable gulf of time or space. “Uh…” he mumbled, glancing at his watch. She saw the look of surprise dart across his face, then felt a rush of triumph when Con slowly rose to his feet. “Yeah, okay,” he answered. “Thanks.”

Conner knew she was right. He needed a break. He’d spent the past three hours engulfed in memories, engulfed in guilt, and that was a dangerous habit even without any scotch in the house.

But even so, it took him a moment to save the document on his computer screen, to flex the stiffness from his shoulders and to return his full attention to the present. Saturday afternoon. Scottsdale. A trip to the park.

With Lucy…

“We can walk there,” she told him. “It’s right up the street, and it’s really nice out.”

She must have been out walking already, he noticed, because her cheeks were flushed with color. But the weather was evidently warm enough that she hadn’t taken a coat, so he followed her and Emma outside in his long-sleeved rugby shirt and inhaled the fresh December air.

“Thanks,” he told Lucy again, stretching his arms behind his back and feeling the muscles shift into place. Her invitation was all the more welcome because he’d spent the past week maintaining a formal distance between them, and yet here she’d taken it on herself to offer a gesture of friendship. “I needed to get out for a while.”

“Darn right,” she agreed, tucking a baby blanket between Emma and her loose green sweater, then flashed him a challenging glance. “Don’t you ever do anything besides work?”

“Not lately,” Con said, wishing he could set aside his sense of responsibility for the next hour or two. But that wouldn’t be fair to a woman who’d already been abandoned by his brother, and Lucy didn’t seem inclined to pursue the question. Instead she transferred Emma to her shoulder and pointed toward the west.

“The park’s right across the street, practically. They have a lake, and a soccer field…Emma’s never been, but I think she’ll get a kick out of it. Last week I saw a bunch of kids playing there.”

It seemed wildly optimistic to believe that Emma would enjoy playing with other kids—she couldn’t be more than six weeks old—but he wasn’t going to mention that. Instead he observed, “She might need a few more years before you give her a soccer ball.”

Lucy grinned at him. “Did you ever play soccer, growing up? Or was your whole family into golf?”

Her quick pace was a pleasure to match, and already her sparkling energy seemed to have jump-started his own, which was happening far too often lately. “Kenny was the golfer,” he answered, hoping the conversation would stay on sports rather than on the Tarkingtons. “I mostly ran track.”

“What did your mom do?”

It took him a moment to remember. “She played tennis.”

“How about your dad?”

He drank.

“Golf,” Conner said, choosing the simplest answer. After all, his dad had still been a member of the Philadelphia Cricket Club when he wrapped his car around a Schuylkill River boathouse at ninety miles an hour. “He would’ve been proud seeing Kenny make the tour.”

“I bet he would’ve been proud of you, too,” Lucy observed, pushing a stray cluster of dark curls behind her shoulder. “I mean, you’re a lawyer and everything.”

“Well, everybody in the family’s a lawyer.” This was a safer line of conversation, one he’d used with dozens of women over the years. He had discovered during his first semester at Cornell that there was something appealing in the notion of eldest sons carrying on the family tradition, which made it useful for impressing women without moving beyond the surface.

Not that he cared about impressing Lucy….

The hell he didn’t.

“Do you miss it?” Lucy asked, and it took him a startled moment to realize she must be asking about his practice.

“Yeah, it’ll be good to get back.” His partners had already covered for him longer than he had any right to expect, but they’d agreed to another six weeks of leave. And by the time he returned with The Bryan Foundation up and running, Conner knew, he’d be able to live with himself again. Next year, he could face the holiday season with his soul intact. “But I have to get the foundation started.”

She wrinkled her forehead, as if calculating feasible workloads, which reminded him once again that this vividly emotional woman was a lot smarter than he’d expected. “Couldn’t you start your foundation and do your lawyer stuff at the same time?”

Even if he’d been willing to face another Christmas in Philadelphia, that would have required more time than he possessed. At least he’d learned that much from the therapist his partners had insisted on, after discovering he’d spent eighty-two consecutive hours at his desk.

“No,” Con answered, letting her precede him out the community gate and trying not to let his eyes linger on the naturally sensual way she walked. “Only so many hours in a day.”

“And some of them,” Lucy announced with a nod at the grassy park across the street, where clusters of people were enjoying the afternoon sunshine, “you have to spend enjoying.”

He knew that, Conner reminded himself, with a twinge of envy at how easily she moved from business to pleasure and back again. He tended to forget the importance of taking time to play catch, feed the ducks, all those things the people across the street were doing. All the things he could do once the foundation was complete. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“I don’t want to sound like I’m bossing you around,” she said as they waited for a break in traffic. “But working as much as you do…I don’t think it’s very good for you. I think you need to take more breaks.”

When was the last time, Con wondered, anyone outside the firm had worried about him like that? All this time he’d been keeping his distance from Lucy, she must have been noticing far more of his habits than he realized. And it was endearing that she cared enough to try and straighten him out.

That she saw him as…well, as a friend.

“You’re right,” he said again, letting his mind explore the concept of friendship and realizing that it could work out fine. Just because she loved his brother was no reason they couldn’t be friends. “Once the foundation’s up and running, I’ll make more time for fun.”

Lucy shifted Emma to her other shoulder as a distant group of golfers strolled toward the adjacent course. “I bet you’d enjoy playing golf if you ever got back into it,” she offered, evidently guessing how quickly he’d always neglected his periodic vows to relax more often. “Kenny said you guys used to play together.”

Back in college, yeah, when he was still trying to get his brother through high school. “Well, it was a way to keep an eye on him.”

“Really?” She slowed her steps, regarding him with what looked like fascination. “Did you kind of take over, after your dad died?”

He’d taken over even before that, in a way, but it wasn’t until the death of his father that his mom had completed her escape into the haze of prescription drugs. “Yeah, pretty much,” Conner replied. He had learned early on that the agency who replaced the Tarkingtons’ constantly quitting housekeepers never challenged a new request, and that no one ever questioned his scribbled initials on whatever papers his mother let pile up on the desk.

But that wasn’t a story which needed sharing, and Lucy seemed more concerned with crossing the street than his response. Until they reached the opposite sidewalk and she glanced at him with open curiosity. “I’ll bet having you around made things easier on Kenny, didn’t it?”

Things had always been easier on Kenny, though. Con had recognized even as a child that everyone—including himself—enjoyed his brother’s carefree attitude, the happy-go-lucky charm which proved their family was as normal as anyone else. While Conner had been silently acknowledged as the one who kept things running, Kenny seemed to have a gift for attracting fun and friendship and love.

He was just that kind of person.

And you’re not.

“I don’t know,” Conner muttered, “I probably wasn’t anyone’s dream of an older brother. I was always throwing my weight around—do your homework, don’t stay out too late—that kind of thing.”

“That sounds more like a dad or a mom,” Lucy observed, surprising him with the accuracy of her perception. It wasn’t like any big secret, of course—there was no reason not to explain the Tarkingtons’ sordid family dynamics—but the habit of making his life sound normal must be more deeply ingrained than he’d realized, because he automatically chose an evasive response.

“My mom was pretty easy on us,” he said lightly, and Lucy gave him a teasing smile. As if she sensed the growing companionship between them.

“So she didn’t mind if you spent all day playing golf, huh?”

“No, not really.” When she’d completed her recovery a few years ago, Grace Conner Tarkington had apologized for being so uninvolved with her sons, as if their inability to love might somehow be her fault. But he couldn’t remember whether she’d mentioned their frequent escapes to the golf course. “Anyway, that was only on weekends.”

Lucy glanced around the park, evidently seeking a spot near children whose voices might attract a baby’s interest, then started toward a group playing Frisbee in a nearby clearing. “So what kind of things did you do during the week?”

Good, they were finished with the family history. And she still sounded genuinely interested, Conner realized. Not in whatever trauma he might have suffered, the way the shrinks had been, but simply in his everyday life. “You mean, besides school?”

She spread her baby blanket on the grass and set Emma down on it, then brushed her hands against her jean-clad hips and cocked her head at him. “School, or whatever. I’m just trying to picture you, when you were little.”

It was a little unnerving how flattered he felt by her forthright interest. By the way she kept her eyes focused on his, waiting for an answer he didn’t even know how to give. “Well…”

“You know,” Lucy explained, “what you did for fun.” As if spotting an example, she gestured at the teenager attempting to throw a bright orange Frisbee with an elaborate, under-the-knee move. “Did you go around collecting golf balls?”

Golf— She was asking about Kenny, he realized with a sudden jolt of embarrassment. Of course she wanted to know about the childhood he’d shared with his brother.

Because Lucy loved his brother.

Before he could stammer a response, the orange Frisbee came sailing right toward them, and he instinctively grabbed for it. Caught it on the downward arc, then steadied his balance. Glanced around for the kid who’d thrown it, took aim and flung it back.

“Good one!” the teenager’s buddy called, and sent another shot his way.

He could deal with a Frisbee a lot easier than anything else, Conner thought, and already Lucy was moving Emma toward a nearby olive tree as if acknowledging the newly expanded playing area. So he caught the second throw as well, returned it with the same lofty spin as the first, and in no time was part of a three-way circle that soon expanded by a couple more teenagers and a dad with some kids.

This was mindless activity, nothing but working his body, watching the angles, running and catching and throwing whatever came his way, but it offered the same distraction as his computer. A refuge from thinking, a refuge from feeling, and that was all he could ask for right now.

“Feelings are our—”

No, forget it.

The game began moving faster, tighter, and he found himself making higher catches, more demanding throws than he would have attempted at the start. But by now he was in the rhythm of motion, the simple exhilaration of calling on his muscles and feeling them respond. And when the kid beside him missed a Frisbee that skittered to the ground near Lucy, his first reaction to seeing her fling it back was an instinctive admiration—damn, she was good! Even as he watched, one of the teenage girls moved over to where she sat with Emma and gestured an invitation to switch places, and in another minute Lucy was part of the circle as well.

She was good, Conner realized, sending her a tougher throw than he’d aimed at the previous girl, and feeling a surge of pleasure as she caught it deftly and, without ever moving too far from Emma, sent it skimming across the circle. The way she moved, the way she threw herself into the game, laughing, so alive, so…

God, I want her.

The raw heat of recognition startled him, even as he realized that it was nothing new. He’d been wanting her for days, but had never let himself feel it so intensely, so acutely—until now, with the vigor of the game pulsing through his veins, with the pleasure of her company still heightening his senses, with her sparkling energy almost radiating across the circle to him.

Lucy had a gift for enjoying the moment, he realized, watching as she applauded a successful catch by the kid beside her and beamed at Emma’s sitter, who was entertaining the baby with a bright red balloon. A gift for reaching out to friends, as well, but right now she was so happy, so vibrant, so gut-wrenchingly beautiful that he found himself staring at her without a single conscious thought in his head. With nothing but the raw, pulsing desire for—

Don’t go there.

But he’d already shot way past friendship, Con knew as the orange Frisbee came his way again—there, up, another step, grab it—and he almost missed the catch before flinging himself sideways for a perfect, last-minute save. Lucy grinned at him, a smile that might have been simple congratulations but which he suddenly suspected, with a flash of heat that left him reeling, meant that they’d shared the same primal awareness.

The same ache of need.

Now wasn’t the time for reasoning, not when the other Frisbee was coming right toward him—easy, up a little, there, coming, got it, go! But when he fired it back across the circle and saw Lucy still smiling at him, still watching him with that curious new light in her eyes, he knew that reason didn’t matter. Nothing mattered right now except moving, straight toward her, forget the game, forget the park.

And to his exultation, she seemed to feel exactly the same way. As soon as he approached her she backed out of the circle…then welcomed him with a hug that could have been sporting, could have been the same congratulations she’d offer any teammate, but…

But there was more than congratulations going on, more than celebration. More than sharing the fun of a game, more than simple enjoyment.

Because when he kissed her, she kissed him back.

As eagerly, as joyously as if she’d been waiting all day, all her life for this fierce embrace. He had never imagined such a flash of heat could rise so intensely, sweep in so fast, but it was happening now with staggering power, with astonishing force. He ran his fingers down her spine and heard her gasp, drew her hips closer and felt himself shudder as she deepened the kiss, buried his hands in her hair and abandoned all thought, all reason, knowing they were soaring together into something that could sear their very souls—and just as the thought took shape in his mind, Lucy pulled away.

“Conner,” she gasped, “we have to stop.”

They had to stop, Lucy reminded herself as she struggled against the wave of dizziness that had all too swiftly replaced the pressure of his body against hers. She couldn’t let this happen, no matter how much she might have wondered what Conner would feel like, whether his body was as hard as his gaze, how his lips might taste if she—

She couldn’t do this.

But when she heard the growl of “Why?” it took her a moment to realize that the question hadn’t come from her.

“Why?” Conner repeated, gazing down at her with such unabashed desire that she felt herself starting to sway toward him again. Even though she couldn’t. Hugging a teammate was one thing, but this… She couldn’t.

“You’re my boss,” Lucy whispered, although that was the least important reason. But she couldn’t think well enough right now to explain why falling for another Tarkington would mean the end of her battered self-respect, why she couldn’t let herself lose control again.

“Lucy,” he began, and then suddenly the pleading in his eyes gave way to a harder, darker expression. “I know,” he said abruptly, squaring his shoulders and taking a step back from her. “We can’t do this.”