Connor has left me aching, and it seems like there’s no remedy for it.
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“You look tired,” my father observes the next morning when I meet him downstairs in the hotel restaurant for breakfast. “Didn’t you sleep well?”
“Did you?” I glance at him, slipping into the chair across the table and motioning for a waiter. “Smoked salmon on scrambled eggs, half an English muffin with butter, and water, please,” I tell him, my stomach grumbling with hunger. “And black coffee.”
“No,” my father says flatly. “I didn’t expect him to be so bloody intransigent,” he growls, stabbing his sausage link with a fork, and I don’t have to ask who he’s talking about.
“He’ll come around.” I smile gratefully up at the waiter as he brings me my coffee. “It’ll just take a little time for him to think about it—the possibilities. And Liam.”
“I thought that would change his mind.” My father grimaces. “His brother’s life is in danger, and he’s dawdling,thinkingabout it—”
“Thinking about what?”
Connor’s voice comes from behind me, and the flush of heat that it sends across my skin, the way it makes me tingle all the way to my fingertips, is unacceptable. It’s unlike me in every way, and I know I need to get a grip on it.
If Connor accepts, I don’t know what kind of marriage we’ll have. I don’t even know that I’m all that concerned about it—I’ve always known what to expect. He won’t hit me or be overly cruel to me, and he’s attractive and young, and I know that’s better than what a lot of women in this life are afforded in marriage.
But as he comes to sit in between my father and me, sans the jacket, this time with his muscled, tattooed arms visible, and sinks lazily into the chair, I feel my heart speed up with sudden thoughts of our potential wedding night, and everything he could make me feel.
I’m tired of my virginity, of its ever-present importance, and of waiting to be handed off to someone. I’m ready to take my place next to the man I’m going to marry—and if my father and I have anything at all to say about it?
That man is going to be Connor McGregor.