Meant To Be Family (Meant To Be Series Book 3) Read online

  He rested his forearm on the top of the open door and squinted up at the sky for a moment before locking his gaze with hers once again. “Connor Elliott Carlisle. Twenty-one years old. I’m in my junior year for a bachelor’s in architecture. I’m the next to the youngest in a family of four boys, and they are all basically the biggest pains in the ass you’ll ever meet. My family has lived in Asheville for as long as I can remember, but once I started college, there was no way in hell I was going to still live at home. I like dogs better than cats, I hate pickles on a sandwich, and my favorite color is navy blue.” He winked just before shutting the door. “See, now I’m not a stranger.”

  Kelsey was still laughing when he climbed in the driver’s seat beside her. “Is that the civilian version of ‘name, rank, and serial number?’”

  Connor stuck the key in the ignition but didn’t turn the car on. Instead, he swiveled in his seat and faced her. “That’s the ‘I want you to feel safe being in a car with me’ speech.”

  Her heart stuttered in her chest. “I’d say that’s a pretty successful one then.”

  He only drove two miles away from campus to a small diner, which took away the last remnants of worry. She was fairly certain he was either laying on the charm exceptionally thick or he was a throwback to a much more chivalrous generation. He opened every door for her and held out her seat. When the waiter arrived, he motioned for her to order first and spent most of the night asking about her, only revealing additional details about himself when she gently pushed.

  “Okay, spill, is this for real or am I getting punked?” She finally had to ask the burning question when he walked her to the front door of Mills Hall.

  His lower lip jutted out slightly, and the corners of his mouth curled down, brows furrowed together. “What are you talking about?”

  Kelsey’s hand moved up and down to encompass him before motioning back and forth between them. “You. This. Tonight. First, I spill my food on you in a crowded cafeteria, which I really do need to replace your clothes for you.” He rolled his eyes and his head fell back, but she continued. “Then you take me out to dinner and are a level of gentleman that would embarrass Gene Kelly. How can you be real?”

  “First,” Connor took a small step forward, closing some of the space between them, “you don’t need to replace anything. Second, my mother will be thrilled to hear that I behaved exactly the way she raised me to, although probably not surprised. Don’t tell my brothers, but I’m definitely her favorite.”

  She fought to control the grin that was causing her lips to twitch.

  He took a second step toward her and tentatively laced his right fingers through hers. “But maybe I had an ulterior motive to it all.”

  “Ha!” She crowed with delight and poked a finger against his chest with her free hand. “I knew it! I knew you had something shady up your sleeve. Okay, out with it.”

  Connor gripped her waist on the left side. “I wanted to kiss you.”

  The smug grin disappeared, and she blinked up at him several times. “Wait, you…what?”

  He curled his lips in a soft smile. “The entire time you were talking in the cafeteria—and you really do talk a lot—I couldn’t stop looking at your mouth and wanting to kiss you.” He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “Can I?”

  His eyes nearly hypnotized her, but not half as much as the tender words he spoke, sincerity lacing each one. Her voice refused to cooperate, and she was left to simply nod. Connor’s hand released hers and held onto the back of her neck. His lips found hers and brushed against them softly, with reverence and care.

  In the fading sunset, moments ticked by unnoticed. Kelsey had a handful of boyfriends in high school and one serious one since she started college three years ago, but none of them had ever kissed her like this. She gripped his wrist to keep him in place with one hand, the other stroking the front of his shirt.

  When they finally broke, she blinked several times to bring his face back into focus. She ran her tongue along her lower lip. “Was…was that what you expected?”

  He grinned and bent down, planting one more soft kiss on her cheek. His mouth moved to her ear and created a shiver down her spine. “Better.” With one last squeeze, he released her and offered a small wave as he walked backwards to his car. “Night, Kels.”

  Chapter Three

  Connor

  Present Day

  No. Nope. No way. His elbows rested on the arms of the wheelchair, and he dug his fingertips into his skull. Walking with a permanent limp would be preferable to having Kels here three times a week touching him, guiding him, helping him…

  Oh, hell no.

  The familiar squeak of the rubber soles of her practical work clogs on the hardwood floor echoed behind him. Weren’t the physical pain and the nightmares enough? Why did his last shot at being able to stay in his own home have to be the girl who shattered his heart one hundred and eighty-two days earlier? Not that he was counting.

  Perhaps if you hadn’t been such a bastard to everyone else, you wouldn’t be here right now, the obnoxious voice of reason reminded him from the far reaches of his mind.

  Even his family was frustrated with him, although the only one willing to call him out was Dean. Everyone else was still handling him with kid gloves from both his breakup with Kels and the accident. His mother had damn near forced him to move back home when he was released from the hospital.

  “You could have refused.” The dead tone the words were uttered with surprised even him. He swallowed back, fighting the explosion of questions burning in his chest. All the things he had already asked her repeatedly were met with complete silence.

  The footsteps stilled close enough to the back of his chair, and he could smell the lemon verbena scent of her body wash. His eyes drifted shut, and he took a deep breath, his heart aching with the flood of memories the scent incited.

  “I could have.” Her voice was softer than he’d remembered. It was only a little over four months; she couldn’t have changed that much that soon…could she? “But if I had, that would have meant you’d be stuck inpatient. You’d be sharing a room with a ninety year old with dementia that would keep you up half the night. If you’re home, you can work, you can call clients, and you can do something.”

  He spun his chair around, eyes narrowed as he looked up at her. Up. Something he had never had to do before with Kels. At five-foot-one, she barely hit his shoulder. “So? It isn’t like you give a damn, Kels. You sure as hell didn’t when you left, so why would you start now?”

  The full lips that taunted him in dreams not occupied with twisted metal and broken glass pressed together into a thin line. “Just because we didn’t work out doesn’t mean I don’t care. It doesn’t mean I can’t be compassionate. It certainly doesn’t mean I want to see you stuck in an inpatient rehab facility. Dammit, Connor, we had six years together. That kind of thing doesn’t just disappear.”

  His brows shot up. “Really? Because you sure as hell seemed to just disappear without a problem.”

  Fire sparked in her gray eyes. “Listen, we can stand here and fight and scream and battle it all out or you can just let me do my damn job and get you back on your feet.” Her nostrils flared slightly. “Neither of us wants to be in the situation, I get that, but it’s where we are and we both have ownership in the outcome. You couldn’t make it work with just one of the people that came out here—”

  “And you had to bail without an explanation.”

  Her normally fair complexion paled even further, and his stomach dropped in response. He didn’t want to hurt her. Ever. But he wanted answers. Needed them. He needed her to tell him how everything went from perfect to so bad she had to leave in the blink of an eye.

  That alone was the driving force to softening his tone and desperately trying to clear the anger from his face. “You’re right.”

  The tip of her nose had turned pink, and the corners of her eyes sparkled with unshed tears. Her brows drew together, her confusion wri
tten across her face. “What?”

  Connor took a deep breath. “I said, you’re right. I’ve had a miserable attitude and alienated not just every therapist that walked in here to try to work with me, but half of my friends, too.” He scrubbed his hands down his cheeks, roughened from a thick five o’clock shadow he hadn’t bothered to shave this morning. “If I have any hope of getting back to life as I knew it, I need to deal with you being here.”

  What he didn’t say was life as he knew it sucked after Kels left. He didn’t mention that he spent nearly every night drowning the constant ache in his heart with whiskey, vodka, or whatever was on tap that sounded interesting. And he definitely left out the part of leaving the bar more than a dozen times with various women only to make an excuse at the last minute and catch an Uber home to his solitary bed.

  Her gaze dropped to her feet for a moment before locking with his once again. She nodded and cleared her throat a few times. “Here would probably be the best place to start. I can slide the coffee table out of the way and make room to do your exercises.”

  A small, mirthless laugh bubbled up. “You seem to forget who my family is. A group of obnoxious, overbearing, meddlesome creatures who feel the need to take over everything.”

  Her lower lip protruded slightly and turned down. “I…don’t understand.”

  Connor flicked off the brakes he had come to lock in place habitually and rolled past her down the hallway. “You know Tanner. He has to fix everything.” He turned the knob to what had once been a guest bedroom and hit the switch on the wall. “And since he couldn’t fix me, he did the next best thing.”

  The space had been transformed into a mini therapy room. When his older brother had hatched the idea, Connor pulled from his knowledge of all the things Kels had told him were necessities as well as additional things his brothers had stumbled across and just found cool. Which immediately translated into something they had to buy.

  It made Tanner and his parents feel useful and kept Wyatt and Dean occupied. Basically, it kept them all entertained enough that he was left with his miserable attitude and dark memories without someone making teasing a smile from him their pet project.

  Her jaw fell, her fingers resting against her lips. “This is…” Her eyes danced around the room before settling on him again. “It’s almost exactly like my clinic.”

  His sister-in-law Izzy declared that the room not only needed to be flooded with equipment, but also required some updates to the paint as well. She’d brought in half a dozen paint samples for his approval, but the soft aqua tones were his immediate choice, nearly identical to the one Kels had chosen when she rebuilt her rehab office.

  She also insisted on putting pictures of him with his niece and nephew on the walls. Positive motivation, she called it. Since she and his other sister-in-law Georgia were the least pushy of all his family members, he didn’t argue. Besides, he’d been wrapped around the twins’ pinky fingers since birth, and they knew it.

  Connor held out a hand, simultaneously needing to feel her and needing to get the inevitable over with. Part of therapy would mean she’d be touching him to help with exercise, massage sore muscles, and other things he wasn’t prepared to think about just yet. Focus on the goal, he reminded himself, finding out exactly what the hell happened.

  “Truce?”

  She hesitated for half a moment and sucked in a breath. Slowly, she slid her palm against his with a soft shake. “Truce.”

  ***

  Kelsey

  Present Day

  Her stomach clenched at the same time her rebellious heart sang its joy. It was almost too easy. And even though Connor was undoubtedly the most tenderhearted man she’d ever met, she wasn’t stupid. She’d hurt him when she left, and there was no way he was getting over it that easily.

  If she were honest, she hoped he couldn’t. She wanted to believe that he ached at their separation as much as she did.

  But for at least the next two months, she would be here three times a week in the place she once called her own, her sanctuary. With Connor. The man whose voice she swore she could hear in the early morning hours when she tossed and turned in her incredibly uncomfortable and oh-so-lonely bed.

  It was both a priceless gift and a terrifying form of torture to be so close to him, to be required to touch him, and know he wasn’t hers. A framed picture across the room put her regret in check. Connor, covered in dirt, flanked by his oldest brother’s kids. The blinding grin on his face relayed every emotion. He loved every moment his spent with them and was always first in line to babysit. Even if they managed to talk him into agreeing to ice cream for breakfast.

  She shook her head and deposited the bag that had been weighing down her shoulder. “This will definitely be helpful.” She pointed at the inflatable exercise ball, resistance bands, and small weights. “Normally I have to bring all that stuff with me.”

  Connor nodded his spiky, frosted head, a look she still couldn’t reconcile with the boy she fell in love with who was constantly pushing the hair out of his eyes. The citrus and ginger notes of his shampoo chose that moment to reach her nose, and a weight formed in her stomach. The same strands that would fall against her face when he’d roll on top of her in the mornings, waking her with kisses to her jaw, neck, collarbone—

  She cleared her throat and moved some equipment around, mostly in an attempt to focus her mind on something else. “Have you been doing any exercises on your own since you kicked Emily out?”

  “I didn’t kick her out,” he argued from behind her. “She was too rough. You need to have a talk with her.”

  Kelsey turned to face him, resting her backside on the vinyl upholstered treatment table and crossing her arms. “When she got back to the office,” she held a finger up, “in tears, mind you, she specifically said you told her, and I quote, ‘Get the hell out of here and don’t touch another person with those man hands.’”

  He threw his arms out to the side. “Her idea of ‘massaging’ my calves after a million exercises was to damn near pull them off.”

  To be perfectly fair, he wasn’t the first client to complain that Emily was a bit overzealous and needed a softer touch, both literally and relationally. But based on the reports from all the other PTs, he was a bit of an insufferable asshole.

  The same thought that played on repeat in her mind when she first heard of the accident, and when she snuck into the hospital to see for herself that he was broken, but alive, trickled through her consciousness once more. This never would have happened if she hadn’t left.

  Her jaw clenched, and she bit back a sigh. “I’m going to assume by your lack of answer to my original question that the answer is no. Can you get up on the table by yourself or do you need help?”

  When she took a small, hesitant step toward him, he held one hand up and used the other to roll a small distance back from her. Her heart shredded at the rejection. One she deserved, but one that caused a dull ache nonetheless.

  “I, uh, I’ve gotten pretty good at some things.” He curved his lips into a ghost of a smile. “That doesn’t mean I want this to last any longer than necessary.”

  Connor moved the chair beside the therapy table and hit the button to lower the vinyl top to nearly the same height as his chair. The veins in his forearms popped out as he transferred himself from the wheelchair.

  Pride at his self-sufficiency warred with the low thrum of pain that accompanied her desire to help. She’d never admit to pulling whatever strings she could at the hospital to make sure lemon Jell-O was never on his tray and that the nurses’ station just so happened to have individual pints of rocky road ice cream in their freezer that miraculously showed up on his dinner tray every night. Sitting by and doing absolutely nothing hurt her almost as much as seeing him broken and bandaged.

  They went through the exercises methodically, but just a little more briskly than she would for any other client. Touching him, feeling him, smelling him was all overwhelming. Her world both righted and
crumbled being so close and knowing he was no longer hers. Their only conversation revolved around his range of motion, limitations, and pain level.

  But she knew Connor. She knew his three was really a five on the pain scale. She knew he was pushing himself harder than he should. And she knew a big part of that was to end this truce and get back to whatever life he was leading without her.

  Her stubborn resolve kicked in. The life he deserved. Because that was why she left, to give him everything he wanted, everything they’d planned, and everything she couldn’t deliver. Because sometimes loving someone meant your own heart had to break so they could be happy.

  She shoved the resistance bands and small weights, ones she hadn’t even used thanks to the exceptionally well-stocked mini therapy room the Carlisle’s had created, back into her duffel bag with more force than necessary. The polyester side ripped in response, and she clenched her molars together tightly. Perfect. This was just freaking perfect.

  The tearing sound drew Connor’s attention from where he was rubbing the muscle relaxing ointment into his calves a few feet away. His eyes landed on the bag and then shot over to her rapidly warming face. She could have pointed out the exact second recognition dawned on his face.

  It quickly settled into something darker that clawed at her gut. “That was old anyway. I’m sure you’re happy to have a reason to get rid of it.”

  Stupid tears seared the corners of her eyes, threatening to spill over. He knew exactly how old it was because he had given it to her as a gift on her first day of clinical rotation in graduate school. And had her initials embroidered on it so no one could take it.