Laurie Campbell - His Brother's Baby

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.”