“I changed my mind. I want you to take me home. I want you to make love to me tonight.”

A devious smirk spread across his face and his eyes were dark with need. “No, not tonight,” he finally said through gritted teeth.

“Why not?” I looked at him in confusion.

“Because you’re right. You’re still engaged to him. You have no idea how much I want to fuck you right now.” He grabbed my hand and pressed it against his jeans. I inhaled sharply as I felt his rock hard erection pushing against his jeans. “But, when I fuck you, when I make love to you, I want all of you and I want you completely to myself.”

With more restraint than I thought was possible for a man, I watched Ethan straighten up.

“I’m going to talk to Connor when he gets home,” I reassured him. I got up from the bike and grabbed his hand. “I’m going to end our engagement.”

As we kissed good night, my heart ached at the thought of leaving him. I wasn’t sure how I had suddenly fallen so deep down the rabbit hole, but I knew I had reached a point of no return. I couldn’t explain it, but there was something about this man that caused every hair on my body to stand up in excitement when I was around him. He was able to lift me away from the dense-foggy oblivion that weighed me down, and made me feel more alive and free than I could remember. He was the key to my past. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I just did.

CHAPTER N INE

I pushed against the glass door that led out into the darkness. Tears streamed down my face at how quickly tonight had turned upside down. I could hear the happy chatter from our engagement party in the main hall before it was absorbed by the silence of the night as the door shut behind me.

I ran as fast as my feet could take me in my jeweled Yves Saint Laurent stilettos. Maybe I should stop wearing heels all the time, I thought as I wished for my lone pair of tennis shoes that were collecting dust in my walk-in closet.

But this didn’t slow me down. I wanted to get out of here. It was the last place I wanted to be. 

“Liv!” I heard a familiar male voice call after me.

The sound of his voice pushed me to move faster. I pulled up the jewel-encrusted blush-pink evening gown that weighed down on my body and restricted my movement. The air was bitter cold and cutting, but the adrenaline that coursed inside seemed to shelter me from the cold like a protective blanket. I didn’t have to turn around to know who that was. All my senses went into overdrive as I continued to move.

“Liv!” he called after me again, this time closer than before.

I stopped briefly and turned to see him about fifty yards away at the entrance of the building.

His wide eyes were filled with guilt and alarm, frozen against the stark-white complexion of his face.

It was Co nnor in the Tom Ford tuxedo I had bought for him for our engagement party.

“Liv! Please stop!” He ran toward me, closing distance between us. For that brief moment, our eyes locked and I knew he wasn’t the man I had fallen in love with. This man was a complete stranger to me, someone I didn’t know anything about.

“Get away from me, Connor!” I screamed as I turned away from him and started to run again.

“Look out!” I heard him yell out.

But it was too late. Suddenly, I saw two bright, blinding headlights coming toward me at high speed. The sharp screeching of car tires filled the air, drowning out all other noise. I felt the impact of cold metal against my body as I was lifelessly flung sideways against the solid pavement.

I tried to get up from the ground, but winced as excruciating pain shot through every nerve in my body. As my gaze fell on the fresh blood that covered my hands, I felt my eyelids grow heavy. Then the lights that illuminated the city night outside of the museum faded into the empty, black oblivion.

I woke up in a pool of cold sweat. I looked over to Connor’s side of the bed and let out a sigh of relief to see that he wasn’t there. I drew in several deep intakes of breaths as I tried to settle my nerves. Questions swirled in my head as I tried to understand the new pieces of this flashback. Why did Connor feel like a stranger to me when I’d seen him? Why didn’t I think he was the man I’d fallen in love with?

As I pondered these questions, I felt reassured that I was making the right decision to end things with Connor. I don’t know what had happened that night of my accident, but there was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that Connor was keeping something from me.

Just then, my phone rang. It was Anna.

“Hi, Anna.”

“Hey, Birthday Girl! How was your day yesterday?”

It wasn’t until then that I realized so much has happened in the last twenty-four hours since I’d talked to Anna. I decided to tell her everything that’d happened with Connor recently as well as my day with Ethan. As sure as I felt about my decision to end my engagement with Connor, it felt nice to confide in someone who not only knew the post-accident me, but also the me before I had lost my memories.

“Wow, I can’t believe this. Are you serious?” She asked after I told her everything, including my flashback this morning. “That doesn’t sound like Connor.”

“It doesn’t?” Her doubt made me feel uneasy and a part of me wondered if I was being too rash in deciding to end things with Connor.

“Well actually…to be honest, I don’t know him that well.”

Her comment surprised me. “What do you mean?”

“Well to me, he was always my boss, and the limited interactions I’d had with him outside of the workplace, you were always there. So come to think of it, I’d never really had too many real conversations with him that went beyond surface level niceties.”

“How did you know I loved him then?” I thought back to my first conversation with Anna after my coma when she had described how amazing my relationship had been with Connor.

“Hmmm. Well, I guess because you guys were always together. For lack of a better word, you were both workaholics. When I first met you, I knew you were still struggling with the loss of your mom, so outside of your long hours at work, you’d always wanted to go out and party. You didn’t seem to want to be alone. But when you started dating Connor, you seemed to eat, live, and breathe Brady Global, Inc. Besides the occasional times we met up and went out, all your time seemed to be spent with Connor or on work—and usually those two together.”

“So you’re saying, you thought I was happy and in love because I had devoted all my time into Connor and his company?”

“Well…if you put it that way, it doesn’t sound like a great relationship after all.” She paused before adding. “But you did seem happy. Sometimes I wondered if you felt lost after losing your mom, and Connor gave you purpose. His dedication to his company became your own, and in some way, it seemed to be what you needed at the time.”

I thought about Anna’s words and felt confused again. I had been the one that had changed since my coma. The one thing that had bonded me and Connor was no longer there. I had no desire to work as much as Connor did. I wanted to live my life and explore the world around me.

“What do you think I should do, Anna?”

“Well, that depends on how you feel now. Tell me how you feel about Connor and Ethan. What does your gut tell you?”

“Well, I still think Connor is caring, patient, and generous. But his biggest flaw is his devotion to his company. In the last week or so, I’ve realized that with Connor, I feel like I will always be second best to his company. Anytime he needed to choose between me and Brady Global, I’d always been the loser.”