“Your folks were pretty hard on you?” Connor scooped up another big mouthful of ice cream, and Gabriella tried not to focus on the way his tongue lagged over the edge of the plastic spoon.
“Were?” she asked with a snort. “They still are.” She almost added that their constant distance and propensity to judge were slowly killing her, but she forced the thought away, not wanting her baggage to become a third wheel on the date. “But I guess all parents hard on their kids, right?”
“I wouldn’t know. Mine took off years ago.”
Gabriella stopped walking. “They took off?”
Connor paused as well and frowned at the ground.
“My dad left when I was thirteen. Apparently, his next fix was more important than we were. I found out he died a few years later.”
He looked up, squinted and pinched his lips together, as if the words had a bad taste to them. “Mom tried to manage for a while, but she was using too. She couldn’t make ends meet, so she left me with my grandparents when I was fifteen to go into rehab.”
“Wow. How did that go over?”
“Weird at first, since I’d never met them before, but they took me in right away, no questions asked. Of course that was because Mom said it would only be until she got out of rehab.”
“She didn’t go?”
“She did. She just never came back.”
Gabriella’s mouth fell open. For all her parents made her crazy, she couldn’t imagine being abandoned like that. “I’m so sorry.”
Connor shook his head and let out an abrupt laugh. “Don’t be. She made the right choice. She couldn’t have handled me anymore. I was a real rebel back then. I needed some serious discipline.”
Something inside her flared at the word rebel, but she squashed it down.
“So your grandparents raised you?”
“Yup. They made me clean up my act. Taught me to respect others and to play by the rules.”
Gabriella’s stomach bobbed like a buoy on the tide. She wondered exactly how dirty his act had been and what rules he’d forgotten to play by, but she concentrated on her ice cream instead as they resumed their stroll down the street.
“My grandmother always taught me to just be myself,” she said. “Even when my parents seemed to want the exact opposite.”
“They don’t want you to be a mathematical genius?” He smiled at her, and that damn dip under his nose taunted her again.
“They do, but my mother wants me to find a safe, rich husband and settle down too.”
“And that’s not what you want?”
She halted on the corner and looked up at him. There were so many things she wanted, the least of which was the comfortable parameters of the kinds of relationships she’d known. No, she wanted Connor, wanted those brawny hands of his pushing her up against a wall and showing her all about the rebel he once was.
She flattened her tongue against the shaft of her ice cream and licked. Slowly.
“No. That’s not what I want.”
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