He sat back in his chair and studied her. “True, but things worked out well anyway.” He nodded around him to the large house and the surrounding trees. “Maybe, princess, it was all part of the master plan.”
She nodded. “Knowing you, I don’t doubt it. What I want to know is, what was the master plan?”
He looked amused. “You just keep probing until you get some answers, don’t you? Which is probably what makes you a great prosecutor.”
“Don’t try to sidetrack me with compliments.” She steeled herself against his flattery and leaned forward in her seat. “Why go back to South Boston after Harvard? One would assume you had every reason not to, particularly since your father was killed in the line of duty there.”
She knew from Quentin that Connor’s father had been a cop who had died when Connor was still a kid. She also knew Connor’s mother, a nurse, had died of breast cancer soon after his high-school graduation, leaving him parentless from the age of eighteen. It had all made her feel very sorry for Connor when she’d met him.
“Am I being cross-examined?” Connor’s tone was casual, but she sensed an underlying tenseness in him.
Knowing that she was on to something, she ignored his question and said, instead, “Tell me about your father.” She added, gentling her voice, “Please. I’d really like to know.”
He saluted her with his empty beer bottle. “Okay, princess, I see I’m not going to throw you off.”
She wondered if that were true. She got the feeling he was only going to give her an answer because he wanted to—and she also sensed she was on terrain that Connor didn’t ordinarily let people onto.
He was silent for a time, looking off into the distance before his gaze came back to her. “I was nine when Dad died. Tough age to lose your father—but no age is a good one. He was the assistant coach of my softball team and taught me the usual stuff: how to ride a bike, how to swim.”
He blew a breath, then continued, “My father had this thing about giving back to the community. Perhaps because he’d grown up as a working-class kid in South Boston himself and had gone on to become a cop.”
“Hmm,” was all she said. She’d finally gotten him going and she wasn’t going to give him the opportunity to get sidetracked by her commentary.
“Anyway, even though we could have afforded to live out in the suburbs, he wanted to stay in South Boston. He even angled his way to a job there.”
“In other words, he was into ‘community policing’ even before the term was coined,” she put in.
He nodded. “Exactly. He believed not only in police patrols, but police involvement in the community.”
“Getting to know people,” she supplied. “Coaching softball as a way to keep kids off the streets.”
He nodded again. “Right.”
She waited for him to go on.
He took a swig of his beer, then squinted into the distance as if he was trying to make out something among the trees. “One day the doorbell rang and I thought it was him, back from the evening shift. Instead it was the sergeant from his district, looking so serious I immediately got a queasy feeling in my stomach.” He shifted his gaze back to hers. “You can guess what came next.”
“How did it happen?” she asked softly. They’d known each other for years but this was the first time she’d felt comfortable enough to ask him about the circumstances of his father’s death. She ached for the boy who had opened the door to a nightmare so many years ago.
“He was responding to a break-and-enter. He caught one guy, cuffed him. What he didn’t know was the guy had a partner who was packing a .38 special.”
Allison flinched at the image he evoked.
Connor grinned crookedly. “You wanted to know, princess.”
“What I want to know is why you bury that story.”
“Ever combative and feisty, aren’t you?”
She frowned. “Maybe, but there’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of in that story. I have no idea why you keep quiet about it. In fact—”
“In fact,” he finished for her, “people might have felt sorry for me and gone out of their way to help, is that what you were going to say?”
“Well, yes—”
“And that’s exactly what I didn’t want,” he said, his look almost combative. “That’s exactly how the people who did know—at my father’s precinct and in the neighborhood—did act.” His brows drew together. “I didn’t need their sympathy. It wasn’t going to bring my father back. And I sure as hell didn’t want anyone thinking I was trading on a tragedy.”
His words were startling. And, yet, they were in keeping with what she knew him to be: proud, tough, private.
“Curiosity satisfied, petunia?” he asked, rising with his empty plate. His tone wasn’t mocking, just matter-of-fact.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said simply, picking up her own plate and utensils and following him inside, where she deposited her load in the sink. “I can’t even imagine how hard it was for you and your mother.”
He leaned back against the kitchen counter, legs casually crossed at his feet. “Yeah, it was devastating for Mom. She went back into nursing to earn some money, but South Boston was all she knew, so that’s where we stayed.”
“You must have been lonely.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I was a terror. My father had been killed and I was mad as hell at the world. I fought, I skipped school and I took unnecessary risks. What finally turned me around was a combination of my mother and some well-meaning high-school teachers meting out tough love, and my own realization that I had a brain and I might as well use it in a way that got me somewhere.”
She went to perch on a bar stool. “Which brings me back to my original question. Why go back to South Boston after all that? You could have gone anywhere after Harvard, and you had every reason to.”
“Like I said, you’re tenacious.” He gave her a once-over with his eyes, then smiled at her scowl. “When I started my business, I was looking to keep overhead low. The neighborhood is changing, but the rent on a rinky-dink apartment in South Boston at the time was the right price. It was as simple as that.”
She nodded. Suddenly, turning down a cushy big law firm job for the DA’s Office while living in a townhouse in exclusive Beacon Hill didn’t seem like much of a sacrifice. “Every time I come across a profile of you in the newspapers or in magazines, they always mention that you headed back to South Boston to start your business.”