Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 113923 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113923 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
“I’m not saying I don’t want you involved.” He shifts, rolling over to face me too. “I don’t want all these lines and rules and shit.” Cooper finds my hand in the dark and brings it against his chest. He’s shirtless, in only his boxers. His skin is warm to the touch. “The money thing is always going to be there, and I’ve gotta stop getting bent outta shape about it. I know you’re not trying to make me feel any sort of way.”
“I was afraid you weren’t coming back.” I swallow again. Harder. “As long as I was here, I mean.”
“Gonna take more than that to get rid of me.” He tangles his fingers in my hair, rubbing his thumb against the back of my neck. It’s a sweet, soothing gesture, practically putting me right back to sleep. “I figured something out tonight.”
“What’s that?”
“I was sitting in this grimy little bar with Levi and a bunch of sad old bastards hiding from their wives or avoiding their sad old houses. Guys only twice my age but who’ve already done everything that’s ever going to happen to them. And I thought, fuck me, man, I’ve got this crazy hot girl at home and our biggest problem is she’s always trying to buy me shit.”
I smile against my pillow. When he puts it that way, we sound like a couple of dumbasses.
“And this jolt kind of hit me suddenly. I thought, what if she isn’t there when I get back? I was glaring into the bottom of a glass feeling sorry for myself. What if I’d run off the best thing that ever happened to me?”
“That’s sweet, but I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I’m serious.” His voice is soft yet insistent. “Mac, things around here were never good. Then my dad died, and it was confirmation that nothing would get any better. Shelley split. We made do. Never complained. And then you showed up and I started getting ideas. Maybe I didn’t have to settle for slightly better than nothing. Maybe I could even be happy.”
He breaks my heart. Living without joy, without anticipation that tomorrow can still be extraordinary, will suck the soul right out of a person. It’s the cold, dark, strangling infinity of nothingness, of being swallowed up by despair. Nothing can grow in the empty places where we resign ourselves to the numbness. Never really alive. It’s the same long tunnel into complacency that I saw closing in around me the harder I looked at the future Preston and my parents imagined for me.
Cooper saved me from that. Not because he whisked me away, but because meeting him finally revealed the possibilities I’d been missing. The exhilaration of uncertainty. Passion and curiosity.
I was half asleep until I met him.
“I thought I was happy,” I tell him, gliding my fingers up and down his ribs. “For a long time. What was there to complain about, right? I’d been given everything I could ever ask for—except purpose. A choice. The potential to fail, to get hurt. To ever love something so much the thought of losing it tears me open. Tonight, when I thought you and I might really be over, all sorts of things ran through my head. I was making myself crazy.”
Cooper tilts my chin toward him and presses his lips to mine with the lightest touch. Enough to make me seek him out for another taste.
His breath is a warm whisper against my lips. “I might just be falling in love with you, Cabot.”
My heart jumps. “Uh-oh.”
“You have no idea.”
He drags his fingers down my spine, setting every nerve alight. I bite his bottom lip, tug a little, in our wordless language that says I need him. Now. Take this ache away. But he’s methodically, frustratingly patient in removing my tank top before he palms one breast while licking at the other. He pushes his boxers down. I wiggle out of my underwear as he puts on a condom. A shiver of anticipation skitters through me when he drags the hot length of him over my core.
He holds me tight as he moves inside me. Unhurried. Slow, languid strokes. I cling to him, muffling my moans against his shoulder.
“I love you too,” I say, shaking in his arms while I come.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
COOPER
A few days after filing charges against Shelley, I receive a call to come to the police station. On the phone with the sheriff, I learn that the cops picked her up in Louisiana, where she must have forgotten about all the unpaid parking tickets she’d left behind after her “fella” kicked her to the curb. When the South Carolina warrant popped up, the sheriff in Baton Rouge had her transferred back up to the Bay.
Mac and my brother come to the station with me, but I make Evan wait outside while we go in to speak to Sheriff Nixon. Evan was equally furious to learn that Shelley robbed me blind, but I know my brother—he’ll always have a soft spot for that woman. And right now I need to keep a clear head, not allow anything to cloud my judgment.