Chapter 2
C ooper’s dart hit the three, and the bitch of it was, the damn thing was right up against the outer bull’s-eye ring. Touching it. So close in distance but so far from that twenty-five points. Just like he was with Zoe.
He went to the full-sized, bar-style dart cabinet that he’d splurged on right after he and Zoe had called it quits — now the centerpiece of the living room — and plucked out his darts.
He set his feet behind the strip of duct tape they’d stuck down on the tile floor a precise seven feet and nine and a quarter inches away.
Muttering a vulgar threat to the state-of-the-art board, he let another dart fly just as the front door opened behind him.
Like a dumb ass, his heart sped up with hope that it was Zoe, even while his brain knew full well it was Penn. He grunted at his roommate and tossed another dart, nailing the three.
“Stiff competition?” Penn asked, tossing his keys on the end table and giving Cooper adequate space to finish his turn before going to the cabinet and retrieving his own set of darts.
“I’m off my game tonight. How was dinner?”
“As good as it can be with three gabby women.” Penn’s love-drunk grin contradicted the exasperation in his tone.
“You think Nadia has any idea you’re gonna pop the question?”
“She was so busy chattering about the details of my party I’m pretty sure she’s oblivious.”
“Excellent,” Cooper said. “Where’d you eat?”
“Went to Local Lou’s. My mom loves that place.”
“You mean Zoe loves it.” She’d insisted on eating there every single time she’d been in town.
Cooper had always been happy to comply. It was decent food, especially for being “healthy,” but even better was making Zoe content.
Nothing selfless about it on his part — he loved seeing her face light up, watching her enthusiasm over something as simple as a local-ingredient salad.
“Wasn’t sure I was allowed to mention her name around you.”
“Don’t be a jerk-off.” Cooper reset the game — not a sacrifice as crappy as he’d been doing — and pushed the two-player option.
“Heard you after we walked out the door earlier,” Penn said.
Shit . Watching Zoe and her family walk out without him, even though he wouldn’t have joined them if they’d asked, had pissed Cooper off irrationally. Like an overgrown four-year-old, he’d smacked the closed door behind them. And maybe yelled a couple of choice swear words to the empty condo.
He said nothing as Penn took his turn.
“This is why people don’t break up on the phone,” Penn said as he pulled the darts off the board.
“Wasn’t my doing.”
“You don’t have closure that way. Then the next time you run into each other…” Penn shook his head.
“Tell your sister that.”
“Tell her yourself.”
“She doesn’t want anything to do with me.” Cooper threw the first dart of his turn so hard it bounced off the board and skidded across the slick floor.
“Seems like you want something to do with her.”
Cooper gritted his jaw — hard — on the urge to tell his roommate to fuck off. Reining in the need to smash the darts into the board, he managed to toss the next one gently enough to stick in the triple one.
“You can tiptoe around each other all weekend, I guess,” Penn said at the exact moment Cooper threw his third dart, distracting him just enough that he hit the bull’s-eye. Fucking figured.
Cooper walked to the board and slowly plucked out his darts. “You think I should get my ‘closure.’” He moved off to the side.
“What I really think you should do?” Penn tossed in a triple twenty. “Both of you should quit being so damn hardheaded.”
Coop let out a sardonic chuckle. “Good luck with that. Your sister is the most stubborn woman I’ve ever known.”
“Two peas in a pod.” Penn continued to nonchalantly kick Cooper’s ass with a bull’s-eye.
Cooper told him where to go.
“What do you want from her, Coop? You wanna get back together?”
“Two people have to want that for it to happen, dude.”
“Answer the question.”
Cooper took his entire turn without saying a word. Did he want Zoe back? God, he’d loved her. More than he’d loved anyone in his thirty-five years. But it was past tense, love with an ed on the end. Getting back together? He wasn’t going there. Not an option.
“I want her to not hate me,” he said quietly. How the hell had it come to them not being able to say hello, how are you to each other?
“So go do something about it. I’m destroying you so completely at darts it’s getting embarrassing anyway.”
Cooper narrowed his eyes at his roommate, not sure which of his statements pissed him off more. He shook his head. Penn was right about both.
Dammit.
He slammed his darts down on the table by Penn’s keys, felt for his own keys in his front pocket, and headed for the door. “Don’t wait up.”
Zoe paced from one end of the hotel room to the other, bathroom to balcony door, as her mother crawled under the covers of one of the beds.
“You okay?” her mom asked.
Pausing at the balcony door, Zoe moved the curtain aside and looked out at the waves in the moonlight. She would never get tired of the sight — Nadia had set them up with a primo view — but tonight, neither it nor the normally soothing roar was doing a thing to relieve Zoe’s agitation.
“Just restless,” she said as she considered sitting out on the balcony for a few. She shook her head. Sitting still, trying to relax sounded like torture.
“You should’ve taken Nadia up on the offer to have a drink in the bar.”
“I almost did. But I was afraid I’d say something to give away Penn’s secret. I nearly slipped up three or four times at dinner.”
“Heavens, me too. Just one more day to get through without blowing it, thank goodness.”
Zoe’s phone vibrated on the nightstand between the two beds, and she went to it, hoping for a text from one of her friends from home, any of them, to distract her.
Her heart dipped into her stomach when she saw Cooper’s name on her phone.
You awake? the text message read.
Zoe let out a frustrated breath.
“Who is it?” Nell asked.
“Three guesses.” She returned the phone to the nightstand and went back to the balcony door, needing the physical distance from Cooper and his message.
“Cooper?”
Zoe didn’t answer.
“You’re being kind of hard on him, aren’t you?” Her mom’s voice was gentle, more sympathetic than her words, and tears threatened in Zoe’s eyes.
“Not on purpose. I just…” She shook her head. “It’s tougher than I expected.”
The phone buzzed again. Another message. Zoe fought the need to check what it said.
She sensed her mom watching her, felt her mother’s sympathy reaching out to her as if it had fingers. Zoe swiped the tears away.
“Have you ever given serious thought to moving here, Zoe? To be with him—”
“Of course I have! A thousand times.” Zoe swallowed down the pulsing lump in her throat.
“I can’t do it, Mom. Not in good conscience.
After everything Celeste and the others have done for me, allowing me to start building my name even before I was officially done with school, I can’t just walk away from my job.
It’d put them in a bind just as much as it would mean starting from scratch for me, and financially, I don’t have the years it would take to build up a new following. ”
“They have been extremely good to you,” her mom admitted.
“I saw what it did to the clinic when David Jennings moved to Chicago. The other two ended up working sixty-hour weeks to handle his clients as well as their own. Until I could step in and officially start taking some of them over. And they trusted me to do that, Mom.” Zoe knew her voice was much too emotional, loaded with defensiveness, but how could her mom even ask her this stuff?
She of all people knew . “I’m five years ahead of where I’d be otherwise. ”
“It’d be bad to leave them in the lurch after all their support,” Nell acknowledged.
“I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”
“Do you think,” her mom said, “it might be a good idea for you and Cooper to deal with this awkwardness now, so you don’t ruin your brother’s big weekend?”
Her words were like a jab to Zoe’s chest. That was the one thing her mom could say to make her back down. Zoe wanted Penn’s weekend to be amazing. He deserved it, especially after all the suffering he’d gone through because of his back injury.
Inhaling a deep, unsteady breath, she willed the tears away. She marched to the nightstand and picked up the phone, turning away from her mom for privacy.
Would like to talk sometime. Settle the air , Cooper’s text said.
Zoe bit her lip. Closed her eyes hard. Summoned her big-girl panties and replied:
Meet me on the beach in ten.