The One Real Thing (Hart's Boardwalk) (20 page)

“Unfortunately, yes. Quite a bit at the prison, actually. Old fractures, scars so multiple it’s a history of abuse mapped out on the body—the truth right there for me to see and yet they still lie to me about it.” She shook her head sadly. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that your family ever had to deal with it.”

“My mom mostly,” he said, the familiar anger licking at his nerves. “She did the right thing, though. She got help. The sheriff at the time was a man who’d been really good friends with my grandfather. He, uh . . . well . . . let’s just say he did what he had to, to get the message over to my dad that he was no longer welcome in Hartwell.” He narrowed his eyes, remembering their conversation about his mother’s cousin. “There were options open to my mother. She made the right choice.”

Understanding instantly dawned on Jessica. “I get you,” she whispered.

He continued, “After he left, things got better. But they were also hard. It was just me, my mother, and my baby sister, Catriona.
Mom had inherited the bar from my uncle who’d passed, and she never liked it much. She kept the management on and they ran it for her, but it wasn’t what it could be. For a place on the boardwalk it was kind of a dive. I was always trying to find ways to make money and so I worked a lot and missed out on a lot of school. Graduated with my GED and got a job working as a mechanic in Uly’s Garage. Mom worked as a grocery store clerk. We worked our asses off so Cat didn’t have to. Mom gave the bar to both of us, but Cat let me buy her out years ago. She had no passion for it. She wanted college. She was a smart kid. We wanted college for her, too. She wanted to be prelaw and, smart cookie that she is, she got into UPenn.”

“That’s amazing. And partly because of you.” There was open admiration in Jessica’s expression.

He liked that, but he wasn’t taking credit for Cat’s hard work. “It was all her. She worked hard in high school and didn’t have much of a social life. But she got to college and . . . I don’t know.” He sighed. “I don’t know if it was too much pressure or what . . . She got a little wild. She called me about a pregnancy scare her freshman year and I hoped the scare and my reaction to the scare would be enough to keep her on the straight and narrow.”

Jess made a face. “It didn’t.”

“It didn’t.” He still remembered how he’d felt when she told him she had to quit college because she was pregnant. “She was twenty years old. She came home for the summer. Got shit-faced and knocked up by a tourist whose name she couldn’t remember.”

“Oh boy.”

“Yeah. But I had to come around fast because our mother was so disappointed she didn’t speak to Cat for the first five months of her pregnancy.”

“Double oh boy.”

He gave a huff of laughter. “Yeah.”

“But then Joey came along.”

“Joseph Cooper Lawson.” He grinned just thinking about the
kid. “Even smarter than his mom. And you can bet his grandmother was more gaga over that kid than anyone. She got over her disappointment quick first time she held him in her arms.”

Jessica was quiet a moment as she studied him. She said, her voice soft, “And how long did she get to enjoy him?”

That sharp sting of sadness pricked him. “Not long, Doc. Only a few years before the cancer claimed her.”

“You were close.”

“Extremely. It was like the world ended for a while.”

Her eyes suddenly shone with tears and that sting got a little sharper at her genuine sympathy. “I’m sorry you lost her.”

He nodded, unable to speak for the emotion that was thick in his voice. Sometimes the grief could hit him hard out of nowhere, even after all these years.

“But you know what?” she said. “I’m even happier that you had her.”

And just like that her words took away a bit of the sting. He cleared his throat, but it was still thick when he said, “Me, too, Doc.”

I discovered something new about myself right then. I discovered that my emotions
could
be connected to my sexual attraction to someone. Because right then, emotionally tangled up in this man, I had never been more attracted to a guy in my life.

I wanted Cooper Lawson.

Badly.

I wanted to launch myself across the table at him.

To hold him.

To kiss him.

To rip his clothes off after the embracing.

Very inappropriate, considering what we’d just discussed. I’d never met a man like him before, though. How he could be so many
things . . . so goddamn rugged and masculine, honest and open, and even showing a little of his vulnerability . . . it was unreal. He hadn’t hidden his emotion, his grief over his mom. He’d given that to me. And that meant so much more to me than anything else could.

And for the first time in a very long time I wanted everything with a man.

And for the first time
ever
I was going to see if it was possible to have everything with
this
man.

“So what about you?” Cooper said after a moment of comfortable silence. “Tell me about your family.”

His question dropped down in my stomach like a lead weight, sending up a flurry of butterflies in its wake. Anytime someone asked me a question about my family I physically trembled before shutting the line of questioning down. This time was no different—Cooper’s question made me shake—but it was the first time I’d ever contemplated giving someone at least part of the truth as an answer to that question.

This would be a day of a lot of firsts because I knew it would be unfair not to give Cooper anything after he’d given me something of himself. Something so real.

I took a deep breath and watched Cooper frown as he watched my reaction to his question. “It’s not an easy question, is it?” I said.

“For some people it is.”

“Well, that’s true,” I said. “I’ll amend that. It’s not an easy question for me.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

He meant that. However, I could see the light of something in his eyes and I thought it might be disappointment. I felt completely anxious at the thought. I didn’t want to disappoint him and miss my chance to explore this connection with him.

“It’s just not a pretty story . . .” I took another slow breath, trying to find the words and all the while willing the painful images to stay out of my head. “I don’t really ever talk about it. My
sister . . . uh . . . my sister, Julia, committed suicide when I was nineteen. It was only a few days after her sixteenth birthday.”

Cooper looked stunned. “Fuck, Doc . . . you don’t have to—”

I waved away his concern with a confidence I didn’t feel. “It’s alright. She . . . had her issues that I won’t go into. But we were really close. Our parents . . . um”—at the mention of my parents, the old hurt gripped my chest hard like it always did—“they completely disconnected from me when she died. I mean, I tried. I tried for years to reconnect with them, but they’re not interested. I only have my best friend, Matthew, back in Iowa, and his daughter, Perry, is my goddaughter. They’re about the only family I have left now.” My mouth trembled, but I wouldn’t cry. A long time back I’d shut that part of my emotions off. It protected me from the worst of the pain.

Suddenly Cooper’s hand covered mine, his fingers wrapping tight around my hand. The gesture made me look up.

His expression was fierce. “If you need to cry, Doc, you can cry. You don’t have to hide that from me.”

I covered his hand with my other one and gave him a grateful smile. “I’m okay, Cooper. It’s a hard story to tell. But I’m okay.”

“It means a lot to me that you told me,” he said gruffly.

And there. There it was.

What I’d been thinking about him, he’d just said it right out in the open.

No bullshit.

God, I liked this man.

I squeezed his hand and then let go and watched him as he slowly withdrew his hand from mine. “You don’t have any other family?” he said, frowning. “No aunts or uncles, cousins or grandparents?”

“My mom’s sister. Theresa. We were close. But after . . .” I’d feared she’d want nothing to do with me, just like my parents, and somehow I knew her rejection, her blaming me, too, would hurt worse, so I’d left her also and never looked back. “We haven’t spoken since . . . then . . .” I shook off the thought of her. “Tell me
about growing up here,” I said, changing the subject to something a little less heavy.

“Let me get you another coffee, and I’ll do just that.”

Five minutes later he was back and sprawled in the booth, relaxed and at ease with me as he’d been from the moment we met. “This is a great place to raise kids,” he said immediately. “Even with all the shit going on with my family, I had a great childhood here. It’s got that small-town thing where nearly everyone knows your business, and that has its ups and downs, but for the most part it’s good. Thing about Hartwell is, although you’ve got your small pocket of hard-core conservatives, this is a friendly, open place. We’ve moved along with the times pretty well.” He gave me a crooked grin.

That grin hit me low in my belly.

It was starting to do that every time.

“You grow up somewhere like here and I like to think it gives you good values, makes you a better kind of person.”

“From what I’ve seen I would say so,” I said. “You have all charmed me.”

“And thank fuck for that,” he said forcefully.

I crossed my legs under the table at the heat in his eyes, and that smolder in them only darkened at whatever he saw in my own.

“Idyllic, then,” I murmured, a little dazed from the intensity of the rush of desire pumping through my veins.

“What?” he murmured back, still staring at me like he wanted to devour me.

“What?” I said as my thoughts grew increasingly lust fogged. I suddenly had a vision of him throwing the table between us across the room like Superman, and then scooping me up in his arms and hurrying me home to his bed at the speed of light.

Oh boy
.

“Idyllic?” he said, pulling himself out of the sensual moment and thus pulling me, too. “Yeah. This place is pretty idyllic for a kid.”

I nodded and recrossed my legs.

Cooper’s eyes narrowed on my body. “You okay there?”

I knew by the purr in the back of his throat that he was plenty aware I was not “okay.” “Fine,” I lied.

He smirked and looked down into the coffee mug. “Tell me about medical school.”

“You weren’t done telling me about Hartwell.”

“Tit for tat, Doc. You tell me something, I’ll tell you something.”

That sounded fair. “Okay. Medical school was grueling. My medical residency was worse. Working twenty-four-hour shifts is pretty hard.”

Cooper winced. “Twenty-four-hour shifts? Are you kidding?”

“Nope. Once you hit second year you’re legally allowed to do twenty-four hours. It’s hard-core.”

“How did you cope?”

“Adrenaline mostly. Most people who are cut out to be surgeons . . . I think that’s what gets them through it. And mixed in with the high you get from saving someone’s life is that feeling of power. We can’t always control life or death, but we can do our damn best to. And that’s what it’s like being a surgeon. It’s taking back a little of that control. The high is phenomenal. It’s even better when you get to tell a patient’s family that the person they love is going to be okay.”

“But equally shitty to tell them the opposite.”

There were actually no words for how shitty that was. I would always remember the first surgery I’d participated in as an intern when the patient died on the table. I was with the attending surgeon when she told the family. On top of the overwhelmingly raw grief that emanated so powerfully from them that I couldn’t escape feeling it, I couldn’t see past the look in their eyes . . . this angry disappointment in us that went beyond any description.

It had never left me.

I tried to compartmentalize it, and the deaths that came after, in order to do my job. I just couldn’t. I could handle giving a patient
bad news, knowing the person could still fight to survive or, selfishly, knowing I wouldn’t have to be there to see it if he or she lost that fight. But watching a patient die and then telling the loved ones that the person was gone started to wear on me. And that was when I knew I couldn’t be a surgeon. Even if the good days far outweighed the bad, it was the bad days that haunted me long after.

Cooper saw the answer in my eyes.

I changed the subject. “A growing-up-in-Hartwell story,” I prompted.

He immediately went with it. “You want to hear about the time I held up Lanson’s grocery store?”

Shock ran through me. “What?”

“I was eight and my gun was a toy.”

I laughed. “Oh, my God.”

“My mom regretted letting me watch that marathon of western movies, but old Jeff Lanson got a laugh out of it. Thankfully.”

I laughed harder, imagining a cute little version of Cooper holding up the supermarket. “What happened?”

We sat there for the next few hours, exchanging stories, until my eyes started to grow heavy.

“Come on, Doc, we better get you home. You’ve got an appointment with Anita in a few hours.”

Oh, crap. I’d forgotten about that.

After Cooper had locked up the bar, he walked me back to the inn along the darkened boardwalk. The whole way there I had my head on his shoulder. He held up my tired body with his arm around my waist and I held on with my arm around his.

It felt easy and right.

And so goddamn beautiful I could have cried.

To cap off the best night I could remember in a long time, Cooper brushed his lips over mine to say good night. Just a whisper of his mouth, a tease of the taste of him, and that touch zinged through my blood.

“I’ll check in with you in a while.” He whispered his promise against my lips.

There was so much emotion rising up out of me that it got choked up in my throat and I couldn’t speak. I could only nod, hoping he saw everything I felt in my eyes.

And, judging by the small, sexy smile he gave me, he did.