Road Trip with the Best Man

by Sophie Pembroke

  She had no idea where that instant dislike for her had come from, but Justin had told her he was like that with any girl he got serious about, so she was willing to bet it was more of a Cooper problem than a Dawn one.

  ‘It’s not what I want that matters,’ Cooper said. He left the fact that Justin obviously wanted her out of his life unsaid, which was possibly the nicest thing he’d ever done for her.

  ‘My point is, it’s quite hard for me to, say, up and leave the country to start over somewhere else while Justin has my passport.’ Never mind that she had no intention of leaving the States if she didn’t have to, especially since it would involve her traipsing back to Britain and her parents with her tail between her legs. If Cooper needed to believe that she was on her way out of Justin’s life to tell her where he was, then he could believe that.

  He didn’t need to know that her passport wasn’t the only thing Dawn wanted from Justin. The answers she needed were none of his business.

  Cooper sighed, his broad shoulders sinking slightly as he realised she wasn’t going to give up. Dawn stood firm, staring him down, not giving him a second to rethink that realisation.

  ‘Listen, Dawn, Justin said in his note that he needed to get away, he needed time to think. To refocus himself, he said. He needs to be away from everyone right now—family, friends and especially you. You need to give him that time.’

  ‘Time to think,’ Dawn echoed, a thought of her own crystallising in her brain.

  ‘Exactly.’ Cooper sounded relieved. He shouldn’t. ‘Why don’t you spend some time with your family, while they’re over here, try and relax too? I mean, this must have all been very stressful for you.’ The disbelief was strong in his voice on that last point, but it didn’t matter. He’d already told Dawn what she needed to know.

  There was only one place Justin went when he needed to get away from everything and think. He’d told her on their third date at that hot new restaurant that served everything with kale.

  She knew where she needed to go.

  ‘I could do that,’ she said agreeably. ‘Or I could head over to your family’s beach house in the Hamptons and find Justin.’

  Cooper’s eyes widened, just enough for her to know she’d guessed right.

  ‘I think I know which I’d rather do, don’t you?’ Dawn smiled triumphantly and enjoyed seeing Cooper’s face fall.

  At least she’d come out on top once today.

  * * *

  ‘I didn’t say he was at the beach house,’ Cooper said as soon as he gathered his wits again. How could she possibly know that? He felt in his pocket to make sure the letter Justin had written him was still there. He wouldn’t have put it past Dawn to have pickpocketed it from his jacket when they were investigating the trunk of the Caddy. She’d obviously already stolen the car keys from his bag, so thievery wasn’t beyond her. Not to mention the millions of dollars she had hoped to take his brother for.

  Dawn slammed the trunk closed. ‘You didn’t have to. I know my... I know Justin.’

  For a moment there, Cooper almost thought he heard sadness in her voice as she failed to find a word to describe his brother in relation to her. He wasn’t her husband, that was for sure. And she couldn’t possibly still think of him as her fiancé, or even boyfriend, now, could she?

  Except he had a very bad feeling that if Dawn went to the beach house to find him she’d go out of her way to convince Justin to be exactly that once again. That was what a gold-digger would do, right? She’d invested too much time and energy in Justin as a prospect to give up now. She’d probably even try and talk him into eloping to Vegas and making things official as soon as she had her passport back.

  Her passport. She didn’t have her passport. And she wasn’t a US citizen or a permanent resident, so she would need it to fly across the country to the Hamptons where Justin was holed up.

  He would have flown, Cooper realised. Anything else would have been crazy. Which meant he’d probably already be there, and Dawn’s belongings were in some long-stay car park at the airport, locked in his car. Even if she had the keys, she’d have to hunt through several thousands of cars to find his. But that, he suspected, wouldn’t stop Dawn from heading to New York State to find Justin.

  ‘Even if he is at the beach house—and I’m not saying he is,’ he added quickly, off Dawn’s smug smile. ‘Say he is there. How, exactly, are you planning on joining him, given that he has your passport?’

  That wiped that smile off her face. But only for a moment.

  Grinning widely, she held up the keys to the Caddy. ‘I’ll drive.’

  Since she hadn’t been able actually to open the door a few minutes ago, Cooper doubted that she was capable of driving forty-eight straight hours or so across the entire continental US, but the determined gleam in her eye still gave him pause.

  ‘Really. You, all on your own. Across the whole of America. Alone.’

  ‘If I have to,’ Dawn said stubbornly. ‘If that’s the only way to get to Justin, yes.’

  Yeah, this wasn’t about her passport at all, was it? She wasn’t setting off on this absurd road trip to get her stuff and hightail it back to Britain.

  She was doing this to get Justin back. And he simply could not allow that.

  ‘Give me the keys.’ He held a hand out across the bonnet.

  ‘No!’

  ‘The car is hired in my name,’ he said patiently. ‘If I call and report it stolen, the cops will have caught up to you before you even get out of the state. Besides, how much have you had to drink?’

  ‘Not much,’ she mumbled, sounding less certain. ‘Fine, then I’ll hire another car.’

  ‘With what proof of ID?’

  ‘I’ll take my dad’s rental.’ She was getting desperate now, he could tell. And that was bad. Desperate people did desperate things.

  ‘No,’ he said, making what might possibly be the worst decision of his life. ‘We’ll take this car. Now, give me the keys.’

  ‘We?’ Dawn asked, dropping the keys into his open palm.

  Cooper crossed to the driver’s side and unlocked the car.

  ‘We,’ he confirmed. ‘And I’m driving.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  DAWN WOKE UP as they drove through what she thought must be San Francisco.

  They.

  She and Cooper.

  How the hell had that happened?

  She kept her eyes closed, so Cooper wouldn’t know she was awake, while she tried to figure it all out.

  It might be Ruby’s fault. These sorts of things—crazy, unpredictable, ridiculous things—usually were. If she hadn’t forced that Prosecco on her then Dawn would have been clear-headed enough not to get into this position. Possibly. Okay, fine, but at least she’d have been able to open the car door the first time and drive herself away from her nightmare of a not-wedding.

  Of course, if Cooper hadn’t intervened, she wouldn’t have known where she was going, and who knew how long it would have taken her to figure out that Justin had run off with her passport and suitcase?

  Justin.

  Of course. It was Justin’s fault. All of it.

  She felt a little better for deciding that, so risked opening her eyes.

  ‘Sobered up yet?’ Cooper asked without looking at her. ‘There are some painkillers in the glove box.’

  ‘I had, like, two glasses of Prosecco, Cooper.’ Even if they hadn’t actually been in a glass. And probably not as good as the champagne Mrs Edwards had ordered to go with the wedding breakfast her guests would be sitting down to eat around now. ‘I wasn’t drunk.’ Was that the only reason he’d insisted on driving her? Because he thought she was too drunk to do it herself?

  Cooper sighed. ‘Well, there goes the only justification I could come up with for this crazy road trip.’

  ‘What’s crazy about it?’ Shifting
in her seat, Dawn tried to get comfortable and work out the kink in her neck from sleeping with her head against the window. How long had they been on the road, anyway? If the bright lights around them really were San Francisco, it must have been about an hour since they’d left the venue.

  ‘Everything,’ Cooper said flatly.

  Dawn ignored him. Clearly he didn’t understand about closure. He didn’t understand her. And that was fine—why should he? In a day or so she’d have what she needed and he’d be out of her life for good. Right?

  Wait. Frowning, Dawn tried to pull up a mental image of the map of the USA she’d had on her wall as a teenager, when she’d planned to escape the stifling perfection of her family and run away to her mother’s homeland, the States, as soon as she was old enough.

  She couldn’t exactly remember all the particulars of the interstates and roads, but she did remember one crucial thing: America was big.

  Really big.

  And the Hamptons were right on the other side of it from where she’d planned to get married today.

  She shuffled around in the leather passenger seat of the Caddy again, trying to get her skirt into something resembling a comfortable position. American cars might be bigger and arguably better than the rest, but no car was truly comfy when wearing several thousand dollars’ worth of lace and silk. The voluminous skirt would have looked wonderful walking down the aisle, or dancing the first dance, but Dawn felt it was rather wasted being crammed into the front seat of what was clearly Cooper’s dream car.

  ‘How far exactly is it to the beach house, anyway?’ she asked as nonchalantly as she could. However far it was, it was where she needed to go.

  But she had a nagging feeling it might take a little longer than the day or so she’d imagined when she’d suggested driving there.

  ‘About three thousand miles,’ Cooper replied, equally casually. ‘Give or take.’

  ‘Three thousand miles.’ Dawn swallowed. Hard.

  ‘Give or take,’ Cooper repeated. ‘About forty-eight hours of solid driving, mostly along Interstate 80.’

  ‘You’ve done this before?’ That was good. If he’d driven this way before, then it was clearly doable and not quite as insane as it sounded in her head.

  ‘Never,’ Cooper said, and Dawn’s spirits sank again. ‘Justin and I always planned to do a coast-to-coast road trip one day, though. Had it all planned out and everything. We were going to do it over a couple of weeks one summer. Hire a vintage Caddy like this one, really make the most of it.’

  And instead he was making the trip with her—his sister-in-law who wasn’t. Dawn wanted to ask why he and Justin had never taken their trip, but the closed expression on Cooper’s face stopped her.

  Well, that, and the phrases ‘a couple of weeks’ and ‘forty-eight hours of solid driving’ echoing around her head.

  ‘We’re going to need to stop overnight, then,’ she said.

  ‘Over several nights,’ Cooper corrected. ‘Even if we split the driving, we’ll both need to rest. Plus this car is a classic, vintage model. It’s been refurbished, of course, but still. It’s not exactly covered for non-stop cross-country travel.’

  ‘How many days do you think it will take us?’ Dawn asked, staring at the hard planes of his face, the set jaw. Two days ago, she’d never even met this man. Yesterday she’d realised he seriously disliked her. And now it looked as though they were going to be spending an awful lot of time together.

  Maybe this wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had.

  Cooper shrugged, never taking his eyes off the road. ‘Maybe four or five. If we really push it.’

  And longer if they didn’t. Possibly a lot longer if anything went wrong with the car.

  Dawn tried to remember how much space she had left on her credit card. Motel rooms for a week were going to add up fast. Not to mention food, petrol and everything else. She forced herself to take deep breaths and stay calm. The last thing she needed was Cooper figuring out how much she was freaking out.

  She just had to stick to the plan. Get to the Hamptons, get her stuff back and find the closure she needed to move on. After that, this whole trip would just be a memory—like a half-remembered, crazy dream.

  One more breath, and she felt the calm settling over her again. That was better.

  Then she looked down at the puddle of lace and silk she was sitting in and cursed Justin one more time for good measure.

  ‘In that case, I’m really going to need to find some new clothes.’

  * * *

  ‘It’s not too late to turn back, you know.’ Cooper could tell she was getting cold feet. She was British—what did she know about great American road trips? Or how long they took? For some reason, tourists always seemed to underestimate the size of this country. And he could totally use that to his advantage now. ‘I mean, we’re only an hour or so out. It would be no big thing at all to turn round, head back to that lovely mansion you picked and get back to your regularly scheduled life. You can tell your family you just needed to get some space, so you went for a drive. No one’s going to think anything’s odd about that, not after the day you’ve had.’

  Cooper did his best to sound sympathetic, rather than gleeful. He might have always wanted to do a big coast-to-coast road trip, but this wasn’t exactly how he’d pictured it—even if the car was perfect. No, the best thing for everyone involved was for Dawn to give up now and go home.

  ‘In fact, we’re still going to be closer to the wedding venue than to the beach house for another....’ he glanced down at the dashboard ‘—one thousand, four hundred and seventy miles. I mean, we haven’t even crossed the bridge to Oakland yet. Perfect time to turn round.’

  ‘No.’ Just the one word, but Cooper could hear a world of stubbornness behind it.

  ‘You know, I could call Justin and ask him to courier your passport and stuff to you,’ he pointed out, entirely reasonably, in his opinion.

  ‘Still no.’

  Damn. He must have laid it on a bit thick. He’d been so sure she’d been about ready to back down from this crazy stunt. What was she really hoping to achieve? To prove to Justin how much she truly loved him so he’d forget that, until she drove across the country, he knew she’d only wanted to marry him for his money? Did she really think that would work?

  Cooper sighed. The worst part was, she might be right. After all, if he wasn’t afraid Justin might fall for the big romantic gesture, he wouldn’t be turning onto Interstate 80 at the San Francisco-to-Oakland bridge right now.

  The problem was that Justin had always been the romantic one—even if he’d been the only one to see through Rachel the one time Cooper had let down his walls long enough to fall in love. Justin still believed in love and happy-ever-afters in a way that Cooper never had—and certainly hadn’t since he’d learned the hard way that the only thing other people wanted from him was his money and influence.

  But Justin... Justin had always been easily swayed by a beautiful woman—just like their father. And Dawn was, Cooper could admit, objectively speaking a beautiful woman. With that dark hair and pale skin, not to mention those bright green eyes...

  Of course, every woman looked beautiful on her wedding day. Which was no doubt the reason Dawn had decided to chase after Justin in her wedding dress and full make-up—to make maximum impact.

  Cooper smiled to himself. At least he could be pretty certain that the dress and make-up would look rather less impressive in a week’s time, when they finally reached the Hamptons and Justin. And, since he was the one who knew where they were going, he’d have to do his best to make sure that any new clothes she did manage to get her hands on wouldn’t be half as alluring.

  ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to take a proper road trip too.’ Cooper glanced over and saw that Dawn had kicked off her shiny satin high heels and rested her feet against the dashboard. Her perfectly
painted toenails peeked out from under the edge of her wedding dress, glossy red.

  He looked away. ‘Have you really?’ As of five minutes ago, he’d bet.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Dawn said, nodding enthusiastically. ‘And really, there just isn’t enough of Britain to count as a proper road trip. You can drive the whole thing in a day or so. No, you have to come to the States for a real road trip experience like this.’

  ‘And what constitutes a “real road trip experience” in your mind?’ Cooper asked sceptically.

  ‘Uh, well...snacks, obviously. And music. You need a soundtrack.’ She looked dubiously at the ancient radio the Caddy boasted. Cooper suspected that if it picked up anything it would be radio waves beamed straight from the fifties, giving them a steady diet of Elvis and Buddy Holly. The car’s engine and working parts had all been updated enough that he trusted the Caddy to make the distance he needed, but the interior and aesthetics were most definitely of its time—radio included.

  ‘What else?’ he pressed.

  ‘Stopping to eat in diners—like, proper, authentic American ones, with pancakes and burgers and stuff.’

  ‘Are you hungry, by any chance?’ Cooper asked. ‘Because that’s the second food item on your essentials list so far. And you’ve only come up with three things.’

  ‘Kooky roadside attractions!’ Dawn shouted. ‘That’s what a road trip needs! I mean, that’s what I’ve always imagined for my dream road trip.’

  That she’d clearly come up with five minutes ago as a way of convincing him she was going through with this. Right. ‘Roadside attractions,’ he repeated dubiously.

  ‘Yeah, you know—like the world’s biggest ball of twine. That sort of thing.’

  ‘The world’s largest ball of twine is in Kansas,’ Cooper replied automatically, and regretted it almost instantly. ‘We’re not going through Kansas.’

  Dawn stared at him. He tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed. ‘How do you even know that?’

  He shrugged. ‘I know things.’ Such as the world’s largest ball of twine made by one person was in Minnesota, which they also weren’t going through. But he wasn’t telling her that.