Road Trip with the Best Man

by Sophie Pembroke

  Why was Cooper there, anyway? What was it about her that made him want to drive cross-country just to be there with her when she saw Justin again? She was under no illusion that Cooper was doing this to get them back together again, so he must be planning to make sure that Dawn didn’t try to win Justin back.

  But why? What was it he disliked so much about her?

  She sighed. Another mystery to add to the list of things she didn’t understand about Cooper Edwards. One she definitely intended to solve before they reached the Hamptons.

  Just as soon as she got some sleep.

  * * *

  When the alarm on his phone went off at six a.m. the next morning, Cooper cursed it for a solid minute while grappling to find the snooze button. Why was he getting up at six in the morning when he was supposed to be on holiday? He’d booked a whole week off, something he hardly ever did, to relax after playing best man for his brother. That week had been designated for lazing in the Californian sunshine with a couple of quick work visits to the vineyards to check on things and do a taste test or five. Nothing that required six a.m. starts.

  Then, as the alarm went silent, he blinked at the yellowing motel ceiling and remembered.

  No wedding. Road trip. Stupid hotel booking app.

  Dawn.

  Turning onto his side, he looked over at the sofa, only to find it empty. He frowned, until the sound of the shower running in the attached bathroom caught his attention and explained Dawn’s absence.

  Yeah, that couch must have been really uncomfortable if she was already up and moving. He’d have to make sure she got some sleep in the car, or there was no way she’d be fit to drive in the afternoon. And he had a feeling she was the sort to be grumpy when she didn’t get enough sleep—much like himself—and he’d like to keep things friendly, since they were stuck together.

  Wait. Friendly? Since when had he wanted to be friends with Dawn Featherington? Hadn’t he planned on avoiding that very thing?

  From the shower, her voice rang out, singing something from some Disney movie or another, and Cooper held in a sigh.

  There was one thing he hadn’t counted on when he’d agreed to this road trip.

  He hadn’t imagined, for a moment, that it might be fun.

  And it wouldn’t be, with anyone else.

  He groaned, rolling over to bury his face in the pillow as he thought back over the past couple of days.

  The problem was that he’d been expecting Dawn to be someone else. Someone with high expectations, and doing a lot of whining when he didn’t meet them. He’d expected her to be annoyed at the long hours in the car and never offer to drive, horrified by the tacky motels he kept choosing for them to stay in and disgusted by the idea of hot dogs for lunch and pancakes for dinner. He’d expected Dawn to fleece him for nights in five-star hotels and insist on dressing up for dinner in the fanciest restaurants.

  He’d expected Dawn to be just like his ex-wife, Rachel.

  Instead, he’d got the woman who wanted to stop off to see giant polar bears, and drove the Caddy with the sort of love and affection he showed her himself. And had actually named her, come to that.

  He hadn’t been mentally prepared for Dawn. That much was clear.

  That was one of the reasons he’d set his alarm so early. Because, when they’d settled into their room together the night before, just for a moment he’d imagined them heading out and grabbing breakfast together the next morning. He’d thought of suggesting they take in Gilgal Gardens before they hit the road, because if she thought the giant polar bear was quirky she really hadn’t seen anything yet. He’d even considered, just for a moment, suggesting they share the damn bed.

  But then he’d remembered his brother’s note, remembered who she really was, interest in kitsch roadside attractions aside. So when he’d opened his mouth to say goodnight, he’d found himself saying, ‘I want to hit the road by seven. We can stop for coffee and breakfast on the way. It’s ten and a half hours to Lexington, and we can make it in a day if we don’t hang around.’

  That was what mattered. Getting to Justin quickly and ending this.

  Then he’d turned over in the bed, his back to her couch, already regretting the overreaction that meant spending over ten hours stuck in Claudia’s overheating seats the following day.

  He regretted it even more now, as the alarm went off again, and he levered himself out of bed to wait for his turn in the shower. But then he remembered what roadside surprises Interstate 80 had for them today and he couldn’t help but smile.

  Maybe this road trip had started out as an obligation. But did that really have to mean it couldn’t be fun too?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BY THE TIME Cooper was done with his shower, and had packed up his few belongings, Dawn was already waiting for him in the lobby, paying the motel bill for the night before. Cooper faltered slightly as he approached when he realised what she was doing. Yes, she’d said she would, but he hadn’t actually believed it.

  The woman made no sense. The only possible explanation that fitted with Justin’s letter was that she was trying to prove him wrong—trying to show Cooper that the money wasn’t important to her, so that he didn’t interfere with her plans to win Justin back.

  The only problem with that theory was that Cooper had been with women like that before—women who liked to live the high life on credit to enable them to move in the circles that meant they could find a rich husband to pay it off. And Dawn, with her hair scraped back in a high ponytail, wearing the same denim skirt as yesterday with another cheap and colourful tee shirt, did not fit that mould.

  His instincts told him that Dawn wasn’t trying to be anything right now. She was just being herself. And that made no sense at all. So either his instincts were wrong or there was something else going on here that he didn’t understand.

  Who the hell was this woman Justin had run out on? And why did it bother Cooper so much that he couldn’t read her the way he read every other woman he met these days?

  ‘Ready to go?’ Dawn asked, smiling cautiously at him, probably in response to the frown he could feel creasing his forehead.

  ‘Yep. Let’s go see how Claudia fared for the night, shall we?’ He tried to make his words friendly, and saw Dawn’s shoulders relax a little for the effort.

  Claudia was as steady and reliable as ever, and Cooper slipped behind the steering wheel with relief. This, at least, he understood. The classic car, the open road, travelling to reach a destination—that all made sense.

  The woman in the seat beside him, less so.

  He swung into a drive-through to pick up coffee and breakfast muffins before they left the city, then headed back out on the interstate. Dawn seemed quieter this morning—maybe more tired than ever after her night on the couch. She dozed for a bit, but even after she woke up she didn’t seem to have much to say.

  After about an hour, the silence grew a little too oppressive as they drove through the hills out of Utah into Wyoming. Cooper switched on the radio, hoping for something not terrible, and grinned when Elvis crackled through the speakers.

  ‘Seems appropriate,’ Dawn said, returning his smile. ‘Claudia, the open road and Elvis. I’m basically living the American cliché right here.’

  ‘If it were the nineteen-fifties, maybe,’ Cooper admitted. ‘This is more of a nostalgia trip than reality, I think.’

  ‘You’re probably right. Still, it’s nice to imagine.’ She sounded strangely wistful as Elvis sang of lost love and heartache.

  ‘So, is this what you were imagining when you moved Stateside?’ Cooper asked, curiosity getting the better of him. ‘Being an all-American housewife, baking apple pies and driving places with the hood down?’

  Dawn laughed. ‘Do you think I’d have agreed to marry Justin if it was? That’s not exactly the sort of lives you guys live, is it?’

 
‘No, I suppose not.’ With the Edwards brothers, it had always been work hard and play harder. Until Rachel, of course. Then, for Cooper at least, it had become ‘work hard and forget’.

  ‘But... I guess... I grew up on stories from my mum—she’s American, did you know?’ Dawn said, and Cooper nodded to show he remembered. ‘She grew up here in the sixties, and apparently her mother was very much that all-American housewife you talk about. Her family were quintessential middle America, I guess. All the clichés you can imagine.’

  ‘So what took her to England?’

  ‘My dad. They met when he was over here on a road trip of his own, actually. They fell in love fast, and her parents thought she was crazy when she said yes to his proposal after only two weeks.’

  ‘Hardly surprising,’ Cooper pointed out. He’d proposed to Rachel after only a month—and look what an almighty screw-up that had turned out to be.

  ‘But she stood her ground. They got married less than a month later and moved to England together.’ She paused and Cooper waited, knowing that couldn’t be the end of that story. ‘My wedding-that-wasn’t was the first time she’d been back in almost forty years.’

  Cooper’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Wow. Talk about burning bridges, huh?’

  Dawn gave a small, embarrassed-looking shrug. ‘I guess my grandparents really didn’t approve of the marriage. But, the thing is, she talked about her life here, growing up, so often that it felt real to me. And so when I got the opportunity to come and work over here it felt like a no-brainer, you know?’

  ‘Did you track down any of your family?’

  ‘No,’ Dawn said, turning to look out of the window. ‘My grandparents both died years ago, and Mum was an only child. So there didn’t seem much point, really. I wanted to come here for me, to see what it was really like. And then I met Justin.’

  ‘And fell madly in love.’ Cooper didn’t try very hard to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, but Dawn didn’t even seem to notice.

  ‘Yeah. I did.’ She smiled down at her hands shyly, as if embarrassed by it. ‘The funny thing is, everything happened so fast it was almost scary. And Justin... His world wasn’t mine, and sometimes I felt so out of my depth. But then I realised it couldn’t be half as terrifying as what my mum had been through for love. So I just let myself go with it. Of course, with hindsight...’ Her smile turned rueful.

  ‘Would you do things the same?’ Cooper asked. ‘If you’d known how things would turn out?’

  Dawn bit down on her lip before answering, obviously giving the question far more thought than Cooper thought it deserved.

  ‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘I think I would.’

  * * *

  Would she have done things the same? Would she have risked getting stood up by Justin on her wedding day all over again, and then taken off cross-country with his brother on a crazy road trip?

  Who in their right mind would bring all that on themselves twice?

  Well, she would, it seemed. Because, try as she might, Dawn couldn’t imagine living her life in a way that didn’t take that sort of chance to find a ‘for ever’ love. Couldn’t imagine not jumping at the chance for happiness.

  Was that how her mother had felt all those years ago? Suddenly, Cooper’s question made her feel closer to her mum than she had in years.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said, smiling. ‘All these years, I’ve thought I was nothing like the rest of my family—especially my mum and my sisters. But maybe I have more in common with them than I think.’

  ‘You all fall in love too fast?’ Cooper asked, and she knew he was being sarcastic, but he was also right, so she nodded.

  ‘We all take a chance on love,’ she amended. ‘Some of us more often than others.’

  ‘Ah, so you’ve done this a lot, then?’ Cooper’s tone wasn’t surprised—more as if she was confirming something about herself that he’d long suspected. Although why he’d been thinking about her past romantic entanglements Dawn couldn’t imagine.

  ‘Not lots, exactly.’ Dawn winced as she wondered what the exact definition of ‘lots’ was, anyway. ‘Let’s just say I haven’t always been particularly lucky in love.’

  ‘I noticed,’ Cooper said drily.

  Shifting in her seat, Dawn looked past him out of the windscreen rather than continue the conversation. Then she frowned.

  ‘What is that?’

  Cooper didn’t even look before he answered. Apparently he’d known this was coming.

  ‘It’s the giant head of Abraham Lincoln.’ There, on the side of the road, a huge statue stood over them, judging them.

  ‘That’s...kind of what I was afraid you were going to say.’ Dawn stared out at the looming figure high over the interstate, staring down at the traffic. ‘Um, why is it there?’

  Cooper shrugged. ‘Hard to say. I think it used to loom over the Lincoln Highway, which at least made some sense. Then it got moved, well, here.’

  ‘Because that is a totally normal thing to do,’ Dawn said, staring out of the window as Cooper drove past the giant bronze head.

  Huh. America.

  Maybe her mum had been right to get out while she had the chance.

  ‘This is the country of extremes,’ Cooper pointed out. ‘Extreme wealth, extreme poverty, extreme temperatures...’

  ‘And extreme statues,’ Dawn finished for him. ‘I get it.’

  ‘Just wait until you see what’s coming up next.’ Cooper smirked at her, then turned his gaze back to the road.

  Dawn didn’t have to wait long. About fifteen minutes by Claudia’s clock—although she had no idea how accurate that was.

  ‘Okay, that’s less bizarre than the giant head,’ she admitted. ‘But what is it?’

  ‘It’s a tree. Don’t you have those in Britain?’

  ‘Not growing out of solid rock in the middle of the road we don’t.’ At least, not that she’d ever seen.

  They were in the middle of Wyoming, with bright blue skies and scorched brown earth all around them, the interstate a river of grey in the landscape. And there, right in the centre of I-80, stood a tree. Lopsided and windswept, and maybe a little stunted, but a living tree. Growing right out of a piece of what looked like granite.

  ‘That takes some perseverance,’ Dawn said as they sailed past the plucky little tree. ‘I mean, the road even goes around it.’

  ‘Story goes that when they were building the first railroad along this route the railroad men were so impressed with that stubborn little limber pine, they actually moved the railroad so as not to disturb it.’ Even Cooper sounded vaguely impressed by the tree’s pluckiness. ‘Then, by the time the railroad moved and they wanted to put the interstate in, the tree was too famous to shift, so they made the road go around it.’

  ‘Huh.’ The tree in the road zoomed out of sight, and Dawn turned back in her seat, settling down again, thinking hard.

  ‘Huh?’ Cooper repeated. ‘It’s just a tree, Dawn.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ She hadn’t even got a decent look at the thing, but she already knew it was more than that. It was a parable. A promise. ‘It’s hope.’

  ‘Hope?’ Cooper’s tone was even more derisory than normal, which Dawn hadn’t been entirely sure was possible.

  ‘Yeah. Hope.’ The more she said it, the more sure she was. ‘Think how many other seeds must have tried to grow into trees in that place and failed. All the saplings that didn’t survive their first winter. Or seeds that landed on stone and just rotted. But not that one.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘That seed flourished, even though it shouldn’t,’ Dawn went on, warming to her theme. ‘That tree grew in the most unlikely place, defying all the odds. And it was that defiance that kept it alive when the railways or the roads should have destroyed it. It was the hope it gave people—the promise of survival against impossible odds. It�
�s basically American history in horticulture.’

  Cooper laughed. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I’m right.’ And, if a tree could do it, why couldn’t she? That little pine hadn’t given up, so why should Dawn? ‘Haven’t you ever succeeded at something against all the odds, against all the people who told you that you couldn’t?’

  It was the wrong question, clearly. Cooper’s face closed down instantly. ‘Mostly I like to stack the odds in my favour first, to assure success. It’s just good business.’

  ‘Yeah, but there must have been something you stuck at, or went ahead with, even when it seemed hopeless?’ She could tell there had been. If there hadn’t been, Cooper wouldn’t have reacted that way.

  ‘Nothing that ended well,’ he said darkly, and Dawn winced.

  ‘Well, I’m going to be more like that tree,’ she said firmly. Then she risked a cheeky smile in his direction. ‘You can be more like the giant bronze head of Abraham Lincoln, if you like.’

  He didn’t dignify that with a response, and Dawn only just held in her laughter.

  * * *

  Cooper wasn’t sure why he insisted on driving so far that day when they were both already so tired, but he suspected it had something to do with Dawn’s musings on succeeding against the odds and perseverance.

  The only time he’d ever done anything that smacked of defying conventional wisdom was when he’d fallen in love with Rachel. Hell, it hadn’t been even just conventional wisdom he’d defied—it had been his own. He’d known better, and he’d fallen anyway.

  He hadn’t been in love with Melanie, back when he’d been twenty-one and his mother had asked him to show her around the company and teach her the ropes—but he knew he could have fallen, if she’d let him. She’d been a student on a summer placement, and he’d been showing off because she was beautiful and he wanted to impress her. She’d flirted, smiled and let him think that he mattered, that he was important. He’d been so full of himself he’d let all sorts of company secrets slip—and she’d turned around and given them to her boyfriend, who’d just happened to work for their biggest competitor.