by Jill Shalvis
Bullshit he was rigid and unbending.
Right?
Okay, so he hadn’t exactly been a good listener when Olivia had tried to talk to him, but he’d been…
An ass.
A rigid, unbending ass.
Chapter 31
Olivia called the TV Land producer. “I’m in.”
“Making my day, sweetcheeks.”
“On one condition,” she said. “Well, make it two.”
“Name ’em,” he said without hesitation.
“Call me sweetcheeks again, and I kick you in your sweet cheeks. And two, you film my part of the retro special here in Lucky Harbor.”
“You don’t want to come to the studio? We were going to re-create the set of Not Again, Hailey! for you.”
“No.” She shuddered. God, no. “I want to do it here, where my life is now. Just a quick interview, and if you need an audience, we’ll use locals.” She wasn’t hiding here in Lucky Harbor, she was living the way she wanted to. No shame in that. Time to prove it to both herself and her world. “In my shop.”
“Done,” he said. “People will love the current look-see into your life. Can you do something wild and crazy to help ratings?”
“No! And I want to do this in the next few days.” She wanted this over with. An incoming call beeped. She looked at her screen.
Cole.
Surprise, anxiety, and hope hit her. Along with a good amount of anger. God, she was mad at herself, but she was mad at him, too. “I have to go,” she said.
“Just hold on a second. I’m working my mind around trying to get up there that fast,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Take it or leave it; I have another call.”
“Jesus, you’re as difficult as they say.”
“Yeah, I am. You’ve been in a hurry for this for a long time,” she said. “And now I’m in a hurry to be done.”
“Killing me, Sharlyn.”
“Olivia,” she said. “My name’s Olivia. Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
God help her, but it was done. “Fine. Gotta go.” She clicked over to Cole, but he was gone.
About an hour into Cole’s return trip to Lucky Harbor, it began to rain. It came down in long, steady slashes that made seeing out the windshield a challenge.
This didn’t bother him any. Hell, he could remember being five years old and sitting on his dad’s lap in the family truck, hands on the wheel, steering while his dad worked the accelerator and brake.
And then being ten and driving his dad’s truck better than any of his sisters. Or his dad, for that matter. The old man had gotten a big kick out of that, and had let Cole drive on the back roads whenever they were out there together.
By the time Cole had turned fifteen, he could drive anything, with wheels or without. Hell, he could’ve parked a semi in an asscrack. Backward.
He’d been given free rein with the family boat two years before he was legal, and that had cemented his love for all things with an engine.
His mom had worried that they’d bred a daredevil, but Cole had never felt compelled to be stupid.
Just fast. Smart.
And good.
He was still those things, or so he liked to believe. On and off the road. And on and off the water.
But as for real life?
Not so much, apparently.
In matters of the heart, for instance, he was slow as a fucking turtle in peanut butter.
And stupid to boot.
What was real? he’d asked Olivia. Any of it?
She’d actually taken a step back, as if he’d physically slapped her.
All of it…
It’d certainly felt real. Before her, he’d been just floating through life. Living but not experiencing. And then she’d jumped off that dock and nearly drowned him, and he’d thought of little but her ever since.
He had people in his life, good people, and he’d always been loved, accepted. Wanted.
She hadn’t been so lucky.
And yet she instinctively knew how to love, how to give back, and in fact, she was better at it than he was. She’d jumped into the water after a perfect stranger to try to help. She’d given a piece of her past so a little girl in need could have the costume she wanted for Halloween. She’d braved his entire family with a smile and no visible fear—and only now was he realizing just how hard that must have been for her.
Had he accused her of acting her way through life? Jesus, what a complete idiot he was. Her emotions were always there for him to see, whether she was facing him down, laughing with him, or simply making him ache like a son of a bitch as she lay beneath him by moonlight, rocking up into him, eyes locked on his, hiding none of her feelings…
We all create a fiction.
Yeah, she’d been as honest with him as she could. He knew that now.
Could he say the same? Had he given her everything he had or held back out of his own damn fears?
When the real thing comes along, there’s nothing like it.
Until recently, he wouldn’t have recognized the real thing if it’d hit him in the face.
Or jumped onto his head in the water…
But he knew it now. The real thing was back in Lucky Harbor, and he’d let it go.
Let her go.
Two hours into the drive, the rain turned to sleet. And then thirty minutes later, snow. Visibility went down to zip. Cole shifted into four-wheel drive and slowed accordingly to meet the road conditions.
He was one of the lonely few in that regard. Over the next five minutes he watched cars playing Slip ’N Slide across the road.
Damn. He knew what came next, and sure enough, not ten minutes later—during which time he’d gone a whopping half a mile—Oregon Department of Transportation shut the highway down.
He exited into no-man’s-land and found a tiny hole-in-the-wall inn on a stretch of highway across the street from a McDonald’s. No WiFi. The bathroom sink dripped in an uneven rhythm that made him want to crawl beneath it and fix it. The toilet ran. The bedside lamp kept flickering. And there was a low-level hum coming out of the smoke alarm that made him wish for a BB gun to shoot the fucker.
Or himself.
With nothing else to do, he lay in bed and stared at the lights from the McDonald’s arches dancing across the ceiling.
It was six thirty at night, and he was alone with his own stupidity. He played the images on repeat through his mind. Like walking away from Tanner and Sam in anger…The three of them had fought plenty over the years, sometimes quietly, sometimes not so much, and yet they’d never stayed mad. They threw words, and occasionally a shove or two, and they got over it.
No one had ever walked away.
He regretted doing that, hugely.
Drip, drip, drip.
The bathroom sink was going to give him an embolism. That is, if the flickering light of the lamp didn’t give him an aneurism first…
Shit. He rolled out of the bed, pulled a few tools from his cargo pants, and took the lamp apart.
And then put it back together.
And then, because he’d lost all self-control, he fixed the bathroom sink.
He was looking around for something else to fix—or toss through the window—when the power went out. On the bright side, he no longer had to worry about the lamp. And hey, a side benefit—no more slashing yellow light from the McDonald’s across the way, either.
Six forty-five.
He had two bars of battery left on his phone. Nope, make that one bar. Since he was going to die in this godforsaken hellhole, he blew through some time checking email. His mom wanted to get a Christmas list together early this year because she liked to shop on the Internet. Cindy’s laptop was still not working. Sam wanted to know if Cole was over himself yet.
Tanner hadn’t been so politically correct. You’re an asshole was all his email said.
Right. He’d just make a note of that.
There in the dark, he began a fun little game cal
led Torture Yourself by Replaying Your Most Idiotic Moments.
Such as acting like a first-class asshole with Tanner and Sam.
Such as acting like a first-class asshole with Olivia.
And then he pictured Lucille, standing out there by her mailbox in her bright red lipstick and rheumy blue eyes, suggesting he get on the Internet.
He looked at his phone and decided what the hell. Why not waste his last bar doing something productive?
He looked up Not Again, Hailey!
He vaguely remembered the show, though he’d never seen it. He hit Wikipedia first. Holy shit, Wikipedia was a veritable cornucopia of…shit. The pictures and YouTube clips he found numbered in the tens of thousands, and he just started at the beginning, working his way through some of the interviews and clips of the cast and crew.
As he flipped through hundreds of pics and articles, watching clips of Olivia singing and dancing and acting her little heart out, he got grim, and more grim.
She’d been plucked out of obscurity by a pushy stage mom. She’d carried an entire show from the age of seven until she’d hit sixteen. With that birthday had come a maturity that could no longer be hidden. And then it’d come to an end. Everything and everyone she’d known had scattered.
She hadn’t handled it like an adult, but she hadn’t been an adult. And ouch on the DUI, but he forced himself to keep watching and reading. It was like a train wreck, and he couldn’t look away. In the pictures and clips from after the show had ended, her smile was all wrong.
No one had seemed to notice. How had no one noticed? She’d had all those people around, but they’d been looking out for numero uno—themselves. Who’d had her back? Who’d protected her?
She’d been forced to do that herself, and she had—by burying her past. Her right, he realized.
He wished he could kick his own ass.
He tried calling her again, and just as it rang once, his phone shut off and went dead as a doornail, whatever the fuck that meant. Dead as he’d felt after Gil’s death, after his dad’s death…
But there was something that was no longer dead.
His heart.
And he knew who to thank for that. The person he’d walked away from, and God, he couldn’t believe he’d done that to her, when all her life, people had walked away from her.
He didn’t deserve a second chance with her, he knew this, but he was going to ask for one anyway, and spend the rest of his life trying to make it up to her.
Chapter 32
Unfortunately for Cole, the “storm of the year” blew in and made itself at home along the entire Pacific Coast, socking in fifteen hundred miles of the west.
It carried on the drama for two days, during which time he—holed up in the motel room—ground his back teeth into powder, ate a whole lot of Mickey D’s, and stalked the unstocked, trampled aisles of a convenience store.
When he finally got back into Lucky Harbor two days later, it was six in the morning and so cold he had no choice but to be thinking painfully and clearly.
There was no doubt he’d screwed things up. He was hoping that could be fixed. After all, he was good at fixing things.
Almost always.
With that one silver lining in mind, he drove straight to Olivia’s.
She didn’t answer.
Probably she didn’t want to get out of her warm bed and answer the door. And because he knew that about her, knew too that her heater was probably not even on so she could save money, he didn’t hesitate to take out a slim tool from a pocket and help himself by picking her lock.
Her place was empty.
Shit. He slid behind the wheel of his truck and picked up his cell phone, which was finally charged and going off.
Nothing from Olivia, but he had twenty-five texts from Cindy. With a sigh, he headed over to her house and found his sister trying to feed the baby with one hand and working her tablet and her cell phone with the other.
“Where the hell have you been?” she demanded, trying to shove a spoonful of applesauce into Kyle’s mouth.
Kyle tightened his mouth and shook his head back and forth, sending a happy, drooling coo in Cole’s direction.
Cole smiled at him. “Hey, tiger.”
Kyle bounced up and down in his seat and blew raspberries, trying to entice Cole to scoop him up.
Cole bent low, lifted the kid’s shirt, and blew an answering raspberry on the baby’s belly, eliciting a gut laugh and some serious leg kicking.
“Both of you cool it,” Cindy said. “Trying to feed him here.”
Cole took the spoon from her and promptly made like a plane with it for Kyle, complete with sound effects.
Kyle opened his mouth like a bird and swallowed the whole bite. Then he smiled like an angel at his mama.
Cindy rolled her eyes.
“So what’s the emergency?” Cole asked.
“I screwed up my laptop.”
“And?”
“And,” she said, frowning at him, “you always fix it when I screw it up. And also you told me last time that I shouldn’t dare attempt to fix it myself, or ever let anyone else touch it, or you’d toss it into the harbor.”
“I shouldn’t have said that,” he said. “That was…rigid of me.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What’s the matter with you today?”
“Nothing.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “So can you fix it or not?”
He stared down at the offending piece of technology. “You didn’t deny the rigid thing.”
Craning her head, she blew a strand of hair from her harried face. “Huh?”
“Do you think of me as rigid?”
She paused. “Define rigid.”
“Doesn’t stray from a routine,” he said. “Unbending. Rigid.”
She blinked, then clearly bit back a smile. “And you want me to tell you that you’re not those things?”