The One Real Thing (Hart's Boardwalk)

by Samantha Young

  “I just . . . I need some space from it.” I shrugged.

  “Sure that’s all it is?” he said.

  I tensed at the suspicion in his voice. Looking at my plate, I shrugged again. “Sure.”

  Silence fell between us and it didn’t feel as comfortable as usual. I had to fill it before he spoke up with more questions I didn’t want to answer. “What do you want to do today?”

  Bailey had told me to enjoy my last day of vacation so I was doing that, and Cooper didn’t work the bar on Sundays. He left the management of it to Ollie on Sunday since it was one of the days he didn’t serve food, and things were a little easier to handle.

  Cooper had just opened his mouth to reply when there was a loud bang at the front door two seconds before a tall, pretty brunette strode in with a young boy at her side.

  His house was on the north side, a few blocks from Bailey’s small home, and it was very similar in style to hers. Everything was open plan. You walked in off the porch into the main room. There was a staircase in the middle of the space leading up to the second level. To the left of the staircase was a sitting area, to the right a dining area, and at the back of the room was a large kitchen.

  We were currently in the dining room being stared at by the brunette and child.

  “Oh.” The brunette was visibly confused. “Coop, I’m sorry. It’s . . . just . . . Sunday.”

  The boy looked just as confused, his blue eyes boring into mine.

  Cooper stood up and I found myself doing the same. I’d already guessed who the intruders were and now I had nervous butterflies in my belly. “Cat, Joey, this is Jessica. Jessica, this is my sister and nephew.”

  I stumbled against the leg of a chair trying to round the table to get to them. I flushed, wondering why I was acting like such an idiot over meeting his family. I laughed, a little embarrassed, and held my hand out to Cat.

  She stared at it with eyes as blue as Cooper’s, and I felt her hesitation. Finally good manners forced her to shake my hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, although now I was thinking not so much as she gazed at me with polite coolness.

  I turned my attention to the boy and my heart almost melted. Iris was right. Joey was Cooper’s spitting image. I cast a glance back at Cooper, my expression clearly giving away my thoughts because his eyes warmed. When I turned back to Joey I found him studying me.

  “Are you Uncle Cooper’s girlfriend?”

  “Um . . .” I didn’t know what to say because Cooper and I hadn’t labeled our relationship yet.

  “Yes,” Cooper said from behind me.

  Okay, then.

  Yay!

  I grinned. “Yes.”

  Joey grinned back at me. “That’s nice. Not for Sadie Thomas, though. She likes my uncle Cooper a lot.”

  “Joey.” Cat shot him a look of warning.

  His eyes went round. “What? It’s the truth.” He looked at his uncle. “I asked her why she was kissing you and she said it was because she liked you a lot.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Cooper and mouthed, Sadie Thomas?

  “That was a while ago,” he assured me. “And Sadie will be fine, Joe.”

  “Yeah . . . she seems to like a lot of people a lot.” He nodded sagely. “You’re not the only one I’ve seen her kissing.”

  “I’ll bet,” Cat murmured, smirking.

  Who the heck was Sadie Thomas?

  “Okay.” Cooper moved toward his nephew. “Beach today, Joey?”

  “Yup!” He started bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I have my drawing in my backpack.” He looked at me and went on to explain, “We’re building the biggest sand castle ever today! We’re going to break our own record.”

  I almost melted at the hero worship in the kid’s eyes. He loved Cooper. Seeing that kind of adoration for him only increased my own, in fact. I seriously needed to start finding some imperfections in this man; otherwise, I was going to start to worry that I was merely infatuated rather than actually falling—

  I cut that thought off abruptly.

  Too soon, Jess; too scary!

  “So what do you think?” Cooper slid an arm around my waist, drawing me close. “You up for the beach today?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to intrude.”

  “Okay, then.” Cat gave me a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “We’ll see you some other time.”

  Ouch.

  Cooper gave her a dirty look. “No. Jessica is coming with us if she wants to.”

  I wasn’t sure that I wanted to join them. I’d never really liked hanging out with someone who didn’t want to hang out with me. I didn’t know many people who did like being in that situation.

  As if he sensed my thoughts Cooper squeezed my waist. “I want you there. I want you to get to know Joey.”

  “Yeah!” Joey cried enthusiastically. “Uncle Coop said you’re a doctor, which means you’re really smart, and engineering a large sand castle isn’t easy.”

  Engineering a large sand castle . . . “I don’t think you need me,” I said, blown away by his vocabulary. “You are clearly wicked smart.”

  Joey beamed. “I have an above-average brain, yes.”

  I laughed and caught Cat’s eyes and she softened a little. “You must be really proud of him.”

  “More than,” she said and then heaved a sigh. “Okay, if we’re all going, let’s get this show on the road.”

  “Three weeks?” Cat said.

  She was sitting beside me on a towel, staring down the beach to where Cooper and Joey were starting their sand castle.

  “Excuse me?”

  When she turned to look at me I couldn’t read her expression because she was wearing big black sunglasses. Thankfully she didn’t have me at a disadvantage because I was also able to hide my thoughts and reactions behind my sunglasses.

  We’d taken Cooper’s truck to the beach, parking at his bar. The whole drive there and the whole time we set up our towels and picnic area, Cat didn’t say a word to me.

  When Joey pulled Cooper away to get to work on the sand castle, Cat asked me to stay just as I was about to follow the boys.

  So out of politeness I’d stayed.

  Even when I didn’t want to.

  Because I could feel a lecture coming on.

  “You’ve known each other three weeks. Three weeks.”

  I was right. Lecture.

  “I’m aware.”

  “Are you?” She cocked her head to the side. “Because from where I’m sitting you’re not exactly screaming ‘stable, responsible adult.’ You meet my brother on vacation and then you give up your whole life? After three weeks?”

  Alright, so I got her point. From the outside looking in, I probably seemed crazy.

  “It’s not just about your brother.” I tried to explain what I had discovered about myself since coming there. “I wasn’t happy where I was. This trip and the people I’ve become close to in Hartwell have made me realize what I was missing for so long. Friends, relationships . . . peace.”

  “A woman doesn’t start over after three weeks unless she has nothing to lose. And a thirty-something woman who has nothing to lose concerns me. Because someone like you could easily pick up and leave again, and my brother has lost enough people in his life.”

  The bite of pain in her voice actually soothed my ruffled feathers. It reminded me that Cat was a sister who loved her brother and she was just looking out for him. “I’m not going to hurt him, Cat.”

  She looked back toward her boys, not saying anything for a while.

  My whole body was tense, waiting for her to decide if she was going to accept me in Cooper’s life or not.

  Finally she said, “Sadie Thomas was in my year at school. She likes sex and doesn’t care what anyone thinks about that.”

  “And Coop
er was with her,” I murmured, feeling sick at the thought of him being with someone else. It was ridiculous! It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been with other men.

  “One night.” She sighed. “Unfortunately I don’t get the same privilege as other siblings of not knowing anything about my brother’s sex life. We live in a small town. After Dana he went through a lot of women. Mostly tourists who didn’t stay in town for long. I thought for sure you were going to be just another one of those women.” She lowered her sunglasses so I could see her eyes. “You’re not, though. He talks about you a lot.”

  Warmth suffused me. “Yeah?”

  She smiled reluctantly. “Yeah.”

  “I really care about him. I just want . . . I want to give him a little happiness. He deserves it.”

  “He deserves someone who will be open and honest with him.” She gave me an assessing look that turned a little sad. “There’s something about you. I can’t put my finger on it . . . but it just doesn’t sit right. I don’t trust you.”

  Well, crap.

  That stung more than I was expecting.

  I blew out a shaky breath. “What can I do to change your mind?”

  She shrugged. “Stick around. Only time will tell.”

  “So Uncle Cooper says you were a surgeon?” Joey said around a mouthful of sandwich.

  He and Cooper had returned from building their sand castle. They had a ton of pictures to capture the moment they broke their sand castle record (it was a pretty epic sand castle), and finally they came back to relieve the tension between me and Coop’s sister.

  “I was,” I said in reply to Joey’s statement.

  “A head surgeon or a heart surgeon?”

  I smiled at his inquisitive question. Was I really talking to an eight-year-old about this? “Neither. I was what you call a general surgeon.”

  He scrunched up his cute little face. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a surgeon who helps fix problems with the stomach, esophagus”—I pointed to all the places on my body, deciding not to dumb it down for the kid—“small bowel, liver, bile ducts, gallbladder, and pancreas.”

  “Huh.” He frowned in thought. “I don’t know what some of those are.” He seemed put out by this. “What’s an eso . . .” He trailed off.

  “Esophagus.”

  He repeated it until he felt it sounded like what I was saying.

  “It’s the tube that connects our throats to our stomachs.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “Was it yucky? Being a surgeon?” He made a face at the thought.

  Cooper chuckled beside me and I laughed. “For some people it is a little yucky. But it never bothered me.”

  Joey shook his head. “I once saw the inside of a dog. I didn’t like it.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  Cat gave me a sad look. “Our neighbor’s dog. She got run over last year. Joey found her.”

  “Oh no.” I was a dog lover. We’d had a beautiful Lab, Hazel, when I was a kid and I was heartbroken when she died of old age. I hated any sad stories about dogs.

  “You like dogs, Doc?” Cooper said softly.

  I nodded.

  His eyes smiled at me. “Me, too.”

  “Why don’t you have one?” I remembered him playing with that woman’s dog on the beach. I could see him with a big dog, accompanying him on his morning runs along the shore.

  Cat grunted beside me. “One guess.”

  Confused, I shrugged at Cooper and waited for him to fill me in. He sighed. “Dana. She hated dogs.”

  “And kids,” Joey said, piping up.

  Cooper and his sister tensed on either side of me and I wondered what that was about. I wasn’t going to ask, however, with Joey around.

  “So”—I hurried to change the subject—“I hear that you are something of a musical genius.”

  He shook his head, very serious and grown-up. “I am very good, though.”

  I bit back my laughter, nudging Cooper with my shoulder. He grinned at me, pride practically bursting from him. “Well, I would love to hear you play. You know, Bailey has a piano at the inn.”

  “I know.” He nodded, his eyes lighting up. “She lets me play on it.”

  “Well?” I looked to Cat and Cooper. “Would you mind?”

  It turned out they didn’t mind at all and were, like any proud family, excited for me to hear how good Joey was.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” Bailey said as we strode into the inn. She moved from behind the reception desk and immediately hunched down to hug Joey, who patted her on the back like a forty-year-old man.

  When he pulled back he grinned at her. “Jessica would like to hear me play.”

  Bailey smiled. “You know I love listening to you, kid. The piano”—she gestured to the Steinway upright she had in the front room of the inn—“is all yours.”

  “You’re in for a treat,” Cooper said, taking my hand as we followed Joey around the corner.

  “What would you like to hear?” Joey said to me.

  “You pick.”

  When the first strain of Tchaikovsky hit my ears I couldn’t believe it. And when I recognized it as the music from the dying swan scene in Swan Lake, every muscle in my body locked.

  There was a part of me dealing with the awe of watching an eight-year-old play Tchaikovsky.

  But a much bigger part of me was thinking of my little sister and the fact that the anniversary of her death was only a mere thirty-one days from now.

  I’d been trying to push it aside, hoping that my new routines here, the excitement of settling into a new place, would help me forget. However, it was like someone didn’t want me to. Someone didn’t want me to finally have peace after all these years.

  Tears welled in my eyes as the memory of my sister dancing the dying swan rushed me. Julia had loved dancing since she was a kid, and she’d been a talented ballerina. She’d danced until the end. She’d finally gotten an audition for the School of American Ballet. She didn’t get in.

  It was the one thing that had kept her focused. Kept her going.

  Everything fell apart after that moment.

  Bailey wrapped her arm around my shoulder and gave me a hug, pulling me back into the present. “I know, he’s that good.”

  I could feel Cooper staring at me, but I refused to look at him. I didn’t want him to know my emotion wasn’t over Joey. “He’s amazing,” I whispered.

  Because, despite what his music choice had done to me, the kid was amazing.

  A warm, strong hand curled around mine. At Cooper’s touch I couldn’t help but look up at him. He stared back at me, concerned.

  He saw far too much.

  I squeezed his hand and smiled to cover up what I didn’t want seen. “You must be so proud,” I whispered.

  His answering nod was slow because he was still scrutinizing me.

  Thankfully, Joey finished and I was able to avoid Cooper by whooping and clapping along with Bailey and Cat.

  “So?” Joey turned around on the seat to grin at me. “Did you like it?”

  I returned his grin. “Like it? I loved it! You, Mr. Lawson, have the hands of a world-class surgeon.”

  Joey’s whole face lit up at the thought before it quickly turned crestfallen. “I find insides yucky, remember.”

  Cat laughed and moved over to her son to hug him against her waist. “I guess you’ll just have to stick to being a piano prodigy.”

  He grinned at his mom and then jumped off the stool to hurry over to me. He tilted his head back to look up at me. “What next?”

  My melancholy began to slip away. Joey was adorable and it was heartwarming that he seemed to like me. “Hmm.” I tapped my chin, thinking about someone I hadn’t seen in a few days. “Do you like books?” I had a suspicion he did.

  I was right.

 
His blue eyes grew round. “I love books!”

  “Yeah? What’s your favorite?”

  “I can’t choose just one, silly,” he scoffed.

  I laughed. Oh yes. He definitely had to meet Emery. “I know someplace where there are lots of books.” I looked up at Cooper and Cat. “And coffee for us.”

  Cooper shook his head, but he was smiling. “You can’t be serious, Doc. She’ll have a heart attack if we all walk in together.”

  “I don’t think so.” I looked down at Joey. “Trust me.”

  Not too long later we found ourselves at Emery’s. The place was much busier than I was used to, with tourists looking for a coffee and a good book to read on the beach. There was a girl behind the coffee counter I’d never seen before, while Emery was helping a customer in the bookstore. The reading area itself was empty—I guessed because it was so nice outside.

  Emery shot me a smile as soon as she saw me and, finishing up with her customer, came toward me. Her footsteps faltered as she realized Cooper was with me.

  “Hey.” I grinned at her. “Guess who decided to stick around?”

  “I heard,” she said, her smile shy now. “Iris told me.”

  “You talk to Iris?” Cat said, not hiding her surprise.

  Emery immediately blushed.

  “I brought someone who loves books,” I said as a distraction, nudging Joey toward Emery.

  As for Joey, he was staring up at Emery with his lips parted in wonder.

  As for Emery, when she looked down at Joey all her timidity seemed to disappear. “Hey there.”

  Joey just blinked at her.

  I covered a chuckle and placed my hands on his shoulders. “Why don’t you go with Emery and she can help you pick out a book? My treat.”

  He nodded, still staring at her, that wonder only increasing when Emery held out her hand to him. “So what kinds of stories do you like?” she said as they walked away together.

  “Your treat?” Cat said. “If the plan is to buy my kid’s affection with books and a woman who looks like a character from Frozen, then well done.” She grinned at me and strode toward the coffee counter.

  Confused, I turned to Cooper. “Frozen?”