Irresistibly Yours

by Lauren Layne

  Penelope might have loved Evan once. She might have. The kind of love that became sort of desperate because of its unrequited nature, thus making you feel that it was the biggest love you’d ever known.

  But now…

  In hindsight, Penelope recognized it for what it was—a shallow love that, while genuine, had never had the chance to grow roots.

  For the longest time, she’d thought that Evan hadn’t seen her because she wasn’t a certain type. Because she wasn’t pretty enough or flashy enough.

  But in the end, Evan Barstow was a useless jerk, and Cole was…

  “It’s more than a fling,” Penelope said quietly.

  Grace and Jake stood in unison, perfect soulmates that they were. “What are we waiting for? Up, Pen! Let’s go!”

  The subway ride back to the city was the longest journey of Penelope’s life, but she was rewarded when they emerged from the tunnel in Manhattan and she had a text from Cole.

  “Bellevue,” she said, already dashing to the curb to hail a cab. “He’s at Bellevue Hospital.”

  A cab pulled up beside her, and Penelope reached for the door handle even before it came to a complete stop.

  Then she whirled around, gave Grace and Jake fierce hugs. “Promise you’ll go someplace ridiculously fancy for dinner and let me pay you back for it later?”

  They both ignored this. “Let us know as soon as you know what’s going on,” Grace said.

  “I promise,” Penelope said, climbing into the cab. She blew them both a distracted kiss and then reread Cole’s text once more.

  On one hand, he’d replied. Good sign. On the other hand…

  They took him to Bellevue Hospital. He got hit by a cab while crossing the street. He’s fine, but they’re keeping him overnight. Don’t come, we’re fine.

  Don’t come, he’d said.

  Penelope tried not to read too much into it. He was probably just being a good guy—not wanting to take her away from the baseball game.

  Don’t come.

  There was something so final—so harsh about those two words. One sentence.

  Don’t come.

  “Too damn bad, Cole,” she muttered. “I’m coming anyway.”

  Penelope tossed a twenty at the cabdriver, not bothering to wait for change, and sprinted into the hospital.

  She started toward the reception desk then skidded to a halt and took several steps backward when she saw the gift shop out of the corner of her eye.

  A couple emerged carrying flowers, but Bobby wouldn’t want flowers. Her eyes drifted to a display of balloons. Bobby would love balloons.

  Ten minutes later, Penelope made her way to the reception desk with an enormous bouquet of orange, blue, and white balloons.

  Penelope was in luck. She’d come during visiting hours.

  Penelope followed the nurse’s directions to Bobby’s room, ignoring the annoyed looks she got when her balloons took up the entire elevator.

  Her heart pounded harder as she approached Bobby’s room. Please let him be okay. Please let him be perfectly okay….

  She got as far as the open doorway and froze, unsure of her best move.

  Surprise!

  It’s me!

  I know you said don’t come, but I love you, so really, it wasn’t a choice…

  In the end, it was Bobby who decided for her. He turned his head, and his face broke into a smile that felt like it lifted her heart right out of her chest.

  “Penelope!”

  Cole’s head whipped around.

  He was seated in a chair next to Bobby’s bed, and even as she pasted on a smile for Bobby’s sake, inwardly she lurched at the look on Cole’s face.

  He looked like he’d aged five years in two hours.

  “Are those for me?” Bobby asked in a delighted voice, apparently unaware of his brother’s distress.

  “Um, of course they are,” she said, coming toward the bed.

  “Mets colors!”

  “What else would I bring?” she said in a scoffing voice.

  There was a tiny table and chair against the wall. “How about I tie these here?” she asked, looping the ends of the balloon strings through the rung on the back of the chair.

  “Okay!”

  “Who’s the bear from?” she asked, nodding at the enormous stuffed bear on the table.

  “My friends at the Big House. They can’t come see me yet, but Cole said they wanted me to have the bear.”

  Penelope risked a glance at Cole. He was standing now, hands shoved into his back pockets as he stared at Bobby with a bleak expression on his face.

  Penelope’s smile never wavered, but her eyes skimmed over Bobby. His foot was in one of those sling things, a cast running all the way up to his upper thigh, but it was the only obvious sign that he’d been hurt.

  “What happened?” she asked, coming to stand beside him.

  Bobby sighed. “Cole’s mad.”

  Cole ran a hand through his hair. “I’m not mad, it’s just—”

  “I’m not supposed to leave the house by myself,” Bobby explained with a voice resembling a weary teenager’s. “But Penelope, I had to.”

  She reached out and rubbed his arm. “What for?”

  His eyes were wide and earnest. “For Carly. I wanted to get her flowers. Yellow ones, ’cuz they’re her favorites.”

  Penelope swallowed. The sweetness was killing her.

  “I didn’t know the taxi wouldn’t stop,” Bobby said glumly.

  “You should have waited for me, Bobby,” Cole said.

  “I know. You’ve told me a hundred times.”

  “Then why—”

  “I wasn’t going to see you till Wednesday,” Bobby said. “I needed the flowers for Carly today.”

  Oh, Bobby, no.

  Penelope closed her eyes.

  She knew Bobby didn’t mean any harm. He was just stating facts without a single thought to laying blame.

  But instinctively, Penelope knew it was the worst possible thing he could have said.

  A glance at Cole confirmed it. He looked destroyed.

  And Penelope knew why. Sunday was Cole and Bobby’s day; any other Sunday, Cole would have been there when Bobby wanted to get the flowers. Could have gone with him. Could have stopped him from stepping into the street.

  But Cole had rescheduled for another day.

  For her.

  “Will you sign my cast?” Bobby asked. “My doctor says I have to wear it for weeks but that I can have everyone sign it if they want to.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Okay,” Bobby said happily. “You can sign it after Carly. And after Cole.”

  “Uh-huh, I see where I rank,” she teased.

  “Penelope, can I talk to you for a sec? Outside.” Cole’s voice was gruff.

  Uh-oh.

  “Sure,” she said, smiling at him. He didn’t smile back.

  “Bob, can you keep yourself busy watching TV for a few minutes?” Cole asked.

  “Definitely,” Bobby said, attention already turned to the television. “Do they have ice cream here?”

  “I don’t think so, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks for the balloons, Penelope!” Bobby called as she left the room.

  She turned to face Cole as he followed her out, but he shook his head. “Not here. I need air.”

  The walk to the elevator was silent. As was the ride down.

  Not until they stepped outside into the warm sunshine did he speak.

  “I told you not to come.”

  Her footsteps faltered at his hard tone, and she turned to face him.

  “I know,” she said quietly. “I just didn’t want you to be alone.”

  “Are you kidding me, Penelope? He’s the one who shouldn’t have been alone,” Cole snapped. “I should have been there.”

  She knew it was coming, but the sharpness in his tone still stung.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said quietly.

  He ignored her.
“Do you know what he told me when I asked why he walked into the crosswalk when there was a no-walk sign?”

  Penelope shook her head.

  “He said that I do it all the time,” Cole said, his eyes wild. “That I never wait for the walk sign to indicate it’s okay to cross, so why should he?”

  “Cole—”

  “So let’s recap, shall we?” he said, voice louder. “My brother looks up to me for everything, and I teach him how to jaywalk. And then, on the one day out of the week that I’m supposed to be there for him, I’m at a fucking baseball game with a—”

  Penelope narrowed her eyes. “With a what?”

  “A woman,” he said tersely.

  Penelope inhaled. She wasn’t exactly loving his tone. Still, the guy was having a rather massively bad day. He needed patience, not for her to go all diva on him.

  Cole closed his eyes briefly. “I never should have canceled on Bobby.”

  She took a step closer and reached out a hand. He backed up, which stung even more than his sharp words, but she let it go.

  This wasn’t about her.

  “I’d be feeling the same if I were in your shoes,” Penelope said quietly. “But I wouldn’t be any kind of friend if I didn’t tell you that this isn’t your fault. You do your best by Bobby, but you can’t put him in a bubble. You can’t be there every second of every day.”

  “Yes, but—”

  She pressed on. “What if this had happened on a Tuesday morning? Or a Thursday evening? What if he’d decided that Carly needed to have her flowers at midnight on Monday? The fact that this happened on Sunday is a coincidence, Cole.”

  “Maybe,” he granted. “But Penelope, he’s up there with his leg in a cast, and bruises up and down his torso, and—”

  “And he’s fine.” She found his hand and squeezed. “I’m not minimizing what happened, but he’s okay, Cole. And we’ll talk to him about crossing the street, and we’ll be more careful about—”

  Cole stepped back, shaking off her hand. “We?”

  Penelope faltered. “Well, I mean, I don’t want to insert myself, but I care about Bobby too—”

  He laughed. “Today is the second time you’ve ever even met the guy, Penelope. Him dumping his popcorn all over you at a baseball game hardly makes you part of the family.”

  She blew out a breath. “Wow.”

  His words hurt; she suspected that he meant them to, but once again she tried to remember Cole wasn’t being himself.

  “I’m not trying to insert myself into your family,” she said.

  “And yet you came, when I specifically asked you not to.”

  Penelope held her palms out to her sides and then let them drop. “What’s going on here, Cole? I’m having a hard time seeing my crime. I brought Bobby balloons, which he loved. I came to be here for you—”

  He cut her off. “I don’t need you to be here for me. I don’t even— We’re not even—”

  “We’re not even what?”

  “We’re not together,” he said quietly.

  Right. There was that.

  “Not officially,” she said, “but I thought…things seemed like they were changing between us—”

  He shook his head and cut her off. “You made a promise, Penelope. So did I. This was never meant to get serious, and this is why.”

  “By this, you mean the off chance that your brother was going to get hit by a cab while we were at a Yankees game? That’s why you promised you wouldn’t fall in love with me?”

  “Mock all you want, but he’s all I have,” Cole said.

  “He’s not,” Penelope shot back before she could think better of it. “He is not all you have. You have friends, and colleagues, and me. You have me, Cole. You may not like that I’m here, but that doesn’t change the fact that I came for you, and that I’d do it all over again.”

  His eyes were flat, his expression betraying nothing. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

  Penelope ignored that. “Also, for what it’s worth, you’re not all Bobby has either. He loves you like crazy, Cole, but honestly, I wonder if he’s not better adjusted than you are, because he seems pretty okay with the fact that you two can be brothers and have your own lives.”

  This time his eyes did flicker to life, and when they locked on hers they were full of anger. “Hey, here’s an idea, Penelope. You’ve got a sister, right? How about we wait until she’s in the hospital, and then we can have this little chat. Better yet, make sure that she’s entirely financially reliant on you, and that her well-being sits on your shoulders, and then come find me.”

  This was not going well.

  “Do you want me to leave?” she asked.

  He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  It was no less than she’d expected, given his current mood, but ouch.

  “Okay,” she said. “If you need anything, I—”

  “I won’t.”

  She met his eyes steadily. “Tell me you’re not actually doing this, Cole. Tell me you’re not that guy who goes all Jekyll-and-Hyde when something unexpected happens.”

  His face crumpled for a moment before he put a hand over it, covering most of his features as he took a long breath. “I’m sorry, Penelope. I am.”

  She stepped forward, putting her arms around him, the embrace slightly awkward because she was still wearing her Yankees hat.

  He stiffened, and though he didn’t push her away, he didn’t exactly return her embrace.

  “I should get back,” he said gruffly.

  Penelope retreated a little, letting her arms fall back to her sides and trying not to feel humiliated by the one-sided hug.

  “Okay.”

  He started to turn away and then paused, hesitating before he met her eyes. “Believe it or not, I do get that I’m acting like an ass. I just…I can’t do this right now. It’s only ever just been me and Bobby, even when my parents were alive, and I don’t know what I’d do without him. Or him without me. He has to come first.”

  “I see.” She managed to keep her voice steady. “You’re just realizing this now?”

  He hesitated. “I’ve always known it, but lately…you made it easy to forget, Penelope.”

  The statement would have warmed her heart if it hadn’t been uttered as he geared up to walk away from her.

  She tried one more time. “Your heart’s bigger than you think, Cole. There’s room for me and Bobby. And Cole, you have to know that…”

  I love you.

  She opened her mouth to say it, but faltered when he took another step backward.

  “Don’t, Penelope.”

  “Cole—”

  He turned away. “See you around, Pope.”

  Penelope stood rooted to the spot as she watched his lean figure head back into the hospital.

  See you around, Pope.

  Was he for real?

  See you around, Pope.

  Suddenly she was so very glad she hadn’t uttered the words she’d been about to say.

  Chapter 27

  “I can’t believe you guys came all the way from Chicago,” Penelope said around a mouthful of Cool Ranch Doritos.

  “Oh, sweetie. We’re your family.” As if punctuating this point, her mother snatched the chip bag away and replaced it with a bowl of carrots.

  Penelope ignored the carrots, opting instead to pull a pillow over her chest and flop back against the couch.

  Her sister came out of the kitchen and handed her a beer before sitting on the coffee table so she could study Penelope.

  It had been like this for two days, Penelope going through the motions of life as her mother and sister alternated between feeding her beer and carrots and watching her like she might shatter at any moment.

  And she might shatter. She just might.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said quietly.

  “Please,” Janie said, reaching across to squeeze Penelope’s arm. “You think we wouldn’t both jump on a plane the second you called us? You think we didn’t have t
o practically handcuff Dad to his La-Z-Boy to prevent him from going after Cole with a shotgun?”

  Penelope gave a small smile at the thought of her gentle father even swatting a fly. He hadn’t been able to come with her mom and sister because of work, but he’d called her twice a day, trying to distract her with every possible bit of sports trivia on the planet. She knew every fact before he said it, of course, but the distraction was welcome all the same.

  Anything to keep from crying again.

  Penelope had made it all the way home from the hospital on Sunday without shedding a tear.

  But once inside the safety of her apartment? Waterworks. The tears had come hot and furious, and hadn’t stopped until sometime around 4:00 A.M. on Monday, at which point she texted her sister.

  By Monday night, her mother and sister had descended upon New York in full mother hen/warrior mode.

  It was now Wednesday evening, and the tears had grown more intermittent, although she’d had a breakdown in the women’s restroom at work today. Jo, Oxford’s sweet receptionist, had patiently stroked her hair before rigging up an awkward ice pack for Penelope’s puffy eyes.

  It hadn’t worked. Penelope was pretty sure Lincoln and Jake were on to her. Cassidy too.

  As for Cole…

  She hadn’t seen him. Not since his See you around, Pope send-off.

  He’d taken the week off to get Bobby settled, but he’d be back on Monday. Penelope was counting the days, half in dread, half in hopes that he’d show up and it would be like their fight had never happened.

  “No word from him?” Janie asked, pulling Penelope’s beer out of her hand and taking a sip.

  She shook her head. “No. Do you think I should call him?”

  “Absolutely not,” her mother said. “The ball’s in his court. He’s the utter fool here.”

  Janie nodded. “I’m not saying he doesn’t get a little bit of a free pass because of what happened with his brother, but he still owes you an apology. And he needs to initiate it.”

  Penelope stared blindly at the fishbowl, where Edgar swam in aimless circles. “That would be all fine and good if we didn’t work together. What am I supposed to do when he shows up on Monday?”

  “Well, one thing’s for certain, you have to look fabulous,” her mother said. “Which reminds me, I want to take you shopping. Your closet is eighty percent sports outfits.”