Last Good Man: A Crown Creek Novel

by Theresa Leigh

  "Sorry to interrupt you two." Chrissi was hovering just off to the side again. "Cooper, visiting hours are over in ten minutes. Just wanted to let you know."

  "I have to sleep anyway," Willa said as she suppressed a yawn, and I felt guilty, wondering if she was keeping herself awake on my account. Some protector I was. "Liam's orders."

  I stood up. "Yeah, you need to sleep," I agreed hastily. I felt like I had nowhere to put my hands, so I shoved them into my pockets. "See you."

  She blinked up at me with heavy-lidded eyes. "See you," she said in a soft voice.

  She looked so vulnerable there. Vulnerable and eerily beautiful. Leaving her here, lying alone in a big hospital bed with a ring on her finger that I'd put there felt like a betrayal. To myself.

  All at once, I was filled with the sudden urge to kiss her. Just press my lips to the side of her mouth. Or her forehead. Or over the top of her eyelid as she closed them and drifted off to sleep. It was so powerful that the only way to escape it was to dart out of the room without saying goodbye.

  I didn't visit her the next day. I wrote five different versions of my apology text before finally sending her one that just said, "Sorry I can't come today," without giving the reason as to why. "Sorry I can't come today, I'm trying to figure out how I feel about you." "Sorry I can't come today, it pisses me off how much I want to kiss you." "Sorry I can't come today, you make no goddamned sense to me." "Sorry I can't come today, why do I feel like you belong to me when I never wanted you to begin with?" None of those seemed like something I should even put into words, much less send to the girl who I was desperately trying to hate again.

  Try as I might, there didn’t seem to be a single way I could go back to how things used to be, and though I would never say it out loud, that scared the crap out of me.

  The next day, I deliberately showed up only twenty minutes before visiting hours were over. I thought I saw disappointment in her face when I stood back up to leave after just barely sitting down in the first place. But she was Willa, so she put on that brave face of hers and shooed me away. I drove off flooded with rage that swung like a pendulum between anger at her for being such a martyr all the time, and anger at myself for being a goddamned coward. I'd promised Liam, after all.

  After a night spent ducking my friends and making excuses as to why I couldn’t show up to our usual Thursday night get-together at the Crown Tavern, I felt shitty enough about myself that I vowed to stop being such a coward. Of course, I’d replied when Claire sent me a text saying that she was heading to the hospital with Ruby and Sadie and would Romeo be there with his Juliet? I knew she’d see the ring and have a bunch of questions, and I didn’t want to leave answering them for Willa to deal with on her own.

  But then Trish called and told me my rental application was approved. And right after that, Taylor from the bar called to ask if I could work an event for him since he was shorthanded. I needed the cash for the deposit, so I sent my excuses to Claire. And yes, another apology text to Willa. And then turned my phone off so I wouldn't have to read her grace-filled forgiveness before I was drunk enough to handle it.

  The next morning I woke up with a raging hangover and a serious case of self-loathing. Forcing myself to get out of bed felt like the kind of penance I deserved, so I dragged my ass through the morning routine double time, then marched myself down to my truck. I was going to get there right when visiting hours started. Or maybe a few minutes after because I had a strong urge to show up bearing flowers. What would the note read? Get well soon, please, so I can go back to my normal life and stop thinking about you all the time?

  I ditched the idea of flowers, but I still floored it to the hospital. It was still two minutes until visiting hours started when I pulled into a space on the roof of the three-story parking garage. I jogged, then ran to the elevators, and when they opened on her floor, I sprinted through them and down the hall.

  "Cooper!" Chrissi sounded shocked to see me. I waved distractedly at her and cut the sharp corner into her room.

  And stopped short.

  An old man slept open-mouthed and snoring on Willa's bed. I wheeled around to see the unfamiliar name on the whiteboard just as Chrissi caught up with me. "What are you doing here, honey?" she demanded. "Your fiancée went home yesterday!"

  Chapter Eighteen

  Willa

  The house was a mess.

  I'd walked in the door and immediately had to kick Jake's winter boots out from the middle of the kitchen floor. Why they were out in the middle of the summer, I didn't want to guess. I set my bag down on the counter, wincing at the tenderness in my ribs, and was about to start surveying the rest of the damage when my phone buzzed inside of it.

  I reached for it, winced again, and then turned and grabbed it with my good hand. God, being in a cast was a pain in the ass. "Hey," I answered, bracing myself.

  "Where the hell are you?" Claire sounded even more worked up than usual. "I called your room because I wanted to hear your reaction when you saw the video I sent you, and you're not there? Did you get moved?"

  "No. I'm back home." Claire went silent. It stretched out long enough to make me uncomfortable. "It's better for me," I told her quickly. "Lying there bored out of my mind wasn't exactly a healing experience."

  "So you're home now." I couldn't gauge her tone of voice. It was completely flat.

  "Pat, you know the lady with the medical taxi service? She just dropped me off."

  "You called a taxi? Willa, I'm right here." Claire worked for Cooper's cousin Cole Granger, the big-shot developer guy in Reckless Falls. "My office is like, two miles away from the hospital."

  "But you're at work."

  "It's not like these copies I have to make are more important to me than you are."

  It was my turn to fall silent. I was surprised by how hurt she sounded. "It really isn't a big deal, honey," I tried to soothe her. "Plus Pat's a nice lady and I get the feeling she could use the money."

  "You could use the money too, Willa."

  I licked my lips. The looming medical bills were one reason why I'd requested an early discharge. Not the main reason, but a pretty close second. Unless they found the driver of the car soon, all those bills were going to fall on me.

  I pushed that from my head and tried to switch gears. "Pat has all these bobbleheads on her dash." Claire had a visceral hatred for bobbleheads, which meant that she received at least three of them from us every year for her birthday. "You would have died."

  Claire didn't take the bait. "I don't like this, Willa. You should have stayed in the hospital. You were hit by a fucking car."

  But I wasn't listening because I'd spotted something on the kitchen table. "Oh my God, is that his homework?"

  "What?"

  "Jake's homework. It's still here on the table. Oh my God." I gritted my teeth. "My mom didn't put it in his bag last night."

  "Shouldn't he be the one doing that?"

  "He kept getting marked off for not having it, so I started double checking that it was in his bag every night before bed. But since I wasn't here..." I trailed off as little alarm bells started dinging in my head. "Claire, I have to go, there's like a stack of papers here on the table that he needed for school. Oh my God, she never signed his permission slip for his field trip!"

  "Willa? What are you..."

  I cut her off with a quick, "Loveyoubye," and hung up so I could set my phone down and use my good hand to rifle through the teetering stack of papers. All the notes, flyers, and permissions slips were still sitting there, some from last week. Had my mom not been going through his folder with him every day after school? Was she even checking his homework every night? Making sure he had his sneakers on gym day?

  I ran my tongue over the top of my teeth. This was it. Right here. Why I couldn't waste one more minute rotting in that hospital bed. Lying there and fretting about how bad things were getting screwed up without me wasn't restful at all. And one look around our trailer - at the bills left unopene
d, at the dishes left piled in the sink - just confirmed what I'd told them when they made me sign the papers saying I was leaving against medical advice. "I'm going to keep getting better no matter what, so I'd rather do it at home with my family."

  Rolling up my sleeves wasn't an option with only one good hand, so instead, I just took as deep a breath as I could handle.

  Then I got to work.

  * * *

  Chapter

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cooper

  "What do you mean, she went home?" I was shouting so loudly that Chrissi reared back from me, but I didn't care. I didn't care how I looked. I cared about only one thing. "She wasn't well enough to go home yet!"

  "It was her request." For all her swishy-girliness, Chrissi was solid steel. Her initial shock wore off pretty fast, and she was right back up in my face, on the defensive. "The doctors were hesitant, but she insisted she was well enough."

  "Of course she did, that's what she does!" I threw up my hands, letting them come to rest on the back of my neck, which I rubbed in furious circles. "Oh my God, I can't believe... shit, no, I totally can. Of course she did wanted to go home, but you shouldn't have let her!”

  Chrissi didn't roll her eyes, but her voice sure did. "We're not going to keep her here against her will, Cooper. And it's not like we just sent her home to rot, either. "She lowered her voice to a hiss. "You think I'd do that? Me? Of course not. She's got all her prescriptions. She's going to have her PT of course. And a home nurse will check up on her twice..." She trailed off and cocked her head to the side suspiciously. "Wait, why am I telling you this? Why aren't you with her?"

  "I don't know!" I turned and ran down the hall in a blind rage. Without thinking, I burst back out of the elevators and up to my truck and was on the road before I even realized where I was headed.

  Her house.

  How could she do this? She's been hit by a fucking car. I found her on the side of the road, almost dead. I knew she was a stubborn martyr, but this was ridiculous. It was dangerous. It was a fucking slap in my face after everything I'd done for her. She had some fucking nerve, doing this to me....

  My conscience pricked at me. You've been hiding from her for days.

  I didn't want to think about that. I wanted to shout at her until my throat was hoarse.

  But I only drove faster.

  It wasn't until I was bumping along the long, dusty and deep-rutted drive that wound through thick woods that it occurred to me that even though I had never been to Willa's house, I still knew exactly where it was. I'd made the turn like I'd been making it my whole life. And I knew exactly the place I was looking for once the trees thinned and I saw Willa's house.

  No one had ever used the phrase "trailer trash" to her face in high school, because they knew that Liam would have their ass if they did. And that his best friend the quarterback would back him up. But the undercurrent was still there, as were the whispered speculations as to why the mayor's son would ever want to "date down" like he was. There was also even nastier speculation that Willa Harlow was nothing better than a gold-digger who was using him for his family's wealth. Of course, out of loyalty to Liam, I'd tried to keep from asking the same questions, but once he dumped her for cheating on him, I felt free to wonder as well, assuming I had her all figured out.

  As I barreled down her rutted drive with my heart in my throat and my fingers on the steering wheel in a white-knuckle grip of worry for her, I realized, once again, that I really didn't know anything about her at all.

  Her trailer was perched at the edge of a stand of trees that shaded a rutted lawn already browning in the summer's heat. Wood siding on the trailer looked like it had been installed by someone carefully, but still a complete amateur, and the way the pieces fit together made it clear they used every last scrap left rather than let it go to waste. A faded yellow and green striped awning stretched out over a sunken wood porch that housed a jumbled mess of chairs and tables. It looked like her family used it as an extra living room in the summer time. The scalloped edges of the awning flapped lazily in the hot breeze, sending their shadows out over the tangle of bikes and wagons that leaned up against the side of the porch. Jake's presence was definitely felt here. But where was Willa's stuff? Maybe she wasn't here after all?

  That brief, relieved thought flitted through my brain and was gone just as quickly as it came. Because just as I was putting my truck in park, I spotted her through the narrow window by the front door.

  I sat up, stiffening with recognition when I saw her familiar shape. I stared a beat too long at the way she was framed by the window and the way that even her cast couldn't hide how her shirt clung in all the right places. I stared, and out of nowhere, a smile tugged at the side of my mouth, just to see her again, up and around like this.

  And then I remembered.

  I was pissed.

  I vaulted from my truck and bounded up onto the porch, ready to burst through the door and give her a piece of my mind. "What the hell do you think you're doing, are you fucking high?" was perched fully-formed at the tip of my tongue. But my foul-mouthed tirade was cut off at the knees when I heard a childish voice on the other side of the door.

  "...And all my friends are going to be going! Why can't I?" Her brother had worked himself up into a full-bore, piercing whine that made me want to punt him, but Willa's voice was pure patient love. "Jake, I don't know his mom, I'm sorry. If you can get me her number, and let me talk to her first, I promise I'll make every effort. Maybe she'll even consider picking a different movie?"

  "That's so embarrassing! My friends are going to call me a baby!"

  "You are my baby, though."

  He yelled something unintelligible and I shook my head, stunned. She was literally just out of the hospital and already having to deal with a bratty kid? Where was her mother to deal with this shit so that she could rest?

  There was a thump and then the front door slammed open. "Hate you!" Jake screamed over his shoulder. And then stopped short when he saw me standing there. "Willa! There's a man on the porch!"

  Willa was there in a second, puffed up with mama bear rage, and we both stared at each other, open-mouthed. She was the first to recover. "Cooper, what the heck?"

  The bandage on her head had come loose, flapping up at one end so that the bright leering glare of the still bloody gash was visible. She was holding a sponge. With her left hand. The one that had born the full brunt of her weight when she'd been flung to the ground by a speeding driver.

  I stared at her, tried to stammer a greeting or an explanation.

  And then I fucking lost it. "What the hell are you doing?"

  She stepped back, shaking her head in exaggerated confusion. "I'm sorry. What the hell did you just say to me?"

  "Here." I yanked the screen door back so hard it squeaked on the rebound, then stabbed my finger across the lawn. "You get your ass in my truck right now. You're going back to the hospital."

  "What?" She laughed, but I was done laughing about this.

  * * *

  "You aren't better yet, what the hell are you doing?"

  She glanced at Jakey, who was listening with keen ears for all the swearing I was about to do. And I was about to do a lot. "You're crazy, you know that? You have a fucking head wound. It's still bleeding!”

  "It is not."

  "It is!" I reached out for her, intending to swipe the blood over her eye to show her. To open her damn eyes so she could see that she still needed my fucking help.

  But my fingers didn't stop at her eye. They brushed past, twining into her hair, and then cupped behind her neck, bringing her close just as my mouth sought hers.

  She made a noise deep in her throat as I kissed her. Or was that noise coming from me? It made sense that I had no clue either way because absolutely nothing was making sense. Not how angry I was, not how good this felt. Not how soft her lips were, or how silky and alive her curls felt as they slipped through my fingers. Nothing made sense except the bright f
lare of heat in my gut, the one that felt just like I'd lit a match and held it to something that was more than ready to burst into flame.

  "Cooper!"

  I was so lost that it took a moment for the outrage in her voice to register. I pulled back just as her hands - which had been resting on my chest, right over the beat of my heart - pushed me, harder than I was expecting, and I took an involuntary step back.

  "Cooper?" Her voice was strained and measured, but I was more focused on the pink in her cheeks and the way her chest rose and fell in gasping breaths. "What the hell, Cooper?"

  And then I blinked and came back to myself. What the hell, indeed? I had... fuck, I had no excuses. "I'm sorry," was all I could think to say. I felt like I'd been hollowed out.

  "Holy fuck," added Jake.

  "Jake!" The color drained right back out of Willa's cheeks and she shot me one withering glare before she snapped back into scolding big sister mode. "You don't say those words. I don't care what the people around you" —another look that should have reduced me to ashes— "are saying. You don't use language like that."

  "Cooper said it." The kid didn't miss a thing, my name included.

  "Cooper was just leaving." Willa's fingers curled against the door frame and she started slowly shutting it in my face.

  When I caught sight of that winking gleam on her ring finger, righteous anger flooded back into the space that kiss had opened up inside of me. "We're not done here."