Lantern Lake

by Lily Everett

  Her deep blue eyes softened, and Cooper knew he had her. “That makes sense. Although, in the interest of full disclosure…. it doesn’t always work that way. I did a ton of work on the Westchester house where I lived with Gerald, and it never really felt like home.”

  A complicated blend of triumph and jealousy went through Cooper in a confusing rush. He chose to focus on the victory of getting his own way with Vivian. “Great. I’ll call my money guy and have him start the paperwork. In the meantime, what’s the first item on your punch list?”

  Vivian held up a hand to stop him. “Wait. Before we shake on it, I have a condition of my own.”

  “I’m not a business shark like Miles,” Cooper said, amused. “But even I have enough savvy to know you’re not really in a position to add conditions of your own to this deal.”

  “Nevertheless.” Vivian set her jaw stubbornly, even as a light flush pinked her cheeks. “I have to say this, because we need to be clear. You’re buying this property, and the right to help fix it up. You’re not buying rights to anything else…including me.”

  This time, it was Cooper who almost took a step back. He felt like she’d smacked him across the face. Voice low and dangerous, he said, “Is that what you think of me? That I’m trying to buy you?”

  The blush across her cheekbones intensified, but she didn’t back down. “No, actually.”

  “If you recall,” Cooper pointed out tensely, “No money changed hands before last night.”

  “And I’m not saying I don’t want a repeat,” Vivian replied, tilting her head up challengingly. “But I’ve had enough of my body being used as a bargaining chip in a business negotiation. If I sleep with you again, it’ll be because we both want it. Not because I owe you anything, or because I’m obligated to in any way. I have to be crystal clear about that…not just for me, but for you. Because I know you’d never be comfortable with anything less.”

  All Cooper’s indignation drained out of him, leaving behind nothing but a strange pride in the way Vivian was handling this. She’d been through a lot since he last saw her, but she’d come through the fire strengthened at the core. He held out a hand, and when she clasped it to shake, he pulled her in close.

  “I agree to your terms,” he murmured into the soft tendrils of black hair fanning across her temple. She smelled like wood smoke and lavender. “Does that mean we can’t seal the deal with a kiss?”

  A slow, sweet smile curled the corners of her mouth. Those lips were made for smiling, Cooper thought. And for kissing.

  In answer to his question, Vivian stretched up to press their mouths together, the heat of the embrace shocking in the morning chill. Hunger roared through him, but Cooper could control it.

  Now that he knew this wasn’t a one-time deal, and he’d have weeks or months…however long it took to fix up this crazy little cottage, to sate his need for Vivian Banks. And when they were through with the renovations, he’d finally be through with her.

  Right?

  Chapter 7

  The next two weeks passed quickly. The days were full of learning things like how to patch a roof together, and evenings spent curled up on the second-hand couch that was the only living room furniture. Vivian hoped Cooper would let her stick around after the renovations were done, at least long enough to help with the interior decorating, but she was afraid to bring it up. Things were good between them as they worked side by side and slept tangled in each other’s arms. She didn’t think she could bear it if the answer was “no.”

  Not that Cooper gave her reasons to doubt him. If anything, he seemed intent on protecting her happiness rather than tearing her down.

  “Can you hand me that hammer?” he asked absently, sprawled on his stomach below the peak of the roof, surrounded by piles of replacement slate shingles.

  From her position on the ladder, Vivian could reach the spot it had slid to if she stretched, but the zipper of her puffy down vest caught on the edge of the roof.

  “Whoops!”

  Cooper’s head shot up, concern darkening his handsome features. “Never mind! Stay put, I’ll get it.”

  Vivian unhooked the zipper and rolled her eyes. “I can do it, just give me a minute.”

  “No need. Just hang out on the ladder. It still feels steady, right?”

  She hid a smile, fond exasperation tickling at her. “Yes. The ten-pound bags of mulch you braced it with are holding. Honestly, Cooper, when you said you wanted to oversee the renovations, I didn’t imagine that meant you’d be doing them all yourself!”

  “You’ve helped.” He hooked the hammer with his foot and inched it up the roof to where he could grab it. Holding it aloft triumphantly, he wiped a trickle of sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. It was another mild winter day on Sanctuary Island, and working on the roof in the afternoon sun made it seem almost hot.

  Not that Vivian had been allowed to do much actual work.

  “Sure, because standing on a ladder and doing nothing is really helpful,” she grumbled.

  “You made me lemonade,” Cooper pointed out. “And brought me lunch.”

  “I’m supposed to be learning about home repair and renovation, not how to be a waitress!”

  “Learn by watching,” he said firmly, going back to his careful placement of the dark grey stone tiles. “I don’t want you scrambling around up here. You could fall.”

  “So can you. But I already know how useless it is to mention that fact.” She sighed. “Useless is basically my middle name.”

  “Don’t say that,” Cooper mumbled around the nails he’d stuck in the side of his mouth until he needed them. “You’re not useless. I’m here to help, so just accept it. You don’t have to do this all on your own.”

  A wave of warmth swept through her, but right on its heels was the old, familiar clench of guilt. She should be on her own. It’s what she deserved.

  Cooper’s eyes narrowed as if her negative thoughts were written on her forehead. He propped himself up on one sweatshirted elbow and pointed the hammer at her. “Stop it. Seriously. I can’t take that guilty face. What do you have to feel so guilty about anyway?”

  She could hardly believe he had to ask, but… “Um, disappearing on our wedding day without even leaving a note?”

  An odd look came over his face. “You really still feel bad about that.”

  Bad didn’t begin to cover it. “It was the worst mistake of my life. And it led to a whole host of other mistakes, terrible choices and stupid decisions, and I feel guilty about all of it. All those people my parents and Gerald defrauded—some of them lost their life savings.”

  “Yeah, and you spent your life savings trying to pay them back,” Cooper argued. “Even though you had nothing to do with the crime.”

  “I should have known what Gerald was up to. How could I not have realized something was wrong?” She shook her head, hands tightening on the top rung of the ladder until the rough metal tread cut into her palms. “The truth is, everything was wrong back then. I couldn’t pick out that one criminal thread of wrongness from the mess of the rest of my life.”

  Cooper’s eyes flashed, and he began the slow, precise process of making his way across the slanted roof toward her. Vivian swallowed, nose and eyes burning, and wished she had the inner fortitude to laugh off the memories and assure him she was fine.

  Instead, she waited mutely until Cooper had inched close enough to put his arms around her. As steady as the ladder was, Vivian sighed with relief at the strong, sure grasp of his arm. She dropped her head on his shoulder and tried not to unbalance him.

  “Viv,” he said tenderly, in a tone that threw her back ten years into the past, when everything had been simple and she’d still had hopes about how her life could turn out.

  “Hey, come on now.” Cooper’s long-fingered hand, rough with new calluses, cupped her chin and lifted her face until he could kiss her. “You’re fixing it. Maybe not literally with a hammer and nails, like you thought—but you’ve ta
ken major steps to fix your life. You should feel good about that.”

  Tears choked her for a moment, and when she could speak again it was more of a croak. “How can you say that? You, of all people. You know how much I deserve to be punished.”

  ***

  The whole world slipped sideways for a horrifying instant of vertigo that made Cooper clutch at Vivian more tightly, certain that the roof was caving in or the ladder was toppling to the ground. But when he sucked in oxygen and steadied himself, he realized it wasn’t the roof or the ladder that had shifted.

  It was his reality.

  Every moment of anger, every bitter recrimination he’d leveled at Vivian in the years since she walked out on their future…and nothing he’d said or thought could match the ways she’d punished herself.

  “You told me once that you married Gerald because you’d already given me up, so it didn’t matter what happened to you. But it was more than that. You were punishing yourself for what you did to us.”

  He saw the truth in her eyes before she gave a short, ashamed nod. “Every day I stayed with him was like being in prison. It was awful—but I couldn’t leave. It was like making reparations, like penance. I thought, if I stayed with him even though I was miserable, then maybe eventually I’d earn forgiveness. But it didn’t work, because the person whose forgiveness I needed was you. And you were gone.”

  “Oh, Viv.” Heart ripping in two, Cooper pressed his mouth to her forehead and tried to control his breathing. “Sweetheart. We need to get down off this roof.”

  She sniffled. “Sorry. I know you were hoping to get this finished today.”

  “Stop apologizing,” he growled, then blinked at himself. But he meant it. “The roof isn’t important. What’s important is that I need to hold you right now, if not sooner, and I don’t want a ladder and the threat of a fifty-foot drop between us.”

  Giving a watery laugh, Vivian nodded once and let go of him to grasp the sides of the ladder. Cooper watched her make her careful way down the rungs, only the glossy black hair on top of her head visible. Every inch of space separating them felt wrong all of a sudden, and he hurried down after her.

  When they were both on solid ground, Cooper wasted no time pulling her into his arms. It was colder in the shadow of the house, but he didn’t think the chilly breeze was what made Vivian tremble against his chest.

  He could sympathize. He felt a little on the shaky side himself when he thought about how intent he’d been on punishing Vivian when he first saw her again after all those years apart. All those years, which he’d spent getting rich and seeing the world—and she’d spent miserable and trapped in a loveless marriage by her scheming, opportunistic parents.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, the words ripped from his gut.

  “Hey.” Vivian leaned back enough to lift her face to his. “If I’m not allowed to apologize anymore, you definitely aren’t! Especially since you haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Maybe not, but he’d sure thought about it. Shame curdled in Cooper’s belly. “I should have known you wouldn’t just leave me. I should’ve looked for you, made sure you were okay. Instead, I went off and made my fortune…and you lost everything.”

  Vivian shook her head, her brows wrinkled in concern. “Cooper. Don’t blame yourself. I certainly don’t. And anyway, I might have lost a few things along the way, like my horrible ex-husband and the fantasy that my parents loved me and cared about me…”

  “And all your money,” Cooper reminded her.

  She laughed. “And all my money. But I found a couple of important things, too. Like my self-respect. And the strength to pick myself up and start over—that one was a nice surprise. I didn’t know that about myself, that I was capable of that kind of resilience.”

  “You should be proud of yourself,” Cooper said, fierce protectiveness expanding his rib cage with every breath. He hated it that Vivian had ever been made to feel like less than the strong, amazing woman that she was. “I’m proud of you, if that means anything.”

  “Of course it does!” She blinked up at him, dark violet-blue eyes wide with something like shock, mixed with trepidation. “Cooper, you’re everything. The last couple of weeks with you…that’s my latest and best discovery. That the past doesn’t have a stranglehold on us. Because if you can forgive me for what I did to you, then maybe, just maybe…there’s hope for the future.”

  She stopped as if she’d run out of words and breath, and the expression on her face made Cooper want to shout and rage and tear down the world with his bare hands—because Vivian Banks should never look at Cooper Hayes like that. As if she didn’t know that she was everything to him, too.

  Cupping her face between his hands, Cooper did his best to drill every word straight into her heart. “Vivian. I forgive you. I do. We were just kids, and the pressures your parents put on you…it must have been overwhelming. They sound like master manipulators, and you were so young, so sweet, so hungry for love. Your parents knew that, and they used it against you. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Joy lit her eyes like sapphires, but she shook her head. “It means more than I can tell you, to hear you say that. I’ve wanted your forgiveness for a long time. But I can’t put all the blame on my parents. As you pointed out, I could have stood up to them. I wish I had. Every day and every night of my marriage, believe me, I wished I had the guts to tell them all to go to hell.”

  She shuddered, darkness moving through her like a cloud passing in front of the sun. Cooper tensed, his muscles going tight and battle-ready as every part of him ached to fight off her demons. But then she smiled, and the sun came out once more.

  “Just knowing you’ve forgiven me is the greatest gift, Cooper. I can hardly believe it.”

  The adrenaline in Cooper’s bloodstream converted to hunger in the blink of an eye. “Believe it,” he said, bending to sweep her up into his arms and hold her high against his chest.

  Vivian didn’t even tense at the abrupt move—she only sighed happily and melted against him, winding her arms lazily around his neck. “I’ll try,” she promised, pushing her face into the side of his neck and inhaling as if she liked the smell of sunshine, male sweat, and roofing dust. “But it might take a while.”

  She shot him a glance from beneath her lashes, and Cooper realized what she was really asking. A sense of rightness steadied his steps as he carried her around to the front of the cabin, heading toward their warm, soft bed. “Take as long as you need,” he told her seriously, laying her down on white cotton sheets that already smelled like the two of them. Like home.

  Vivian caught her breath. “You mean…”

  Leaning over her, Cooper smoothed back a lock of her hair and brushed her bottom lip with his thumb to make her shiver. “I mean, we have time. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. And neither are you.”

  And as they sank into each other, Cooper tried to lose himself in the moment. Because the moment was wonderful, heat and tightness and the kind of pleasure that turned a man inside out…but in the back of his mind, the past lurked like a cancer, sending our tendrils of black poison.

  He still had questions, things he wanted to know but hesitated to bring up because he didn’t want to cause Vivian any more pain than she’d already suffered. Now wasn’t the time, anyway. They’d made enough progress for one day.

  Cooper forced the questions down, focusing on the sweet taste and eager response of the woman in his bed. They had time. He’d make sure of it.

  Chapter 8

  Vivian scraped one last curl of flaking paint off the porch railing and blew out a breath. She paused for a minute to wipe her forehead and smooth her flyaway hairs back into the hasty knot she’d twisted it into after the long—shared, delicious, knee-weakening—shower that morning.

  Since she’d stopped, it was a perfect time to check her messages. Vivian pulled her phone from the pocket of her sleeveless down vest to see if either the bank or the title company had returned her emails. There was a noti
fication from her bank, and she clicked it quickly only to frown at the news that it would take several days for Cooper’s check to clear. And there was still no news on the status of all the ownership paperwork.

  “What’s the matter?” Cooper called from the yard, where he was working on scraping and sanding down the front door, which they’d taken off its hinges and rested on a pair of sawhorses in preparation for repainting the cabin’s trim a bright, happy red.

  Vivian slipped the phone back into her pocket. “It’s kind of crazy that I could deposit a tiny check for not much money and have it all available immediately—but when it’s a lot of money that I really need, it’s going to take another week.”

  “Whatever you need the money for, I can cover it,” Cooper said.

  Vivian went still. She didn’t want to offend Cooper, and she could tell it meant something to him that he’d pulled himself up by his bootstraps into the financial stratosphere, and that he could afford to buy her anything she wanted. But at the same time, she didn’t want to set a precedent she wouldn’t be able to live with.

  “That’s sweet of you,” she told him sincerely. “I truly appreciate the thought. But it’s important to me to be independent.”

  Cooper frowned. “You always shared whatever you had with all your friends at school—buying rounds of drinks, picking up the tab for lunch. What’s the big deal about me helping you out now?”

  “I don’t want to owe you anything.” Vivian’s fingers cramped, and she realized she was clutching the metal-handled scraper too tightly. Uncurling her fist, she set it gently down on the railing.

  “I’m not going to collect on you,” Cooper protested, starting to get frustrated. Worse than the irritation, though, was the hurt Vivian could see lurking in his hazel eyes. “What do you think, I’m going to take it out of your hide? If you insist on it being a loan, that’s fine—I know you’re good for it, since I already cut you a check.”