“You still like doing that?” she commented.
“Yeah. Ketchup should be a food group all by itself.” He put his empty containers in his bag. She did the same with hers and they left the picnic table, stopping at the garbage cans to deposit their waste.
“Feel better?” he asked quietly.
She did, surprisingly. It wasn’t just the food, either, although she’d been very hungry. She’d had a few moments to breathe, to unwind. Funny how he’d seemed to know she’d needed that. Or maybe she was reading too much into his motives. Maybe it truly was all about eating his dinner while it was hot.
“I do feel better,” she admitted. “I was pretty spooled up after my day.”
“Give me five more minutes, okay? Come with me.”
She frowned but followed. He led her over to the swings. “Sit down.”
“Okay, now you’re being silly. I just want to go home and get off my feet.”
In response, he sat on the swing beside hers. It was set low for kids, and his long legs folded up like a frog’s, but he pushed off anyway and put it in motion. “This gets you off your feet. Look.” He held his booted feet up in the air. He looked ridiculous.
She felt foolish, but sat down and scuffed one shoe in the dirt, making the swing rock a little.
“Hold on to the chains and lean back.”
“Cooper, you’re crazy.”
“Do it, Mel. Lean back and then open your eyes.”
She pushed with her foot a little harder, then gripped the chains between her fingers and leaned back. The breeze from the motion ruffled her hair, making bits of it feather across her cheeks. Slowly, she opened her eyes and looked up.
There were stars. Not too many, but a handful that seemed to rock in the sky as she swayed back and forth. When had they come out? Sometime between leaving the restaurant and eating her dinner in the twilight.
The sky was so big, so endless. She heard a loud sigh and realized it had come from herself. As she watched, more stars appeared out of nowhere. One second vast emptiness, then the next time she looked, pop. There they were, twinkling down at her from the infinite blackness.
“Make a wish,” Cooper suggested.
Her throat tightened. What in the world was she doing, sitting on the swings in the dark with Cooper Ford? “I’m too old for that nonsense. Besides, that’s for the first star you see, and there are at least two dozen right now.”
His voice was low and warm beside her. “Then make two dozen wishes. Wish on every one.”
“Cooper…”
She knew it was stupid and juvenile, but she couldn’t resist. She closed her eyes and made a wish.
Let this time be the one.
All she really wanted was to be a mom. She’d wanted it when she was married to Scott, and they’d supposedly been trying when she’d caught him cheating. The divorce had killed not only their marriage but her dream of a family, too. And she wasn’t interested in getting married again.
But the longing for a family, for a child of her own, hadn’t abated. If she could survive starting her own business and her marriage blowing up, she could handle being a single mom. She certainly didn’t want to marry someone she didn’t love just to make that happen. That made less sense than doing it alone.
She really wanted the pregnancy to take this time. If not, she could look into adoption, but she truly wanted to experience the joy of carrying her baby inside her. There was just something so…complete about it.
“You still here, or are you on another planet?”
Coop’s voice intruded. Her swing had stopped swaying and her arms were twined around the chains, while her face remained tilted toward the sky. She swallowed and opened her eyes. “I’m still here. It takes a while to make twenty-four wishes.”
He chuckled in the darkness. That funny curling sensation wound its way through her stomach again.
She jumped off the swing and brushed her hands down her trousers. “I really do need to get home. I’ve got to be back to work tomorrow to do up all the arrangements for the Madison funeral.”
“All work and no play makes Mel a dull girl.”
She shrugged and reached for her purse. “It happens when you own your own business. You know how it is. There’s no real time clock to punch.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m going to be locked up in my office tomorrow going over paperwork.”
They made their way back to the sidewalk and on toward Melissa’s house. “We really did grow up, didn’t we, Cooper?”
His boots sounded on the concrete, steady thumps that seemed slightly out of place and yet reassuring. “Yes, we did. And some of it was painful.”
Melissa had hoped he wasn’t going to bring it up. She shivered in the rapidly cooling air. Without saying a word, Coop took off his jean jacket and slid it over her shoulders.
“Live and learn.” She injected some lightness into her voice, as if it was no big deal.
Her house was just a few blocks away now. She had to put him off for only a minute or so and she’d be home and he’d be gone.
“Live and learn?” Coop stopped and put a hand on her arm, halting her, too. His voice was harsh. “You don’t talk to me for three years and then come out with a flippant ‘live and learn’?”
She pulled her arm away from his fingers. That was twice tonight he’d taken the liberty of touching her. “Maybe you should take the hint that I don’t want to talk about it.”
They carried on for a few minutes, the silence growing increasingly awkward between them. Twenty more steps and she’d be at her front walk. She was nearly there when she realized she couldn’t hear his boots just behind her anymore. For some weird reason her heart was pounding, but she made herself keep going. She took five more steps before his voice stopped her.
“I was wrong.”
She slowed, paused for just a breath of a moment, but kept walking. They weren’t going to do this. Not tonight and not on the sidewalk outside her house.
The memory of their argument was still fresh in her mind—as if it had happened yesterday—and nearly as painful. She’d been so angry at Scott. Angry and hurt with the vitriolic bitterness of a wife betrayed. But with Coop, it had been different. It had been a trust of a different kind that he’d broken. She’d been hurt by that, too. Hurt and disappointed that the one person she’d turned to when everything blew up had already known. He’d betrayed her, too.
“So you said already,” she replied, wondering why the last twenty steps felt like a hundred.
“I thought maybe you’d be willing to accept my apology after all this time.”
His longer legs caught up with her by the time she reached the first row of interlocking patio blocks that wound their way to her front door.
“Melissa. Please. Hasn’t this gone on long enough?”
“What, our hating each other?”
She looked up into his face. In the glow of the streetlamp, he actually looked hurt. That was preposterous. She’d been the person wronged in all of this and they both knew it.
“I never hated you.”
“Well, you sure never cared about me. That was clear enough.”
A muscle