Last Good Man: A Crown Creek Novel

by Theresa Leigh

  Here he was. “So now what?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched. “Now I think we try eating pie together.”

  “I already had a piece.” He looked hungrily at the plate in front of me and I pushed it toward him. “Go ahead.”

  He picked up his fork. And then put it back down again. “Share this with me?”

  “I already - “

  “I want to share this pie with you,” he cut me off as he stared right into my eyes. “And I also want to share my soul.”

  “Cooper?”

  He slid his fork into the piece, letting the bright red juices stain the clouds of cream. “I want to give you a piece of this pie. You’ve already got a piece of my heart.”

  “Cooper… no -“

  “I want to share everything with you, Willa.” His voice broke as the fork hovered right in front of my mouth. “I love you.”

  At the sound of those three words, my mouth fell open. He smiled and slid the fork in between my lips. The cherries hit my tongue in an explosion of flavor, sweeter than anything I had ever tasted before. I made a sound and Cooper nodded. “I know that’s how you’re saying I love you too. I know you, Willa. Your ‘I love yous’ sound like, ‘did you eat? Call me when you get home. Be safe. Hold still while I wash that cut for you.’” His eyes were shining unnaturally bright. “You’ve shown me how to love, and also how to be loved by someone with the biggest heart I’ve ever seen.” He reached across the table to wipe the corner of my mouth, then press the dab of cream to his lips. “I love you more than I thought was possible. I love you more than I knew I was capable of loving someone.”

  “You do love me.” It came out in a rush of breath. I couldn’t wrap my head around what he was saying. I’d mourned the loss of us like he’d died, and then I’d had to pick up the shattered pieces of my heart and keep numbly going on.

  But shook my head. He'd told me this before, and I didn't believe him. Three words weren't enough. I needed to know... “Why?”

  He sat back in the booth and stared for a moment. “Fair.” He nodded. “I love everything about you, Willa, but you need specifics, I know. Here it is.” He leaned forward and took my hand again, turning my palm upward and tracing the lines on my wrist as he started talking.

  “I love how you sacrifice without asking for anything in return. I love how you give and give and give some more. I love how your love is bottomless, and there is not a single thing you’re unwilling to do for the people you hold dear.” He looked up at me and reached up to brush away the tears that were now falling freely. “I love how you never forget the things that are important to people. I love how you watch out for people. I love how you think ahead, even when no one else is. I love how you always bring an extra sweater for Sadie. I love how you intervene when Claire goes overboard teasing Ethan. I love how you want what you think is best. And I love how you are a vault for so many secrets because everyone trusts you with their most important ones.” He leaned over and kissed the pulse on my wrist. “But I’m not keeping this a secret any longer. I love you.”

  A sob caught in my throat as he took my other hand in his. His thumbs traced circles over both of my wrists. “What do you say, Willa? Can we start all over again, all over again?”

  Just feeling his touch again was enough to bring me back to life. The taste of cherries sang on my tongue as the world suddenly had flavor and color again. How was it possible to love one person this much? How could I ever truly tell him how much I loved him too?

  “Cooper.”

  His eyes widened. Hope was mixed equally with fear, and he held his breath. “Yeah, Willa?”

  “I love you, too.”

  His shoulders sagged with relief and he lifted my hand and kissed the tops of my fingers as I laughed and cried at the same time, then leaned over the table to kiss him. The second my lips touched his, I knew there was no going back. This was it. He was my first love. And he would be my last.

  He pulled back from the kiss with a lingering sigh. “Hang on,” he said. I stared as he rummaged in his pocket, my breath coming so fast I felt faint. “Your finger looks awfully naked right now.”

  I started to laugh at the same time the tears started falling all over again. Because he was slipping the fake ring onto my finger again. “Really?” I managed to croak.

  But he wasn’t laughing. “This is just a placeholder, Willa. When you’re ready, I’m going to put a real one there in its place.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Think of it as a good start. A promise that you can keep looking after everyone else.” He leaned forward and brushed his lips against mine. “As long as I can keep looking after you.”

  I cupped his face with my hands and looked into my man’s eyes. The fake ring sparkled on my hand.

  Except it wasn’t fake anymore. It was the start of something real. Something that would last.

  Something good.

  * * *

  THE END

  * * *

  Do you need more from Willa and Cooper? I know, I love them so much, I could not stop writing about them. I have a bonus epilogue where they go to New York City to visit Liam, as well as a ton of extra scenes, and you can get all of them now by clicking here!

  Willa, Sadie, Claire and Ruby are all together in Ruby’s book! Find out how a sweet kindergarten teacher brings a rockstar to his knees in Sweet Crazy Song, available now!

  Keep reading for a sneak peek!

  Sneak peek of Sweet Crazy Song

  Chapter One

  Jonah

  The decision to stay here in Crown Creek had felt like the right one for all of twenty-four hours. But one night in my old bed had me nearly wild with claustrophobic memory. Every creak of the house settling was one I had heard before. Every sigh or grunt from Duke was a direct link to the past. Every pass of my father's footsteps on the squeaky stairs as he got himself ready for the day was an echo of all my childhood mornings.

  If I didn't get out of this house today, I was going to lose it. And I needed to flee before my father could corner me and rope me into doing the one chore that just might break my heart.

  I rushed down to the garage and then stopped.

  My father had beaten me down, and was there with his head under the hood of my rental car.

  I stood there for a moment, jingling the keys in my hand. "Hey, uh, what are you doing?

  But I knew exactly what he was doing. He'd won. He'd beat me. I remembered him pulling the same kind of stunt when I'd come home from tour seven years ago and wanted to sneak out to a party late at night. Rather than forbid me from leaving, my dad just disconnected my car battery saying he'd replace it 'once the good ones are back in stock at Chuck's shop.' I was stuck home for the remainder of that visit. It worked exactly as he'd planned.

  But he never admitted that keeping me home was his goal, nor would he admit it now. So he muttered something about jokers and who they thought they were fooling, then pulled his head back out from under the hood. "Your lines are almost completely clogged."

  "Ah, yeah. But it's a rental, so that's really not my problem."

  "I'm almost done with the flush."

  "Dad, it's their job to deal with it. Not yours."

  He turned and looked at me like I had sprouted an extra head. Then he swept his hand over to the neatly laid out parts and disconnected hoses and sort of shrugged like 'what can I do?' "Never leave a job unfinished," he intoned.

  I pressed my lips together and sighed. Whenever I complained to Gid about my dad, he'd always say the same thing. "You're more like him than you realize."

  Stubbornly refusing to let go of something until it worked the way you wanted it to?

  I understood that all too well.

  "Fine," I said, shoving my hands into my pockets.

  "You're gonna be around later, right?" Dad asked me, wiping his hands on a rag.

  I swallowed. If this were any other place in the world, I'd be able to say 'hell no' and leave it at that. But this
was Crown Creek. This was my Dad's house, and so I had to say, "Probably."

  I could see by the twitch at the corner of his eye that he didn't like that answer. "Got a lot of work ahead of us," he said, taking off his glasses and wiping them with a different rag. Of course he had rags assigned for specific purposes. "I could use the help."

  I'd come down hoping I could slip out un-noticed. If I was gone, then there was no way my father could ask me to help clean out Gid's house with him. But he'd made certain I couldn't flee by disabling my car.

  But maybe he hadn't won. I wasn't as dumb as I used to be. "Yeah, if I have the time, definitely," I said smoothly. "But I was going to run into town." I grinned and shrugged. "Looks like I"m going to have to walk, huh? I guess I could use the exercise but it's definitely going to take me longer."

  My Dad put his glasses back on again and regarded me with a fierce stare. Gabe could almost match it in intensity but my father's had the advantage of profound disappointment in all your failings as a person. "Huh," he said. He paused, letting the silence stretch out, most likely hoping it'd start me squirming in shame. But when I didn't buckle, he blew air out of the side of his mouth and turned back to the car. "Then I guess I'll see you later," he said pointedly.

  "Hope so!" I replied, clapping him on the back. Feeling flush with outsmarting him, I didn't even mind that I had a mile and there-quarters walk ahead of me along frozen country roads. If I was walking, that meant I wasn't down in Gid and Izzy's place with a trash bag, throwing out the remnants of his life.

  Izzy was moving off the property now, into a little trailer near where the cult-people lived. My dad had told her she could stay, but the idea of living with the memories of Gideon was too much for her fragile nature, and she'd declined. Which meant that now all of Gid's instruments and equipment were being packed up in boxes. Izzy had mentioned maybe donating them to the school in his memory and the thought was nice but my mind rebelled at the idea of Gideon's memory being let loose, formless into the world rather than staying tightly contained in the place where he'd lived.

  I had no right. I knew that. I wasn't so much of an asshole that I couldn't see that it was Izzy's choice to do with this stuff what she wanted. She was the one who had spent half her life with the uncle I'd barely seen in two years. But a hurt kind of anger, a childish sense of unfairness, was nipping at the edge of my rational mind. I didn't want to see him do it. I didn't want to help him do it. And I knew if I hung around the house there would be no way to avoid it. So I left the house.

  Walking into town was like playing peekaboo with the creek. I left it at my parents' house, heading out along our road only to find it again as it dove under Davy's Bridge, the first of the three spans over it. Then it left me as it hooked out in a wide loop before making another sharp turn out there by the cult people and heading straight into town. I found it again, narrowed within cement banks, as the first scrappy stores that clung to the outskirts of town came into view.

  I huffed out a visible puff of breath. My coat was too thin for this kind of damp cold. It was made for style, not for weather and right now the smell of snow was in the air. I could see it up there, the sky was fuzzy with it, but nothing was falling yet. Tonight it would, for sure.

  The town of Crown Creek was really little more than a glorified intersection - which the locals loftily called 'The Four Corners.' Here the creek narrowed some more before taking a steep dive over three small series of rapids, baby waterfalls, but falls all the same. These falls were why the town had sprung up out here in the first place. The shells of old flour mills clung to the banks of those little falls, their grinding wheels long since rotted away,. They were old and worn and now looked like part of the landscape.

  In the summer the falls would be roaring, but ice was already starting to freeze the creek into silence. A car went by, the tires noisy on the wet pavement, but otherwise everything was quiet.

  It had been a long time since I had heard this kind of quiet.

  I passed a few shops. A sad little pet store with a sleeping cat in the window that looked like it had given up on the idea of adoption and made its home right there. A shuttered art gallery. A dollar store.

  Nothing I needed.

  At the corner of Mill Street, I looked in on an empty storefront, the only thing left inside was a fallen over chair in the very center of the space. There was music leaking out of the building next to it and I did a double take to see a bar in front of me.

  I turned in a slow circle, uncertain if I had somehow lost my bearings. I didn't remember a bar being at this intersection. Not that the name was much to go my. Crown Tavern. Everything around here was Crown this, Royal that. Even my family name fit with the theme of the area.

  Crown Tavern. Slowly, the name brought up a faint memory of kids in T-ball uniforms. The kids with normal childhoods, the ones who didn't always know exactly what they wanted from the moment they could speak. This bar must have always been here and I was just too young to go inside.

  I was old enough now.

  I pushed my way inside. It felt overwarm after my freezing walk and I immediately shed my jacket. The smell of cigarettes hung in the air, although smoking indoors had been banned for ages now. It seemed to be seeping out of the walls.

  I looked around, taking in the wood paneled walls, the cheap metal tables, the U-shaped bar with the video-trivia games bolted to the ends. There was a small, cleared out space in the corner by the window, with a raised, rickety looking stage sitting on small risers. It was smaller than even the ones I had played as a kid. I went over and took a seat next to one of the trivia machines and studied my frozen hands.

  There was no nostalgia here. I had no memories sniffing around the back of my head like dogs trying to catch a scent.

  I could relax. I did relax.

  But only for a moment.

  The man four seats down twisted on his stool. I could sense him studying me and wondering is he should say something. He wondered so long it was actually a relief when he finally spoke up.

  "Sorry," he said. "But, you're Jonah King right?"

  Instantly I was on the alert. After losing my manager and having my appearances cancelled, the last thing I could afford was a pissed of Tweet from some aggrieved civilian. Even though I was home, I still had to be extra sure to answer all autograph requests with a smile and a witty joke. "I am," I said, pasting my practiced smile into place. "How are you?"

  But the man wasn't done talking. His face was familiar in the vague way every face was familiar in this town. "Yeah, you're definitely Foster King's boy. It's all in the eyes, that's for damn sure."

  I blinked. It had been a long while since 'Foster King's boy' was how people knew me. "I've heard that before," I said carefully, still not quite sure where this was going.

  He nodded and sipped his beer. "Sorry about your Uncle. Andrew was so excited about the spring musical."

  I blinked, then remembered. Right. Gid was a music teacher. I looked at him again, inhaling sharply. "I remember you."

  He grinned showing yellowed, nicotaine stained teether. "Yeah. Wondered if you were gonna. I'll save you the brain strain." He held out his hand. "Jack McLean. I was a year behind you and a year ahead of Gabe."

  I nodded, feeling more at ease now. "Until we left, yeah."

  "Now you're back for a little while, huh?"

  I licked my lips. "I'm working on a new project," I lied smoothly. He raised his eyebrows, the impressed look on his face emboldening me. "Stripping it down, getting back down to my roots, you know?"

  The lie must have sounded believable because Jack looked impressed. "Well if you're gonna be hanging around a while, you need to know what's what."

  I took a drink and listened as Jack brought me up to speed with the town gossip. He was really gifted at summarizing. In no time flat I knew which of our classmates had ended up in jail, and which of those charges were 'complete bullshit.' I also learned who had ended up with six kids but never got married and who l
eft town to become 'some big city hotshot.'

  Through all of this, the bartender - who I was pretty sure was at Gid's wake but didn't say a word then and said more of that now - brought me an assortment of craft beers from the brewery down the road. I felt my shoulders unknot.

  "Jonah fucking King."

  "Jesus," I almost fell off my barstool when I saw Taylor Graham suddenly behind the bar. With a beard. "Tay. What are you doing here?"

  He grinned. "I work here, what the hell are you doing here? Shouldn't you be off banging groupies somewhere?"

  Taylor hadn't changed. Except everything about him had. The eager face was still there, but ringed with a giant, bushy blond beard that looked like it should be groomed using hedge trimmers. The same hopeful smile was hidden under all that hair, as well as an extra one hundred pounds and several inches. But it was still Taylor, still looking at me with that hero worship. He'd played with us a few dates back when we were doing local festivals. And honorary King Brother, we'd called him, until our slimy manager Bennett put an end to that.

  I had to smile. "Need to rest sometime, don't I?" But anxiety settled in a knot right between my eyes.

  "Been following your solo stuff," Taylor went on. "You seem like you want to move in a different direction."

  "He's getting back to his roots," Jack piped up.

  Taylor's smug expression made me instantly regret the lie. "I mean, I'm stripping down a list, yeah. But new direction?" I waved my hand. It was one thing to have self-doubts. It was another thing to let Taylor know I had them. "Why fuck with what works though, you know? When you got a winning formula."

  He nodded, wiping the same glass, spinning it around and around in his hand until it was streak free and spotless but still he didn't put it away. His smile was so wide it looked like it hurt. "Yeah, yeah well of course, man you're on top" He shook his head and seemed to suddenly notice the glass in his hand and set it down with a clang. "Shit, how long you in town? And sorry about your uncle but the way. But seriously, if you're around for a while we'd love to have you play a set."