Lantern Lake

by Lily Everett

***

  She was giving him too much, every word leeching strength from her as if she’d sprung a leak like the old gas stove in the cabin. Any minute, she’d go up in flames of embarrassment and nerves. But Vivian held her head up and stared deep into Cooper’s green-gold eyes. He deserved the truth.

  So what if it left her a pile of ashes on the frozen ground?

  “You never met my parents,” she reminded him, wrapping her arms around herself to ward off the chill. “Maybe you thought…I know you thought it was because I was ashamed of you.”

  Cooper dropped his hands from her shoulders, stepping back. “Can’t say I gave it that much consideration.”

  Vivian averted her gaze politely from the lie. “Well, that’s not what was going on. I wanted to elope with you, to run away and leave everything behind, because I knew that if I told my parents about you—if they understood what you meant to me—they’d stop the wedding. Stop us from ever seeing each other again. And I was right.”

  She swallowed hard at the look on Cooper’s face before he smoothed it into distant blankness. “What do you mean?”

  “The dean invited them down to talk about donating a new wing for the science building,” Vivian recounted, the entire sequence of events engraved on her soul. “They decided to stop in and visit me at my dorm after lunch, but I wasn’t there.”

  “You were never there,” Cooper agreed absently. “You’d all but moved into my apartment by that point.”

  The apartment. A wave of nostalgia swept over her head, drowning her in memories of the grimy little fourth-floor walk-up where Cooper had lived and studied during their college years. A blazing oven in the summer and colder than a freezer in the winter, no kitchen but a hot plate and narrow mini-fridge. “I loved that place,” she said without thinking.

  “Right.” Cooper’s cheeks went brick red, in the way that meant he was embarrassed but didn’t want to show it. “You loved it so much, you married me and we lived there forever. Oh, wait…”

  Pain scraped along her nerves, scouring out her ribcage. “No, you’re right. I had some of the best times of my life in that apartment, but I didn’t want to live there forever. And when my parents got the address from the R.A. on my dorm hall, and confronted me there—” She broke off, overwhelmed for a moment by the image of her expensively dressed parents picking their way through the cheerful clutter of the small studio. The look on her mother’s face when she saw how Vivian had been living…and when she saw what Vivian was wearing.

  “Where was I during all this?” Cooper demanded.

  “You were already at the courthouse,” Vivian said faintly. “I had class, remember? So I was going to meet you there. I wanted to skip it, but you said…”

  Her throat went tight, choking off the words, and Cooper’s expression went flat and distant.

  “I said we’d have all the time in the world to be together after we were married. A few more minutes apart wouldn’t matter.”

  Miserable, Vivian felt her shoulders slump as she nodded. “I’d gone home to change—so my parents walked in on me wearing a white dress and holding that pillbox hat with the veil I bought at that vintage shop on Fulton Street. And they knew.”

  “So what?” Cooper shook his head, frowning fiercely. “What difference did it make if they knew you were getting married? You were over the age of consent. All you had to do was walk out that door and come meet me.”

  “It wasn’t that simple,” Vivian protested. “They’re my parents—I grew up trying desperately to make them proud of me, and failing ninety percent of the time. Nothing I did was ever good enough, but that only made me try harder. Until that day.”

  Cooper’s eyes were as hard as moss-covered stones, opaque and judgmental. “They forbid you to marry me. And you caved.”

  That was the stark truth of it. Vivian wished she could argue, that she could point to some heroic motive, but nothing she said would change the fact that if she’d defied her parents, she would have spent the last ten years a far happier woman. And she never would have hurt Cooper so badly. “I was wrong,” she confessed baldly. “I’m sorry. I made the wrong call. If I had it to do over again, if I could go back…”

  “We can never go back.” Cooper cut her off with a sharp, slashing hand gesture before turning and stalking down to the lake’s edge.

  Vivian watched him shove his hands into the pockets of his well-worn canvas jacket, her battered heart sinking to the pit of her stomach. She’d finally had the chance to apologize to Cooper, and it hadn’t made any difference.

  Not that she’d truly hoped it would—although she was appalled to discover there was a small, stubbornly optimistic part of her that had held out a slender thread of real hope.

  That part was crushed, now, trembling under the weight of the past and all her many bad decisions. Leaving Cooper at the altar had only been the first of many…but it was the one she regretted the most.

  ***

  “All you had to do was walk away from your parents,” Cooper said. He could feel her hovering behind him, but he kept his gaze on the placid surface of the misty lake. “But you walked away from me instead.”

  She took a few steps closer. “At the time, I didn’t think I had a choice. It was so ingrained, the need to obey my parents and follow their rules. To not rock the boat.”

  “You were already planning to rock the boat,” he pointed out. “You knew they’d hate it if you married me, that they’d never think a low class scholarship punk like me was good enough for their perfect debutante daughter.”

  Vivian paused at his side, her posture defeated. When she smiled, it was more of a grimace. “I had enough courage to go behind their backs—barely. But I didn’t have the guts to defy them to their faces.”

  “They’re your parents,” Cooper ground out. “They would have come around eventually.”

  She was quiet for a long moment, nothing but the gentle lap of water on the lakeshore filling the air. “Maybe your parents would have, in a similar situation,” Vivian finally said, choosing her words carefully. “But mine wouldn’t. Trust me on this.”

  Cooper wanted to shake his head and deny it. The whole idea of parents—whose whole job was to love and care for their kids—being so unforgiving and so unwilling to allow their daughter to pursue her own happiness…it was completely foreign to the way Cooper grew up. His parents never had any money, but their house was full of love and laughter, until his dad got sick.

  Breathing out the grief of that with the ease of practice, Cooper slanted a look at the woman beside him. Her classically perfect profile was as familiar as the shape of his own hand, but had he ever truly known her?

  “For a long time, I wondered why you left,” he said. “We were in the middle of senior year, but you even transferred to another school to get away from me.”

  She sighed. “My parents insisted. And I didn’t transfer. I just never went back and finished my degree.”

  Some of the leftover anger and betrayal from that time period colored his voice when he asked, “Did they also insist that you marry that other guy? Whatever his name was.”

  “Gerald Findlay.”

  The name was almost familiar, but he was distracted from placing it by the realization that Vivian hadn’t answered his actual question. Cooper glanced at her sharply, narrowing his gaze on her guilty face. “Are you serious? You let your parents pick out your husband for you?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and wrapped her arms around her torso, as if the wind had just kicked up. “I didn’t think it made any difference. If I couldn’t be with you, I thought it wouldn’t matter who I actually married, and I might as well make my parents happy.”

  “Lucky guy.” Cooper felt an unwelcome stab of sympathy for the poor schmuck who’d married into that dysfunctional family mess. Had the guy thought he was getting a wife who loved him?

  But Vivian was shaking her head, a small and completely humorless smile flattening her mouth. “Believe me, Gerald didn’t car
e. I looked the part, and I expected nothing from him, which left him free to get back to what he really loved—his business dealings. Which were the reasons my parents wanted me to marry him, in the first place. They wanted to get in on his investment scheme. I was basically collateral. I didn’t know it at the time but they were on the verge of bankruptcy, and Gerald offered them a way to hold onto their lavish lifestyle.”

  The offhand way she said it, as if she hadn’t expected more from her parents, made Cooper frown. “Is that why you divorced him?”

  That wary prey look came over her again. “I divorced him because he abandoned me. Three years ago. You really…you never heard about this?”

  Dread crept up the back of Cooper’s neck. “What should I have heard?”

  Under the cold-reddened cheeks, Vivian looked pale and wan but she squared her shoulders. Tilting her chin up determinedly, she said, “It was all over the news for a while, because so many people were affected.”

  “By your divorce?”

  Vivian blew out a gusty breath that fogged the air in front of her. “No. By the fact that Gerald’s investment company turned out to be a sham. He fled to the Maldives with the cash, after cleaning out everyone who invested with him.”

  Reeling with shock and sudden recognition—he had heard the name “Gerald Findlay” before—Cooper said, “Including your parents?”

  She flinched, but kept her voice steady as a rock. “Actually, no. As it turned out, my parents were in on it with him. They steered their wealthy, high society friends to invest with Gerald…and when it all came crashing down, they were safely ensconced in a penthouse in Moscow, sitting on piles of money. They sold out all their friends and cashed in, then retired to a country with no extradition to the U.S. So they can never be forced to return. They didn’t leave me much, but everything I had went to paying back the victims of their fraud.”

  Speechless, Cooper could only stare at her. While he’d been off making his fortune and enjoying it while seeing the world, she’d been used as part of a negotiation between her crooked parents and crookeder husband, then abandoned by both to face the wrath of the people they’d duped.

  No wonder she seemed more guarded than he remembered. But she wasn’t hiding from him now.

  In fact, Vivian pulled her shoulders back and lifted her face to his as she said, “So there you have it. I broke my engagement to the penniless man I loved and married the rich guy my parents wanted—and now here I am. I own nothing more than the clothes on my back, and you’re a billionaire with the freedom to do and be whatever you want. I could almost laugh at the irony, if it weren’t the life I have to live.”

  Shaking his head as if that would re-order the pieces of information that this revelation had shattered into pieces, Cooper said, “What do you mean, you own nothing? You just bought this cabin.”

  Sadness and longing darkened her eyes to the color of the night sky after a storm. “With Miles and Greta’s money. They loaned me the down payment, and I got a loan from the bank—that’s what I was doing the other night, that made me miss the wedding rehearsal. The cabin doesn’t belong to me…but it is my future. I’m going to fix it up and flip it, and hopefully make enough money to buy the next place. And so on.”

  “You’re doing the renovations yourself?” Alarm tightened Cooper’s chest. He’d seen the rickety state of the cabin, but… “I assumed you’d be hiring contractors and handymen to do the work.”

  “I don’t have the money for that.” She smiled, and it was only a little shaky at the corners. “Don’t worry, I’m looking forward to it. I spent most of my marriage decorating and redecorating our house, and I borrowed a few DIY books from the Sanctuary Island library. I’ll be fine.”

  She would be fine, Cooper decided on the spur of the moment. He’d make sure of it.

  “I have a proposal for you,” he told her. “And this time, you’re not walking away from me before I’m done with you.”

  Chapter 6

  The word “proposal” rang oddly in Vivian’s ears, everything else fading out around it. “What?” she asked, sucking in a breath and half expecting him to go down on one knee.

  Instead, Cooper put his hands on his hips and turned to survey the exterior of the cabin with a critical eye. “How much did you borrow to pay for this place?”

  Vivian didn’t like the skeptical tone. But as she followed his gaze, taking in the dilapidated side view of the front porch, the disreputable missing shingles from the roof, and the general air of being down on its luck, she couldn’t blame Cooper for turning up his nose at the old place. But Vivian had vision, and if she squinted, she saw the cabin as it could be—bright lights shining from the windows, a curl of smoke seeping from the chimney, and fresh paint job would work wonders to turn this house into a home.

  “I didn’t borrow more than it’s worth,” she assured him, biting her lip when it sounded as if she were trying to convince both of them. “It’s going to be someone’s dream home, I’m sure of it.”

  She ought to know. It was her dream home. But she had to sell it. That was the plan.

  Until Cooper Hayes tilted his head and said, “I want to make you an offer. Right here, right now.”

  Caught off balance, Vivian stammered, “What kind of an offer?”

  “A generous one.” Cooper’s mouth quirked up, and he named a figure that was five times the amount Vivian had paid for the cabin. Her eyes felt like they would pop out of her head as she mentally tabulated how quickly she could pay back the Harringtons and the bank, with enough left over to fund her next house flipping project.

  “But…” She struggled to control her lungs, which wanted to hyperventilate. “Cooper, that’s too much. I can’t accept.”

  Annoyance creased the corners of his eyes. “My money is as good as anyone’s. At least I came by it honestly.”

  He meant it to sting, and it did. But Vivian couldn’t let emotion or personal need into this conversation. “I didn’t tell you all that stuff about my parents and Gerald to make you feel sorry for me, and I won’t take advantage of…”

  “What?” He lifted a brow. “Our relationship? We don’t have one. Our history? It sucks. You’re not taking advantage of anything except a solid opportunity. This is a business deal, plain and simple.”

  Vivian blinked away the burn of his cool assessment of their relationship. Message received, Mr. Hayes. Last night meant nothing to you. I mean nothing to you.

  But if that were true…

  “Why are you doing this?” she demanded.

  Cooper shrugged, pacing a few steps along the lakeshore as if he were restless. “I don’t know, I like it here. Sanctuary Island is pretty, the people are nice, some of my best friends have fallen for local girls…it makes sense to establish a base camp somewhere. Might as well be here.”

  Vivian narrowed her eyes. “What about all that stuff you said, when you thought this was my vacation home? You sure weren’t interested in having a base camp then.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  Breathing deeply through her nose, Vivian turned to look at her cabin once more in the harsh, unforgiving mid-morning light. Temptation prodded at her to accept, arguing that she’d never get another offer this good.

  “There’s only so much of a fight I can put up, here,” she said absently, her imagination already working on the list of supplies and tools she could buy with the purchase money.

  “I’m not sure why you’re fighting it at all, to be honest.”

  “Would you believe it’s been a long time since anything surprised me in a nice way?” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “I started to get used to bad luck.”

  Cooper smiled, slow and predatory in a way that pumped adrenaline into Vivian’s bloodstream. “We’ll see if you still feel lucky when you hear my conditions.”

  ***

  Cooper had learned to trust his instincts over the years, to let the universe guide him. The universe had led him to his best friends, his most memora
ble experiences in foreign lands…and it had also led him back into contact with Vivian Banks.

  There was something between them, and he needed more time to figure out what it was. Other than the obvious, he acknowledged silently with an appreciative scan of her lithe, slender form. They’d always been compatible in bed, and when they first knew each other, they’d been compatible everywhere else, too.

  Things were different now. They were both different people, a lot of water had passed under the bridge—so much that maybe it had flooded and washed the bridge out completely.

  But maybe not. He looked at Vivian now, hope and apprehension warring in her eyes, and he knew he wasn’t ready to walk away. Did that mean he was giving up on his revenge?

  Not entirely.

  Cooper smiled, and it must not have been a very comforting grin because Vivian immediately looked wary. That was okay. She should be.

  “What conditions?” she asked cautiously.

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and cracked his neck lazily. “I think the amount I’m offering buys me input into what renovations you do.”

  She nodded slowly, the line of her shoulders relaxing slightly. “That seems reasonable.”

  That was because she hadn’t heard the kicker. “I’ll also want to oversee the renovations personally.”

  Vivian’s jaw dropped for a bare instant before she closed her mouth with a snap. “You mean, you want to stay on the island so you can order me around and watch me work?”

  “Not exactly.” Cooper sauntered closer, feeling like a lion stalking a gazelle when she quivered in place, clearly fighting the urge to fall back. “I want to stay here…in the cabin. With you. And I want to help with the work.”

  That wrinkle he’d always adored appeared between her black brows. “You want to pay me a fortune for a fixer-upper, and then you want to do the fixing up yourself?”

  Not quite ready to admit that he wanted to spend more time with her, Cooper shrugged again. “Sounds like an interesting project. And who knows, maybe that’s what’s always been missing when I’ve bought a place to live before—maybe if I get my hands dirty and make it the way I want it to be, it’ll feel more like a real home.”