The Boyfriend Contract

by Victoria James

  He reached out for his former mother-in-law’s hand, staring into the eyes of the woman he’d held when she was overcome with grief, when she’d whispered goodbye to Catherine. “You will always be like a second mother to me. You will always be family. I will never forget Catherine,” he said hoarsely.

  She nodded, reaching out to hug him again. “You stay in touch, Cooper. But only if it means you can still move on. Don’t come and visit us if it drags you down.”

  “You’ve never dragged me down.”

  She pulled back. “I should go and apologize. Do you know when she’s coming home?”

  He shook his head. He needed to see Emily; he needed to make things right. “I don’t, but I do know she’ll be at the council meeting this week, trying to get this place approved for housing a shelter for women and children.”

  “That’s lovely,” she whispered. “I’ll go to the meeting. Frank will, too. We’ll say something in support of her.”

  He tried to smile. “I think Emily would really appreciate that. I don’t know what kind of a response to expect. You know how much people hate change around here.”

  She patted his arm. “We’ll show our support. We’ll see you there, Cooper.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  He watched his former mother-in-law leave, knowing he had to make this up to Emily.

  …

  “What the hell did you do, Cooper?”

  The banging on Cooper’s door, followed by his sister’s yelling, made him haul his ass off the couch. He should have known one of his family members would find out. Maybe he needed to see Callie, though. Maybe she would be able to tell him how Emily was doing.

  He put down his beer, lining it up with the others on the coffee table, and walked to the front door. He supposed Callie was the best choice of his family members if he had to talk to someone. His brothers would have been much more irritating. After his talk with Bernice, he’d come home and drowned himself in beer and self-loathing. At least if he was forced to speak about his feelings, the alcohol had numbed things a little.

  He opened the door to find all three of his siblings standing there.

  He swore as Austin bulldozed his way through. “That’s no way to greet family. And yes, we were quiet on purpose because we knew Callie had the best shot at you opening the door.”

  He moved aside as his siblings invaded his home and his personal space. Austin had already gone to the fridge, presumably to get beer for everyone, while Callie started straightening up the living room. Brody flopped down on the armchair and turned on the television, probably to irritate their sister. He watched with mild amusement as Callie snatched the remote out of his hand, shut off the television, and put the remote in her back pocket.

  Austin entered the room a moment later and handed out beers. “Care to join us?” he asked.

  Cooper leaned against the doorway. “Not particularly, no.”

  Callie grabbed a beer and then glared at him as she sat down. “Cooper, you better tell me why you broke my best friend’s heart.”

  He looked down at the ground and clenched his teeth. He had no good answer for her.

  “Because he’s an idiot. One too many baseballs to the head,” Brody said. “No one with half a brain would walk away from Emily.”

  Cooper shot him a look.

  “That’s not helping,” Callie snapped at Brody. “If you have nothing nice to say, then keep it zipped.”

  “I thought you signed a contract that prevented you from acting like a douche?” Austin said, propping his feet up on the coffee table.

  Callie shook her head. “I’ve heard enough from the both of you. Leave the talking to me. Cooper, can you please sit beside me on the couch so we can talk?”

  He almost smiled at the tone of his sister’s voice, but instead he opted to scowl at his brothers as he sat on the couch. “I didn’t mean to break her heart,” he said.

  “Well, you did.”

  He cleared his throat and made eye contact with her. “Did you talk to her?”

  “She avoided me. Avoided me. Her best friend. Because of you. When you guys started dating, we acknowledged it might be weird, and we both agreed not to share sordid details and that whatever happened between the two of you wouldn’t come between us. But it’s easier said than done when you actually destroyed my best friend. And the worst part,” she said, taking a huge gulp of air and then a long swig of beer—which was probably for dramatic effect, knowing her history, “the worst part is that she didn’t even trash-talk you. I would have. Hell, I tried. But she didn’t. She just said something sad, like you would never be able to get over Catherine, and that was okay, and she was fine with her life.”

  He opened his mouth, trying to come up with something to say, but couldn’t because he felt sick. He knew it had nothing to do with the mass consumption of beer. Callie swatted him with a pillow. “You’re ruining your life, Coop. You’re ruining your life and hers, and you know what?”

  He shook his head. “No, what?”

  “She’s wrong, isn’t she? It’s not because of Catherine at all. It’s because you’re afraid. You’re afraid of loving her so much that it hurts,” she whispered, pausing to blow her nose. He caught the sad expressions on his brothers’ faces. He hated pity. He hated being the object of their worry, but they were right. They knew him better than himself, and if Emily had known her own self-worth she would have known he’d been lying to her.

  He leaned forward and braced his forearms on his thighs. “You’re right. I was an asshole because I thought I was protecting myself. I don’t just want to…screw around with Em. I want her forever. I’m in love with her.”

  Silence clung to the air, and he felt somewhat better having that out there now.

  “Well, then fix this,” Brody said.

  “That’s my problem. How the hell do I fix this?”

  “She’ll talk to you,” Callie said softly.

  He hung his head and forced himself to speak to them and be open, when he hated being open. “It’s not that. How do I convince myself to take a chance again?”

  “Do you have a choice?” Brody said, putting down his beer and leaning forward, giving him that serious big brother stare that he’d mastered early on in his role as the oldest sibling.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s the plan? Can you forget about Emily? Can you just walk away and live your life happily? What happens when you see her? When you see her with some other guy, are you going to want to rip his head off? Are you going to sit around like some loser wondering what your life could have been like with Emily if you weren’t so damn scared?”

  Cooper stared into Brody’s eyes a little longer than was comfortable, mostly because he had already thought of this but was still incapable of getting off the couch and acting on it. “I know. I know you’re saying the truth, but none of you really get it. You can sit there and tell me the logical thing to do, but none of you have had to watch your spouse die.”

  “You have to get that line of thinking out of your head,” Brody said harshly.

  Cooper stood up, adrenaline and anger kicking in. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Any of you. You just perpetually date whoever the fuck looks good to you on any given weekend, and it never goes anywhere. So until you have to watch someone die, then shut the fuck up. You know what I saw when Emily was telling me about her plans for that women’s shelter she wants to build? I saw her as my wife. Pregnant. And then I imagined her dying. Like, who the hell have I become? I picture people dying? This is who I am now?

  “I don’t even know what I am, what I want. All I know is that I never want to do that again. I never want to lose someone again.” His voice broke, and he wanted to kick something or someone. The silence in the room told him what he already knew—he had deep issues. Maybe they’d never go away.

  “You lost your faith, Cooper,” Callie said softly.

  He turned away from all of them, bracing his hands
on the fireplace mantel and purposely not looking at the picture of Catherine. “I don’t want it, Cal. It got me nowhere. It means nothing. Faith means nothing when everything gets taken away from you.”

  Callie walked over and put her arms around him. “We know, Coop. We know. Which is why we want you to live your happily ever after. No one deserves it more than you.”

  Hell. Maybe it was that moment, his little sister’s tear-filled plea about no one deserving a happy ending more than him, that got his head out of his ass, because there was someone who deserved a happy ending. An incredibly beautiful woman who’d trusted him, a woman who deserved the love of a man who’d make her first in his life, who’d show her with words and actions how amazing she was.

  He’d been selfish, thinking just about how he couldn’t go through grief again, how he was so scared of losing Emily. But what about Emily? She told him she didn’t need a man—that she’d gotten to where she was without one and that she’d get to where she needed to be without one. Maybe he needed to prove his worth to her, because he knew the power of two.

  He kissed the top of Callie’s head and said a sort of thanks. “Okay, I’m good. Get out.”

  Austin was the first to stand. “I see our work here is done.”

  Callie nodded, standing as well. “At least we can tell Mom and Dad not to worry about him anymore.”

  “Getting really sick of that conversation,” Brody added.

  “Yeah, you owe us one. They were going to come here tonight, and Mom had highlighted passages from the Bible she was going to read you,” Austin said, slapping him on the back a little too hard to be friendly.

  Cooper folded his arms across his chest and glared at them. “Fine. I owe you guys.”

  “Don’t worry,” Austin said as they left the house. “We’ll be sure to collect.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Cooper stood by Pine Lake, the exact spot where he and Catherine’s parents had spread her ashes. He’d come here a lot after she died. He’d sit on the dock and talk to her as though she were still alive. It had never felt stupid to him. She’d been a part of his life for so long, his best friend, that when she died, he’d longed to keep talking to her. But time had passed, and he’d slowly learned that in order to really move on, he’d have to let go a little. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten her, but it was that he needed to start living again.

  He’d thought he’d started to. He thought he’d re-entered the real world, but he hadn’t. He knew that now, because of Emily. He hadn’t been living until Emily came along. He’d been living a half life, a one-foot-in-the-lake kind of life. That half-assed approach was now going to cost him his relationship with Emily. Because when push came to shove, when he’d been faced with his greatest fears, he’d chickened out. He’d let Emily walk out of his life. He made a woman who’d never believed she was good enough trust him with her heart, only for him to basically confirm that she wasn’t enough for him, either. He was an asshole. If he could have gone back and done things differently, he would have.

  He would have protected her from his past. He would have talked to Catherine’s parents before he was serious about Emily, so that he could protect her from them. But Emily hadn’t signed up for any of their baggage. She could have any man she wanted, someone who didn’t have issues with faith and trust, someone who could have given her the best of themselves. He didn’t know what he had left of himself, and it clearly wasn’t good enough for someone like Emily. She’d trusted him with her heart, with her secrets, her insecurities, and he’d walked away.

  He pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and swore out loud toward the empty lake. He was so damn sorry for hurting her and losing her. No, he was afraid of loving her more and more and then losing her. He didn’t know how to explain that. He had never started out wanting to fall in love again. With Catherine it had just been natural. They were so young neither of them really had any idea what they were doing. They had no idea how shitty life could be, how cruel. They just went in blind—and they’d gotten burned.

  Now that he was older, he knew what it meant to love someone with everything you were and to make dreams for a future that would never happen, and he was afraid. Emily made him alive again. She gave him purpose. She made him laugh. He was humbled by her faith and trust in him, which was why he hated himself for letting her down.

  He sat on the edge of the dock. He needed to get this over with and make things right.

  “Hi, Cath,” he said, letting out a deep, weighted sigh. He still came here now and again, but he didn’t have that need to speak aloud anymore. Sometimes he’d stand here waiting, searching for the guy he used to be, searching for the life he used to have. He didn’t need that today. Today he needed closure; he needed to move forward.

  “I was thinking back to that night we talked about me moving on.” He could remember like it was yesterday. The doctors had told them hope was gone, that there was nothing left to try. They had stayed in bed, and he’d just held her. They had clung to each other as though there might be some way they could stay like that forever. If he’d been a kid, he’d have wished he might be enough, that his holding her in the real world would be enough to keep her there. They had talked the entire night, and he’d been so grateful for that because it was the last night she’d really talked. They had talked and cried and kissed, and he’d told her there would never be anyone else for him.

  And yet now, here he was, in a place where there was someone.

  Five years ago, he never could have imagined himself with another woman, let alone another woman he loved more than anything. He ran his hands through his hair. “You told me you didn’t want me to spend the rest of my life alone. You told me you wanted me to get married again and have kids, and we argued until I finally agreed, because I didn’t want you to be upset. But I lied. I lied to you to give you peace. You know how much I missed you; you know how much we all missed you. You were my best friend and lover and wife, and I never thought I would want that again. Losing you almost killed me. It changed me. I’m not the same person I was. I’ve realized I was half-living because I was afraid of full-living and loving.

  “I met someone. Emily. She’s new here and, uh, as weird as it sounds, I think you’d have liked her. She’s different from you; she’s different from anyone I’ve met before. I’ve fallen for her. I see myself with her forever. And I just want you to know that my loving her doesn’t ever change the love I had for you. And I’ll still watch out for your parents. They will always be a part of my family.”

  He wiped his palms down the front of his jeans and took a deep breath, the heaviness in his chest easing as he stood. He pulled out the two wedding bands that had been on his dresser for the last five years, clutching them for one last moment before dropping them into the water. They belonged with Catherine, with whatever part of him she took with her when she died. They belonged with his old life. This part of his life wasn’t erased, but it was over. He was ready to move forward, fully.

  He wasn’t afraid of the depth of the love he had for Emily. Now, he just needed to make things right for her. He needed to prove she was the only woman on his mind.

  …

  Emily finished applying a coat of neutral lip gloss and then assessed herself in the front hall mirror. She needed to appear professional, but not too dressed up or no one would identify with her at the town hall meeting. She needed to seem approachable. She also needed to look good and not like she was dying of a broken heart, because she knew Cooper and his family would be there tonight. Or maybe just his family. Regardless, they’d tell him if she was thriving or if she looked like a zombie. This wasn’t about her and her drama; this was about convincing the town that a women’s shelter was the right thing for it.

  She double-checked that her notes were in the bag. She had prepared as much as she could, and at least this time she knew what to expect. She was ready to fight for her shelter, with or without Cooper’s help.

  The doorbell rang
, and Emily’s heart leaped. She foolishly hoped it was Cooper coming to tell her he’d made a horrible mistake. What she hadn’t realized when she started falling for him was how much it would hurt to be rejected by him. She’d been able to save face that night because she’d had years of practice, years of being hurt and not letting it show. She had put herself out there for the first time in her life, and she’d been shot down. The old her might have picked apart all her worst qualities and then said that was the reason. But she knew it wasn’t her fault.

  She was barely making it through the days. She kept busy by avoiding Cooper and getting to know Morgan more and more. She and Morgan had developed an understanding, and she was so happy to see that the girl seemed to be coming out of her shell. She’d even been able to see her laugh, and some nights they’d watch TV together and order pizza. She had never imagined that helping someone like this would help heal her own wounds. Callie’s friend Noel had been the biggest blessing, helping her with the new plan to turn the house into a women’s shelter. She knew the exact people to reach out to for approval and to get funding and nonprofit status. If all went well tonight, she would be able to make this a reality and help countless women and children.

  She walked to the door, refusing to hope for something she knew wasn’t going to happen, but still having a tiny glimmer of hope that Cooper was standing on the other side. She opened it, and dread pooled in her stomach as she found her brother standing on the porch.

  It was cruel—of all the people in the world to show up, and right before she had to get to the town hall. She clutched the door, trying to summon strength for the blow she hadn’t seen coming. She’d thought it was Cooper. How pathetic could she get?

  “Hi,” her brother said, for a second looking as though everything was fine. She knew it was all an act. This was the calmness and pleasantness before she said no. When you said no to him, that’s when all hell broke loose.