Page 11 of Broken Heart

I could see her emotions getting the best of her. “Please don’t say that. Simon and I really want you to be back in our lives. We miss you. And we want you to be in our baby’s life.”

Maybe the lack of sleep was causing me to imagine things. Maybe I was hallucinating. Nobody who did to me what Maria had done could actually believe what she was suggesting would ever be possible.

“That’s never going to happen.”

“So, what are you saying? We’re never going to speak to each other again? I couldn’t help it, Skye. I fell in love with him, but I’m willing to do whatever it takes to fix this between us.”

I shrugged my shoulders, shot her a look of indifference, and said, “Well, I’m not.”

“How do you think that’s going to work? What about the charity benefit for literacy coming up in two weeks? We’ve all been going to that for years. Are we supposed to just pretend we don’t know one another when we’re there?”

The charity benefit had been one of the things I’d decided I needed to let go of when everything happened. I wasn’t going to subject myself to being in the presence of two people who betrayed me the way Simon and Maria had.

Simon worked at the local public school as the librarian and Maria had been just as much of a book addict as I was, so we’d always attended the event together.

“This will be my first time since I started going to that benefit with my grandmother that I won’t be going, so you won’t have to worry about seeing me there,” I told her.

Disappointment washed over her. She parted her lips to respond to me, but before she could, a masculine voice broke into the conversation.

“Sweetheart, why didn’t you tell me you had a charity benefit you attended every year?”

My eyes widened as my head snapped to the side. Cooper was standing there, looking at me with something I couldn’t quite read in his expression.

Had he just called me sweetheart?

“What?” I rasped.

Cooper moved closer, wrapped his arm around my back to my opposite shoulder, and gave me a reassuring squeeze. He let go of my shoulder, sifted his hand into the mass of hair at the back of my head, and massaged my scalp.

My heart pounded harder at the intimate touch and the proximity to Cooper. Between his masculine scent and strong presence, I was a bundle of nerves. Cooper moved his hand through my hair with such ease, like he’d been doing it for months.

In any other situation, I might have loved the way that felt and succumbed to the gloriousness of it. I had a feeling Cooper was trying to get me to relax, but I was growing more and more tense with each passing second.

Not once taking his eyes off me, he said, “You should have told me about the benefit. What day is it?”

I swallowed hard. “June 30th.”

A smile broke out across his face. “That’s the day before my birthday celebration. We can do both that weekend.”

What was happening here?

I licked my lips, feeling so unsure of what to do or say. Finally, I decided it might be best to play along, doing it while making sure neither one of us made any commitments we weren’t going to follow through on.

“I… I just thought it would be too much, so I decided against going to the benefit,” I explained with a shrug.

Cooper’s hand that had been massaging my scalp finally stilled just above my neck. Or, well, every part of it except his thumb. His thumb stroked back and forth on the bare skin at the back of my neck, sending a shiver down my spine.

He shook his head. “But you’ve been doing it for years, sweetheart. We’re not missing it.”

“Cooper, I… we really don’t have to go,” I told him.

“I insist. We’ll have a great time. I promise.”

It seemed he refused to let me decline, and since I was trying to deal with how I felt with his hand in my hair, his thumb stroking the skin on my neck, and the scent of him this close while his big body was cocooning mine, I couldn’t seem to speak.

Maria, unfortunately, had no problem finding any words to say. “You’ve moved on.”

For the first time since Cooper had approached and joined in the conversation, I tore my attention away from him and looked at my former best friend. “Is that a problem?”