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He brushed the hair off her forehead and let his touch linger there a moment. “Don’t worry. I’ll be there to catch you.” His hand drifted down, along her jaw. “I always will be.”
She shook her head, and tears glimmered in her eyes. “Cole—”
“Trust me, Em. Just tonight.”
She bit her lip and watched him for a moment, wary, hesitant.
“It’ll be fun. Unscripted, spontaneous, fun. I promise.”
Then the hesitation disappeared and she smiled. “Okay. As long as you don’t rock the boat.”
He took her hand and led her down the hill. Her hand felt good in his, right. Long ago, they had stopped holding hands. Why, he couldn’t remember. If they ever got back together, he vowed that if Emily was nearby, he would always hold her hand. “Of course. Not rocking the boat is my specialty.”
“You’re wrong about that, Cole. I’m the one who never likes to rock the boat,” she said, bending to help him right the boat and slide it into the water. “You’re the one who takes chances.”
“In business, yes. In my personal life—” he took an oar, then waited while she climbed into the rowboat before handing her the second oar “—not so much.”
Cole gave the boat a push, and it slid into the water with a gentle ripple. He took both of the oars, positioned himself on the bench, then began rowing away from the shore. The oars made a satisfying whoosh sound with each stroke, while his back and shoulder muscles jerked to attention. A fish jumped out of the water behind them, then flopped back in, spattering them. Emily watched him row, a smile playing on her lips. “What?” he asked.
“You look...well, you look sexy and strong doing that.”
“Then maybe I should do this more often.”
She didn’t respond to that, just smiled again and leaned back on the bench. “All the times I’ve been to the Gingerbread Inn, I’ve never been out on the lake after dark. It’s so peaceful out here.”
A perfect setting for a man to propose, Cole thought. When he’d proposed to Emily all those years ago, he’d done what he always did—he’d created a plan for the evening and stuck to his timetable, almost to the minute. Dinner in the city, followed by the ubiquitous and clichéd carriage ride along New York’s streets, then pausing by Central Park to slip onto the carriage’s carpeted floor and pop the question. He’d known Em was going to say yes before he even asked, because they’d talked about getting married a half dozen times before.
Out here, alone in the dark while fish bobbed in the water around them and geese swam silently along the banks, he had the perfect setting for something unexpected. Something that would show Emily he wasn’t here to fix the porch or chop firewood. He was here for them. For a second chance. He gave the oars a final tug, then set them across the center of the boat. Then he leaned forward, dropping to one knee, and reached for his wife’s hands.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Living on the edge,” he said. “Emily, I don’t want a divorce. I don’t want us to live apart anymore. I want to try again, to give our marriage the chance it needs. Will you try again?”
Her eyes widened, and she backed up a bit. Damn. This was why he planned these things out. So he could have time to write a good proposal, to plan out what he was going to say. That had to rank up there with the top ten least romantic proposals in the history of time. “Cole, there’s a lot we need to discuss. Things we haven’t settled yet.”
“What’s to settle? I love you.” He held her hands, but noticed she didn’t hold his back. Nor did she tell him she loved him. Had her feelings for him changed? Was he reading her all wrong?
“It’s about more than love, Cole. It always was. We’re...not on the same path anymore.”
He grinned. Okay, so she hadn’t said she didn’t love him, either. He’d take that as a good sign. “We are now. A path that’s kind of going in circles in the middle of the lake.”
She pulled her hands back and tucked them inside her coat. The air between them dropped a few degrees, and the grin faded from Cole’s face.
“I want a family, Cole. I always have. We’ve put it off forever, and honestly, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t understand why. You’ve achieved what you want with the company, I’m writing my book...what more is there to do or get before we have kids?”
Just the word kids made him freeze. When he’d first married Em, he’d told her he wanted children, and maybe for a time, he had. But as the years had worn on and he watched his friends have kids and have trouble and turmoil in their families, trouble and turmoil that affected the kids and ruined their childhoods, the more Cole didn’t want to change the status quo. But he knew that telling Em would drive her away for good. She had always been set on having children, the one risk Cole didn’t want to take. “We always wanted to travel, Em. Have fun, live our lives, before we added kids into the mix.”
She let out a gust. “Let’s go back to shore. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“Let me ask you this.” He leaned toward her, causing the boat to make a gentle rocking motion. “Why do you think having kids will improve our lives?”
“How can you say they won’t?” She shook her head. “I don’t get you, Cole, I really don’t.”
“I’m just trying to make sure we have everything in order first.” He didn’t want to tell her that the thought of being a father was the only thing that truly scared Cole. He knew what he was good at and what he wasn’t—and parenting didn’t make the list of talents.
“You and your lists and timetables.” She let out a gust. “For once, I wish you would just let all that go.”
He was losing her. He could hear it in her voice, see it in her face. They had reached a moment of no return, a time when he had to act, instead of just talk. Their relationship stood on a fault line, and only a dramatic shift would keep it from falling apart.
“I can, if you want me to, Em.” He tugged his cell out of his pocket and held it over the water. “I can drop this in the water, and not think twice about it. Devote myself entirely to us for the next week or month or year or however long it takes.”
“You’d do that? Walk away from the company?”
“If it brings us back together, yes.” Then, as if God was testing his resolve, Cole’s phone began to ring. Doug, again. The little notification bar under the caller ID showed Doug had called four times with no answer. Definitely an emergency, if he was trying that hard to get hold of Cole.
He glanced at the screen, his stomach churning. The urge to answer the call, to solve the problem, burned inside him. The company had taken so much of his life in the past ten years and even now, even when it mattered, he couldn’t let it go. He could feel the need calling to him, like the business held an invisible string to his gut. He wasn’t sure which direction the need went—whether it was the company that needed him or him who needed the company. The phone dangled from his fingers, inches from the water. Then his fingers tightened their grip and the decision was made. He realized that at the same time Em did.
Emily gave him a sad little smile. “You might as well answer it.”
“What about us?”
“Us?” She took the oars and put them in the water, then began rowing back toward shore. “The only thing I know for sure is that I’m done going in circles.”
CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_944bf083-4084-54f6-b082-9c0ebe2c8236)
COLE CAUGHT UP to her after the boat was back on shore and Emily was already striding up the hill. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“Back inside.” Where she belonged. Where she wouldn’t have to think about that little rise of hope she’d had a few minutes ago when Cole had offered to throw his phone away—and answered it instead. She should have known better. He was doing what he’d always done—making promises that would dissolve as soon as they got back to real life.
“I thought we were talking.”
She spun around. “I am tired of talking, Cole. We’ve done nothing but that for years. And where did it get us? Nowhere but divorced.”
“We’re not divorced yet, Emily. There’s still—”
“I don’t want to hear one more second about how there’s still a chance. How many times did I say that to you? How many times did I try to make this work? Try to change our lives? And what did you do?” She cursed under her breath and shook her head, hating the pain in her chest, the tears burning the back of her eyes. God, why did this hurt so much? When would Cole stop having a hold on her heart? She wanted to scream at him, to tell him to stop putting her through this emotional roller coaster. The same one she’d ridden so many times in the past ten years, she could predict the next loop. There’d be a high, a wonderful honeymoon period of flowers and dinners out, followed on its heels by the plummeting lows of Cole’s absence, an empty house and an empty bed. “You made a bunch of promises and then went to work. Which is what you’re going to do this time, too, Cole. I know you. That is the curse of being married to you for so long. I know what you’re going to do, and I keep coming back even though I know it’s going to hurt.”
“The company—”
“Was always number one. And I was somewhere in distant second place.” She refused to cry. To let that hurt any more than it already had. But it did, oh, how it seared against her heart, the truth a branding iron that left a jagged scar.
Silence stretched between them for a long moment. “I never meant for that to happen.”
“Yet it did, Cole. Do you know how many times I hoped and prayed and believed, and then you’d break my heart again?” She pressed a hand to her chest and forced herself to take a breath, to be strong, to sever this connection once and for all. “I can’t do that anymore. I don’t have it in me to go through that pain one more time. Not one more time.”
Emily had finally reached her breaking point. Maybe it was the baby, maybe it was being here at the inn, where she had first learned to believe in happy endings. Maybe it was that damned hope that had sprung up inside her when Cole arrived here, and when he stayed, and when he held his phone over the lake.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “I’m done with this insanity, Cole.”
The statement exited her with a measure of frustration and relief.
Done.
All this time, she’d never used the word done. She’d always believed there was a chance, but when he’d answered his phone on the lake, she’d known the truth. He was always going to go back to the way he was, and she was always going to be the one in second place.
“I’m done, Cole,” she said again, softer this time.
“What if I’m not? What if I want to keep fighting for us?”
She shook her head, and braced her heart against the hope trying to worm its way back in there. “Where was all that six years ago, Cole? Or hell, six months ago? Now you show up, when it’s over, when we’re a few pieces of paper away from divorced, and you want me to believe you?”
“I have tried, too, Emily. I have tried to connect with you, tried to make this work. It’s not just about the company taking too much of my time. You...” He shook his head. “You stopped giving time.”
She opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again. He was right. There’d been dinners she had turned down, lunch dates she had skipped out on, late-night talks she had avoided. Cole would come and go in bursts of trying to fix them, then burying himself in work, and after a while, she learned to maintain her distance rather than trust. “It was too risky.”
“Because when it didn’t work out, you got hurt. Yeah, well, you weren’t the only one.”
In those vulnerable words, Emily heard pain, frustration, loss. An echo of what brimmed in her. They’d hurt each other, time and time again. The only thing to do, the only smart course to take, was to end this and stop the hurt, on both sides.
She nodded. “Cole, I can’t do this anymore. I mean it. I’m—” she stopped before she said she was pregnant, and trying to conserve her energy, her heart, for the baby “—done.”
Maybe if she said it enough, she would stick to that resolve. And Cole would believe her.
He eyed her, then, after a moment, nodded and let out a gust. “Then I guess my being here is a waste of my time.”
A waste of his time. That hurt. What did she expect? That he would keep fighting and fighting for their marriage, showing her finally that he was committed? Yeah, maybe she had. And now, after just a few days, Cole was giving up.
“Maybe it is,” she said, though the words hurt her throat and cost her something deep inside. She told herself it was better this way, better to let go now than to keep hoping. Sweet Pea needed a dad to depend on, not one who came and went like the wind.
* * *
The next day, Emily fiddled with her book for a couple hours but didn’t get much accomplished. The words that had flowed so easily earlier now refused to come. Probably because her mind was filled with images of Cole.
She was done, she reminded herself. Done, done, done.
He’d surprised her last night, not just with the excursion on the lake, but with the impromptu proposal. How she’d wanted to say yes, to believe that the Cole she’d seen in the past few days, the relaxed, easy man who had fallen asleep in the sun, would be the one she’d wake up next to tomorrow and every day after that.
But he wasn’t, nor did he want the same future she did. Ending it now would save her a lot of heartache down the road. Even if it felt the opposite in the light of day.
Emily gave up on writing, tugged on a thick sweatshirt, then headed outside. There was a nip in the air, a definite sign that the pretty fall days were coming to an end.
That meant she also had to start thinking about where she was going to go. She couldn’t stay here forever, though a part of her finally felt grounded here in this tiny town in Massachusetts, more familiar than the neighborhood where she’d lived with Cole for all those years. Maybe she’d rent a little house in town, settle down here and build a life with Sweet Pea. It would be a simple, uncomplicated life.
Yet the thought also saddened her. Cole didn’t want children, and once they were divorced, she doubted he’d have much to do with their baby. After their cooking fun in the kitchen, she’d hoped that maybe things would be different, but it was clear the same walls stood between them now as always. With Cole, the company came first, and family came in a distant second, if at all. She’d be raising this child on her own, and in the end, Cole would be the loser.
Cole’s rental wasn’t in the drive, but Martin Johnson’s van was, which explained why Carol had been busy fixing her hair when Emily told her she was going for a walk. Emily smiled. The inn owner was a nice woman and deserved a man who would treat her well.
“Hey, Emily,” Joe said when she stepped outside. He had a window propped on a sawhorse, removing the old glaze in order to fix a broken pane. “Cole went into town for some supplies. He should be back soon.”
“That’s okay. I’m not looking for Cole.”
Joe leaned the window against the sawhorse and crossed to Emily. “I hate seeing you guys like this. Cole’s miserable...you’re miserable. Are you sure you can’t work it out?”
“I wish we could, I really do. But it’s over.” She let out a long breath. “I still love him. Heck, I probably always will. But we just want different things out of life.”
Joe flashed her a grin. “It seemed like you were on the right track last night at dinner.”
“I thought so, too. And in a lot of ways, we are. But not in the most important ways, so I told him last night that I’m done for good.” Emily tucked her hair behind her ears. It didn’t seem right to feel this sad on such a pretty day. She had something wonderful to look forward to, and she needed to focus on that, not the problems that would soon be in her past. “I’m just tired of waiting for him to be ready to start a family and to put family first.”
“Ah, that explains a lot.” Joe grabbed a water bottle out of the cooler at his feet and took a long sip. “Did Cole say why he doesn’t want to have kids?”
“He keeps saying we haven’t done this or that. Traveled enough. Been together long enough.” She exhaled. “If you ask me, they’re all excuses.”
“If you ask me, I think you’re right.” Joe tipped the bottle in her direction and arched a brow. “The question is why a smart man like Cole would make excuses like that.”
Emily threw up her hands. “I don’t know.”
Joe nodded. His gaze went off to the distance for a moment as if he was trying to decide whether to say the next words. Finally, he returned his attention to Emily. “Did you ever meet Cole’s parents?”
“Once. A long time ago, while we were still dating. Then his dad died and his mom moved to Arizona, and... Gosh, I can’t believe it’s been that long since we’ve seen his mom.” She didn’t have the best relationship with her parents, but at least she saw them for holidays and talked to them once a week. Cole, however, didn’t call very often and had never wanted to go to Arizona. Yet another aspect of family he kept down the list from his hours at work. That alone should have told her where their child would rank.
“I’ve known Cole a long, long time,” Joe said. “And I knew his parents, too. Let’s just say he didn’t have the ideal childhood.”
“He never talks about it.” There were a few conversational topics that Cole steered away from. His childhood was one of them. She’d sensed it hadn’t been happy, something she could relate to, and had never pushed him to open up. Had she been avoiding the conversations that would have brought them closer? Had her efforts to keep the peace been part of the problem? “What happened?”
“His father was a tyrant, to put it mildly. Nothing Cole ever did was good enough. Probably why he keeps on trying to be better, even when he’s already the best in his industry. And his mother, well, she buried her head in a bottle and ignored everything around her.” Joe shook his head. “Cole pretty much raised himself and his little brother. He told me a hundred times that he never wanted to have kids and treat them like that.”
“But he’s not like either one of them. Why is he still afraid of repeating their mistakes?”
Joe shrugged. “You’d have to ask him.”
“Maybe.” Emily started to head away. She didn’t remind Joe that with the divorce looming, there’d be no conversations with Cole about his past. Done meant done, and she had to move on before she let herself get suckered back into riding that emotional roller coaster.
“Emily?” Joe said. She pivoted back. “Cole might not be the best at showing how he feels, or hell, even saying it, but believe me, that man loves you more than anything in the world. Keep an open heart.”
That man loves you more than anything in the world. How she wanted to believe that. But she thought of him answering the phone last night, and knew there were things Cole loved more than her. And always would. “I thought the expression was keep an open mind.”
“When it comes to Cole, an open heart’s a better idea.” Joe gave her a grin, then got back to work on the window.
Emily nodded, not making any promises, then strode down the dock, sat on the end and let her feet dangle above the deep blue water. The breeze skipped across the water, making it look like corrugated denim. Beautiful, serene.
She fingered the rock in her pocket and thought back to the day the four of them had found the rocks, scattered at the edge of the lake. The stones were so similar that the girls had taken it as a sign that they needed to keep them and make them special. So they’d stood by the water, holding hands and promising to always follow their dreams.
It had taken Emily a while, but she was doing that now. She wondered if Andrea and Casey were doing the same thing, or if they were stuck in Neutral like Emily had been for far too long. Oh, how she missed the other Gingerbread Girls. Maybe a talk with her friends would take her mind off Cole, and all that Joe had said.
Emily tugged out her cell, then dialed Andrea. When her old friend answered, nostalgia filled Emily’s heart. She could think of no one better to share this moment with than one of the other Gingerbread Girls. “Guess where I am?”
Andrea paused a moment, thinking. “On the end of the dock, watching for the Loch Ness monster to show up.”
