The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River #3)

If Emma swallowed her pride and gave Cooper this medal, he would disappear. Being mean hadn’t worked. Seduction hadn’t worked. The only thing that would work to get rid of him before things got really complicated was to give him the medal. If Cooper had that, he would go back to LA and tell stories about her.

If she gave it to him, she would humiliate herself. But she would also spare herself the agony of wanting to climb a mountain she was incapable of scaling. Best to look at the mountain from afar, admire the peaks, but keep her distance.

So give it to him. Give it to him, give it to him, send him on his way. The longer he stays, the more he sees. The more he sees, the weaker you are.

It was the only thing to do, and yet it was so hard, almost unbearable to admit that she really was a liar and a thief and a slut with some very mixed-up ideas.

Emma rolled onto her back on the bed, put the box on her belly, and stared up at the peeling ceiling.

Shortly after she’d arrived in Pine River, she’d attended a yoga class with Libby. Yoga wasn’t her thing, but Libby had convinced her. Come on, you’ll feel like a new person, she’d said. Emma had needed to feel like a new person. So she’d gone.

At the end of class, with her hands in prayer pose, her thumbs pressed to her heart center and her head bowed, the instructor had said, “Today, be yourself. Your true, undefined self.”

That particular comment had stuck with Emma and had pointed out a huge gaping hole in her: She didn’t know who her undefined self was. She’d been defined by the summer of her seventeenth year for so long that she’d barricaded her spirit from the world. And in that yoga class, Emma had been struck with the unnerving realization that she didn’t know how to set her spirit free.

“Maybe now,” she said aloud. Maybe now was the time to be undefined, to step out of the borders of her boxed-in life.





FOURTEEN

Cooper was thirty-eight years old. His ability to close out the world when he was in an unfamiliar place—to sleep anywhere, like he had in his twenties—was considerably diminished.

The sleep he’d managed on that couch over the last two hours had been very shallow. He’d been aware of every creak and moan in this old house, and had even believed he could hear the snow falling. In fact, the snowfall became so loud that he worried it was a true blizzard and he’d be trapped at this ranch. He got up to peer out the big picture window, wearing only his boxers.

Not only had the snow quit falling, there were only three inches of it on the ground, if that—nothing that Luke couldn’t manage in his Jeep.

Cooper was not trapped. He hadn’t miraculously developed supersonic hearing.

He’d returned to the couch and slung an arm over his eyes. His nerves were electrified, his thoughts whirring. He kept thinking of Emma, of the way her eyes weren’t exactly green, but neither were they blue. More like the color of a tropical sea. He thought about the way she’d interacted with everyone at the supper table, the invisible veil she put up between her and everyone else. As if she was present, but not entirely. Her gaze had found him occasionally, and the faint flicker of a smile across her lips would show before she quickly averted her eyes. She was afraid to look at him after he’d talked to her in the kitchen. Why?

Cooper also thought about the canyon he’d seen today. He must have drifted into sleep, dozing a little, because he was climbing the sheer face of a cliff, his hold so tenuous that a breeze would have dislodged him. He became aware of someone or something, and when he turned his head to look, he slipped from his hold.

Cooper’s eyes flew open; a shadow passed in his peripheral vision. He blinked against the dark until he could focus in the dim light of a lamp that had been left on in the hall, and turned his head.

Emma was standing at the front window, gazing out. She was wearing an oversized shirt, and her legs, slender and shapely, were bare. Her hair fell down her back in one long silken drape, and Cooper was reminded of the feel of it between his fingers.

“It’s stopped snowing,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.

Cooper didn’t speak; he lifted up to one elbow.

Emma turned around to face him. She looked ghostlike, framed in the window as she was. Cooper’s curiosity was aroused, as was his body. “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice gravelly from fitful sleep.