Chapter 30

“What’s that troubled look on your face for, little moon?” Mr. Cooper asked later that day.

Sitting across from him at his dinner table, I took a second to finish chewing the lightly seasoned chicken breast that Lydia had made that night. The same piece of chicken breast that I had more than likely been chewing for the last two minutes while I’d been busy thinking about the first part of the day. Specifically, the part of the day that involved my interactions with Ripley.

The part where he told me he wanted me in his life in a way that had nothing to do with work.

That entire conversation that had left my heart pounding, my brain confused, and my entire existence uprooted.

That was what I’d been thinking about all day. Even right then, while I ate with the Coopers and spent time with them… until my date in two hours.

My date.

What the hell was I doing?

“Problems at work? Ripley said Jason never came back,” Mr. Cooper kept picking, his face genuinely concerned, which pulled at my heart.

Finally swallowing the chicken, I shook my head, not sure what I should say. Sir, your estranged son of twenty years that was in a motorcycle club says he needs me. I love him, but I’m scared he’ll change his mind and won’t care about me someday, or he’ll tell me to leave him alone again.

That wasn’t going to happen.

“Yeah, he never came back. He probably knew the guys would kick his butt if he did,” I told him with a smile that was mostly genuine, at least beneath the confusion screwing up the rest of me into Gordian knots.

That had Mr. Cooper grinning. “Doesn’t surprise me. I’m too old to be fighting with boys young enough to be my grandchildren, but I have to say, I would’ve put a world of hurt on that boy if I were ten years younger. Gus”—he was referring to Lenny’s grandpa—“called me after he found out what happened and tried to talk me into doing something about it.”

The smile I gave him that time was totally genuine. I could already imagine Grandpa Gus’s crazy self wanting to do something about it. He hadn’t gotten the memo he was in his seventies.

“What is it then, honey?” Lydia asked from her spot across the dining room table from me.

It comforted me. They comforted me. Living with them had been the first time ever I’d sat around a dining room table to eat. We had done it every night after work unless we all went out to eat, or they went out and I stayed at the house. It had been one of my favorite things about living with them. The sense of family.

It had made me want that for my own someday.

They deserved more than me keeping things from them, even if those things revolved around a man who they both had strained relationships with. But I guess life was just one big complication any way you looked at it.

Life wasn’t easy or black and white.

And I really did need to tell them the truth.

Because if Rip wasn’t lying….

“It’s…,” I started to say before lowering my fork and knife to the plate. “It’s Rip.”

Both of them blinked and stayed very, very still.

“Did he finally decide to get his head out of his ass?” Mr. Cooper asked with a wary smile after a moment.

“What?”

He repeated himself. “Did he finally get his head out of his ass and tell you to save those dates for him?”

My mouth gaped open, and I was really, really glad that I had set down the knife and fork. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the cautious little smile on Lydia’s face as she bent toward her food and started cutting her chicken while Mr. Cooper and I made eye contact.

“I knew you didn’t see it, little moon. I knew it from the first moment that I saw that look in Ripley’s eyes. Didn’t I tell you, Lydia, honey?” he asked his wife.

Lydia nodded as she chewed her food and then held a hand up to cover her mouth as she agreed. “You did, and I saw it with my own two eyes too.”

“What did you tell her?” I asked slowly, trying to process what he was implying.

He cocked his head to the side. “That you didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know what?”

His smile was bittersweet. “That he took one look at you and knew.”

“Mr. Cooper, you know I’m not that great with puzzles and contexts clues. What did he know looking at me?”

“The same thing I knew when I looked at Lydia.” His smile changed from a bittersweet one to a soft one, and I could see in his eyes that he thought about another woman he had known once. “My daddy was the same way. His daddy was the same way. Us Coopers, we just know. The only difference is, Ripley got his stubbornness from his mom’s side of the family. I didn’t fight it.”

“You think Ripley… likes me?” I asked.

The older man cocked his head to the other side and went about cutting a piece of his chicken as he answered, “I don’t think. I know. I’ve seen it on his face a thousand times, Luna. Especially when he was being hard on you. I’ve tried telling him a few times that he should do something about it, but God knows when he sets his mind to something, there’s no convincing him to change it unless he decides to. And I know that takes an act of God. Just like his mom. He’s got that Ripley blood in him.”

He still didn’t look back up at me as he continued going. “I don’t know him that well anymore, but I still see the boy he used to be in bits and pieces of him. He’s got the thickest skin I’ve ever seen, but I know those bones are still made out of love like they were… before.”

Before his mom’s accident? Before he’d left Houston and done all those things he didn’t want to talk about?

“Luna, honey,” Lydia spoke up. “Our relationships with Ripley are what they are. I couldn’t hold it against him, but I wish he would forgive us after so long. I never had kids, but I was close to my mama and daddy, and if my daddy would have married some strange woman a year after my mama died, I can’t say I would have behaved any better than he did. I knew what I was doing coming into Allen and Ripley’s life back then. I’ve gotta live with knowing that because I loved someone, his son packed up his things and left him for twenty years,” she paused. “We both have to live with that.”

It all made sense all of a sudden. Rip’s reaction to Lydia. And as much as I would want to think that if I had a healthy relationship with my dad that I would want him to be happy… well, I wasn’t sure what I would think if or when he got remarried.

I tried to think of how Lenny would have reacted to Grandpa Gus getting married again, and really, it wasn’t a pretty scene when I imagined it.

A large hand drifted over my forearm and settled there, and even though I knew it was Mr. Cooper’s, I still glanced at his face. “He’s a difficult man. Trust me. Nobody knows that better than me. But he pushes the people that love him, pushes them like he’s trying to make sure they won’t go anywhere. Rip is the total opposite of you. God knows I love him and I will until the day I die, but I love you too. And you both deserve to be happy. He thinks the world of you, and I can’t help but think God brought you into our lives for a reason.”

I stared at this man, feeling the fear in my chest, and I asked him, “But he loved you and he left you for twenty years, Mr. C. That’s not… what I want.”

His smile was slow and honestly heartbreaking. “Luna, he threatened to quit on me a hundred times in the first year he came back.”

I blinked.

“He hasn’t stuck around because of me, honey.”

* * *

Why was I even here? I asked myself as I put my car into park and then turned off the ignition.

Why was I? I should have cancelled the dumb date. I was wasting my time, gas, and money, and doing the same for whatever poor fool was meeting me here.

Because I didn’t want to meet this guy that my sister Kyra had set up for me over a month ago.

I didn’t want to meet any of the guys that I had. The more I thought about it, the more I accepted it.

This whole thing was a mess I didn’t know how to handle or what to think of.

Mr. Cooper had been adamant as I’d left, that regardless of what had happened between him and his son, that Rip did care about me. And Rip had been Lucas Ripley Cooper at one point. He was still in there.