Irresistibly Yours (Oxford #1)(70)

“I don’t think so, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks for the balloons, Penelope!” Bobby called as she left the room.

She turned to face Cole as he followed her out, but he shook his head. “Not here. I need air.”

The walk to the elevator was silent. As was the ride down.

Not until they stepped outside into the warm sunshine did he speak.

“I told you not to come.”

Her footsteps faltered at his hard tone, and she turned to face him.

“I know,” she said quietly. “I just didn’t want you to be alone.”

“Are you kidding me, Penelope? He’s the one who shouldn’t have been alone,” Cole snapped. “I should have been there.”

She knew it was coming, but the sharpness in his tone still stung.

“It’s not your fault,” she said quietly.

He ignored her. “Do you know what he told me when I asked why he walked into the crosswalk when there was a no-walk sign?”

Penelope shook her head.

“He said that I do it all the time,” Cole said, his eyes wild. “That I never wait for the walk sign to indicate it’s okay to cross, so why should he?”

“Cole—”

“So let’s recap, shall we?” he said, voice louder. “My brother looks up to me for everything, and I teach him how to jaywalk. And then, on the one day out of the week that I’m supposed to be there for him, I’m at a f*cking baseball game with a—”

Penelope narrowed her eyes. “With a what?”

“A woman,” he said tersely.

Penelope inhaled. She wasn’t exactly loving his tone. Still, the guy was having a rather massively bad day. He needed patience, not for her to go all diva on him.

Cole closed his eyes briefly. “I never should have canceled on Bobby.”

She took a step closer and reached out a hand. He backed up, which stung even more than his sharp words, but she let it go.

This wasn’t about her.

“I’d be feeling the same if I were in your shoes,” Penelope said quietly. “But I wouldn’t be any kind of friend if I didn’t tell you that this isn’t your fault. You do your best by Bobby, but you can’t put him in a bubble. You can’t be there every second of every day.”

“Yes, but—”

She pressed on. “What if this had happened on a Tuesday morning? Or a Thursday evening? What if he’d decided that Carly needed to have her flowers at midnight on Monday? The fact that this happened on Sunday is a coincidence, Cole.”

“Maybe,” he granted. “But Penelope, he’s up there with his leg in a cast, and bruises up and down his torso, and—”

“And he’s fine.” She found his hand and squeezed. “I’m not minimizing what happened, but he’s okay, Cole. And we’ll talk to him about crossing the street, and we’ll be more careful about—”

Cole stepped back, shaking off her hand. “We?”

Penelope faltered. “Well, I mean, I don’t want to insert myself, but I care about Bobby too—”

He laughed. “Today is the second time you’ve ever even met the guy, Penelope. Him dumping his popcorn all over you at a baseball game hardly makes you part of the family.”

She blew out a breath. “Wow.”

His words hurt; she suspected that he meant them to, but once again she tried to remember Cole wasn’t being himself.

“I’m not trying to insert myself into your family,” she said.

“And yet you came, when I specifically asked you not to.”

Penelope held her palms out to her sides and then let them drop. “What’s going on here, Cole? I’m having a hard time seeing my crime. I brought Bobby balloons, which he loved. I came to be here for you—”

He cut her off. “I don’t need you to be here for me. I don’t even— We’re not even—”

“We’re not even what?”

“We’re not together,” he said quietly.

Right. There was that.

“Not officially,” she said, “but I thought…things seemed like they were changing between us—”

He shook his head and cut her off. “You made a promise, Penelope. So did I. This was never meant to get serious, and this is why.”

“By this, you mean the off chance that your brother was going to get hit by a cab while we were at a Yankees game? That’s why you promised you wouldn’t fall in love with me?”

“Mock all you want, but he’s all I have,” Cole said.

“He’s not,” Penelope shot back before she could think better of it. “He is not all you have. You have friends, and colleagues, and me. You have me, Cole. You may not like that I’m here, but that doesn’t change the fact that I came for you, and that I’d do it all over again.”

His eyes were flat, his expression betraying nothing. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

Penelope ignored that. “Also, for what it’s worth, you’re not all Bobby has either. He loves you like crazy, Cole, but honestly, I wonder if he’s not better adjusted than you are, because he seems pretty okay with the fact that you two can be brothers and have your own lives.”