Good Girl Complex(Avalon Bay #1)(96)

He breaks my heart. Living without joy, without anticipation that tomorrow can still be extraordinary, will suck the soul right out of a person. It’s the cold, dark, strangling infinity of nothingness, of being swallowed up by despair. Nothing can grow in the empty places where we resign ourselves to the numbness. Never really alive. It’s the same long tunnel into complacency that I saw closing in around me the harder I looked at the future Preston and my parents imagined for me.

Cooper saved me from that. Not because he whisked me away, but because meeting him finally revealed the possibilities I’d been missing. The exhilaration of uncertainty. Passion and curiosity.

I was half asleep until I met him.

“I thought I was happy,” I tell him, gliding my fingers up and down his ribs. “For a long time. What was there to complain about, right? I’d been given everything I could ever ask for—except purpose. A choice. The potential to fail, to get hurt. To ever love something so much the thought of losing it tears me open. Tonight, when I thought you and I might really be over, all sorts of things ran through my head. I was making myself crazy.”

Cooper tilts my chin toward him and presses his lips to mine with the lightest touch. Enough to make me seek him out for another taste.

His breath is a warm whisper against my lips. “I might just be falling in love with you, Cabot.”

My heart jumps. “Uh-oh.”

“You have no idea.”

He drags his fingers down my spine, setting every nerve alight. I bite his bottom lip, tug a little, in our wordless language that says I need him. Now. Take this ache away. But he’s methodically, frustratingly patient in removing my tank top before he palms one breast while licking at the other. He pushes his boxers down. I wiggle out of my underwear as he puts on a condom. A shiver of anticipation skitters through me when he drags the hot length of him over my core.

He holds me tight as he moves inside me. Unhurried. Slow, languid strokes. I cling to him, muffling my moans against his shoulder.

“I love you too,” I say, shaking in his arms while I come.





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE


COOPER

A few days after filing charges against Shelley, I receive a call to come to the police station. On the phone with the sheriff, I learn that the cops picked her up in Louisiana, where she must have forgotten about all the unpaid parking tickets she’d left behind after her “fella” kicked her to the curb. When the South Carolina warrant popped up, the sheriff in Baton Rouge had her transferred back up to the Bay.

Mac and my brother come to the station with me, but I make Evan wait outside while we go in to speak to Sheriff Nixon. Evan was equally furious to learn that Shelley robbed me blind, but I know my brother—he’ll always have a soft spot for that woman. And right now I need to keep a clear head, not allow anything to cloud my judgment.

“Cooper, have a seat.” Sheriff Nixon shakes my hand, then settles behind his desk and gets right down to business. “Your mother had about ten grand in cash on her when the Baton Rouge boys brought her in.”

Relief slams into me like a gust of wind. Ten grand. It’s a couple thousand short of what she stole, but it’s better than nothing. Hell, it’s more than I expected. She was gone four days. Shelley is more than capable of blowing twelve grand in that amount of time.

“However, it could be a while before you get the money back,” Nixon adds.

I frown at him. “Why’s that?”

He starts rambling on about evidence procedures and what not, as my brain tries to keep up with all the information he’s spitting out. First things first, Shelley will be arraigned in front of a judge. Mac asks a lot of questions because I’m kind of in a stupor about the whole thing now. All I keep thinking about is Shelley in an orange jumpsuit, her wrists shackled. I despise everything that woman’s ever done to us, but the thought of her behind bars doesn’t sit right. What kind of son sends his own mother to jail?

“She’s here now?” I ask Nixon.

“In holding, yes.” He rubs a hand over his thick mustache, looking every inch the part of a small-town sheriff. He’s new to town, so I doubt he knows much about me and my family. His predecessor, Sheriff Stone, hated our guts. Spent his afternoons tailing Evan and me around the Bay all summer, looking for a reason to glare at us from his unmarked cruiser.

“What would happen if I changed my mind?”

Beside me, Mac looks startled.

“You want to withdraw the charges?” he says, eyeing me closely.

I hesitate. “Will I get my money back today?”

“There’d be no reason to hold it in evidence. So, yes.”

Which is all I wanted in the first place.

“What would happen to her after that?”

“It’s your prerogative as the victim. If you’re not interested in prosecuting, she’ll be released. Mrs. Hartley was only held in Louisiana at the request of this department. Whatever fines she faces there are a separate matter. We aren’t aware of another warrant for her at this time.”

I glance at Mac, knowing it isn’t a decision she would make for me one way or the other, but wanting the confirmation that I’m doing the right thing. I guess in this situation, it’s all degrees of shitty either way.

She studies my face, then offers a slight nod. “Do what you feel is right,” she murmurs.