The orderly assigned to transport Coop from the ER to his private room looked like a nice kid, but Piper stayed by the wheelchair as they traveled up an elevator and down several long corridors. Coop fumed the whole time, not from pain, but because the medical staff wouldn’t let him walk.

There were too many people hanging around outside his room, and Piper wasn’t having it. “If you’re not his doctor or nurse, you shouldn’t be here. Move on.”

Mr. Nice Guy raised his hand from the wheelchair and gave his cocky grin. “Appreciate your concern.”

The adrenaline she’d been riding on had faded, leaving her exhausted and heartsick. All she wanted to do was get away, but she couldn’t leave him in a hospital full of people looking for excuses to come into his room. He needed someone stationed outside his door until he was discharged, and while a nurse took his vitals, she got Jonah on the phone and told him what had happened.

Coop had been given the hospital’s version of the penthouse-a large room with a city view. He had the head of the bed in an upright position as she came back into the room from talking to Jonah. “You should be lying down,” she said.

He looked at her oddly, as if she were a stranger he was trying to identify, but then he reverted back to his normal self. “Get serious. I had worse injuries in high school. I can’t believe they’re not letting me out until tomorrow.”

“It’s for your own good.” She turned her back on him and went to the window.

“Thanks, by the way,” he said. “I appreciate you watching out for me.”

He didn’t sound begrudging, and she pondered what it must have cost him to say those words. How could she have done this to herself? How could she have fallen in love with someone so different? “I’m the one who’s grateful,” she said. “If you hadn’t come back to the apartment…” She turned to him from the window. “Why did you?”

He dropped his head back onto the pillow. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“It couldn’t wait until morning?” She wrapped her arms around her chest, hugging herself.

“It was important,” he said.

She regarded him quizzically.

His jaw set in that obstinate way she’d come to know. “I was hoping you’d calmed down enough to realize this whole breaking-up thing makes no sense. Instead of that, we need to ratchet it up. That’s what I’d been planning to talk to you about at dinner on Wednesday night before you had your freak-out. Moving in together. My place, not yours.”

The knife twisted in her chest. “Why would I move in with you?”

His eyes narrowed. “It’s a good thing I have an oversize ego because if I didn’t, you’d have destroyed it.” She swallowed the constriction in her throat as he went on. “You’re being stubborn about this for no reason. It’s common sense.”

Could he really have convinced himself of something so fundamentally wrong? “I don’t know why you’d say that.”

“I’ve done a lot of thinking about the two of us this week.” The color was coming back to his face. “You look me in the eye and tell me this isn’t the best relationship you’ve ever had, because I know it’s the best one for me.”

That brought her to a full stop, and she quashed a dangerous spark of hope. “Really? If this is your best relationship, you are in serious need of therapy.”

She watched his stubbornness take over. The stubbornness that refused to accept a loss. The quality that made him a champion, but also made her so wary of him. She had to do something quickly. Something definitive. She knew exactly what it was, but she wasn’t certain she could go through with it. She took a deep breath. She had to do this for no other reason than that she loved him enough to want the best for him… even if it broke her heart.

“Here’s the thing, Coop…” She took a shaky breath. “As soon as the dust settles, you need to call Deidre.”

He tilted the bed back a few inches. “I’ve lost the desire to do business with her.”

“What happened with Noah wasn’t her fault, and I’m not talking about business. I’m talking about your personal relationship.” She pushed the words through her throat. “She’s better than Hollywood. The two of you are perfect for each other. And she’s already half in love with you. If we learned anything last night, we learned how short life can be. If you keep dallying around with another woman-namely me-you’re going to screw up your chance to find your perfect woman.”

He looked at her as though she’d developed a hole in her brain, and the bed came back up. “Deidre Joss is not my perfect woman.”

How could he not see what was so clear? “She is! She’s smart, successful, beautiful-the kind of woman who’ll always have your back. And she’s crazy about you. She’s also nice. A decent human being.”

“It’s official,” he declared. “You are out of your mind.”

“You’re thirty-seven years old. It’s time.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re trying to break up with me and fix me up with another woman, both at the same time? Do I have that right?”

“Not any woman. You and Deidre are a matched set. I’ve seen the way you act when you’re together. You could easily fall in love with her if you’d give it half a chance. It might not be clear to you what you should be doing with your life, but it’s clear to me.”

“Go ahead,” he said with something close to a sneer. “Tell me. I know you’re dying to.”

“All right. You need to get out of the nightclub business. It’s wrong for you. Buy some land. Plant it. Grow crap. And settle down… with the right woman. Someone who’s as… as dazzling as you are. You need someone spectacular. Someone brainy and gorgeous and successful, but grounded, too. Like you.”

He spoke with almost a sense of wonder. “This is so mind-numbingly fascinating. So tell me… What do I do about the fact that I might be maybe”-his gaze wavered ever so slightly-“falling a little bit in love with you?”

A sob threatened to spill right out of her. Somehow she managed to alter it into a harsh, unfunny laugh. “You’re not.”

“You know that, then.”

She did. As surely as she knew anything. A little bit in love. As if there were such a thing. She would not cry in front of him. Never. “You’re a champion. That’s in your blood. It’s the mind-set that’s made you great. But this is life, not a game. And instead of throwing up a smoke screen, think about what I’ve said. About you. About Deidre. About everything.”

This made him furious. “What happens with us, then? After I’ve hooked up with Deidre, that is.”

“Nothing happens with us.”

“Don’t you want to be pals?” The rough sweep of his arm made him wince, but he didn’t seem to care. “Get together now and then to have a couple of beers? Go to a strip club? Poker night? Just us guys.”

She couldn’t take any more. “I’ll wait in the hall until Jonah gets here.”

“You do that,” he said.


***

I might be maybe… falling a little bit in love with you. Love either was or wasn’t. She knew that now. For the first time since she was a kid, she cried. All the way to her apartment-big, blubbery tears that sloshed down her cheeks and dripped on her jacket. Tears that came from a well with no bottom.

She’d waited too long to fall in love. That was why this was so hard. She should have fallen in love for the first time when she was a teenager, like any normal girl. And a couple more times after that. If she’d done things the normal way, she’d have practice dealing with heartbreak, but she’d had none. That was why her world had fallen apart.

The Sonata’s front wheel climbed the curb as she turned into the alley behind Spiral. She had to pack up her things, but she couldn’t go inside with her nose running and tears everywhere. She couldn’t let anyone see her so broken. She backed up and drove blindly to the lakefront. When she got there, she stumbled across the grass to the lakeshore path.

The wind was sharp off the water. It cut hard through her sweatshirt, but her tears kept running. All the tears she’d never let herself shed over the years were escaping at the same time. Tears for a mother she couldn’t remember, a father who had loved and resented her, and an ex-quarterback who’d stolen her heart when she wasn’t paying attention.

She started to run. There weren’t many joggers on this part of the path, and a few snowflakes scuttled in the wind. November would be here in a couple of days. And then winter. A cold, Chicago winter. She ran faster, trying to outrun her misery.

A woman clad in trendy athletic gear and pushing a jogging stroller was running toward her. As the woman came closer, her pace slowed, and then stopped. “Are you all right?” she asked as her baby slept peacefully in the stroller.

Piper knew how crazed she must look. She slowed long enough to acknowledge the woman’s concern. “My… dog died.”

The woman’s ponytail swung. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Piper started to run again. She’d told another lie. She’d never been a liar, but now she’d become a pro. All those lies.

“I go by Esme. Lady Esme, actually. Esmerelda is a family name… The fact is… I’m your stalker.”

She spun around and yelled after the woman. “I broke up with a man I love with all my heart, and he will never, ever love me the same way, and I hurt so bad I don’t know what to do with myself.”

The only indication that the woman heard was the way she raised her arm from the handle of the jogging stroller and waved.

Piper gazed out at the lake, her hands in fists at her side, her teeth chattering, icy tears on her cheeks. She had to find a new self. A self who was indestructible and who would never, ever again let this happen to her.


***

A week passed. Piper was gone. It was as though she’d never been there. The cleaning staff had scrubbed his blood off the apartment wall and put the furniture back where it belonged. Coop had walked in there once and couldn’t go again.

The image of Piper standing in front of him with a gun shoved to her head was seared on his brain. At that exact moment he’d understood. It was as if a gust of wind had swept away the fog that had obscured the truth he should have recognized long before. But instead of coming out with it right away, he’d screwed up bad at the hospital. He hadn’t said the right thing, which was ironic, considering his reputation for working a good sound bite. Years of having microphones shoved in his face had taught him how to divulge exactly what he wanted to, precisely as he intended. But when it came to saying the right words to Piper, he’d fumbled in the worst possible way, and now she wouldn’t take his calls.

The wound in his side was healing, but the rest of him was a mess. Someone knocked on his office door. This was the first time in days that anybody had bothered him. He didn’t blame them for keeping their distance. He was brusque with the customers, unhappy with the servers, and outright hostile to his bouncers. He’d even gotten into an argument with Tony because Tony insisted there was nothing wrong with the club’s HVAC system. But the air was stagnant, not circulating. So heavy with the funk of perfume and liquor it had seeped into Coop’s pores.

He twisted from the computer screen he’d been staring at for who knew how long and directed his wrath toward the door. “Go away!”

Jada barged into his office. “You broke up with Piper! How could you do that?”

“Piper broke up with me. And how do you know about it?”

“I talked to her on the phone. At first she didn’t tell me, but I finally got it out of her.”

He leaned back in his chair, trying to be casual, even though he wanted to shake the details out of her. “So… what did she say about me?”

“Just that she hadn’t seen you since the accident.”

“And from this you deduced that I’d broken up with her?”

“She sounded sad.” Jada dropped down on the couch. “Why did she break up with you?”

“Because she thinks I didn’t take our relationship seriously.” He couldn’t sit a moment longer. He shot up from his desk, then pretended to adjust the shutter slats on the window behind him.

“Is that what she said?” Jada asked.

“Not in so many words, but…” He made himself go over to the small refrigerator next to the bookcases. “She’s extremely competitive. She thinks I am, too.”

She leaned forward like a minishrink. “Aren’t you?”

“Not about her.” He pulled out a Coke and held it up. “Want one?”

Jada shook her head. “Are you going to try to get her back?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t sound too confident.”

“I’m confident.”

“You don’t sound like it.”

She was right. He snapped the Coke’s pull-tab, even though he couldn’t drink anything right now. “She won’t talk to me. She won’t answer my texts or pick up her phone.” He wasn’t exactly sure why he was telling a teenager all this, except that she’d asked, and nobody else had been brave enough.