Dawn ignored him. Clearly he didn’t understand about closure. He didn’t understand her. And that was fine—why should he? In a day or so she’d have what she needed and he’d be out of her life for good. Right?
Wait. Frowning, Dawn tried to pull up a mental image of the map of the USA she’d had on her wall as a teenager, when she’d planned to escape the stifling perfection of her family and run away to her mother’s homeland, the States, as soon as she was old enough.
She couldn’t exactly remember all the particulars of the interstates and roads, but she did remember one crucial thing: America was big.
Really big.
And the Hamptons were right on the other side of it from where she’d planned to get married today.
She shuffled around in the leather passenger seat of the Caddy again, trying to get her skirt into something resembling a comfortable position. American cars might be bigger and arguably better than the rest, but no car was truly comfy when wearing several thousand dollars’ worth of lace and silk. The voluminous skirt would have looked wonderful walking down the aisle, or dancing the first dance, but Dawn felt it was rather wasted being crammed into the front seat of what was clearly Cooper’s dream car.
‘How far exactly is it to the beach house, anyway?’ she asked as nonchalantly as she could. However far it was, it was where she needed to go.
But she had a nagging feeling it might take a little longer than the day or so she’d imagined when she’d suggested driving there.
‘About three thousand miles,’ Cooper replied, equally casually. ‘Give or take.’
‘Three thousand miles.’ Dawn swallowed. Hard.
‘Give or take,’ Cooper repeated. ‘About forty-eight hours of solid driving, mostly along Interstate 80.’
‘You’ve done this before?’ That was good. If he’d driven this way before, then it was clearly doable and not quite as insane as it sounded in her head.
‘Never,’ Cooper said, and Dawn’s spirits sank again. ‘Justin and I always planned to do a coast-to-coast road trip one day, though. Had it all planned out and everything. We were going to do it over a couple of weeks one summer. Hire a vintage Caddy like this one, really make the most of it.’
And instead he was making the trip with her—his sister-in-law who wasn’t. Dawn wanted to ask why he and Justin had never taken their trip, but the closed expression on Cooper’s face stopped her.
Well, that, and the phrases ‘a couple of weeks’ and ‘forty-eight hours of solid driving’ echoing around her head.
‘We’re going to need to stop overnight, then,’ she said.
‘Over several nights,’ Cooper corrected. ‘Even if we split the driving, we’ll both need to rest. Plus this car is a classic, vintage model. It’s been refurbished, of course, but still. It’s not exactly covered for non-stop cross-country travel.’
‘How many days do you think it will take us?’ Dawn asked, staring at the hard planes of his face, the set jaw. Two days ago, she’d never even met this man. Yesterday she’d realised he seriously disliked her. And now it looked as though they were going to be spending an awful lot of time together.
Maybe this wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had.
Cooper shrugged, never taking his eyes off the road. ‘Maybe four or five. If we really push it.’
And longer if they didn’t. Possibly a lot longer if anything went wrong with the car.
Dawn tried to remember how much space she had left on her credit card. Motel rooms for a week were going to add up fast. Not to mention food, petrol and everything else. She forced herself to take deep breaths and stay calm. The last thing she needed was Cooper figuring out how much she was freaking out.
She just had to stick to the plan. Get to the Hamptons, get her stuff back and find the closure she needed to move on. After that, this whole trip would just be a memory—like a half-remembered, crazy dream.
One more breath, and she felt the calm settling over her again. That was better.
Then she looked down at the puddle of lace and silk she was sitting in and cursed Justin one more time for good measure.
‘In that case, I’m really going to need to find some new clothes.’
* * *
‘It’s not too late to turn back, you know.’ Cooper could tell she was getting cold feet. She was British—what did she know about great American road trips? Or how long they took? For some reason, tourists always seemed to underestimate the size of this country. And he could totally use that to his advantage now. ‘I mean, we’re only an hour or so out. It would be no big thing at all to turn round, head back to that lovely mansion you picked and get back to your regularly scheduled life. You can tell your family you just needed to get some space, so you went for a drive. No one’s going to think anything’s odd about that, not after the day you’ve had.’
Cooper did his best to sound sympathetic, rather than gleeful. He might have always wanted to do a big coast-to-coast road trip, but this wasn’t exactly how he’d pictured it—even if the car was perfect. No, the best thing for everyone involved was for Dawn to give up now and go home.
‘In fact, we’re still going to be closer to the wedding venue than to the beach house for another....’ he glanced down at the dashboard ‘—one thousand, four hundred and seventy miles. I mean, we haven’t even crossed the bridge to Oakland yet. Perfect time to turn round.’
‘No.’ Just the one word, but Cooper could hear a world of stubbornness behind it.
‘You know, I could call Justin and ask him to courier your passport and stuff to you,’ he pointed out, entirely reasonably, in his opinion.
‘Still no.’
Damn. He must have laid it on a bit thick. He’d been so sure she’d been about ready to back down from this crazy stunt. What was she really hoping to achieve? To prove to Justin how much she truly loved him so he’d forget that, until she drove across the country, he knew she’d only wanted to marry him for his money? Did she really think that would work?
Cooper sighed. The worst part was, she might be right. After all, if he wasn’t afraid Justin might fall for the big romantic gesture, he wouldn’t be turning onto Interstate 80 at the San Francisco-to-Oakland bridge right now.
The problem was that Justin had always been the romantic one—even if he’d been the only one to see through Rachel the one time Cooper had let down his walls long enough to fall in love. Justin still believed in love and happy-ever-afters in a way that Cooper never had—and certainly hadn’t since he’d learned the hard way that the only thing other people wanted from him was his money and influence.
But Justin... Justin had always been easily swayed by a beautiful woman—just like their father. And Dawn was, Cooper could admit, objectively speaking a beautiful woman. With that dark hair and pale skin, not to mention those bright green eyes...
Of course, every woman looked beautiful on her wedding day. Which was no doubt the reason Dawn had decided to chase after Justin in her wedding dress and full make-up—to make maximum impact.
Cooper smiled to himself. At least he could be pretty certain that the dress and make-up would look rather less impressive in a week’s time, when they finally reached the Hamptons and Justin. And, since he was the one who knew where they were going, he’d have to do his best to make sure that any new clothes she did manage to get her hands on wouldn’t be half as alluring.
‘You know, I’ve always wanted to take a proper road trip too.’ Cooper glanced over and saw that Dawn had kicked off her shiny satin high heels and rested her feet against the dashboard. Her perfectly
painted toenails peeked out from under the edge of her wedding dress, glossy red.
He looked away. ‘Have you really?’ As of five minutes ago, he’d bet.
‘Absolutely,’ Dawn said, nodding enthusiastically. ‘And really, there just isn’t enough of Britain to count as a proper road trip. You can drive the whole thing in a day or so. No, you have to come to the States for a real road trip experience like this.’
‘And what constitutes a “real road trip experience” in your mind?’ Cooper asked sceptically.
‘Uh, well...snacks, obviously. And music. You need a soundtrack.’ She looked dubiously at the ancient radio the Caddy boasted. Cooper suspected that if it picked up anything it would be radio waves beamed straight from the fifties, giving them a steady diet of Elvis and Buddy Holly. The car’s engine and working parts had all been updated enough that he trusted the Caddy to make the distance he needed, but the interior and aesthetics were most definitely of its time—radio included.
‘What else?’ he pressed.
‘Stopping to eat in diners—like, proper, authentic American ones, with pancakes and burgers and stuff.’
‘Are you hungry, by any chance?’ Cooper asked. ‘Because that’s the second food item on your essentials list so far. And you’ve only come up with three things.’
‘Kooky roadside attractions!’ Dawn shouted. ‘That’s what a road trip needs! I mean, that’s what I’ve always imagined for my dream road trip.’
That she’d clearly come up with five minutes ago as a way of convincing him she was going through with this. Right. ‘Roadside attractions,’ he repeated dubiously.
‘Yeah, you know—like the world’s biggest ball of twine. That sort of thing.’
‘The world’s largest ball of twine is in Kansas,’ Cooper replied automatically, and regretted it almost instantly. ‘We’re not going through Kansas.’
Dawn stared at him. He tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed. ‘How do you even know that?’
He shrugged. ‘I know things.’ Such as the world’s largest ball of twine made by one person was in Minnesota, which they also weren’t going through. But he wasn’t telling her that.