“You’re not stealing my recipe for the restaurant,” Bailey said, sufficiently diverted.
“What if we called it Bailey’s crab apple salad and fritters?” Ira offered.
Bailey considered it and then shook her head. “Sorry, no. We serve this at the inn. I can’t have my competition serving the same dish.” She frowned. “Anyhow, it’s not Italian.”
“Oh, right.” Iris grinned mischievously.
“Coop, I saw Cat the other day with Joey. That boy is getting bigger every time I see him,” Ira said.
He felt the doc’s curious gaze and answered her silent question. “My sister, Cat, and her eight-year-old son, Joey.”
“Oh.”
He looked back at Ira. “He’s skipping a grade, did she tell you that?” he said proudly. Unfortunately, Joey’s dad had been a one-night stand, a tourist whose name Cat couldn’t even remember. Not so unfortunately for Cooper, that meant he got to be the man in Joey’s life and it filled a hole in his own in a way that he’d be forever grateful for. His nephew was the nicest kid and he was smart as a whip.
“She did.” Ira grinned. “Proud as punch. And she should be. That boy is being raised right. All ‘yes, sirs’ and ‘no, sirs.’ You don’t hear that much anymore.”
“And he is your spitting image, Coop,” Iris said. “I swear that boy has got more of you in him than his own mother.”
It was true. Joey had inherited his and Cat’s blue eyes and dark hair, but he looked just like Cooper had when he was his age. Except Joey was smarter and more talented.
“Cat was saying he’s doing really well with his piano lessons,” Ira said.
He nodded even though that was an understatement. The kid was a little virtuoso. When he was four Cat had the piano she’d inherited from their mom tuned and refurbished because Joey was so fascinated by it. He just took to it. Cooper had offered to pay for piano lessons, and the teacher had just recently suggested Joey audition for a private tutor in Dover who had once been a tutor at the New England Conservatory and had a high success rate of getting his kids into the best music schools in the United States.
He was very picky about who he worked with and he liked to start with them when they were young like Joey.
He also didn’t come cheap.
But Cooper had promised Cat he’d do whatever it took to make it work if this guy took Joey on as a student.
“Plays ‘well’,” Bailey scoffed at the word choice. “Ira, you should hear him play. He’s eight and—” She made an exploding noise as she made a bursting gesture with her hands near her head. “Seriously. Blows my mind.”
“He sounds amazing,” Jessica said quietly and Cooper’s gaze got all tangled up in hers again. “You must be very proud.”
“The proudest,” he said gruffly.
“They make everything better, don’t they?” she said.
He guessed she was thinking about her goddaughter and he found himself wanting to know more about the girl, whose kid she was, and why those people meant so much to her. “Yeah,” he answered instead. “They do.”
“Thank you for dinner,” the doc said, giving Bailey a hug. “And for everything. Best vacation ever.”
“It’s not over yet,” Bailey said, sounding almost panicked about it. “We still have a few days.”
The doc grinned at her. “That’s true. We’ll make the most of them.”
“I’ll walk you back, Doc,” he offered.
Her grin wilted a little. “We all will.” She gestured to Iris and Ira.
Iris smirked. “Oh, we just live a block over. We don’t live at the boardwalk.”
“Right. Of course.” She turned back to Cooper. “You don’t either, right? So I don’t want you to go out of your way.”
“You’re not walking back to the inn alone at night, Doc. We’ve been over that.” He grinned as she flushed at the reminder of their make-out session on the beach.
She huffed. “I’m perfectly capable of doing so.”
“Not arguing about it.”
“What happened to the enlightened gentleman who let me pay for dinner the other day?”
“Splitting the cost of a date is different from seeing to your safety.”
“Date?” Bailey’s ears perked up.
“Fine, you can walk me home,” Jessica said abruptly, cutting off Bailey’s curiosity. “’Bye, all!” She hurried out of the house.
Cooper was met by four amused stares. He smiled back at them and Bailey looked ready to burst with delight. She thought they were a tag team.
They weren’t.
Cooper still wanted the doc to make up her own mind.
Didn’t mean teasing her wasn’t fun as hell.
He hurried to catch up with her outside. “Hold your horses, Doc.”
She turned to wait for him. The sadness he caught on her face kicked the amusement right out of him.
They walked together toward the inn in silence until Cooper couldn’t take it anymore. It needed to be talked about. “You happy back in Wilmington, Doc?”
He felt her tense beside him. She suddenly threw her hands up in seeming frustration. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know. But I do know that my life is back in Wilmington, Cooper. My job is there. And I’m good at my job. Those women need someone like me. I made a commitment to my job that I can’t just break.”