My Hope Next Door by Tammy L. Gray

but he was much closer than necessary. His chest rose and fell in rapid succession, the telltale sign that he was fighting every instinct to lose control. She felt her courage shrink within. Cooper intimidated her. He always had, and this physical display of dominance was all too familiar.
    “May I help you?” A woman in a hairnet and red apron—not the woman who’d ignored Katie but an older, friendlier one—appeared on the other side of the meat counter.
    Cooper didn’t miss a beat. “Hey, Sally. I need a pound of turkey and some salami. Maybe just a quarter.”
    Her smile broadened. “You got it, Coop.” She busied herself with his order.
    Cooper’s demeanor morphed from flirtatious back to resolute. His hand encircled Katie’s arm and pulled her away from Sally’s eavesdropping. She went willingly, grateful for the escape, even if it was short-lived.
    They stopped near the ATM nestled back in the corner for privacy. The loudspeaker announced a sale on cookies, and Cooper shoved her arm away as if it singed him.
    His jaw was tight, and a line formed between his eyebrows. “Your dad asked me to give it some time, and out of respect for him, I waited. But I’m done. You owe me a conversation.”
    “I don’t owe you a thing. We ended it.” It was her turn to get heated. He was doing what he always did. Demanding, controlling, pushing until she exploded.
    He ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath. “We were angry. Messed up. But we would have fixed things if you hadn’t left.”
    “There was no fixing what happened that night.”
    An immediate ripple of tension made every part of his body turn hard and furious. “You don’t get to make that call. Not when the rest of us were stuck here wondering what the hell happened to you. The rest of us didn’t get to run away.”
    Katie tried to return to her cart, but Cooper blocked her path. Her head ached and her throat cracked from all the repressed aggression.
    “I’m sorry, okay?” Let it go, please.
    “Sorry’s not good enough.”
    “Then what do you want from me?” She was going to lose it. Right there in front of a market full of witnesses. “I’m not staying, Cooper. I’m here to help my parents, and then I’m moving right back to Florida.”
    “I want a conversation.”
    “We’re having one.”
    “No, not like this.” Cooper paced back and forth. Glanced at the counter where his order waited for pickup. And finally fixated on a blue diamond painted on the floor. “Meet me tonight at The Point.”
    Her body went cold. “No.” He was trying to force her back to the past. To rip open the box she’d carefully sealed shut.
    “I never told Laila.” He looked at her, a hint of remorse slipping past the drawn eyebrows. “Not any of it.”
    Of course he hadn’t. It was his fault too. “I’m not meeting you at The Point.”
    Anything resembling concern disappeared, and his eyes went blank. A scary kind of opaque she couldn’t read. “You’ll be there, or I’m gonna start talking, and I won’t stop until this whole town knows what you did.”
    Katie stumbled back, tripping over herself. Keys slid through her fingers and clattered on the floor. “You wouldn’t.”
    “Don’t test me, babe.”
    Silence spun out, muffling the ding of the cashiers, the wails of a hungry baby, and the slamming of Katie’s heart against her rib cage.
    He picked up her keys, dropped them into her clammy hand. “I’ll be there at seven. Waiting for you.”
    Cooper was a con artist. A master of the bluff. He wouldn’t tell. Would he?
    She couldn’t think. Breathing was all she could handle. Breathing and watching him walk away, once again, with the victory.

CHAPTER 12
    A sher stepped out onto his back deck and studied his workmanship. The stain he’d sprayed on the railings that morning had soaked in nicely. Tomorrow he’d do one more coat and then finally place the order for the outdoor furniture set he’d had bookmarked on his computer