Chapter 11

IBN Network, 10172 Peachtree Parkway, Atlanta... Memo from the Chief:

If anyone has seen or heard from Pete Cooper in the last five days, notify the executive offices. If Mr. Cooper calls in, transfer him. If he shows up, detain him for questioning.

"No?"

"That answer's not any different than it was yesterday."

"It still doesn't make sense, either. Do you love me?"

Brooke set her suitcases down on by the front door and turned on him. "Yes."

Pete never bothered to let his bag go. "Do you enjoy making love with me?"

Brooke fought an inevitable smile. "Yes."

"Do I have morning breath, or dandruff or an obscene tattoo that offends you?"

Brooke lost the fight. "No."

Pete lost his patience. "Then why won't you marry me?" he demanded very loudly just as the front door swung open between them.

Much to her discomfort, it was Mrs. Merriweather. "Oh," she trilled uncertainly, wide eyes swinging between Pete and Brooke, hand to ample bosom. "Oh."

It seemed that the first "oh" was for interrupting a delicate conversation. The other was for the fact that she'd shown up with half the town to witness it.

"Oh," they all chorused out on the front porch. And then the cameras began to flash.

Pete swung on them with the grace of a cranky pit bull. Luckily the famed gray green eyes were hidden behind sunglasses and his hands were full, or there could have been mayhem.

Brooke blinked a couple of times, trying to clear away the little red suns that kept dancing across her vision. "Good morning," she greeted the throng.

They never even saw her. "You're Pete Cooper," Mrs. Merriweather accused gaily, waggling a finger at Pete's chest. "We finally uncovered the truth yesterday when Billy Ray Watson saw that article about your rout of that criminal in New Orleans in People magazine. Such a brave thing to do. Of course, Eldon Harper—that's our very own tap-dancing Elvis, don't you know—claims that you stood up on stage singing and dancing with him the other night." She tsked a couple of times. "And you with laryngitis and all, Mr. Cooper. Really."

From that moment on, Brooke felt like a carrot in a pot of boiling soup. Tossed around, poked and prodded, and then shoved aside in favor of the much more interesting chicken she'd found herself sharing the water with. She was a nice person, they were sure—had she really spent three days in Mrs. Merriweather's bridal suite with Pete Cooper without benefit of license?—but Pete was the real story. Which brought up the inevitable, what-was-Pete-Cooper-really-like questions, some of them so personal Brooke wouldn't have asked him herself. To his credit, the big chicken himself quickly defused things and proceeded to handle the crowd with ease and charm.

Brooke ended up packing the car and listening to a half hour of the Saturday Morning Hillbilly Hour on the car radio before Pete managed to break away and join her.

"Well, aren't you just the most fascinating man on the planet?" she cooed with black humor as he waved one more time and pulled the car away from the curb.

His sigh was heartfelt. "Want to know what I had for breakfast?"

"I know what you had for breakfast. It wasn't interesting then."

"Where are we going?"

She sighed right back. "Home."

One hand on the wheel, the other settling sunglasses in place, Pete shot her a look of pure irritation. "Come on, Stump. Don't start up with that again."

Her answering smile wasn't a happy one. "I was just thinking as I sat here listening to Earl Scruggs, about how this was a good example of why I can't marry you."

"Because of Earl Scruggs?"

"Because of Mrs. Merriweather. Because of Buford, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana, and Atlanta, Georgia. Because you're Pete Cooper, world-famous hero, lover and all-round nice guy. I'm a bean counter in a small town who's only purpose when she's standing next to you is to answer questions like, 'Does he wear briefs or boxers?'"

Pete flashed her a look of alarm. "How did you answer?"

"I said you wore those cute leopard-skin things that were tossed to you on stage the other night."

At least he laughed. "Trust me, Stump. You'd never get lost in the crowd."

Brooke looked down to where she was twisting the dime-store ring Pete had gotten her to play their part. Sham, fantasy, fun. They'd always been able to share that. Would they still when she was threatened with being submerged by his fame?

"Coop," she protested gently. "I love you. I have since I've been a girl, and nothing's going to change that. But I can't be any good to you if I lose what I am. What I can give you."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that whatever else Rupert Springs did or didn't do, it gave me the security to be the person I am. And I'm not sure someplace like Atlanta would—especially if I showed up on your arm."

"But I'd be there with you."

She smiled again, caught between that kind of promise and the ramifications of it when it came to him. "I know."

He looked over. "You don't sound especially happy."

She shrugged. "Maybe this was all previews for Mame after all," she acknowledged. "And after playing Philadelphia this morning, I'm just not sure I'm ready for Broadway."

"Would you stop speaking in allegories?"

"I know who I am at home. I wouldn't get the chance in Atlanta," she objected. "Even with you there beside me. And I'd have to deal with a lot more than just marriage and house hunting if I decided to do it."

"Then what do you want to do?"

She shrugged, impatient, uncertain. Wishing with all her heart she could just throw her objections to the wind, aching for a simple solution that would make as much sense to Pete as it would to her.

"I guess I want to figure out what I can find in Atlanta—besides you—that would compel me to leave Rupert Springs."

His expression was more hurt than outraged. "I'm not enough?"

Brooke reached over and patted his leg, wondering still if he understood. "If you were," she said, "I wouldn't be the woman you need."

* * *

Pete was really trying his best. Patience had never been his long suit, although persistence had been mentioned in a review or two. He simply couldn't understand why Brooke didn't see herself the way he did. Brash, bright, with the common sense of a judge and the whimsy of a child. He loved her, damn it. And not just as a friend, although there would always be that. He'd let her stay in Rupert Springs all those years without raising serious protest. Now, soaking in the astonishing magic of her, he wanted to go back and drag her out with him. He wanted to give her everything she'd been denied. Everything she'd denied herself.

Once he'd made the decision that suddenly seemed so inevitable, he wanted Brooke with him. Now. Always. Lighting up when he walked in the door, slapping him down when he got out of hand. Helpmate and companion, counselor and confessor, conspirator and inspiration; he wanted all those things in his wife, and he hadn't realized it until it had dawned on him that his friend had been those things all along.

And lover. But that was the icing, the subtle, special flavoring to her. Stump, that ferocious child and pragmatic woman, had matured into a generous, demanding lover. She danced in his hands, sang and laughed and whimpered in his arms, and provoked him to the same, again and again, each time better, each time sweeter as they discovered the only secrets they'd kept from each other.

"So, what is it you want to do?" he asked as they strolled through the soft woods of Shiloh.

Brooke never looked away from the soft, sad hills, the trees that dripped with rain. "Can you feel it?" she asked in a voice as hushed as the breeze.

Pete looked over to see the pain in her gaze. The empathy. He took his own look around, reacquainting himself with the site Mamie had taken him to as a child where he'd run his hands over the piled canon balls and imagined the nameless dead buried beneath.

But he'd never told anyone about the feeling the place had given him.

"The sorrow?" he asked. "Yeah. It kind of rises up out of the ground."

"I think," Brooke allowed, bending to run her fingers over old, pitted iron, "that there was so much bloodshed here, that it permeated the place. All those boys, all that noise and smoke and terror. It's still trapped here."

Pete couldn't help but smile. Of all people, of course it would be Brooke who would understand. He didn't even need to tell her. He just reached across and took her other hand, sharing the silence with her in a place where it seemed even the birds couldn't speak.

They walked that way for a long time, honoring the Fillihue men who'd died there, the other thousands who must have walked these same paths on their way to battle.

"Have you been to other sites?" Brooke asked.

Pete nodded. "Most of them. Evan wanted a retrospective when they were trying to sell off part of Bull Run that time."

Brooke nodded absently. "Oh yeah, I forgot."

Pete answered the question she didn't ask. "They all feel the same. Maybe Shiloh hurts worst because it's such a beautiful place. Nothing like that should have happened here."

* * *

"History," she allowed hours later when they'd returned to the road, the time they'd spent in that lush, silent valley weighing on them. Still picking at her ring, that silly cheap toy she wouldn't take off, she looked over at him with introspective eyes. "If I had the chance to do something new with my life, I'd want to work preserving something with a sense of history. And beauty."

Pete offered a small smile. "Well, that narrows it down."

She managed one in return. "And I like working with people. It's what's so fun about working at the trucking company."

"Anything else?"

She shook her head slowly. "Don't you think that's enough for now?"

They spent the day wandering through southern Tennessee, and the night in the foothills of the Appalachians, anonymous and comfortable, isolated from the notoriety that was brewing out in the real world, from work and responsibility and consequence. When they made love, it was with a heightened hunger, as if the happiness they shared these few days would have to last them, and when they laughed, it echoed with a more brittle, unstable sound.

"I'll call my friends on the art museum board," he offered as they strolled hand in hand through the Hunter Art Gallery in Chattanooga. "You have a degree. I can find you a job there. Maybe teaching or being a docent or something."

They wandered through the back roads of the Unaka Mountains right at the border to North Carolina and skimmed the edges of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

"Evan's always talking about doing more programs devoted to the arts," Pete offered. "You know, something probably right up your alley. I'll call him when we get back tomorrow."

So caught up was he with his feverish plans and possibilities that Pete didn't even notice how quiet Brooke was becoming.

* * *

It was as they drew closer to Atlanta that Pete finally began to understand what Brooke had been trying to tell him. When they stopped for breakfast, other tourists began to gather like flies after bad meat, at first spotting them, then approaching, then making demands.

"Oh, you're Pete Cooper," they'd say, which was no longer any surprise to him. "May I have your autograph/advice/inspiration? What did you think of that war/trial/Elvis sighting?"

Brooke would be referred to as "that redhead in the Entertainment World" report and nodded to in passing. If any interest was shown at all, it was in the "What do you do, dear?" form, which was never satisfactorily answered. They wanted her to tell them she was a model/rock singer/notorious bimbo to the stars. And although Brooke handled it all with admirable equanimity, Pete finally saw what he was asking of her. He saw that one of the most special aspects of their friendship had always been her distant objectivity on the whirlwind of his life. She'd never signed on for this bus ride, and suddenly he was asking her for the fare.

Lunch was worse, even though they did their best to use the drive-through. The Thunderbird, it seemed, had made the news. Pete's health was asked after, his career, his relationship with any given movie star. Until this moment, such interest had never really affected him. Rude questions and obsequious flattery had always rolled right off his back with equal ease. He'd always known that no matter what, he could make that call to the one sane voice in the world.

And now he was asking that sane voice to jump into his fishbowl. Without water wings.

"Where are we going to have the dress-up dinner?" Brooke asked quietly as they cruised south through Georgia.

"Do you want to do it at an antebellum home?" Pete asked, the new stress eating at him. "Or in the privacy of the Cooper manse?"

"I thought you decorated it in Southwestern."

"I did."

She shook her head. "Hard to get that old plantation feeling with a cow skull hanging on the wall."

"You still need to get your costume."

"I have it."

He actually turned around, as if looking. "You managed to pack a hoopskirt in that stuff?"

"No hoopskirt," she allowed. "Scarlett was not my favorite character."

He looked at her, surprised. "Melanie?"

Brooke just grimaced.

"No, I didn't think so. Well, then, who?"

"You'll find that out at dinner." She sighed. "Of course, the way things are going, so will all of the free world. Did you bring a costume?"

"I got it in Buford."

He managed to get a grin out of her on that one. "Don't tell me. The tap-dancing Elvis also does readings from Showboat on the weekends."

"I plead journalistic confidentiality."

She snorted. "What you should plead is insanity. I never realized that your life was quite so..."

"Bizarre?"

She shook her head, still groping for the right words. "Smothering. And you've been on vacation. I can't imagine what it's like on a day-to-day basis. It's a good thing I got you some time off."

Pete allowed a soft smile for the turbulent pleasures of the last days. "Now you know why I want you to stick around?" he asked.

She never took her eyes from the road, the trees reflecting from her glasses. "Now you know why I'm having so much trouble saying yes?"

Pete turned his attention back to his driving, her words caught in his chest with the inevitability of returning to that pallid, empty apartment, to the rat race that had been getting just a little too crazy lately without respite. He'd lived with it before. He'd just always counted on Brooke to defuse some of the tension. Now the precarious balance he'd maintained was threatening to tumble around him.

Suddenly he didn't want to be alone. He wasn't sure he had the patience to wade back into all that insanity without a change in his life. And the one real stabilizing force, the one constant he could always count on, wasn't constant at all anymore. All because he'd done the unimaginable and fallen resoundingly in love with his best friend.

"Yeah," he finally admitted. "I do."

"It's not that I don't love you," she protested, turning on him now, her forehead creased, her posture intense. "It's that I don't want to become inseparable from you. It wouldn't do either of us any good. Do you understand?"

He could only nod. "When we get into Atlanta, I can set you up with those people I mentioned. Maybe contact an antique dealer or two who might be interested in help. If you can take a couple more days off before heading back to Rupert Springs, we can get you all set up in something. That would help."

"Pull over," she commanded.

He stared at her. "What?"

"I said pull over, or I'll step out of this car while it's doing fifty-five."

It seemed that the decision was taken out of Pete's hands. Before he could even get the chance to turn back around to the road, a tire blew. Suddenly the car was veering back and forth across the blacktop, the wheel bucking like a live thing in Pete's hands. They barely missed two oncoming cars and sideswiping a truck as they careened a short distance down a hill.

"Here we go again," Brooke moaned, eyes closed, hands gripping anything she could find.

All that time spent riding jeeps through deserts and jungles hadn't gone to waste. Neatly skirting two street signs and a telephone pole, Pete managed to get the car onto the shoulder without turning them on their heads. And then, for a few minutes, they just sat there.

"You wanted to stop?" Pete asked, his voice suspiciously quiet.

"That's another thing," she said, eyes still closed, hands clenched around dashboard and door handle. "I'm not sure how many more lives I have to offer. Or how many more times I feel like changing my underwear on short notice."

Pete couldn't help chuckling, which brought Brooke's eyes snapping open. He could see her trying very hard to hang on to her anger. In the end, though, she broke down, too.

"Well, you can't say life isn't interesting around me," he offered with a grin.

She snorted. "I think 'interesting' might be too pale a word."

He gave her his best grin. "You want to get out now?"

"Once my legs start working again."

She wasn't as wobbly as she claimed. In fact, she was the one who dug into the back for the spare tire while Pete rolled up shirtsleeves and tackled the jack.

"What was it you were in such a hurry to tell me?" he asked, bent over the wheel.

Occasionally a car whirred past, and tucked into the dense trees a little farther beyond, the first residential rooftops peeked through. They had just about reached the edges of suburbia.

Home. Reality. Pete wasn't so sure he was all that anxious to get there.

"The tire isn't any good."

He straightened to see only her hair above the lifted trunk. "That's what you were going to tell me?"

She leaned to the side and flashed him a rueful grin. "No, but it isn't."

Pete gave the half-elevated jack a considering look. "Well, then I guess this is wasted effort. Looks like we should be in our hiking shoes."

She gave the car a look of her own. "Are you sure we should leave it here?"

"I don't see how we can bring it along."

She had a really cute grimace on her. "I mean one of us should stay."

"If one of us stays—" he informed her, stepping up to join her by the back of the car "—both of us do. I want to find out what was so all-fired important back there."

She wrinkled her nose at him. "I think you just want to find out what my costume is."

He flashed her an impudent grin. "Can't be better than mine. Now, what's it to be? Walk or stay?"

Brooke answered by slamming closed the trunk and holding out her hand. "A lovely day for a stroll, Mr. Cooper, don't you think?"

Damn her, why couldn't she see how good this was? he thought. Why didn't she want to spend all her days just like this, teasing each other, lightening the load of the rest of the world, shoring each other up over the rough spots. Just like before, only better. Much better. Damn near as perfect as a man could expect.

"Do you realize that you're getting as bad as they are?" she asked without preamble, her attention down on the uneven terrain they were trying to negotiate along the side of the road. It wasn't a big road, one of those lost little thoroughfares Brooke was so adept at finding, so that the shoulders were kudzu and rocks, and the turns all blind.

"Getting as bad as who?" Pete demanded.

She waved her hand in an all-encompassing motion. "All those people who see me as part of your chicken soup."

Pete almost tripped over a vine trying to figure that one out. "I don't think I want to be many more chicken soups," he warned.

"You know what I mean," she objected. "The Pete Cooper Time and Space Continuum. All the Buffys and Muffys and Gidgets who've orbited your planet since Alicia's departure. Reflecting the Cooper light into the night sky without possessing any of their own."

"I don't see you the same way I see Buffy," he protested.

"Probably because my braces are already off."

"Cheap shot."

She grinned. "I know. But I didn't mean that you saw me as Buffy, but that you've been treating me a little like all the fans have. Haven't you seen it?"

"No," he answered honestly. "I haven't."

She nodded contemplatively, her forehead pursed again, her chin out. Pete wondered whether that was a good sign or not. "What did I think about that museum idea of yours?"

He wasn't following her at all. "What do you mean?"

She went right on walking, her eyes down, her steps careful, her hand in his as if they were strolling through the park. "What about the antique store, or the job at IBN, or the art gallery job you were going to get for me?"

This time she stopped, because Pete did. He looked down at her, unsure what to expect, suddenly understanding what she was trying to say. "I don't know," he admitted. "I didn't stop to ask."

Frustration flashed across those brash features, hesitation, unhappiness. "You assumed," she said, shaking her head a little. "Coop, don't you see? I feel like I'm being sucked into your force field so that I'm going to look up in a few months and find that I'm not even there anymore. And buddy, if there's one thing I've learned on this pilgrimage, it's that you definitely need me to be me."

Pete took her in his hands, facing down the truth there on the side of the road. "I'm trying to find a way we can work this out."

She shook her head. "You're trying to find a way we can be together. It's not the same. It never would have occurred to you to try and make my decisions for me two weeks ago. No matter how anybody else in the world saw me or treated me, you believed that I could call my own shots. Since we've made love, that's changed."

"That's because I'm in love with you, damn it!"

Her smile was sad. "That's the worst reason to take over somebody else's life, and you know it."

"And if I leave you alone, you're going to crawl right back into that town and shrivel up and die."

She looked down, her shoulders slumping a little, and Pete thought his heart would break. He thought he'd pushed her away from him by using the argument that mattered to him the most.

"You've been my friend a lot longer than you've been my lover," he insisted. "And in that time I've seen you put your life on hold for other people. I've seen you stuck in that town like a... like a lily in a field of dandelions. And I know what that can do to a person, Brooke." He shook her, shook her hard. "Do you hear me? I know, and I won't let it happen to you."

She lifted her gaze back to him, and everything she felt for him filled those beautiful eyes, both the love and the pain and the frustration. "But you can't save me by making me you. Give me a chance to do this myself, Coop. Let me find my own way to carve out a special, separate niche from the Pete Cooper legend. It's the only way we'll ever manage it."

"Away from Rupert Springs," he insisted. "With me."

She took a breath, teetering on the edge of decision, her expression betraying the price he asked her to pay.

"I'll do anything you ask," he told her. "I'll wait, I'll step back, I'll pay your way through a grand trip to Europe if that's what it's going to take, but I want you to get away from there and see what your potential is."

"I don't..."

"I mean it. Live a completely separate life than mine if you want until you're sure you're ready, but at least take the chance."

She was trembling in his hands, torn between the comfort of the past and the upheaval of the future. Balanced between dread and possibility. And she only had Pete to hold her up.

"It's out there," he insisted, his eyes locked onto hers, his grip fierce, his belief in her all she'd allow him to give her right now. "Whatever it is you want, you can have it. But not if you don't go for it."

"How do I know that?" she asked, her voice small.

And Pete smiled for her, his best smile, the one he'd only discovered since falling in love. "Because I tell you it is. And if there's anybody I know who can help you find it, it's me."

She lifted a hand in exception. "Help."

Pete fought the urge to crow. "Advice and support only. Deal?"

Briefly, that young Brooke peeked through, the one so earnestly seeking comfort and approval, the shy, gawky girl with no one to ask to the prom, and suddenly Pete was giving her a second chance.

"I'll try," she finally allowed.

Pete took a second to pull her to him, filling his senses with the feel and smell and sound of her, closing her to him like a part of himself he'd almost lost—the best part.

And then he turned them back along their way. "Now that that's settled, let's make the most of this nice, quiet summer day before I have to go back to work."

They'd taken ten steps when the nice, quiet day opened up on them, in buckets. Caught a good half mile from the car, Pete elected to pull Brooke back into a stand of pines along the side of the road for temporary shelter.

"Maybe it's you," he complained, his hair already dripping in his face as he squinted out into the downfall. "I usually don't get this much action in a week, even in a war zone."

"Pete," Brooke gasped, her attention caught by something over his shoulder. "Look!"

He turned, fully expecting to find at least Bigfoot bearing down on them, if not the real Elvis. All he found was a battered, faded little sign that hung by one frayed wire from a low-hanging tree limb.

"Bed-and-breakfast?" he demanded, bending a little to peer past the overhanging limbs of the first three or four oaks to see the sign. All he came up with was a very overgrown driveway. "When did they put that sign up, after Appomattox?"

But Brooke was already dragging him back through the dripping trees. "Come on, let's find out."

And that's how they came to discover Eleven Oaks.