The next morning, Cooper was standing at the breakfast buffet in the communal dining room when something blond and wild burst through the door. The retreatants in the room gasped, their collective breaths loud in the usual silence. The two-legged wild thing came toward Cooper at a slow stalk, the soles of her shock-green boots making heavy thuds against the terra-cotta floor tiles. He cautiously set his bowl of oatmeal aside, then braced himself as he watched her determined approach.
Obviously, Angel—the wild thing—had gotten over her surprise of the night before. He’d known she would, and also known that then she’d come after him for answers. What he didn’t know was if she’d accept coronary bypass surgery as an excuse for the way he’d dumped the information on her. And for the way he’d been reacting toward her too—cold one minute and hot the next.
She came to a lurching halt mere inches from his chest, her baby-blue eyes hidden under an untamed tangle of hair that was standing out around her head. He could feel the heat gathering on her tongue.
When her mouth opened, he clamped a hand over it.
“Mm!” Although muffled, her protest was clearly outraged.
With his free hand, he pointed to the nearby sign requesting silence. Though she followed his gesture, he could sense the words still boiling up inside of her. And he was certain this little teakettle had one hell of a whistle.
To save all their hearing, he made a hasty grab for one of the pads and pens that lay scattered about the room. He thrust them into her hands just as they appeared to be reaching for his throat.
Angel snatched the writing implements and he thought better of leaving his palm over her mouth. In this mood, her bark was probably less painful than her bite.
Though his hand was no longer clapped against her lips, she didn’t speak, just moved her hand deliberately across the page. Cooper waited, prepared for her to take a layer off his skin. He’d mismanaged things with her, he had to admit it. Sex had been absent from his priority list for so long that he’d been knocked off his feet by its unexpected reappearance.
Riiiip. The bad-tempered sound of paper being torn from the pad made him wince. She shoved the sheet into his hand and, bracing himself again, he gingerly turned it over.
The handwriting was passionate and so were the words:
My hairdryer! I’m begging you!
Astonished, he looked at the paper another minute, and then at Angel. She shook back the mess of curls and he could see her eyes now. They weren’t angry, but they weren’t quite alert either.
She scribbled again.
Begging you!
At the near desperation on her face, he was forced to swallow his laugh.
What had he been so afraid of? He’d spent the night awake in bed, his ear plastered to the pillow, reassuring himself with his heartbeat and reciting all the reasons why he should keep clear of Angel. He’d vowed again to get her off the story and away from him.
But looking at her now, rumple-headed, heavy-eyed, and on Day Two of serious caffeine withdrawal, he thought she looked…manageable.
And hell, why not admit it? He thought she looked adorable too.
Turning away, he grabbed a mug and filled it with hot water from the nearby carafe. Then he took her hand and started towing her out of the building. She stumbled along behind him, admirably keeping her mouth shut until the dining room door slapped closed behind them.
“My hairdryer?” she asked, voice full of hope.
“Shh!” From the corner of his eye he could see one of the regular visitors coming their way, her hand-carved walking stick poking into the dirt with each step. Mrs. Withers would whack them both with it if they dared to disturb the quiet.
As the old lady passed, they exchanged nods, and then he rushed Angel around the corner of the next cottage and toward his own. “No hairdryer,” he said to her under his breath. “But coffee. I can get you coffee.”
Her fingers tightened on his. “Coffee,” she repeated, in the same tone he’d heard the Benedictine brothers up the hill use during prayer. “Real coffee.”
He didn’t go so far as to commit to that. But at least it kept her quiet until he got her inside his cottage. A quick rummage in a cupboard produced a tiny bottle of crystals that had hardened into instant-coffee clay. He managed to scrape off enough with a spoon to color the hot water in the mug a muddy brown.
“Here.” He passed it to her.
Holding a clump of curls off her face with one hand, she brought the mug to her lips. Drained it. Then she blinked a couple of times, looking around her as if coming awake from a long sleep. “What day is this?”
His lips twitched. “Tuesday.” Oh yes, she was manageable, all right. And still damn adorable, with her baby blues now clearing and that hair of hers waving about as if half-electrified. If somebody was going to do a story on Stephen—and under the circumstances Cooper could only welcome good publicity—Angel might very well be the best for the job.
“Tuesday?” she echoed.
Nodding, he reached for the mug. “Let me take that from you.” Then he shooed her toward the loveseat and easy chair that were angled beside the window in the front room. A plan was forming in his mind, one that would keep all the cards in his hand.
She obeyed, the overstuffed, denim-covered chair nearly swallowing her up. “Tuesday, you said. That makes last night—” she broke off, narrowing her gaze at him.
Yep, she was waking up, all right.
“Last night,” she repeated.
The ominous way she said the words made him guess she was remembering the night before and how he’d tried to let her think the sexual pull was on her side only. How he’d let her apologize for it.
He dropped onto the sofa. “I was wondering when you’d get to that.”
She was still staring at him, narrow-eyed. “I…you…” She sputtered, her hand lifting. “You…me…” The hand dropped.
“Yeah.” Whatever he was admitting to seemed to satisfy her, because he waited a moment and she said nothing more. Hoping they’d left that topic behind for good, he continued talking. “I’d like to talk to you about something else.”
He paused, giving her a chance to light into him if she must. But when she merely lifted her eyebrows, he finished his thought. “I have a proposition for you.”
Her eyebrows rose even higher, and then she settled back onto the cushions and crossed her arms over her chest. “A proposition?” she repeated, her voice oh-too-cool. “What kind of proposition?”
“So suspicious.”
“So wise,” she retorted.
He shrugged. “Whatever. Here’s what I’m offering. The cooperation of our family and friends, complete cooperation, on your story about Stephen.”
“I already have that. Your sister—”
“Will change her mind if I ask her to. You can figure out why she’d be interesting in keeping me happy.”
“Hmm.” Angel crossed her jeans-clad legs at the ankle and pursed her lips, obviously considering all the angles.
Cooper knew the plan was perfect. With the hairdryer and caffeine as last-ditch leverage, keeping her on the story would be a safer bet than some unknown reporter. They could end up with a writer bent on a hatchet job, instead of one who admitted to usually writing pieces on philanthropists and little-known sports.
Oh yeah. The Angel he knew was preferable to some devil he didn’t.
She was still eyeing him suspiciously, though. “And in return for all this cooperation, what, exactly, do I give up?”
Smart woman. It had taken her less than ten seconds to smell a catch. “In return,” Cooper said, “you offer up your promise not to write about C. J. Jones.”
She offered up nothing right away. A moment passed, then her gaze dropped from his face to her lap. “You said he died.”
“Thanks to the miracle of modern science,” he replied lightly, “they managed to bring me back to life. Twice.”
Her lashes rose and he was looking into that heavenly blue of her eyes again. “There’s more to it than that,” she said.
“Sure. You’ve seen the scar.” He stretched his legs out in front of him, pretending a casualness he’d never feel about it. “I had an acute myocardial infarction.”
“Heart attack.”
“Right.” Though attack didn’t come close to describing the long minutes when pain rolled over his chest like a two-ton Ford Ranger and more agony had sliced like a butcher’s knife along his left arm. He ran his hand over his face, remembering how the sweat had poured off of it. “And then I had coronary bypass surgery.”
“You said they saved you twice.”
“I don’t remember the second heart attack. I was on the operating table.”
“And since then…?”
“Since then,” he replied, “I’ve recovered, stopped smoking, learned to eat differently, exercised a lot, managed my stress.” And waited to die.
“But Cooper, it would make a great story…” she began, but the wheedle in her voice was halfhearted and she left off altogether when he started shaking his head.
“You get Stephen,” Cooper said. “Or you get me.”
She rose to pace back and forth in front of the window. “I don’t like it,” she muttered to herself. “I just don’t like it.”
He stood too, and on her next pass grabbed her hand to halt her. “I prefer to keep my health issues private.”
Her chin edged higher, her cheeks going pink. “You make me sound like a gossip.”
He just looked at her.
She whipped her hand from his. “What if I called you an ambulance chaser?”
He shrugged. “I don’t apologize for seeking justice.”
“And I don’t apologize for seeking truth!”
He had to smile at her passion. “So we’re a matching pair of idealists.” But then he sobered. “Seriously, though, Angel, who really needs to know about my heart attacks and surgery?”
Her gaze slid away.
“Who?” he insisted.
“Nobody,” she finally admitted. “Not when you put it like that. But my slant would be C. J. Jones and his most important, albeit out-of-courtroom, battle.”
“No.” God, no. Because both C. J. Jones and Cooper liked to win, and he planned on going out a winner, at least in the eyes of the public.
She studied his face. “All right,” she finally agreed. “On one condition.”
He set his jaw. “The hairdryer’s still out. And I can’t promise the coffee’ll get any better either.”
She shook her head and he watched with wonder as her hair lifted a couple of inches and stayed there, suspended in midair. “It’s not that. I want you to reconsider the story once you come back to San Francisco.”
“Huh?” He blinked away his distraction and refocused on her face. “What?”
“When you go back to work at your firm, at DiGiovanni & Jones, I want you to reconsider letting me interview you.”
“When I go back to work. At the firm.”
She nodded. “Just think about it, okay? A story like yours could inspire people, you know.”
He wanted to laugh again. “Man smoking and working himself into an early heart attack? What’s inspiring about that? We could add that since my father suffered the same fate I should have known better.”
She ignored his protest. “Tell me you’ll consider it.”
He sighed. But then, since he would never practice at DiGiovanni & Jones again, he decided it was simplest to agree. “Fine.”
After a moment more’s hesitation, she shoved out her hand. “Then you’ve got yourself a deal.”
Her fingers were warm and small in his. He held them a second. Two. Too long. Because then it happened again, that undeniable yearning to touch her further. Touch her more. Hungry for the long-lost pleasure of female skin, he found himself succumbing to it, his thumb smoothing over her knuckles.
So smooth, soft. His muscles tensed, his blood went predictably thick, and his free hand found its way to her cheek.
The skin warmed beneath his palm. Then his thumb moved of its own volition too, brushing across her lower lip.
Her breath rushed over it. Hot, quick, nervous.
He’d forgotten that about women. The first time an encounter turned from flirtatious suggestion to blatantly sexual there was always that brief hitch, that vulnerable moment when they revealed their lingering doubts, and yet didn’t move away. It used to make him wary, he remembered, as if he were taking advantage somehow. As if a woman’s trust put too much expectation on him and what they might be to each other.
But Angel’s stillness, her final decision to trust, made him feel surprisingly smug. He smiled to himself and drew his thumb over her mouth again. Then he froze, recognizing his own gesture as a possessive one.
Possessive. Jesus.
He had no business wanting to hold on to anything. Any woman. Her.
Lifting his hands, he stepped back.
They stared at each other.
“Well,” she said after a minute.
“Well,” he echoed.
“I suppose there’s that attraction thing again.”
The offhand way she mentioned it worked like a charm to relax him. He found himself smiling, because he was beginning to enjoy her I’m-no-good-at-coy directness. “Yeah.”
She nodded slowly. “And though you tried to make me believe otherwise, you say it does go both ways?”
“Obviously.” He was still smiling. See? He’d been right. The lust was controllable. She was controllable.
She nodded again. But then she stilled and her eyes went wide. “Hey! Wait a minute! It occurs to me that since we’ve just agreed you’re no longer the subject of a story…”
He felt his smile fall from his face.
“…there isn’t a reason in the world we can’t pursue that attraction now, is there?”
His perfect plan wasn’t so perfect after all.
Men!
Angel damned the entire gender, even as she delighted in the look of dismay on Cooper’s face. That’s what he got for playing games…with the truth, and with her.
Like any man, he probably avoided revealing his health issues whenever he could, as long as he could. Males invested so much ego in their image. To greater and lesser degrees, they’d do anything to keep their armor untarnished.
Her mother’s first husband, he with the especially shiny armor of the Homicide Division, Oakland PD, had been of the former degree. Angel and her mother had spent years running from him—and from what he’d threatened he’d do if they ever told anyone that he battered her mother.
Angel shook herself free of the memories and focused on the man before her. Cooper wasn’t Captain Brendan Colley. But still, she didn’t appreciate the casual—no, almost cruel—manner in which he’d told her about his illness the night before.
“He died” was the way Cooper had put it, and her stomach had shrunk to a cold, leaden ball. She couldn’t let him get away with playing games with her like that.
Tucking her hair behind her ears, she took a cocky step forward. “So what do you say, Cooper? Should we see where this little…pull takes us?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I, uh…”
She didn’t feel an ounce of guilt over his discomfort. Nuh-uh. Because she’d felt uncomfortable herself, foolish even, when she’d admitted her interest in him. When she’d apologized!
Curse him for that. And herself too, while she was at it. She knew better than to give a man the upper hand.
Determined to take it for herself, she moved closer to Cooper and with her forefinger lightly touched a button on the soft cotton shirt he was wearing. “What do you say?”
He stared down at her finger as if it might sting if he breathed. “I say this isn’t a good idea.”
“Oh come on. I won’t bite.” Now tracing a little circle around the button, she smiled up at him with what she hoped was the right combination of insistence and flirtation. She respected his resistance, was glad of it, but she didn’t mind giving him a taste of the same kind of foolish feelings that he’d served up to her. “At least not right away.”
His expression lost some of its alarm. Oh, maybe she wasn’t doing this right! Between work and wariness, her physical relationships with men had been few and far between. The truth was, about three years ago she’d decided the tepid night befores weren’t worth the awkward mornings after.
If you didn’t put your heart into sex—and she never intended to—then what was the point?
Cooper placed his hand over hers, flattening her palm to his chest. “What maneuver is this, Angel?”
“No maneuver,” she retorted, trying not to take notice of the heat of his body coming through his shirt. Trying not to be distracted by the heat, by his body. This moment was supposed to be her payback, her way of regaining control, not the time to succumb to more rash and irrelevant lust.
With her other hand, she reached up to toy with the ends of his shaggy hair. “But it could be fun, though. Wouldn’t it be fun?”
His gaze narrowed. His fingers folded over hers.
She tried to suck in some air, but her lungs seemed already overfull. Breathe out, Angel, breathe out. “We could—” She cleared her throat, trying to make her voice stronger, more confident. Bravado had always worked when she was a little girl, scared and lonely. “We could start with a kiss.”
Beneath her hand, she felt the quick jolt of his heart. “No—”
“Unless you’re afraid.”
Be afraid, Cooper! She willed it, willed him to back away and admit that she’d won. That he shouldn’t ever underestimate her again.
“‘Afraid’?” His voice roughened. “Of you? How could I possibly be afraid of a woman who looks like I should put a hook through her hair and hang her from a Christmas tree?”
Then his free hand clapped against the small of her back to jam her against the front of his body. His mouth fell against hers.
Angel’s mind slid from “tree” to torch to fire. Oh wow. She was on fire. But she opened her lips to its source and let him try to cool her with the stroke of his tongue. More heat sprinted down her body as he thrust it inside. Her fingers speared through his hair to keep his head bent to hers.
He curved his forearm around her waist to haul her up on her toes and even closer against him. His body was Grade A, she’d seen that, but now she felt it, hard to her soft, protrusion to her intrusion. She wiggled against the firm plane of his chest and felt his groan through her hand that still covered his heart.
She slid her hand out from between them and used it to touch him everywhere she could reach, racing it across his shoulders, his biceps, the granite wall of his back. He was all lean muscle and hot skin, and she couldn’t get enough of it.
His mouth moved across her face and she turned hers against his neck, running her tongue over the faint stubble and the tangy taste of man. Everything inside of her was liquid, it was only Cooper who was holding her up, and when his lips found hers again she leaned into him, to absorb more of the flavor and feel of his body.
It’s a delicious weakness, she realized, widening her mouth to take the heavy thrust of his tongue. And only he can save me from it.
The thought, the fear of it being true pierced the hot haze. Locking her knees, she shoved against Cooper. Then, standing alone, standing straight, she took a step away.
They stared at each other, and she was gratified that at least he was panting like she was.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded, raking his hand through his hair. “What the hell was that?”
Her revenge, her payback, her countermove, her way of keeping things cool between them. God, he would laugh her out of the room if she tried those out now. Angel scrubbed her hands over her face to hide how they trembled.
“My mistake,” she finally said. Though it chagrined her to admit it, she’d underestimated him. Without thinking, she touched her fingertips to her mouth, and finding it still burning, jerked them away.
He was still staring at her.
“I…I’m sorry.” She rushed toward the door, opened it, was almost all the way through before he spoke.
“Me too, Angel,” he called to her. “Me too.”
It took Angel several hours to recover her equilibrium. But in the early evening, she ventured into the woods surrounding the retreat, eyeing the untamed environment with a new interest. Her last meal had been two bites of an unappetizing tofu-and-sprouts sandwich, so her grumbling stomach had her wondering just exactly what parts of the forest were edible.
She splashed through a trickle of stream, disturbing a frog. It hopped off a few feet, to the camouflage of a feathery fern, and watched her with a nervous air. Like chicken, Angel remembered, assessing the plump little creature. She’d eaten frog legs on occasion during the six months she and her mother had lived in Paris.
Her foot took a stealthy step forward.
Good Lord! She jerked her boot back and her mind away from the tantalizing memory of meat in a delicate white wine sauce and a fluffy side serving of garlic mashed potatoes swimming in butter. “You’re safe from me, little buddy,” she reassured the frog.
At least for now.
“It’s this place,” she muttered to herself. It brought out the weirdest impulses in her. She hadn’t wanted a man in ages, and she’d never before wanted to capture her own meal either.
At the moment, she wasn’t sure which worried her more.
She tramped onward, following the sound and smell of the sea. A few minutes at the spot Katie had showed her yesterday might clear her head.
But she missed the route they’d taken and was forced to backtrack. By the time she reached the edge of the trees, the sun was hovering just above the horizon and the spot was already occupied.
Cooper and Katie sat silently side by side, their backs to Angel. For a moment she didn’t move, because it was such a pretty image with that backdrop of setting sun. The man’s hair fluttering back in the wind, his shoulder brushing the young girl’s. Katie’s knees were bent, her arms wrapped around them. She stared out at the sky.
The sun slipped another notch and the breeze died. In the well of quiet it left, Angel heard the girl’s voice. “Mom wants me to go back to school tomorrow.”
Cooper didn’t move. “Are you ready?”
She shrugged, one of those teenage gestures that conveyed nothing at all.
They were silent again, and even the sea went quiet enough that Angel didn’t think she could creep off without detection. So she stood where she was, surrounded by the smell of pines and salty air.
Cooper raked a hand through his hair, revealing his frustration. She could feel his question in the air, her own mother had said it to her a thousand times. Are you all right? he’d ask any moment now.
And Katie would answer as only such a question could be answered, the only answer the questioner wanted to hear.
Instead of crying, yelling, railing against fate and fathers and fear, the girl would say the same words Angel had answered a thousand and one times herself. I’m fine.
Cooper’s hand speared through his hair again. “It sucks, Katie. This sucks.”
Both Angel and Katie jolted. The girl took a quick breath, but didn’t give her uncle a glance. “No, no. I’m fine,” she said quickly. “Just fine.”
The words, the way they were said with so little emotion or inflection, poked at Angel like a dulled pin.
Cooper reached over to rest his hand on the crown of his niece’s head. “I’ve been fine before, sweetheart,” he told her. “Just that same kind of fine. And it sucks too.”
Angel’s throat squeezed at the bittersweet feeling in the words. Then it squeezed again when Cooper’s hand fell to Katie’s shoulder and drew her closer against his side.
The girl didn’t protest, but she didn’t snuggle either, and that stiffness pricked at Angel again. She remembered Cooper with his arm around the girl and her mother at the memorial service and it had almost hurt then too, that sign of a man’s support. But now the pain she felt was for Katie, that the teen couldn’t, wouldn’t let herself be comforted by him.
Little girls needed someone to stand between them and the big, bad world.
She didn’t hear Cooper’s sigh, but she saw the way his shoulders moved slowly up, then down. “It’s a pretty good sunset, though, eh?” He reached up to fluff Katie’s hair. “Some days that’s all we have, so we might as well enjoy it.”
Angel’s throat tightened again and the wind whipped up so that it stung her eyes, even in her sheltered hide-away. A clear signal for her to get a move on, she reprimanded herself. She’d been stalling, just as she’d been doing since her arrival at Tranquility House.
As silently as she could, she headed back for her cottage. As soon as she got there, she’d develop a list of questions for her first interview with Katie’s mother. Though she’d pretended to herself for two days that she’d been soaking up atmosphere, she’d really been putting off interviewing the new widow. But the only thing that stalling had bought her was trouble with Cooper and this uncomfortable empathy for Katie.
So Angel steeled her spine. If Katie’s mother thought Katie was ready to go back to school, then Katie’s mother was probably ready to talk about Stephen Whitney. She’d agreed, after all. She wanted Angel to do the story.
The truth would set them all free.
So, yes, it was time to put scruples, sex, and sisters aside. Especially since, so far, they’d only brought her trouble. WWWD?
What Would Woodward Do? He’d get on with the story and then get out of here.