Thank goodness Katie did not appear the least bit teary-eyed when she responded to Angel’s knock on her half-open door. Nonetheless, Angel tried to establish a lighthearted mood by striking a melodramatic pose, the back of her hand pressed against her forehead.
“Please, please. It’s an emergency. I’m desperate for a blow-dryer and some quality time with an electrical outlet.”
Hair was a sure way to any female’s heart. Within seconds she was standing in the bathroom adjoining Katie’s spacious bedroom. And within another few her hair was looking slightly better than it had in weeks. After returning the blow-dryer to its place on a shelf, she took a deep breath and pretended she was hair-fluffing instead of heavily stalling.
You can do this, Angel commanded her reflection.
Was she, or was she not the professional, Fearless Girl Reporter that she’d fantasized about becoming since she was twelve years old?
Sure, she could write a story about Stephen Whitney without interviewing Katie. There was no guarantee she’d get anything worth using, after all. But she’d had other opportunities to talk to the teenager over the last couple of weeks and she’d ducked every one of them.
Angel Buchanan did not duck opportunities. Or hard truths. Or even the other daughter of her father.
And while she could hair-fluff with the best of them, she didn’t stall either.
Sending herself a hard-eyed look in the mirror, Angel allowed one more second of delay. Then she reemerged into Katie’s room to find the girl lying on her bed, reading a magazine.
Angel cocked her head, recognizing Teen People by its Clearasil ad and white-toothed celebrity shots. “They’re not back together, are they? Britney and Justin?”
At a noncommittal hum of reply, she shrugged, then spun a slow 360, taking in the room’s bookshelves, entertainment center, computer, and printer. One wall was dominated by a bulletin board crowded with the usual stuff—photos, certificates, a recent report card that was all A’s except for a C in PE.
She glanced over to catch Katie looking at her. Angel put on a smile. “How’s it going at school?”
“All right, I guess.”
She nodded at the report card. “Mine looked just the same. Physical fitness test nailed me every year. Push-ups, pull-ups. I have zero upper body strength.”
Katie shrugged, her cool expression unchanging.
Geez, I’m dying here. Angel usually did well with children, because, she suspected, she’d yet to stop looking like one. But she wouldn’t give up quite yet. That first day, outside the church, hadn’t she managed to get a few laughs out of the girl?
She crossed toward the bed and perched on the lower corner. “I’m leaving soon. Going back to San Francisco the day after tomorrow.”
Katie’s gaze flicked to Angel’s face again. “You’re done with your story?”
Angel shook her head. “I’ll write it when I get back home. But I’ve pretty much talked to everyone around here who knew your dad.”
She paused. Wait for it.
“Not to me.”
There. It was so much better for the first move to come from Katie herself. Angel didn’t feel nearly as guilty that way. “Well, I did ask your mom if we could talk. She said it was up to you.”
Now the girl looked away, closed off again. “I don’t know what I’d have to tell you.”
What it was like to have a father who stayed.
The thought wrapped around Angel’s throat, squeezed. Digging her fingernails into her palms, she forced it free. She was too tough to wimp out now, too strong to let the old pain hurt her.
Just ask a few commonplace questions about their relationship, she bargained with herself. Then she’d cut ties with these people forever.
“Is your father still alive?”
Startled by the sudden question, Angel whipped her head toward the girl. “What?” It came out like a croak, so she swallowed and tried again. “What did you say?”
“Is your father still alive?”
“Um, well, no. No, he’s not.”
Katie sat up straighter on the bed. “For how long? I mean, since you were how old?”
A little spooked by the conversation, Angel dropped her gaze, watching herself draw an imaginary circle on her denim-covered knee. “My parents split up when I was four years old. I never saw him again.”
“Did your mom…did she marry a second time?”
The urgency in the question caught Angel’s attention. Looking over, she saw that the girl’s wooden expression had livened up—with a distinct spark of anxiety.
Poor thing, Angel thought, helpless against a sharp tug of sympathy, she’s already bracing for more changes to her life.
“My mother married a couple times after she was with my father,” she answered. “Now she lives with her husband in France, just outside of Paris.”
“Paris.” The expression on Katie’s face returned to its previously frozen state. “My mom and I met my dad there once, when I was eight.”
Angel again tried smiling. “EuroDisney?”
The girl nodded. “We were only there for a few days. My dad went to France a bunch of other times, though.”
Angel felt her insides go still. “A bunch of times, you said?” She tried to keep the question casual, even as she calculated the exact years she and her mother had hidden in Europe. “Do you remember when?”
The girl shrugged. “I’m pretty sure he hadn’t been outside of the States until that first time when I was eight. After that he traveled a lot more.”
Angel’s blood started pumping again. For a minute she’d thought Stephen Whitney had gone looking for them. For her. Stupid. Stupid, how she could still hope after all these years that he’d given her a second thought.
She jumped to her feet and walked around the room, determined to distance herself from the old bitterness. Pausing at the bulletin board again, she stared at Katie’s report card. “Yep,” she said, to prove to herself she sounded normal. “My report cards were exactly like this.”
She looked back, steeling herself. It was time to forget about PE and Paris and the kid’s obvious misery. It was time to get on with the interview.
Angel opened her mouth, but found herself hesitating again. And then again. Get on with it, Angel.
Why was she letting the girl get to her? Why did she feel this crazy need to protect her? Biology aside, she wasn’t this kid’s family! She didn’t owe her a thing! She didn’t owe anyone a thing!
But that didn’t stop Angel’s feet from walking back to the bed. She sat down again, closer to Katie this time. “I know…I know what you’re going through is hard.”
Fine, it was a lame remark, as even those kinds of remarks went. She was admittedly lousy at airing out feelings and actually preferred bottling them up herself. But she’d had years more practice than Katie.
“Really hard,” Angel added, shifting uneasily. “But you’ll be all right.”
She said that last part brightly.
God, she was an idiot.
Truly an idiot, because her mouth was moving again and she was continuing to speak in that dumb, cheerful voice. “You’d be amazed at what hard times you can get through.”
Apparently Katie thought Angel was an idiot too, because she pinned her with that near-expressionless stare. “What’s the hardest time you’ve ever had?”
It wasn’t so much a challenge, Angel decided, as a declaration that she and all the other adults in Katie’s world didn’t have a clue about what the teen was going through.
Fifteen years old sucked.
Remembering that, Angel did her best to answer. “The hardest time for me…I don’t know…” She thought of the stories she’d written over the years for West Coast magazine. “I lived on the streets for a week before writing a piece on homeless women.”
When the girl didn’t say anything, Angel found herself confessing more. “Of course, it was summer, and at night I slept on a cot at one of the shelters.” Even to her own ears it sounded like a camping trip, not a hardship.
“And then there was the time I—” She broke off, knowing that crewing a two-day yacht race didn’t hold a candle to losing your father.
Sighing, Angel wished she could let this go, wished she did not feel this sudden urge to give the girl some hope—or at least something else to think about. She dropped her head back, inhaling a long breath as she stared at the clouds that someone—Stephen Whitney, surely—had painted on Katie’s ceiling. “The hardest time I ever had was the year I pretended to be a boy.”
“What?” Katie drew back, her eyes rounded.
Woke you up now, didn’t I? Angel sucked in another breath. “I told you that my mother and father split, right? Well, shortly afterward, my mom married someone else, a police officer. He, uh, he wasn’t a nice man.”
“How wasn’t he nice?”
Angel hesitated.
“Yeah, how wasn’t he nice?” It was Cooper, shooting her a half-apologetic look as he stepped into the room. “Sorry, but Lainey asked me to check on you two. I wasn’t intentionally eavesdropping.”
Fear—or something very much like it—made her stomach dip, scooping right below her belly button. This wasn’t something to share with Cooper. She couldn’t even say why she’d decided to tell Katie.
No, she did know that. She remembered that day at the church. The teen had smiled then. Angel had nearly made her laugh, and now she couldn’t shake the feeling that it connected them somehow—like being responsible for a person whose life you’d saved.
But she couldn’t do this with Cooper listening in!
“Angel?”
It was Katie’s voice and Angel glanced at her, then couldn’t look away. “He, uh, hurt my mom,” she continued quickly. “But because he was a police officer, she was afraid to bring charges against him.”
Katie’s eyes had gone wide again, so Angel took that as her cue to skate over the worst details. “We decided to…to get away.” Run away. “He had access to lots of methods of finding us, though, so we hid from him by changing our identities often and moving around a lot.”
She could feel Cooper’s gaze on her, feel its steady regard, and knew that he could cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s that she was leaving out.
“So for the sake of putting him off the scent,” she said, moving briskly to the point, “I went through third grade as a boy.”
Katie appeared dumbfounded all over again. “But…you…you look…” She laughed.
At the sound, Angel’s stomach dipped once more, but this time it was a warm, gentle movement. Telling the story was worth just that one moment of real amusement on the girl’s face.
“I know,” Angel said. “I look like the girliest girl you ever met. I was as girlie and as shrimpie then too. That’s what made it so difficult.”
“But you managed.”
Katie’s brief spurt of laughter had brought real life to her blank expression. Angel didn’t flatter herself that she’d made a big difference for the girl, but it was a start. A start.
“I did. I made it through my hard time.” She smiled at Katie and, without thinking, reached over to take her hand. Their linked fingers rested on Justin Timber-lake’s pretty face. “A person is tempered in fire. Never forget that. It only makes you stronger.”
Then, embarrassed by her hokey homily, she winked. “And I’ll tell you something else that experience proved to me.”
There was almost a smile on Katie’s face. Almost. “What?”
Angel threw a quick glance over her shoulder at Cooper, then leaned forward and stage-whispered. “The fact is, boys really drool. And girls…girls truly rule.”
Sitting on a blanket stretched on the sand of Cooper’s secret beach, Angel watched the sun slip quickly, and without a splash, into the Pacific. The wind instantly quieted, warming the air of the protected cove.
It should have been a calm time of the day. And it should be a calm time for her in the story-writing process, with the data gathered, contacts made, interviews completed. She was about to begin the part she liked best, when she molded the raw input into a form not only to inform, but also to ignite a reader’s emotions.
But still, she felt jittery.
She flopped back against the blanket and closed her eyes.
Then she heard it, the humming, its echo announcing the progress of someone coming through the tunnel to the cove.
That someone was the source of her jitteriness—Cooper. She’d been hiding from him ever since she’d left the Whitney house that morning. The way he’d murmured, “We’ll talk later,” as she’d said goodbye to Lainey had warned her that he wanted to rehash what she’d revealed in Katie’s bedroom.
That wasn’t going to happen. Her past wasn’t a weakness, by God, but sometimes it had the strange effect of making her feel that way.
The humming stopped. “There you are.”
She didn’t open her eyes. It had been pointless to try to run away once she knew he was nearing, but she could get rid of him quickly, couldn’t she? “Do you mind? I was hoping to be left alone.”
“Sorry, but you’d have to take your bra off for that.”
Her eyes popped open and she rose up on her elbows. “Huh?” Certainly he couldn’t tell there wasn’t one beneath the thick sweatshirt she was wearing.
Dropping down to the blanket beside her, he grinned. “I thought that would get your attention. It’s the old signal my sisters told me to use if I wanted uninterrupted time on the beach.”
“If only I’d known…” Angel murmured, leaning back and closing her eyes again.
“Well, now that you do—”
“Dream on, buddy.”
He laughed. “Oh, baby, I am. I do. Every night.”
She ignored him, and the little lick of satisfaction his words gave her. He had a way of disturbing her sleep too.
“You missed dinner tonight,” he said.
“I couldn’t face another helping of tofu surprise, so I’m out here playing fantasy take-out instead.” Eyes still closed, she smiled dreamily. “Right now its Der Wienerschnitzel. Two corn dogs, a chili dog with extra onions, a chocolate shake, and a double order of onion rings.”
“That’s sick.”
“Well excuse me, Mr. Nutrition.”
“No, it’s sick that if you’re fantasizing, you’d choose Der Wienerschnitzel over Doc’s Dogs.”
Surprised, Angel rolled onto her side and propped her head on her palm to look at him. “You know Doc’s? Doc’s on Ocean Street? I thought it was a secret shared only by me and the kids at the junior high down the block.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You haven’t told anyone else, have you?”
“God, no. And risk losing my chance at the best fast food in the city? If those pigs in the financial district find out about it, they’ll be dispatching their assistants there ’round the clock. It’ll be lines out the door twenty-four/seven.”
Cooper nodded. “Remember what they did to Stinko’s.”
Her lip curling, she sat up. “Arranged for venture capital so the place chained up, then went franchise. I weep, weep when I remember how good the cinnamon rolls were before they McDonaldized the process.”
“It’s the new name that gets to me. I’m too much a man to step foot into a place called Cinnie’s.”
“Hah! I knew it.” Angel looked at him with smug satisfaction. “I got stood up once and I’ve always told myself it was because I’d picked the restaurant. It was a great place called Ribbons and Rhinestones.”
He grinned. “Believe it. Only a wussy name like that could get between a man and finding you irresistible.” Then his smile died.
Angel looked away. They both knew Cooper had found her quite resistible, of course. To cover the sudden awkwardness, she gestured toward the dramatic view of orange sky and gray-blue water before them. “Well, uh, I’ve been wondering…This is nice and everything, but aren’t you itching to get back to the city? To Doc’s and coffee and cable TV? We have ocean there too, if you recall.”
His ambiguous grunt had her glancing at him.
“Haven’t you missed it?” she insisted.
“Yeah.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “Yeah, sure. And—” Breaking off, he pushed his hand through his hair again. “Listen, I came looking for you because I’m not going to be around tomorrow. I’ll probably be gone all day, so I wanted to talk with you about—”
“I’m going to be gone most of tomorrow too,” she jumped in, guessing where he would try to take the conversation now. Doc’s Dogs fan or no, she didn’t want to reveal any more of her private, personal past to him. “I’m heading south to San Luis Obispo for the day.”
“Angel—”
“I have a few things I want to check out there, you see, and—”
“Angel—”
“As a matter of fact…” she babbled on, standing up and brushing off her jeans in a businesslike, you’re-dismissed manner, “as a matter of fact, I should probably go back to my cottage, gather my stuff together, and then start packing….”
He spoke right over her. “I want to thank you for what you shared with Katie this morning. She means a lot to me and she…she’ll have more to face ahead. I hope she’ll remember what you said.”
A fist pressed against the nervous flutter in her belly, Angel turned her back on him to walk toward the surf line, the sand cool beneath her bare feet. “Well, okay, yeah, glad to be of help—”
“And I’m sorry for what you had to go through.”
There it was, too personal. She shrugged, drawing near to where the waves washed up on the sand. “No biggie, none at all.”
“Jesus, yes, it’s a biggie.” All at once he was behind her, his hands gentle on her shoulders. His breath blew warm across her temple. “How long, Angel? For how long did you have to hide?”
Way, way too personal.
His thumbs worked gently into her tense, resisting muscles. He rested his chin on the top of her head, his fingers kneading, working, persuading. Making her soft.
“How long, honey?”
“Seven years.” Really soft, because she didn’t even realize she was saying the words until she heard her own weak whisper. But that wouldn’t do. So she said it again, louder. Stronger. “Seven years. Five in the States, the last two in Europe.”
The waves washed in four times before he spoke again. “Were you hurt?” he finally said, his hands still massaging. “Did your mother’s husband hurt you, Angel?”
“He threatened to. He threatened to kill her and then keep me.” She fought the shiver that wanted to roll down her back beneath her sweatshirt. “And she believed him. That’s why we left.”
“But wasn’t there someone who—”
“There was no one!” No one who would take her mother’s side at the police station. No one, not even Angel’s father, Stephen “Artist of the Heart” Whitney, who would help. Her mother had asked him to take Angel, to keep her safe, and he’d refused to be bothered.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “This was twenty years ago, Cooper. Domestic abuse was hushed up all the time. Her husband was rising in the police ranks, becoming more powerful and possessive.”
“So you went underground.”
Angel lifted her hand. “There were people, secret…networks that made it possible. We moved when he got close, or when we thought he was getting close.”
“Then what happened?”
She almost smiled, because she’d covered enough trials to recognize lawyer talk. Then what happened? That was an attorney’s favorite buzz phrase to elicit more of a witness’s story.
“Then one night we got lucky. The bastard dashed to the corner liquor store for his next bottle of scotch. Didn’t take the time to bring a weapon with him. He happened to walk in on an armed robbery in progress, tried to stop it, and died a hero.”
Cooper squeezed her shoulders.
But it wasn’t enough to calm the bitterness welling up in her. She whirled to face him, unable to keep it inside any longer. “That’s what gets to me sometimes. God, a hero. And you know the greatest irony? My mom inherited the medal.”
Cooper let a minute go by. “Maybe she should wear it,” he said quietly. “Or you should.”
The words drained her anger. Staring at him, she laughed. “Yeah. You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
Leaning close, he cupped her cheek with his hand. “And you’re beautiful.”
No, no, no. She scuttled back, her heels chasing the breaker that was rolling back to the sea. She couldn’t afford to let him touch her, not when talking about the past made her so vulnerable.
His gaze stayed fixed on her face. “Are you still planning to leave the day after tomorrow?”
She nodded. God yes, and it wasn’t soon enough. “I have to get back.”
“I may stay overnight in Carmel.”
Her stomach sliding low, she put two and two together and took another careful step back. The surf rushed over her bare feet and she hardly noticed. “Oh. Well. This is, uh, this is goodbye, then.”
“Yeah. This is goodbye.”
The words moved like a wave through her, in one fast rush washing away all the emotions of the day to leave her…empty. Though now she was instep-deep in the Pacific, the cold wasn’t half as shocking as how the idea of never seeing him again desolated her.
“Of course, there’s San Francisco,” she said, trying to smile. “Hey, what do you bet that when you get back we’ll meet up with each other doing the Rice-A-Roni run for the last open seat on a cable car?”
“Maybe.” His dubious voice said it was highly unlikely.
“Yeah, maybe,” Angel echoed. When he went back to the city he would go back to a life with a zillion women whom he found more irresistible than Angel.
Not that she cared. Why, at home she had men waiting for her, too. Men like…like…
Tom Jones. Her neighbor’s faithless cat.
They stared at each other for another tense, silent moment.
But Angel had never done silent well. So she resurrected that friendly smile and firmly pinned it on her face as she rubbed her right palm on the seat of her jeans. Then she held out her hand to him. “Goodbye, Cooper. Thanks for everything.”
He stared down at her outstretched fingers long enough to make her go jittery again. Just as she retracted her hand, he muttered something under his breath. Then he grabbed her wrist and yanked her to him.
“Wh—” He smothered the rest of the word with his mouth.
Angel tried stepping back, but her feet weren’t on the ground. He’d lifted her against him and her toes only found air. She wiggled them helplessly, but then he slanted his head, took the kiss deeper, and she lost any desire to get away.
“This is crazy,” he said, when he lifted his head to kiss a path toward her ear.
“Of course it is,” she assured him, raising her chin so he could follow the goosebumps that were racing down her throat.
“I promised myself to keep away from you.”
“Good idea. I made the exact same promise.” She threw her arms around his neck. “So do it. Keep away. Move away.”
“Me? Why me? Why don’t you?”
“Because you’re the big strong man.” She moaned when he licked her pulse. “I’m the fragile, defenseless woman.”
“You’re the devil.”
“Angel.”
“Devil.” His lips tickled beneath her ear. “Move away, you said. Are you sure you want me to do that?”
She had no idea what he was talking about now, but his warm breath rushing against her ear made her nipples tighten and her stomach jump up and down. “Yes. Do it. Let’s, um, do it.”
He groaned. “You are a devil. That sounds so good. You don’t know how good.”
He found her mouth again, slid his tongue in slowly, so slowly that she felt her pulse hang, waiting for the first touch of tongue to tongue.
And when it happened, her blood gushed hot through her body and liquid heat rushed between her thighs. She pressed closer and he hitched her higher against him. But she had to get closer, closer. His hand slid beneath her sweatshirt, running over her bare skin.
She knew when he noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. His hand froze and then he groaned. “Angel…”
He shifted her again, his fingers coming between them to cup her bare breast. Moaning, she made it easier for them both by wrapping her legs around his waist.
Oh. Oh. He was hard against her, hard there, and she pressed down, letting her weight drag against his erection. His harsh groan tasted sweet against her tongue.
They exchanged dozens of kisses, or maybe it counted as just one, because while the kisses changed—soft, slow, fierce—their mouths never parted.
Finally he tore his lips from hers, looking at her with an expression almost panicky with desire.
“Cooper,” she whispered. “Cooper.”
“Angel.” His voice was guttural, thick. His eyes filled with an emotion she couldn’t name.
Then his knees buckled. One minute she was in his arms, plastered against his warmth, and the next she was tumbled onto the cold, damp sand. He was kneeling beside her, looking at her with those strangely lit eyes and that same panicky expression.
“My heart,” he said, falling on his back against the sand. “Oh, fuck. My heart.”
Terror clutched at her insides. “What?”
Then the fear slapped her, taking her from paralyzed alarm to keen alertness. Rolling to her knees, she scooted to his side, grabbed his hand, and looked him in the eye. “You’re going to be all right,” she said loudly, swallowing her own panic. “I know CPR.”
With that, she pushed the heel of her right hand to his forehead and used the fingers of her other to tilt up his chin. Then she grabbed both sides of the cotton shirt he wore and ripped it open, buttons popping high into the air. With his airway as unobstructed as possible and nothing between her and evidence that his chest was moving, she bent over Cooper and put her cheek directly above his mouth and nose.
His warm breath brushed against her cheek. In and out. In and out again. The rhythm was a bit accelerated, perhaps, but he was certainly breathing. She lightly placed her palm on his chest, just to make sure she felt it move too.
“You’re breathing,” she said. CPR wasn’t necessary unless he wasn’t getting oxygen. “You’re conscious.”
“No kidding.”
Sarcasm was probably a good sign too, but she kept her position curled over him, her cheek near his mouth, her palm lightly covering his heart. “How are you feeling now?”
“About the same,” he admitted. “My breathing is too fast, too shallow. My heart is pounding so damn hard I think they must have stuck a kettledrum in there during the surgery.”
“Okay, okay.” Angel gently rubbed his skin, hoping to soothe. “Is there any numbness on your left side? Can you make a fist?”
“I’m not numb anywhere. Fists no problem either.”
Angel bit her lip, wondering if she should leave him and run for help, or if it would be safer to stay in case CPR became necessary. “I’d give my life for a cell phone right now,” she muttered.
He managed a short laugh. “Somehow I think that would defeat the purpose.”
She thought laughing was another good sign, but what the heck did she know? “What does your doctor say?” she asked urgently, desperate to find some clue as to what to do next. “What are you supposed to be watching for?”
“He says I’m fine. I lost thirty-five pounds. I’m a vegetarian. I gave up cigarettes. I exercise. He says my heart’s good.”
She’d be relieved as all get out if he still wasn’t lying flat on the sand, his heart beating like that kettledrum beneath her palm. She shoved her other hand under her sweatshirt and laid it against her own heart, to see what a beat should feel like.
Like a kettledrum. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
His breath continued to rush against her cheek, fast breaths that mirrored her own. She was a bit panicked now, yeah, but they’d been just as speedy when Cooper had been kissing her, touching her.
She slowly sat up, leaving her hand against his chest. “How do you feel now?”
“Less anxious. But about the same.”
Her eyes narrowed. His color was good. He was talking just fine. “The doctor says you’re cured?”
“Cured isn’t the word, I don’t think.” He inhaled a slow, careful breath. “But there wasn’t anything obviously wrong when I was in his office last month.”
Angel had a fiftyish, casual gym friend whose husband had had a heart attack the year before. It was amazing the kind of things you’d tell a near stranger on the neighboring Stairmaster. Something about the mingled sweat drops on the floor, maybe.
Remembering some of their conversations gave Angel an idea.
She stroked his chest again. “How are you now?”
“Maybe a little better.”
Casually, she slid her palm downward. The heel of her hand brushed the waistband of his jeans and his belly muscles twitched.
“Jesus, Angel.” He grabbed her wrist.
“Sorry.” She gently pulled from his grasp and returned her hand to its place over his heart. Oh yeah. Just an almost-sexual touch and the beat had sped up again.
“I think I know what’s wrong.” Angel took his closest hand in her free one and slid it under her sweatshirt.
She pressed his palm between her bare breasts, and then, holding it there, bent over to kiss Cooper gently, slowly, and very deliberately. She kissed through his momentary resistance and then let him really have it. Still gently, but wet and thorough. Plenty of tongue.
When she straightened, they were both panting.
“Breathless?” she asked. “I am.”
His eyes widened, his heartbeat still pounding against her palm.
“Feel my heart?” Under her shirt, she pressed her hand against the top of his. “I think it’s going faster, even harder than yours.”
“You’re not serious….”
“Serious as a heart attack.” Angel smiled a little, then slid her hand from his chest to cup his cheek. “It’s arousal, my friend. Lust. Desire. Nothing more dangerous than that.”
Cooper gawked at her, as an embarrassed flush rushed over his face.
Her gym buddy’s husband had been terrified to make love. Every time he got hot and bothered, his natural physical responses had scared him silly. He’d been convinced they would bring on a second heart attack. It was a very common problem, her friend had said, but it had taken her husband months to get past his anxiety.
“You haven’t had sex recently, right? Not since the heart attack.”
The color deepened on his face. “I don’t want to talk about it.” In one quick move he slid his hand from her skin and sat up.
She looked at his rigidly set profile and wished she could make this easier for him. Curling her fingers into a fist, she lightly punched his shoulder. “Hey, would it make you feel any better if I admit that my sheets have been pretty cool recently too?”
When he still didn’t answer, she tried to think of exactly how long he’d been missing from San Francisco. Ten months, maybe more?
“For goodness’ sake,” she said, still trying to work him past his obvious chagrin. “I was willing to save your life. Share my spit with you doing CPR. Can’t we talk?”
He sent her a sidelong look. “You were sharing spit with me before I fell onto the sand, clutching my heart.”
“I know! You owe me something for that. I thought I’d killed you with my kiss!” She punched him again. “For goodness’ sake. This is me, Angel, the woman you’re most likely never to see again. We can get past this, can’t we?”
Though it was obvious he was the one who wanted to be left alone now, she couldn’t walk away. This shouldn’t be their last memory of each other—Cooper feeling embarrassed and Angel feeling…whatever it was.
“Fine.” He turned his head, pinned her with his gaze that was darker and deeper thanks to the now-dusk. “You’re right. I haven’t had sex since the heart attacks and surgery. I haven’t had sex in twenty months, sixteen days, and, oh, approximately three hours and forty-one minutes.”