CupidsChoice (9 page)

She shook her head and refused to look at him.

Alarmed, Cooper went up on his hands and knees above her.
“Are you hurt?”

He looked her over, but she didn’t appear hurt. She looked
freshly fucked and incredibly gorgeous—hair a tangled mess, neck and chest
still flushed a deep red with arousal, the curls between her legs dark with
sweat and her wetness.

“No, I’m not hurt,” she assured him, wiping her eyes before
she looked at him. She drew in a deep, shaky breath. “You overwhelm me,
Cooper.”

The pace of his racing heart skipped a couple of times.

“Oh. Is that all?”

Her eyes went wide and she laughed, shocked. “What do you
mean, is that all?”

“I get overwhelmed just looking at you some days.” He pinned
her to the bed once more, his face close to hers. “I get overwhelmed when we
talk and laugh and touch. Every time we kiss,” he told her, then kissed her to
prove it.

The feeling that rushed his spent body when she wrapped her
arms around him and kissed him back was indescribable.

“Mmm, just like that,” he whispered against her deeply
swollen mouth.

Her eyes closed. “I think I’m more than just overwhelmed by
you, Cooper.”

There was a not-so-small part of him that wanted to leap out
of bed and do a fist-pumping victory dance.

He paused long enough that she opened her eyes before he
told her, “Me too.”

“Have you come to say ‘I told you so’?” Bree asked as Petra
handed her a margarita and settled onto a lounge chair next to her.

Bree watched Petra put on an innocent face.

“I told you so about what, exactly?” she asked with a small
smirk, touching her salt-rimmed glass to Bree’s before sipping. “That your mom
can really mix a drink? Wow, this is good.”

Bree sighed. “You’ve been not-so-secretly watching Cooper
and me all day. You know what I’m talking about.”

The two of them were currently by themselves in Bree’s
parents’ backyard. A small fire burned in the pit built into the center of
their elaborate back patio. Lit tiki torches stood sentry around the perimeter
that extended well into the backyard, surrounding the in-ground pool.

Just a couple of hours earlier that same patio had been
bustling with people enjoying one of her parents’ famous Labor Day cookouts.
Her parents, her three brothers, their significant others and Patrick’s eight-
and ten-year-old sons had all been there. Petra’s boyfriend Jude was spending
the day with his family, so she brought Alex with her instead.

And of course Cooper had been there as well.

Her family was in love with him. He and RJ had taken Patrick’s
boys Henry and Levi to the park down the street to hit baseballs for them to
catch. He’d repeatedly let them push him into her parents’ swimming pool long
after Bree would have lost patience with them. He’d won her dad over by
engaging in a heated political debate, one of her dad’s favorite hobbies,
clearly playing devil’s advocate at certain points even though Bree had no clue
about his political tendencies yet. Her mother and sisters-in-law just plain
thought he was adorable.

There had never been any doubt in Bree’s mind that she
wanted to get married and have a family one day, but at several moments
throughout the day, Bree had felt as though she were getting a very clear look
at her future. And the idea that Cooper just might be a very real part of it
didn’t make her feel like panicking.

After a long afternoon of grilling and swimming, all the men
and the haughty little waif of a girl Dillon had brought back with him from
California had taken the boys to a baseball game in the city. The women had made
margaritas and spent some time gossiping about Dillon’s girlfriend, who none of
them thought would last. Then Petra’s sisters-in-law had taken her mother
inside to show her a discount shopping website they’d found, leaving Petra and
Bree alone for the first time that day.

“Saying I told you so doesn’t sound like me at all,” Petra
told her.

It was true. Pete never bragged. Looked smug because she
knew she was right maybe, but never bragged.

“But if you want to let me know I was right, yet again, I’d
be happy to hear it,” she added with a smirk.

“I disliked him pretty much from the moment he started
working at the hospital, and then he made it worse after the Carrie thing. I
still don’t understand how you ever got the idea to put us together, but I
can’t deny that you were right.”

“Honey, I don’t always know. I’ve just gotten lucky with
this matchmaking thing so far. All I knew was that you were always going on and
on about how much he pissed you off at work, long after the Carrie incident had
blown over I might add. You don’t go on like that about people you really
hate.”

“That’s not true, because I really thought I hated him.
Especially after that investigation rolled over on to me and I thought I was
going to lose my job.”

One of Petra’s shoulders twitched in a half shrug. “But you
didn’t. And you have to admit you’ve always admired him as a doctor.”

“That doesn’t count. Everyone does. He’s amazing.”

Bree resisted the temptation to reach over and pinch her
friend when she gave her another smug look over the rim of her glass.

“Well, between your overly professed hatred of him,” she
made one-handed air quotes on the word hatred, “and the way he always looked as
if he wanted to devour you whenever I caught him looking at you, the temptation
to throw the two of you together and find out what would happen was too much to
resist.”

“You’ve said that twice so far and I still don’t know what
you mean. When did you ever see him looking at me? You and I work on different
floors of the hospital.”

Petra held up one hand fingers tucked, thumb in the air.
“I’m talking about the handful of times you and I have been eating in the
cafeteria and he’s come in for something to drink, or tries to say hello to you
and you ignore him so hard he just about stops existing.” Her first finger
joined her thumb. “I’m talking about the times I’ve been sent to the ER because
it’s short-staffed and busy and get to see the two of you work side by side,
which is impressive I have to say.”

Petra’s middle finger joined the first two and Bree held up
a hand to stop her.

“I get it,” she said with a little laugh. “You were right.”

“He’s good to you.” It wasn’t a question.

“In ways I never thought a man was ever going to be good to
me.” She leaned over as though she was letting her in on a secret. “He lets me
pick out the movie we see when we go out, and he doesn’t complain if it’s a
chick flick.”

Petra gasped in mock horror. “You sure he’s got balls?”

Bree raised her eyebrows. “Oh, he’s got ‘em.” She reached
over and laid her hand over Petra’s forearm. “And get this, he never questions
what I wear or makes snide remarks if I listen to the same Justin Timberlake
song three times in a row.”

She was talking about The Jailer now and they both knew it.

Petra shrugged as if to say whatever. “Sometimes you don’t
know how bad you had it until someone comes along and shows you how good it can
be.”

Bree’s throat instantly thickened and her eyes prickled with
tears.

“So,” Petra said quickly, noticing the subject was getting
too heavy. “Tell me about those balls of his.”

Bree snorted out a quick laugh, then took maybe too big of a
drink from her margarita to dislodge the lump in her throat. “His balls are
none of your business,” she replied haughtily, after she stopped choking on
salty tequila.

Petra gave her a lopsided smile. “That good, huh?”

“Better than I would ever have imagined,” she said.

“And your family loves him.”

That was an understatement.

“RJ thinks the sun rises and sets out of Cooper’s ass since
the day he helped get that tree branch out of my backyard. They’ve been to
three or four baseball games together since then.” She snapped her fingers.
“That’s another thing. The first time RJ called Cooper and asked if he wanted
to catch a game, Cooper checked with me to make sure I didn’t mind first.”

“Get the hell outta here.”

“No lie. And don’t get me started on my mother.” She held a
hand up as though she was asking for patience from the universe. “Of course he
had all kinds of questions about her leg the first time they met. He asked if
he could see the end of her stump, and you know how much she loves to show that
off. He oohed and aahed over what a good job the plastic surgeon did when he
cleaned up her scars, got into a really lengthy discussion with her about
prosthetics.”

“You know this means they’re inside picking out your wedding
dress right now, don’t you?” Petra meant her mom and her brother’s wives.
“That’s why they didn’t ask us to come in with them.”

“Well, they can look at wedding dresses until their eyes
fall out. I’m nowhere near that point yet.”

Petra looked skeptical.

“I’m not,” Bree insisted. “I really like him, don’t get me
wrong. I
really
like him. But I also really like the way things are
right now. It’s easy. We work together. We see each other on our days off.
We’re having fun.”

“You’re happy,” Petra observed.

Bree smiled and nodded. “I’m happy. Thanks.”

Petra huffed a breath onto her fingernails and polished them
on her shirt.

“You’re welcome.”

* * * * *

“I had a lot of fun today,” Cooper murmured into her hair.
They were lying on her couch facing each other with Cooper’s arms wrapped
around her and their legs loosely tangled.

They’d come home from her parents’ house and made it no
farther than the couch. She’d dropped her keys on the floor, kicked off her
shoes and flopped onto the couch.

Cooper, who was just as exhausted as Bree, had followed her
lead and wedged himself between her and the back of the couch. They’d both
worked the night before, ended up in the shower together at his place, then
spent the three short hours they’d had to sleep before her family’s cookout
getting hot and sweaty again.

“You sound surprised,” she murmured, head on his arm, nose
touching his chest.

“I never used to like cookout holidays.” When she angled her
head to look up at him he opened his eyes. “You know, Memorial Day, the Fourth
of July, Labor Day. Turns out I was just hanging out with the wrong people.”

“What do you mean? You like your parents.”

“I don’t mean them. They’re not really cookout people. Our
family only consists of the three of us, and my parents were always so content
with each other that they never had a big circle of friends.”

He’d already told her during one of those gloriously long,
getting-to-know-you talks they’d had that neither of his parents had any living
relatives.

“Their wedding anniversary is close to Memorial Day,” he
continued, “so we went to the Bahamas every year because that’s where they’d
gotten married. We did usually get invited to a picnic and fireworks for the
Fourth, but until I got married Labor Day was always spent on the beach
somewhere on the East Coast.”

It sounded both wonderful and lonely to Bree.

“So it was your wife who introduced you to the joy of the
summer barbeque?”

“If you can call catered affairs where everyone wore white,
sipped expensive wine and tried not to sweat a joy, sure.”

She made a disgusted sound.

“And my ex-mother-in-law would have divorced my
father-in-law and sued him broke and blind if he’d ever even thought of
throwing her into a swimming pool.”

Bree had resigned herself to the fact that her parents were
never going to grow up.

“Yeah, my mom uses her crutches instead of her prosthetic at
summer parties because she knows my dad is going to do just that at some
point.” She smiled when he chuckled. “And don’t let all that squawking she was
doing fool you. She loves it.”

She was pretty sure she could happily drown in the way he
was looking at her just then—as though she was the best thing in the entire
world.

“I like your family. They’re fun.” A small crease appeared
between his eyebrows. “But I feel so tall around them.”

She had to laugh hard at that. He was tall compared to her
family. Bree was the same height and size as her mom, and at five and a half
feet, her dad wasn’t much taller. None of her brothers had gotten some latent
height gene either. Patrick and Dillon were as tall as their dad, but RJ had
stopped at five foot three.

“Rachel says the same thing whenever she’s around them too.”

At five foot ten, Rachel was only a couple of inches shorter
than Cooper.

“And Alex. I mean, how tall is that guy? Six six?”

Oh man she wanted to kiss him right then, just because he
was so damn cool.

She hadn’t wanted him to think she had anything to hide, and
she didn’t want him to accidentally hear it from someone else, so she’d told
him about the brief fling she’d had with Alex. Cooper had taken it in stride,
the same way he seemed to take most everything she told him.

More than that, he’d surprised her by saying the very last
thing she would have expected him to say. He’d looked at her a moment, his
expression blank, before saying, “I can’t even imagine how that went. You come
up to his elbow.”

Even though he hadn’t formally met Alex, everyone who worked
at the hospital knew about the tall, redhead, male nurse that worked in the
pediatric floor. When they were introduced, Cooper shook Alex’s hand as if he
were none the wiser about their little affair. She loved him for the way he’d
handled the situation.

She loved him for a lot of other reasons. They’d both known
what they’d really been talking about when they’d confessed to being
overwhelmed by each other that night, weeks earlier. Neither of them had said
the L-word to the other though. Not yet.

“He’s easily that tall,” she agreed, taking off his glasses.
“My family likes you back.” She put his glasses on the coffee table and
snuggled against him tighter.

He kissed her softly.

“The more important question is do you like me?”

She angled her head so he couldn’t see her face and smiled.
The list of things she liked about him was so long, and she wasn’t sure she’d
scratched the surface of learning everything there was to know about him.

“You’re all right,” she said with a shrug.

He rested his nose against the top of her head and took a
deep breath.

“Yeah, I guess you’re kind of all right too.”

She shifted closer to him, sliding her thigh between his and
rubbing her smooth calf against his hairy one. “Wanna fool around a little?”

He groaned. Deeply. “You’re going to kill me.”

Really, she was tired all the way down to her bones. “After
we sleep then.”

He grunted an agreement and instantly started to go slack
with sleep.

Bree tucked in tighter and followed.

* * * * *

She woke up later to something hard bumping against her
feet. She was in Cooper’s arms being carried to bed. The something hard had
been her bedroom door as he used her feet to gently push it open.

She could see through the open curtains that it was still
night outside. The security light in her neighbor’s backyard threw a rectangle
of silver light across her bed. He laid her down in the middle of it and started
taking off his clothes.