Size 12 and Ready to Rock (14 page)

His frown is all the answer I need.

“But,” I say in surprise, “you said you had a meeting—”

“I did,” he says. “I
did
have a meeting. The woman who made the appointment said it was with a Mr. Grant, and gave an address I didn’t realize until I got there was the new office for Cartwright Records Television. Obviously I was suspicious at that point, but it wasn’t until I walked in and saw Grant Cartwright standing behind the desk that I knew what was going on.”

I wince, picturing it. “That must have been . . . unpleasant.”

“It was.” He looks across the table at Tom and Steven. “Hi,” he says, as if seeing them for the first time, though they’d already had the conversation about the name of the place. “How you guys doing?”

“Better than you, evidently,” Tom says.

“Grant Cartwright,” Steven says, apparently attempting to clarify. “CEO of Cartwright Records, and . . . your father?”

“Correct,” Cooper says, the word almost a growl.

“What did he want?” I ask curiously. Cooper dislikes his family so much and speaks to them so rarely, I’m not surprised his father had to stoop to subterfuge to get him to have a conversation with him.

“To offer me a job,” Cooper says.

I
am
surprised to hear this. The last time Grant Cartwright offered Cooper a job, it was to sing in Easy Street. The offer had gone so poorly that the rift that started then had continued to this day.

“What kind of job?” I ask him. I have a sinking feeling, however, that I know.

Cooper’s drinks arrive, and the way he downs most of the whiskey, then half the beer, as Tom and Steven and I watch, confirms my suspicions. Cooper’s family is the one thing that never fails to discombobulate him. Well, that and a few other things, but those are private, between him and me, and I’m pretty sure he enjoys them.

“Feel better?” Tom asks Cooper when he slams down the shot glass.

“Not really,” Cooper says, and signals the waiter for another shot.

“A full-time job?” I ask him. “Like with his company? Or a private inquiry?”

“Oh,” he says. “It’ll be full-time all right.”

I swallow. “Does it have anything to do with Tania Trace Rock Camp being moved into Fischer Hall?” I ask, dreading the answer but at the same time almost certain I know what it is.

“As a matter of fact,” Cooper says, “it does. My dad wants me to be Tania’s new bodyguard.”

I laugh. I don’t know why. It’s so absurd. Not the idea of Cooper being someone’s bodyguard—I’m positive he’d be superb in that capacity. Just the idea of him being
Tania Trace
’s bodyguard, because Tania Trace is married to my ex-boyfriend, whom she stole from me. And now I’m engaged to that boyfriend’s brother.

I look at Tom and Steven, and they begin to laugh too. We’re all laughing at the idea of Cooper being Tania Trace’s bodyguard.

But when I glance at Cooper, I see that he’s frowning. He doesn’t seem to think the idea is funny at all.

“Wait,” I say, the laughter dying in my throat. “You didn’t say yes, did you?”

“Actually,” Cooper says as his second whiskey arrives, “I did.”

Chapter 10

Thank You

I gave you my heart

Thought you were all there could be

Instead you left me for her,

Said she was better than me

But I thank you now

For setting me free

I said thank you now

For choosing her over me

’Cause the man I have now

Is the best I’ve ever known

The love I have now is

The kind you’ll never know

You were awful in bed

Just thought you should know

So thanks for dumping me

’Cause otherwise I’d never have known

So I thank you now

For setting me free

I said thank you now

So please stop Facebooking me

“Thank You”

Written by Heather Wells

A few hours later, Cooper rolls away from me to lie panting on his back in my bed, beneath the watchful—yet to my mind, comforting—gazes of the dolls of many nations.

“Feel better?” I ask him. After getting home from the bar, I offered to give him some deep tissue massage therapy. I felt it was the least I could do to help him get over his stressful day.

“I’ve never had a massage quite like that,” he says.

“I don’t have any professional training in the art of massage,” I admit.

“I don’t mind,” he says. “But I’m a little worried about what they must be thinking of us.” He nods at the dolls.

Miss Mexico is the fanciest, in her hot-pink flamenco dress and elaborate pointy hair comb. Miss Ireland is the one for whom I feel worst. She’s made of cloth, and her legs, beneath her red skirt covered in green four-leaf clovers, are made out of black pipe cleaners. My mom apparently grabbed the first doll she saw on her way to the plane. I always treat Miss Ireland with extra care, fearful Miss Mexico’s fanciness might have given her a complex over the years.

“Oh,” I say, “they’re extremely nonjudgmental.”

“That’s good,” he says and rolls over to reach for the water glass on the nightstand next to his side of the bed—after a workout like the one I’ve given him, hydrating is both necessary and advisable—only to find Owen, the orange tabby cat, perched there, watching him.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, startled, as Owen blinks at him. “We might as well get cameras in here and put on our own reality show.”

“I told you we could go to your place,” I say, holding out my index finger so Owen will move from the nightstand to the bed. An outstretched index finger is, as any cat person knows, irresistible to most cats, as they cannot help but move toward one to rub their face against it. Owen is no exception, and Cooper is able to reach the water glass as Owen leaps from the nightstand to the bed. “Then we wouldn’t have an audience.”

“No,” Cooper says after swallowing down half the contents of the glass. “I like your place better.”

He doesn’t need to explain. His place—one floor of the brownstone below mine—is bigger, but it’s also been Cooperized, with curtains that don’t close all the way (particularly in the bedroom), books and papers piled on nearly every surface, and at least five pairs of shoes left in the middle of the floor in every room because, as he explains, “that way I know I can find them.” I personally don’t understand why anyone needs to have seven bottles of nearly empty conditioner in the shower, and clearly Cooper doesn’t either since he spends nearly all his time on my floor, leaving it only to use his admittedly fantastic kitchen, his office, and his bedroom to change clothes. Even the animals prefer my place, except when we’re in the kitchen downstairs. My floor only has a kitchenette.

One thing for which I’ve been campaigning is a housekeeper, especially since Magda has a cousin who runs a cleaning service. Although Cooper is horrified at the idea—he grew up on the Cartwright compound, split between Westchester and a huge penthouse apartment in Manhattan, with a full-time staff of nannies, maids, cooks, and chauffeurs, and so as an adult is determined to do his own dishes and laundry—it’s a battle I’m equally determined to win. There’s no reason two busy working people—one of whom is also in school—shouldn’t pool their money to pay a third person who is in the business of cleaning homes to come to theirs to do so. It’s practically unpatriotic, as a matter of fact, for them not to do so, especially in this economy. We’re depriving someone of badly needed work.

I’ve
almost
got Cooper believing in this argument.

“So,” I say to him, now that we’re both feeling more relaxed and the cat has made a neat little ball of himself between us. Lucy, in her own doggie bed on the floor, is snoring softly. “I know you didn’t want to talk about it in front of Tom and Steven. But don’t you think in this particular case client-detective privilege should extend to me?”

Except for telling us that he’d taken the assignment his father had offered, Cooper had refused to elaborate further on what had happened in the offices of Cartwright Records Television. At the bar, he’d just ordered another beer, then wolfed down a plate of fish and chips, fried oysters, and half the contents of the basket of mozzarella sticks I’d ordered for the table. (Though mozzarella sticks are basically my favorite thing, I didn’t object too much. I had a pizza Margherita with which to console myself.)

“In this particular case, the client is going to be my sister-in-law,” I go on, “and working in my building. So I really think I should be let in on what’s going on.”

“Why do you think I took the case?” Cooper asks, lifting an arm so I can snuggle closer.

I’m perplexed. “Your dad offered you a million dollars?” I offer hopefully. With that kind of money, we could get weekly housekeeping, and also all the brownstone’s walls painted, get new window treatments, the windows cleaned—they need it badly—and re-do all the bathrooms, not to mention maybe put in a hot tub in the backyard.

“Not quite that much,” he says with a chuckle. “Although I did give my father a quote that’s triple my normal rate, and he didn’t even blink an eye. If I’m going to have to be spending all my time with Tania, I’m going to need to be amply compensated for it.”

“Yes,” I say, running a finger along his arm, all the way down to the complicated watch I’ve never seen him remove. “How much time exactly
are
you going to have to be spending with Tania?”

“Every minute she’s at Fischer Hall,” he says. “Once they’ve got her tucked into her Maybach and headed back up to Park Avenue, I’m off duty. That’s the deal I made with my dad. I’m only interested in protecting Tania during the hours her presence might be putting your life in jeopardy—though I didn’t tell him so, of course. They’ll have to find alternative security the rest of the time.”

“Wait.” I lift my head from his shoulder and stare into his face. “
What?
How is Tania’s presence putting my life in jeopardy? Or anyone’s? I thought that bullet that hit her bodyguard was random—”

His smile is grim. “If everyone still believes that shot was random, why the sudden move to film the show at New York College? Do you have any idea how much it must be costing CRT to move location from that resort, which they had to have paid millions to secure?”

Now I’m sitting up, holding my—admittedly way too expensive, but I did get them significantly marked down at T.J.Maxx—dark purple Calvin Klein sheets to my chest. Cooper’s chest is protected by a fine mat of dark hair. I’m not that wild about hairless chests—Jordan used to wax his in order to appear nonthreatening to his fans, primarily tween girls.

“They’re furnishing all the rooms,” I say, “and paying to have the cafeteria restaffed and set up over the next couple of days. That can’t be cheap.”

“Granted, the college is probably letting them have the space for nothing,” Cooper says. “The promotion for the school alone will be worth it—”

“
If
the show casts the school in a positive light,” I murmur, thinking about the horrible things Stephanie Brewer suggested, about how we could let the girls sneak out, chaper-oneless, into the city to create “drama.”

“It does make one wonder,” Cooper says. He shrugs, seemingly done with the subject, and reaches for the remote. “Oh well. What sadly morbid glimpses into the lives of the less fortunate have you got recorded for us tonight?”

He might be done with the subject, but I most definitely am not.

“Hold on,” I say. I can’t help remembering that look I’d seen on Jordan’s face in the Allingtons’ penthouse. There’d been something he’d wanted to say, something he might have been too frightened to say. “What’s Tania so afraid of? Did you ask? Has she had any actual threats?”

He sighs and lowers the remote. “My dad swears up and down that she hasn’t and that she’s fine . . . maybe a little shaken up from what happened in front of Christopher’s club. Because we handled the crisis she had while she was at Fischer Hall last week so competently—”

I can’t help snorting. “Stephanie Brewer fed me almost the exact same line,” I say.

“Well,” Cooper says, “it could be true, you know. With her longtime bodyguard—Bear’s worked for her for two years—down for now, Tania might truly want people around her who she thinks she can trust, especially when she’s in such a delicate state.”

“Delicate state? The girl is having a baby. People have been having babies for thousands of years, often in the middle of fields with no painkillers, while running from woolly mammoths.”

Cooper raises an eyebrow at me. “Are you all right?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Of course I’m all right.”

I realize I need to cool it a little. Tania may have stolen one Cartwright brother away from me, and now, by getting herself pregnant by him, is using that “delicate state” as an excuse to hire a second Cartwright brother to “protect” her—or at least her father-in-law is.

But that doesn’t mean she’s going to steal Cooper away from me, first, because Cooper is in love with me, and second, because she’s married now and having a child. And third, because if she lays so much as a finger on Cooper, I will break it off. Unlike when I found her messing around with Jordan, I will actually fight for Cooper, as the love I have for Cooper is a dazzling supernova, whereas the love I had for Jordan was a wet sparkler no one could light on a soggy Fourth of July.