Some Girls Do (Outback Heat Book 1) (17 page)

Later that night,
Lacey woke with a start. Her heart thudded loudly in her chest as she looked around the room, disorientated for a moment, her eyes adjusting to the dark, her ears straining to hear whatever it was that had woken her.

Nothing seemed out of place. Coop was asleep lying on his back. The kitchen windows were shut; so was the door to the room and the bathroom door, and the television was off.

She glanced at the clock—two-thirty. She shut her eyes again, her pulse settling as sleep pulled her in from the edges.

But the noise came again before she was fully under. Lacey turned her head to the right, from the direction it was coming to find Coop muttering to himself, clearly agitated, his head rocking from side to side, his face screwed up, his eyes shut.

He cried out then, shouted something she couldn’t comprehend. It shot straight through Lacey like a hot bullet. Without thinking twice she kicked off her covers and was at his side in a matter of moments.

“Coop?” she whispered, kneeling beside his bed, placing her hand on his bicep, her palm sliding against his warm skin as her fingers breached the sleeve of his T-shirt. He settled at her touch but didn’t wake and Lacey let her gaze roam over his face for a moment or two now her eyes had adjusted.

There was a little crease between his brows still, and his mouth was fixed in a line rather than curved and slack like it usually was when he slept. The dark blond highlights in his stubble caught the glow emitted from the digital clock on the bedside and her fingers itched to trace along his jaw and smooth down his throat.

The glow also lit up the slope of his cheek and the stark white line of the scar on his scalp visible through the spikes of his buzz cut. Was that what he’d been dreaming about? The night that had ended in that scar?

How did he
not
dream about it?

Hell, she’d dreamed about it from time to time. Disjointed, garbled imaginings, rattly breathing and blood that woke her with a pounding heart.

Lacey pushed it from her mind. Forced herself to stand, remove her hand before the delicious pull of his generic man-brand deodorant and the vague smell of coconut that came from his bar of soap in the shower overcame her sense. He was settled and wouldn’t appreciate waking to find her looming over him.

Not if his increasingly distant behaviour was anything to go by.

His bicep tensed as she turned to go and he groaned, this time all low and painful, his hands sliding onto either side of his head, cradling it, the beds of his fingernails whitening as his grip tightened.

Was it a bad dream? Or some kind of headache? She vaguely remembered he got those occasionally.

“Coop?” she whispered, lowering herself to the side of the bed.

But he didn’t seem to hear her. He just screwed his eyes shut tight, his fingers looking like they were trying to burrow beneath his scalp, his biceps and forearms bulging with tension.

It looked like it hurt.

“Coop,” she whispered again, putting her hands on his forearms and tugging gently. She expected resistance but his hands fell away easily. The pained look stayed.

“Shh,” she said, raising one hand to his forehead. “It’s okay.”

She used her thumb to iron out the lines furrowing his brow in long soothing strokes until they were gone and the scrunched skin around his eyes had relaxed. She dropped her hand back to his bicep and watched him again. His eyes quickly puckered, the pained frown returning, another soft groan escaping.

“Shh,” Lacey repeated, placing her hand flat against his chest directly over where his heart beat a rapid tattoo. “I’ve got you.” She leaned forward and dropped a string of light kisses along his brow this time, and one on each eye, nuzzling across to his temple and murmuring, “I’ve got you.”

She shut her eyes as his spiky hair brushed her nose and she inhaled the clean, soapy smell of him.

So very Coop.

Lacey supposed this should feel awkward. But it didn’t. It felt good to be able to comfort him for once, to help him out of a spot. There was no denying how he’d relaxed beneath her touch.

In a moment like this, Lacey could almost believe they were a couple.

She lifted her head after a while and looked down at him again. Had he gone back into a deep sleep? His eyes fluttered open and her pulse tripped.
Nope.

“Lacey?” His voice was a gravelly whisper, his gaze unfocused behind eyelids at half-mast.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Head hurts.”

“What can I do? Do you take something for it?”

“Nothing,” he muttered, his eyes shutting, his hand sliding up to rub a temple. “It’ll go away.”

But she couldn’t bear to watch him like this. “Here, let me try something,” she said, half rising then pulling back his covers and sliding into the single bed beside him.

“Lacey?” His sounded more conscious now. His frown was back.

“Shh, its fine,” she said, rolling on her side, propping herself up slightly on his pillows then urging the back of his head against her chest with her hands, cradling it gently between her breasts as her fingers speared into his hair and massaged his scalp, one at the front, one at the side.

“Lacey …” If it was supposed to be a protest it was a weak one. It was more groan than warning.

“Shh,” she said, closing her eyes as she concentrated on supplying a steady, even pressure. “Go to sleep.”

And he appeared to do just that, his head growing steadily heavier against her as sleep finally claimed him. She took the opportunity to snuggle in closer to his side, seeking his body heat as an antidote to her uncovered arms and shoulders, as she kept up the massage. At some point though, she too drifted off, her arms falling to his shoulders, her chin resting on top of his head.

*     *     *

Lacey was still
thinking about falling asleep in Coop’s bed the next afternoon as she pulled beers at The Stockman. It had been a strange interlude. Nice but strange. Also depressingly platonic considering they’d been in bed together.

Everything about their relationship was depressingly platonic.

Ethan entered the bar, striding towards her in his police fatigues. “Hey,” she greeted.

“Why aren’t you answering your phone?” he asked with absolutely no preamble “I’ve been trying to ring you.”

Lacey frowned, her phone was upstairs on charge. “Everything okay?” A sudden sense of alarm descended. “Is Coop—”

“He’s fine.” Ethan assured briskly. Clearly he was in a hurry. “There’s just a police matter I think you might be able to help with.”

Lacey’s eyes widened. “
Just
a police matter?”

She’d only ever had one brush with the law and it was something she never wanted repeated. Being thrown in those holding cells after that protest had scared the bejesus out of her. She’d never been so pleased to see Coop in all her life than she had that day. And the way he’d sorted it so not only was she released but released without anything on her record had been utterly masterful.

If they’d had any kind of continuing casual relationship she would have jumped him in his car on the way home for sure.

Ethan glanced at JJ. “Can you spare her? This might take a while.”

JJ looked from Ethan to Lacey then back to Ethan again. “Sure,” she shrugged.

“What’s wrong, Ethan?” Lacey asked as she whipped off her apron.

“There’s no time,” he said impatiently. “Come on, I’ll tell you on the way.”

*     *     *

Fifteen minutes later
Lacey was standing in the living room of a grand old homestead at a sheep property just outside Jumbuck Springs, staring at what she could only describe as wedding dress confetti. A distraught Caroline Duncan was being comforted by her fiancé and mother while a massive white marquee was being constructed on the sweeping lawns outside, and her father ranted at Ethan about a national women’s magazine coming in the morning and locking Danielle Gordon up and throwing away the key.

It seemed Danielle still wasn’t over her best friend stealing her boyfriend back in high school and had decided to exact revenge on the six-thousand-dollar Parisian wedding dress the day before the wedding.

Lacey couldn’t blame Caroline for being hysterical. To see such an exquisite dressed hacked to pieces was a travesty.

“What am I going to do?” Caro wailed to no-one in particular.

Her father, Ross, broke away from Ethan to hug his daughter. “We’ll go to Brisbane. Buy one off the rack.”

Caroline shook her head. “We won’t get there in time. It’s already three o’clock.”

“We’ll ring ahead. I can see if the Patterson’s are using their chopper.”

“It still won’t be enough time and I wanted
my
dress.” Caroline looked at the pile of hacked up satin and lace on the floor and her face crumpled. “My beautiful dress.”

Ethan strode over to Lacey. “Well?” he said, half turning his back, his voice low. “Can you fix it?”

Lacey almost choked on her own spit as she gawped at him. What the fuck? “Are you
crazy,
” she whispered, also turning slightly away from Caroline and her parents.

Only a man could look at a huge mound of shredded wedding dress and think
yeah, that can be fixed
. Lacey might never have had a ring on her finger but like a lot of little girls she knew exactly what she wanted for her wedding dress and had done ever since she’d been nine years old.

A wedding dress was sacred to a bride.

Even if Lacey
could
magic something up it was never going to be the same for Caroline.

“C’mon. You’re good at this stuff. Look at Connie’s mermaid outfit you made from those strips of different material.”

Dear Lord, he’d taken leave of his senses. “Just what a bride wants,” she muttered, “A patchwork wedding dress.”

He shrugged. “Connie loved it.”

“Connie’s not even thirteen. And
not
a bride.”

“Exactly. Caroline needs you even more.”

“Caroline needs a freaking fairy godmother.”

“I could get a hold of a pumpkin for you.”

Lacey narrowed her eyes at him, finding nothing remotely funny, but he looked deadly serious too. More than that, he was looking at her with complete confidence. Like he had absolute faith that she could perform a miracle with this dress.

All the old familiar feelings of wanting to please her older brother, needing his approval, rushed to her head.

His belief in her was still her Achilles heel. Maybe if she could pull this off he’d stop doubting that coming back home was a good move.

Lacey looked at the ruins of the dress then at a sobbing, red-faced Caroline. There wouldn’t be time to make a new wedding dress from scratch, not to a Parisian design standard anyway, but maybe something
could
be salvaged. It depended on a lot of things, but the fact that Caroline didn’t have a lot of choices if she wanted to walk down the aisle in any kind of a wedding dress tomorrow couldn’t be escaped.

She glanced at Ethan. “Maybe.”

He grinned at her. “Atta girl.”

Lacey rolled her eyes.
Men.
She sank to her knees and sifted through the massacred fabric. Handkerchief-sized pieces of satin, lace and beaded organza was about all that was left of it. The bodice was reasonably intact although the sleeves and the corset style lacing at the back had been ripped out and a huge diamond shaped hole cut in the middle panel.

The sleeves and lacing were easy fixed. The hole … she could figure something out. If she had a bodice then half the job was done already. She had plenty of material hoarded away that could be used and Mrs Hoff’s was still open.

“What are you doing?” Caroline asked, glancing over, rubbing at her splotchy face.

“I think I maybe could … make another dress out of all of this.”

Maybe.
Somehow.

“What?” she sniffled. “How?”

“Hey, design school, remember?” Lacey teased because if she was going to get Caroline on board with this then she needed to be positive as well. “I can do this sort of thing in my sleep.”

“But … it’s in tatters.”

“And the journo and photographer from
Stylish Woman
are arriving at eight o’clock tomorrow morning,” Ross said.