Because You Love Me ; Journey to My Heart

by Terra Little

  Five minutes passed, and then ten, while he set out two place settings, refilled his mimosa, dimmed the lights and put on his favorite CD—Beethoven’s Greatest Hits.

  “Liv?” he called out at the fifteen-minute mark. “Babe, breakfast is here. Come and eat something.”

  “In here!” she called back and, like a hunting beagle, his cock sprang to attention and led the way down the hallway.

  Halfway there, the sound of the shower running clashed with the music streaming through the house’s built-in surround-sound system, and something like a growl rumbled in Cooper’s throat. Shedding his clothes as he walked, he was completely naked when he deposited his watch, glasses and champagne glass on the armoire just inside the bedroom doorway and padded into the adjoining bathroom with his throbbing shaft in his fist and a Magnum condom packet sticking out from between his gritted teeth.

  “Bend over,” he said, stepping inside of the steam-filled walk-in shower and closing the glass door behind him. She had activated all of the jets, raining water down on her from all sides and from a variety of different angles. He joined her in the midst of it, his hands riding her butt cheeks as she swept her wet hair from one shoulder to the other and slowly bent over. By the time she had completely turned her butt cheeks up to the spray, he was on his knees on the tile floor behind her, ready to bury his face in the sensual divide between them. Appreciating her obvious enthusiasm, he spit out the condom packet and dragged the tip of his tongue back and forth across her flesh, teasing her until she screamed that was she coming.

  Then he sucked her dangling clitoris deep into his mouth from behind and underneath, spread his thighs wide and forced her to watch him pleasure himself while he pleasured her.

  * * *

  Olivia’s mind was officially blown.

  Over a month had passed since they had last slept together, and if it was good the first time, then it was even better now. She hadn’t realized just how much she’d been craving Cooper’s fullness inside of her, his weight on top of her, until the moment that she was pinned underneath him in the middle of his king-size bed, writhing helplessly as he held her trembling legs aloft and drove his thick shaft into her over and over again. The bed alternated between thumping against the floor and the wall, and the sounds coming out of her mouth could’ve been a foreign language. She couldn’t control the drama playing out on her face any more than she could control the ripples of sensation that his powerful strokes set off inside of her. Her nipples were tight, her throat was raw and every cell in her body begged for release.

  He was a stunning lover. Unrestrained and instinctively responsive. So damn good that the erratic and unpredictable rhythm of his strokes was dizzying, the angle and depth electrifying. Wherever his mouth happened to land—on her breasts, the small of her back, the soles of her feet, between her thighs—it was undisciplined and greedy, wanton. The faces he made were raw and unflattering, and the sounds shooting out of his mouth hit the air like canon blasts. He did what felt good, when it felt good, and in the process made her come harder than she’d ever come before in her life.

  Ever.

  Physically spent and struggling to catch her breath, Olivia collapsed face-first onto the twisted landscape of bed covers and groaned with contentment. One of her arms rolled off the edge of the mattress and dangled over the side limply, and her eyes drifted closed. “Okay... I just need to know one thing.”

  “What’s that?” He was breathing just as hard as she was.

  “How in the hell are you so good?”

  From somewhere behind her, Cooper chuckled wickedly. “I’m going to ignore the negative implications about nerds that’s behind that statement and take it as a compliment, anyway. Would you believe that I was inspired?” he asked, first pressing a soft kiss to each of her butt cheeks and then kissing his way up the middle of her back. Understanding that it was a rhetorical question, Olivia lay still and quiet, enjoying the sensual treat. He lingered at the nape of her neck, tonguing the sensitive skin there leisurely before moving away again. She missed his warmth as soon as it was gone. “I think you missed your flight.”

  She caught herself drooling and shook herself awake. “I’ll call the airport and reschedule for a later one...as soon as my eyes uncross.”

  “Or you could just stay here tonight and catch a flight home in the morning,” Cooper suggested, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to stay the night at his house.

  Olivia’s head popped up from the mattress. “Is it safe for me to stay here?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question.” She didn’t have to look at him to know that he was frowning.

  “Cooper, I saw the swamp that you keep out on the sun porch,” she accused around a teasing laugh. Rolling over onto her back, she propped herself up on her elbows, found his heavy-lidded gaze and stretched a leg out to playfully nudge his thigh with her toes. He was sprawled out at the foot of the bed. “There are like thirty frogs out there—”

  “Two,” Cooper corrected. “And their names are Caesar and Othello.”

  “Seven icky lizards—”

  “Only two and they’re chameleons, Liv. Not lizards—chameleons. Their names are—”

  “So many turtles that I tried to count them and kept losing count—”

  “Antony and Cleopatra,” he finished dryly. “And there are only three turtles out there, which I’m sure you already know.”

  She cocked a brow. “Oh, really? And what are their names?”

  “Snap, Crackle and Pop,” he said quietly, and Olivia promptly threw her head back and roared with laughter. A full minute passed before she was capable of speaking coherently.

  “Are you kidding me?” Secretly she thought it was adorable, but she’d cut her tongue out before she ever admitted as much. His pets, if they could be considered that, were obviously well cared for, and the faint blush on his face told her that they were his babies. “It’s like Hogwarts up in here!”

  “Okay, so I’m a nerd. I’m not ashamed of it.” He reached out and toyed with the tips of her toes, eventually looking up from his play and locking eyes with her. “Stay.”

  “Is there a snake out there in that aquarium somewhere? Because if there is, that’s a deal-breaker.” The expression on his face was unreadable when he shook his head. “Then, okay. I’ll stay, but you have to promise me that you’ll get me to the airport as early as possible.”

  “I’ll drop you off on my way to work.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” he said, rolling off the bed and padding out of the bedroom butt naked. “Let’s go eat. I’m starving.”

  She scrambled off the bed and followed him.

  Chapter 12

  Her layover in Knoxville lasted for four charming days and three passionate nights, during which time she and Cooper toured the city and surrounding countryside extensively, and made love in so many different positions and in so many different places that she’d lost count.

  Harriet’s face was the first thing that Olivia saw when she walked through the front door of her house on day four and set her carryall and small suitcase down at her feet in the foyer. Surprised, she stopped short and did a double take. “Oh my God, Harriet!” she shrieked, clutching her chest where her heart was pounding inside of it. “You scared me to death!”

  “Sorry,” Harriet said, sounding anything but. “You looked like you were in your own little world.”

  “I guess I was.” She’d been thinking about the kiss that Cooper had laid on her at the airport. “What are you doing here? Is everything all right?” It was Sunday afternoon and Harriet rarely worked weekends, and never in a tracksuit and sneakers, with a moon-shaped Afro framing her round pecan-brown face and neon-pink earbuds sticking out of her ears. “Did something happen?”

  “Nope,” Harriet chirped, switching off the digital music player that was clipped
to her waistband and removing one of the earbuds. “I was just finishing up some paperwork. So...” Looking pleased with herself, she leaned a hip against the centerpiece of the foyer—a round, French baroque-style marble pedestal table that Yolanda Carrington had bought at an estate auction and imported from the south of France—and folded her arms underneath her breasts. “Did you enjoy your two-hour layover in Knoxville?”

  Olivia looked up from the stack of mail that she’d just picked up and started flipping through, meeting Harriet’s knowing gaze and flushing to the roots of her hair. “Harriet, please don’t start. As usual, you’re imagining things.”

  “Oh, Olivia, please. You walked through that door a few seconds ago, humming, with a giant feather hanging out of the side of your mouth,” Harriet said, giggling like a schoolgirl. “Been a long time since I’ve seen you do that. He must be fine.”

  Refusing to be baited, Olivia rolled her eyes to the ceiling and then took them back to the mail. “As a matter of fact, he is fine, but Cooper and I are just friends, so let’s not get carried away.”

  “Oh, Cooper, is it? Well, that’s certainly a name.” Seemingly speechless, she stared at Olivia for several seconds as her face slowly creased into a wide smile. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she finally said. “You didn’t have to go all the way to Knoxville just to fall in love, honey. You could’ve done that right here in Missouri.”

  “Really, Harriet?” Olivia cried, tossing the mail back down on the tabletop and throwing up her hands in disbelief. “This is why I never tell you anything, because you always take everything and run away with it. Before you know it, something as simple as the fact that Cooper and I are just friends, who happen to enjoy each other’s company, gets blown way out of proportion. Like now, actually. That’s exactly what’s happening now, so just stop it, okay?”

  “Uh-huh,” Harriet said and then grunted.

  “And another thing, Harriet. For your information, there are still some women left who aren’t interested in marriage, kids and a white picket fence, and as you very well know, I happen to be one of them. So to answer your questions, yes, I did enjoy my layover in Knoxville, very much so, and yes, Cooper is handsome. If you need a visual, think Barack Obama meets a younger Tom Selleck. But none of that even matters, because that’s all that it was—a layover—and layovers, if you recall, are by their very nature usually very brief in duration. We’re just friends. Period. Now, can we please be done with this topic?”

  “Sure we can, but what about the other thing that I mentioned?”

  “Which was?”

  “The thing about you going all the way to Knoxville and falling in love.”

  Olivia thought about the question for a second. That was about as long as it took for her false bravado to crumble and her heart to pop back out on her sleeve. “Dammit, Harriet.” She stamped her foot and whined, sounding pitiful even to her own ears. “I don’t know.” What was she trying to say? “I mean, I’m not...” What could she say? “Okay, look...here’s the thing...there is a strong possibil—”

  “I knew it!”

  Olivia put up a hand. “I haven’t finished yet, Harriet.”

  “Well, spit it out!”

  “All right! All right!” Olivia snarled, feeling cornered. “Probably. That’s all I’m prepared to say right now. Okay, Harriet? Probably.”

  “Okay. Probably,” Harriet repeated, as if testing the word out on her tongue. “Probably. We can work with probably.”

  “We’re going to have to work with probably, Harriet, and listen to me—” She stopped short and waited for Harriet’s eyes to meet hers. When they did, the hand that she’d put up slowly turned into a fist, with one finger pointing at Harriet. “Not a word of this to Elise.”

  “But—”

  “Harrriiieeet.”

  “You know that’s not—”

  “I mean it, Harriet. You’re like a second mother to me and I love you dearly, but if you breathe a word of this to Elise, I’ll never trust you again.”

  Harriet sighed long and hard. “Okay.”

  “Okay? It’s in the vault?”

  “Okay,” she said again. “It’s in the vault. I won’t say anything to Elise. It’s not really my place, anyway, but I’m surprised that you’re not going to tell her. You two are like two peas in a pod. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on. It’s just a fling, that’s all. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. Now, can we please be done with this conversation?”

  Harriet seemed to hesitate but she eventually nodded.

  “Thank you.” Relieved, Olivia snatched up her luggage and hurried toward the stairs.

  Harriet has a point and you know it.

  Shut up. Upstairs, she swung her bedroom door open and set her bags down inside the doorway, thinking, Does she?

  You know she does.

  Had she gone all the way to Knoxville to fall in love? No. But could she pinpoint the exact moment she realized that she was half in love with Cooper Talbot, anyway? Of course she could. Right down to the millisecond. But still. It wasn’t like she was an expert in matters of the heart, so she wasn’t in a great big hurry to share her suspicions with anyone else just yet. You know, in case it turned out that her emotional compass was in such a state of disuse that it was simply way off base here. Because, really, stranger things had been known to happen.

  Much stranger things.

  * * *

  They hadn’t spoken in ten days, not since the morning that he’d kissed her at the gate, she had thanked him for his hospitality and they’d parted ways—him heading to work for the first time in four days and her boarding a flight back to St. Louis, Missouri. He had asked her if it would be okay if he called her sometime and she’d said yes; he’d invited her to call him sometime, too, and she’d said that she would. But ten days had passed now and so far neither of them had bothered to pick up the phone.

  Cooper wasn’t sure how he felt about that, nor was he crystal clear on why it even mattered, but somehow it did.

  You could always call her.

  Tempted to do just that, he picked up his cell from his desktop and hefted its weight in the palm of his hand. Then a second later he set it down again. Remember the agreement, Talbot, he reminded himself. Two ships passing in the night.

  His intercom buzzed, breaking into his thoughts. “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Yes, Amelia?”

  “I have Rick Rhinehart on line one for you.”

  Cooper glanced at his watch and sighed. If his frat-brother, who just happened to be an assistant district attorney, was calling him on what was usually a busy court day, at almost three o’clock in the afternoon, whatever it was that he wanted couldn’t be good. He reached for the telephone on his desktop, pressed the button for line two and snatched up the receiver. “Talbot.”

  “Your suspect is ready to talk deals,” Rhinehart said straight out of the gate.

  “In exchange for?”

  “Information about the recent string of bank heists in the Midwest. I know you’ve had some input on the case, so I thought you might be interested in sitting in on the interview. Plus Cheryl told me to invite you over to the house for dinner next weekend,” he said, referring to his wife. “Be forewarned, though. Her mother and sister will be here from Houston.”

  Cooper froze. “Which sister?”

  “The ugly one,” Rhinehart deadpanned. “I guess you want me to tell her that you’ll be out of town...again?”

  “What else are frat brothers for, mate?” Cooper queried, chuckling. “Omega Psi Phi ’til the day we die, right?”

  “Whatever. You’re not the one who has to listen to her fussing because you keep dodging her attempts to hook you up with your future-baby’s mother.”

  “The woman is way out of line,” Cooper decided, shaking his head sadly. He and Rhinehart had been
good friends since their high school robotics-club days—good enough friends that they had both chosen Morehouse for their undergraduate studies and pledged together their freshman year. After graduation they had both been accepted into Columbia and, as the years passed and life happened, they’d grown even closer. Cooper was the best man at Rick’s wedding over a year ago and he supposed that, if he had a best friend, Rick was the closest thing to it. Still, though. He loved Cheryl like a sister, but she had to be stopped.

  “Exactly,” Rhinehart readily agreed, laughing, too. “But she might be persuaded to chill the hell out with all the matchmaking schemes if she were to, say, find out that you slept with her mother.”

  Cooper’s laughter died an instant death. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Hey, don’t get me wrong, bruh. Cheryl’s mom is fifty and fine as hell, so I can’t say that I blame you for tightening her up a little bit, especially since she was the one doing all the pursuing. But if you don’t accept at least one of my wife’s dinner invitations over the next couple of months, it might just have to slip out...to save my own ass, of course.”

  “Of course,” Cooper drawled. “Your pussy-whipped ass.”

  They both cracked up.

  “Tell you what,” Cooper continued after their laughter had tapered off. “Tell Cheryl to cut a brotha some slack for the time being and we’ll set something up next month. Definitely by the end of the summer.” He was thinking of plausible excuses with which to lure Olivia back to Knoxville when he said, “And I might just bring my own date. How about that?”

  “That might just buy us some time,” Rhinehart mused, sounding thoughtful. “So, who is she and exactly how fine is she? I have to live vicariously through you these days.”

  “She is none of your business. You talk too damn much.”

  “Oh, it’s like that?”

  “Now you know a gentleman never kisses and tells.”

  “Whatever, dude. Are sitting in on this clown’s interview or what?”