Cupid’s Choice
Jayne Kingston
Book 2 in the Mischievous Matchmaker series.
Bree knows she’s next on her friend Petra’s list of so-called accidental setups, but when Cooper washes up on her doorstep during a vicious thunderstorm, he’s the last man she’s expecting. Despite her long-standing grudge against the hunky doctor, she can’t deny the sight of him soaked to the skin and looking sexy as hell is making it hard for her to turn him away.
Mother Nature forces them to seek shelter from the storm together. With her most debilitating fear exposed, Bree finds herself in Cooper’s arms, setting off a chain of events that ignites white-hot passion more all-consuming than either of them has known. A passion that is fragile due to the secret hiding in their history.
A Romantica® contemporary erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave
Cupid’s Choice
Jayne Kingston
Chapter One
“Do not send someone to pick me up. I’m not going.”
Bree flinched as another blinding flash of lightning lit the night sky outside her windows, knowing a nerve-splitting crack of thunder was coming immediately after. She jumped and squeaked in spite of herself when exactly that happened.
“Holy shit,” Petra said on the other end of the phone. “You weren’t kidding about the storm. We don’t have anything but a little rain here.”
Bree’s small but adorable house was half an hour’s drive from the classy, three- story graystone where her friend Petra lived with her long-time boyfriend Jude and Rachel, the third of her and Petra’s close trio, in Chicago’s Lincoln Park.
“Rub it in,” she muttered, lighting another candle just in case the power went out. “Now get off the phone and tell whoever you were going to send not to bother. You know I wouldn’t even think about getting in a car on a night like this.”
Petra sighed heavily. “Yes, I know, but it’s too late. He’s already on his way.”
Bree went to the short hallway leading from her living room to the bedroom. She leaned against the wall and pressed a hand to her forehead. “Who’s he?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you. You sound like you’re really freaked out and I don’t want to make it worse.”
In the lamplight reaching the hallway she could see the ghost of her reflection in the glass of one of the framed pictures hanging across from her. She looked like a doomed extra from a B horror movie—eyes so wide they looked as if they might fall out of their sockets and hair a mess of untamed curls.
She’d been getting ready for Petra’s party when the storm hit much harder than she’d been expecting. She was still in the t-shirt and yoga pants she’d put on after her shower, but the dress and shoes she’d planned to wear had already been chosen. She’d just finished her makeup and was about to begin the taming of the hair when the first rumble of thunder prompted her to check the weather station.
“Too late. I’m freaking out worse.” She gasped when there was a knock at the door. “Shit. He’s here already. Petra, who is it?”
“Honey, I had to send him in case the party started without you.”
Petra had been setting up quite a few of her friends through 70’s-style key parties for more than a year. She would secretly rig the drawing so the two people she thought would be well suited for each other ended up with the right keys at the end of the night. So far she hadn’t made a mistake.
At the end of spring she’d switched from setting up casual acquaintances and periphery friends and gone for the big win by fixing up their best friend Rachel Marsh with an old college crush of hers—the super-fine Dr. Ben Richards. Ben and Rachel had been going hot and heavy with no signs of slowing down since.
Bree had known it was her turn and that the night’s party was meant for her. It had only been a little less than a year since she’d left her ex, who she referred to as The Jailer, and the relationship she now considered her self-imposed prison sentence. She was nowhere near ready to make another attempt as settling down, but curiosity had gotten the better of her and she’d agreed to attend anyway. Now she wasn’t so sure that had been a good idea.
“I don’t like the way you said that.” She peered around the corner at the door, not willing to leave the safety of the hallway just yet. “Who’s out there?”
There was another blinding flash, a house-shaking thunderclap and she could hear rain starting to blow against the front of the house in vicious sheets. There might have been some hail as well. If she hadn’t been afraid of going anywhere near a window before the sun was shining high again she would have checked to see who it was.
The next knock was more urgent. Whoever it was had to be getting pretty wet. There was no roof over her front porch or awning above the door.
“Just let him in,” Petra urged gently.
Bree stepped into the living room, flipped on the front porch light and turned the deadbolt. She went ice cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature outside as the door swung open.
“Why do you hate me?” she asked Petra. She turned her back on both the door and the man standing outside and stalked to the middle of her living room, panic rising even higher. “What did I ever do to you to deserve this? Seriously, Pete. This is not cool.”
“Bree, my love, heart of my hearts, I need you to trust me,” Petra spoke calmly.
Trust her? Bree had just opened the door and discovered the person Petra had intended to “accidentally” fix her up with at a sex party—where one of the only two rules was that if you drew a person’s keys, you had to spend the night with them—was someone she couldn’t stand.
A gust of damp wind ripped through her living room and she spun.
“Why are you still standing out there?”
Dr. Cooper Bennett, M.D., hotshot young emergency room doc at Northwestern University Hospital—where Bree also worked as a nurse—and all around controlling jerkface, tucked his hands in his pants pockets as if he wasn’t straining to keep upright in the wind at his back. “You haven’t invited me inside.”
“What are you a vampire or something? Get in here.” She turned to finish berating Petra, then spun back. “Wait. Are you a vampire?”
“It’s too late now if I am,” he said with a smile, stepping onto the small rectangle of ceramic tile that made up her entryway. “You’ve already invited me inside.”
“Oh yeah,” Petra breathed through the phone. “I like him.”
Bree hung up on her.
“Listen,” she started, relaxing slightly as he closed the door, leaving the weather outside where it belonged. “I’m sorry you drove all the way out here for nothing. I do not get in cars during bad weather. Someone should have told you that before they sent you.”
He held his arms out at his sides slightly, the palms of his hands turned toward her. He looked himself over then up at her. “May I borrow a towel please?”
She realized that he wasn’t just a little wet. He was soaked. Water dripped from his hair and the tips of his fingers.
Long fingers. Good fingers. The kind of fingers she would bet money had the skill to make a woman’s body tingle under their touch.
Good lord, how did something as plain as rainwater turn someone from perfectly unremarkable to…that? He looked as if he’d stepped straight out of a gratuitously erotic men’s fashion ad with his sandy brown hair plastered to his head, button-down shirt clinging to a rather muscular upper body and dark dress pants stuck to his thighs. Thighs she could see were gorgeously well defined.
Had she ever thought of Dr. Bennett in terms of human body parts before?
Had she ever thought of him as human before?
“Towel,” she muttered, flushing with a mixture of unexpected warmth and embarrassment as she made a
mad dash down the hallway to her bathroom. She grabbed a clean bath towel for him and a couple of old towels for the floor.
Thunder rattled the house and she flinched, frozen momentarily with her face buried in all the terrycloth in her arms. When she composed herself and looked up he was studying her, eyebrows raised.
“Don’t like thunderstorms?”
She pulled herself up to her full height of five feet nothing and shoved a towel at him. It was one of the ones she’d meant to use on the floor, but she didn’t care. If he didn’t stop looking at her that way she was going to use him to mop up the floor.
“I’m not a big fan,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster, tossing towels onto the water around his feet from a safe distance.
“Normally I love them, but this one’s kicking ass and taking names.” He scrubbed the towel over his hair and wiped his face dry. He started to dab at his wet shirt then stopped, the obvious futility of the effort written all over his face.
“I wouldn’t have driven all the way from Chicago in this if I were you.” She propped her hands on her hips. “Especially if I knew who was at the other end of the road, and how I was the last face that person ever wanted to show up unexpectedly on their doorstep.”
“Really?” He gave her a skeptical look. “The last ever?”
Maybe not the last ever, but pretty close.
“I’m sorry Petra sent you to pick me up.” She held out her hand for the towel. “Be careful driving back.”
“You’re sending me back out in that?” he asked, pointing a thumb over his shoulder as the sound of hail hitting the front of her house grew louder.
Well, he couldn’t very well stay. She hated him for siccing the hospital board on her friend Carrie until they scrounged up enough dirt to fire her. And she hated him because the board turned around and tried to do the same thing to her.
And he was unnerving her, looking at her like maybe he wanted to eat her—you know, in the good way—with hazel eyes that weren’t an ugly mud color at all, just mostly brown with flecks of earthy green and dark-yellow. Or maybe it was just easier to see those eyes because he was wearing contacts instead of the black-framed glasses he usually wore.
She curled her shaking hand into a fist as she drew it back. She’d just opened her mouth to tell him yes, she most certainly was going to send him back the way he’d come, when the tornado siren started howling.
Cooper wondered if she was aware that he could see through her top. It was one of those semi sheer things he was pretty sure women usually wore in layers to make them less revealing, but she only had the one thin white t-shirt hugging her curvy body.
And damn if her bra underneath wasn’t hot pink and only covering maybe half of a pair of really incredible breasts. If he wasn’t soaked to the bone and just about shivering with cold, his reaction to the sight would have been really obvious. Of course that kind of reaction was always obvious, but with his pants stuck to him the way they were it would have been a lot worse.
The tornado siren went off and her eyes went so wide he could see the whites all the way around her dark-chocolate-colored irises. Her face went white and her chest started to heave.
“Bree?” He stepped out of his shoes and quickly peeled off his drenched socks as her entire body started to tremble. He repeated her name as he took her by the arms and peered into her face. She was about to start hyperventilating. He walked her backward and sat her down on her couch with little resistance, but she did squeak in protest when he pushed her knees apart.
“You’ll thank me later,” he assured her, put his hand high on her back and pushed gently until her head was between her knees. He sat beside her and spoke quietly in her ear. “Breathe slowly. In through your nose, out through your mouth.”
“Get your hands off me,” she wheezed, her voice high-pitched and full of fear.
He moved his hand up to just below the base of her skull and squeezed no harder than he would have if he were giving her a massage to get her attention.
“I’m not trying to hurt you. You’re panicking. Breathe,” he repeated. “In through your nose,” he demonstrated. “Out through your mouth.”
Surprisingly, she listened. He breathed along with her for a few breaths, then let go of her neck when she started to calm. She brought her arms up and laid them across her knees, under her head.
“This is so embarrassing,” she groaned.
“No reason to be embarrassed.” He slid his hand down her back a little way and rubbed the space between her shoulder blades in small circles. “If anyone should be embarrassed it’s me. I’m the one drenched to the bone, soaking a wet spot on your couch with my ass.”
Her back shook with silent, nervous laughter.
He looked at the couch, upholstered in red faux suede. At least he hoped it was faux. “I hope I’m not ruining it,” he muttered, running his free hand over a cushion.
Yeah, he was probably ruining it.
She shook her head and her long curls fell in a curtain over her face, arms and legs.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered, still clearly shaken.
Before he thought to stop himself, Cooper slipped a hand under that silky mass of curls and swept them out of the way, exposing the side of her face. He’d only seen her with it down once before, and then it had only been half down, the front pulled back and secured with a silver barrette, but he remembered thinking her hair was absolutely beautiful.
She was absolutely beautiful.
But that had been a different time—a time that he was apparently not going to get a chance to redeem himself for putting her through, no matter what Petra had promised might come out of the night if he attended her party.
The power flickered twice and then the house was pitched into the light of more than a dozen candles that were burning throughout the living and dining rooms.
Bree groaned and sat up. With his hand still on her back, he could feel her start to tremble again.
“We need to get someplace safe,” he said calmly as the wind screamed through her window screens and hail hammered the roof. “Do you have a basement?”
“There’s a flashlight in the drawer under the microwave,” she said.
Not exactly what he’d asked, but mostly on task.
He stood and took her hand. “Show me where.”
She led him to the kitchen and found the flashlight, made sure it was working and then took him to the basement. In the slightly shivering but bright beam of the light, he could see a washer and dryer standing along the wall across the clean, dry room from the stairs. The wooden cage that was the end of an upstairs clothes chute, painted white with a few articles of clothing inside, hung just to the left of those.
A set of curtains cut the neatly organized space in half. In the second half of the basement a narrow bed stood against the back wall, joined by a wardrobe on one side and a small dresser with a television sitting on top on the other.
“My younger brother Dillon lives in California,” she explained, going to the dresser, slightly calmer now. “He stays with me when he comes here to visit.”
She pulled out a drawer and handed him a t-shirt, then a pair of sweatpants from a bottom drawer. “He’s shorter than you, but he wears his clothes big, so these should fit if you want to get out of your wet clothes.”
Cooper looked at her a moment, then opened the first drawer and pulled out a second t-shirt. He set the clothes she’d handed him on the dresser, opened the shirt and shoved it over her head.
“What are you doing?” she asked when her head popped through the neck.
“Covering you up.” He took one of her arms by the wrist and helped it through the short sleeve when she didn’t automatically do it herself. “I can see through your shirt.”
She gave him an impatient sigh. “They’re just boobs, Bennett.”
“Yes, but from what I can see they’re spectacular boobs, and this is no time for that kind of distraction.”
He
took the flashlight out of her other hand and set it on the dresser so he could hold the other sleeve and reach for her other hand at the same time. She moved it out of reach.
“If this storm hadn’t hit and we’d ended up at the party you’d have gotten to see them tonight anyway. Those stupid rules being what they are and all.”
He shook his head. “The rules?”
She gave him an impatient look. “Don’t try to tell me Petra didn’t explain the rules when she invited you. I know better than that, Cooper.”
Petra had told him if he came she could guarantee he would get to spend some time with Bree, but she hadn’t mentioned rules. “Refresh my memory.”
She sighed. “You sleep with whoever’s keys you draw, or whoever’s keys she draws depending on how she has the game rigged, and condoms are a must.”
No, he definitely hadn’t been told anything of the sort. “You’re kidding me.”
Her eyes narrowed. “She really didn’t tell you that part?”
“No. She really didn’t.” An odd kind of excitement filled him as they stood looking at one another, both of them still as the weather raged above them. Did the flippant way she’d just explained the party rules mean she would have gone through with it? The idea caused a stirring in his cock despite his cold, clinging clothes.
Bree moved first, pushing her arm through the sleeve on her own and taking the flashlight from him. “I’m assuming you know how to find your way around yourself well enough to change without this.” She walked to the other side of the curtains and took them in her hands. “I’ll wait out here while you change,” she said, and pulled them closed.
She pointed the beam at the heavy curtain anyway, giving him enough light to see as he unbuttoned his shirt. Cold, wet clothes or not, the effect of what she’d just told him had done the trick. He left his boxer briefs on, thankful they weren’t quite as damp as the rest of his clothes as he needed them to restrain what was now a full erection.
Cooper tried to think unpleasant thoughts as he pulled on her brother’s clothes, but it wasn’t helping. The bed, the storm and the luscious little woman on the other side of the curtain were fueling some serious fantasies about how they could spend the time waiting for the weather to clear. Even the fact that she had seemed horrified to see him when he first arrived was doing nothing to help ease the growing ache in his balls.
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