“Tell me what you need, Bree. I want to feel you come, baby.”
“Just stay with me,” she breathed. “This…it’s so good. Just like this.”
“You are so good,” he told her, lightly kissing that sweet, fat upper lip of hers.
Cooper shifted his weight to one arm and pried one of her legs from his waist, getting his arm behind the back of her knee to draw her leg up high, opening her wide. He sped up the pace of his hips just a little. Her mouth dropped into a wide O, her eyes closed and she dug her nails into his back.
It didn’t take long before she begged him to stop, please just hold still, and he did. He could feel the powerful tighten and release of her pussy. He stayed inside of her, waiting until she let him know it was all right to move again, then he brought her to another writhing, sweating climax, joining her for the second one.
He needed to move before he collapsed on top of her, but he couldn’t. The singular act of holding his weight off her was taking all the energy he had left. When he felt her shaking beneath him, he came back to himself enough to raise his head.
Tears ran down the side of her face. She was crying.
“Hey,” he whispered gently, carefully slipping out of her. “What’s wrong?”
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.”
Chapter Nine
“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.
“I want to fool around now,” he told her, tossing his t-shirt aside and going for the zipper of his shorts.
Heat rushed through her. “All right,” she said, quickly removing her own clothes.
Without a word of warning he grabbed her by the backs of her knees and pulled her so her ass was balanced on the edge of the bed. With her face and upper body now directly in the light, she couldn’t see anything but the dark shape of him.
“Perfect,” he whispered, parting her legs wide. She sensed more than saw him kneel between her legs. “Play with your tits,” he told her, then kissed her pussy right above her clit.
Oh damn she liked it when he got bossy with her. She cradled her breasts in her hands, kneaded them, rolled her nipples to send little shocks of pleasure straight to her clit. She looked down even though she couldn’t see him, knowing he would like it. Her mouth fell open and she gasped in shock when he stroked her with his tongue, dipping into her wetness and parting the folds of her sex as he licked her.
He didn’t take his time. He parted her with his hands and brought her to climax with an almost fierce determination, and she loved every high-speed second of it. Her body twitched and shuddered out of control. She writhed as she came, a high-pitched keening wail as he licked, sucked and stroked her through an orgasm that made her eyes water and her toes curl.
And then he put his hands on her ass and pushed her back to the middle of the bed, dropped over her and buried himself deep before she had time to catch her breath.
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