“God yes,” she ground out through clenched teeth, digging her nails into his ass, encouraging him to pump harder, faster. “Fuck me, Cooper.”
He did. And when he slammed into her and froze, teeth bared, face contorted in ecstasy as he came in long, throbbing waves, she was once again right behind him.
She didn’t care when he collapsed on top of her. She loved the weight of his hot, sweaty body crushing her to the bed. She wasn’t sure she could ever get enough of the feel of the rise and fall of his chest and the racing beat of his heart.
“I love you,” she told him, mouth touching the salty skin of his neck.
He raised up to look at her, one side of the face she’d come to adore lit.
“I love you, Cooper,” she told him again, because he looked rather stunned.
He nodded, then shook his head. “Unbelievable.”
She pursed her lips to keep from laughing. “Why? You think my post-coital confession is lacking in sincerity?”
He huffed out a laugh. Then another.
He kissed her and she felt his still-hard cock stir within her.
“I love you too,” he whispered, and started to make love to her again.
Chapter Ten
Bree turned down the hallway to Cooper’s office carrying a piece of the chocolate-on-chocolate cake Langley had made her for her birthday, which had actually been two days earlier. Cooper taken one look at that cake when Langley brought it in at the beginning of their shift and gotten the biggest smile on his face. The couple of people who’d noticed had mistaken it for excitement about the cake—which it was, he’d eaten a big piece—but Bree knew the underlying reason for that smile.
All throughout the shift she’d been daydreaming about taking him a big, frosting covered piece and proposing they reenact the night of his birthday in reverse, with her licking strategically placed dots of frosting off his body. Sure, he’d already let her do something similar with some strawberry preserves and a can of whipped cream on her actual birthday, but she didn’t expect he would be opposed to extending the celebration by a couple of days.
She checked to make sure no one was looking before she knocked once, opened the door and stepped inside.
He wasn’t alone.
There was a woman sitting on top of Cooper’s desk, on the side where he would normally sit, with her back to the door, her skinny ass perched right on the blotter. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a high ponytail that curled into a pretty ringlet at the end and she was wearing sherbet-orange scrubs. Cooper was standing in front of her with an intimate, intense look on his face.
He straightened and took a wide step away from the blonde when Bree went in, but his expression remained unreadable.
“Have I come at a bad time?” Bree asked. She looked from Cooper to the blonde when she turned. Whoever she was, Bree didn’t recognize her.
“No, Lara was just leaving,” Cooper told Bree in a dark tone.
Lara from the card in Cooper’s birthday flowers, whose gift he’d seemed so unhappy about receiving? The same Lara who’d apparently been the only person in the hospital privy to the date of Cooper’s birth?
She and Cooper had been spending so much time together since his birthday that Bree hadn’t stopped to consider he might be seeing someone else.
Maybe she should have.
“Wow, the infamous Bree Trenton,” Lara said, catching Bree completely off guard. She hopped off the desk and turned but didn’t come around the front. “I didn’t realize you still work here.”
If Bree had hackles, they would have been standing on end.
“I’m sorry, do we know each other?”
“Oh no, we’ve never met,” Lara chirped. “I work up in radiology.” She pointed from Bree to Cooper and back. “This is the same Bree you were trying to get fired last year, am I right?” she asked Cooper.
Bree thought she was going to be sick, right there on the floor of his office.
What the hell was she talking about?
“You must have me mixed up with Carrie Walters,” Bree said, teeth clenched.
“No.” Lara shook her head for emphasis. “Carrie was someone else. You were her friend, right?” She looked at Cooper. “Have I got this wrong?”
“You need to leave.” Cooper started to usher Lara around his desk. “Right now.”
“Is she right, Cooper?” Bree asked.
Both he and Lara stopped. Cooper hung his head and Lara looked smug.
“You tried to get me fired?” The words didn’t make sense in her head. The scene in front of her didn’t make sense. Her head was reeling and she felt as though she needed to scream, just scream bloody murder, to relieve some of the pressure that was building inside her at an alarming rate.
Cooper looked up and reached for her but she took a quick step out of reach and held up her hand to stop him. “Don’t touch me.”
“Wait.” Lara pointed between the two of them again. “Are you dating her now? After you wanted her out of here so badly?” She snorted. “That’s rich.”
Bree looked at Cooper. He had the most nauseating look of apology on his face. Gray spots wavered in her peripheral vision and a ringing had started in her ears. She saw his mouth form her name but didn’t hear the sound. He reached for her and she backed against the closed door so fast she hit her head.
Bree dropped the cake, turned to yank the door open and bolted out of the room. She was aware that she was running through the halls to the locker room. She knew people were speaking to her, asking her what was wrong as she fought with the lock and grabbed her things, but she didn’t dare stop moving. Her eyes and throat burned with the threat of tears and there was no way in hell she was going to have an anxiety attack over a man in front of her coworkers.
Bree burst out the exit doors and headed toward her car at a full sprint. She’d almost made it when she heard the sound of running footsteps behind her. She felt the adrenaline rush of irrational fear a second before a hand on her arm stopped her.
She had no idea if it was that fear or blinding anger that made her do it, but she used the momentum of her wild spin to slap Cooper hard across the face.
“Who is that bitch, Cooper?” she screamed. “And why does she know it was you who tried to get me fired when I don’t?” She covered her mouth and sobbed, once. “I’m such an idiot.”
He tried to take her arm, gently this time, but she jerked out of his grasp.
“I had no idea you didn’t know it was me,” he said, acting as though he couldn’t feel the angry red handprint on his cheek. “Bree, I—”
“Don’t bother. I don’t want to hear it.” She turned and headed toward her car.
It was so close. All she wanted was to get in it and drive away. She couldn’t stand the look on his face or the sound of his voice, and she certainly didn’t care about whatever lame explanation he was about to give her.
“Damn it, Bree,” he called after her. “Would you please just come back and listen?”
She rounded on him a second time and stalked back to where he was standing.
“My job is my life, Cooper.” She felt a strange kind of calm come over her. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. I have never had a plan B. I was eight years old when my mom and I were in that accident. The emergency room nurse that was supposed to help me was a nightmare. I was hurt and frightened and worried about my mother and she hurt me on purpose. I would swear to it to this day. She said awful things to me when no one else was around, and then she would laugh when I cried.
“I became a nurse to right that wrong that had been done to me. I asked to stay in a department where most nurses don’t want to work because it’s ugly and unpredictable. The people who come through the ER need someone who cares about them, no matter who they are or why they’re there, and I care. You almost took that away from me.”
She’d never felt so empty of emotion as she did at that moment.
“I don’t want to understand your reasons for having m
e investigated,” she added, her heart dying inside of her. “This game you’ve been playing, getting me to trust you so that I fall in love with you, is truly sick.”
“Can I speak now?” he asked, his voice calm even though he looked panic-stricken.
She shook her head. “Leave me alone, Cooper. Do not call me, do not come to my house, and stop going to ball games with my brother.” She looked at him a long moment. “I’ll return the things you’ve left at my house as soon as I can.”
He didn’t try to stop her when she turned for the last time. As she climbed behind the wheel she could see in her peripheral vision that he was still standing there watching her, but she couldn’t look. She couldn’t bear the heartbroken look on his face.
Let him hurt, she thought.
But that didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right.
She didn’t want him to hurt. She didn’t want to hurt. She wanted to turn back the clock and go back to a time before any of this had happened so she could sit Petra down and tell her she didn’t want to be set up with anyone. She didn’t want to be in love, because love was only good until it wasn’t. And once it wasn’t, it was hell.
She didn’t remember driving, but suddenly, somehow, she was pulling into her driveway. She’d made it home without so much as shedding a single tear, but the moment she walked through her door and saw the sweatshirt he’d left hanging on her coat tree, her stomach turned on her. She ran for the bathroom, and when her stomach stopped heaving she curled up on the floor and sobbed into the rug by the sink.
It was a long time before she forced herself to stand, wash her itchy, mascara streaked face and crawl into bed. She stared out the window through dry, burning eyes, her mind relentlessly replaying the scene in Cooper’s office. The perky blonde sitting on his desk, the look on his face when she’d opened the door, the way that bitch had oh-so-casually dropped a bomb right on the bull’s-eye of Bree’s life.
She still had no idea who Lara Young was to Cooper. She was so stupid for not asking, and even more stupid for trusting him. She felt like a complete idiot all around, but somehow the wretched humiliation didn’t change the way she felt.
She was in love with him. In ways she’d never loved a man before. She was in so incredibly deep and the day’s revelations weren’t going to show that love a quick, merciful death. No, this was going to be a deep, painful wound that was going to bleed for a very long time. She could feel it.
* * * * *
She called a friend from work to cover her shift the next night. She and Cooper had made plans to drive up to his family’s cabin in Wisconsin for three days after they got off work the next morning. She’d been so excited to get away with him. There was no way she would have been able to focus on her job with her broken heart and those ruined plans hanging heavy between them. She would have been distracted and probably lost it at some point in the night, and her patients and coworkers deserved her complete attention.
Cooper didn’t respect her request to leave her alone. Not on the first day anyway. He tried to call often enough that Bree could tell he wasn’t sleeping either. Which made her happy in a dark and twisted way. Eventually she turned off her phone and put it under her mattress so she would stop making herself crazier by looking at it.
She was watching the sun set through her bedroom window on what would have been the second day of their trip when the knocking on her front door started.
Bree tried to ignore it, but it persisted. It stopped after what seemed like an eternity, and then she nearly came out of her skin when a shadowy figure appeared outside her bedroom window.
Rachel cupped her hands over the glass and looked inside, then gestured to someone out of Bree’s line of sight. She could hear Rachel tell whoever else was out there that she’d found her, and then Petra appeared in the window as well.
“Sweetie, open the door,” Rachel coaxed, speaking loudly through the glass.
Knowing they wouldn’t go away now that they knew she was home, she forced herself out of bed and made her way to the back door.
Rachel pulled her into her arms first. “Oh honey, I’m so sorry.”
Petra hugged them both, sandwiching Bree between them. It would have been welcome and comforting if she’d been able to breathe.
“Rachel, your boobs are smothering me,” Bree mumbled into her chest.
Her friends both backed off at the same time, spun her and she was hugged to Petra, who was shorter and a lot less well endowed than Rachel.
“Better?” Petra asked.
“Better.” Bree laid her head on Petra’s shoulder and they cocooned her again. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said after a minute. “Wait.” She lifted her head and looked at Petra. “How do you know?”
“Cooper called us,” Petra said.
“How chivalrous of him.” Bree wiggled out from between them. “Are you supposed to report back after you’ve checked up on me?”
Rachel looked at Petra. “She’s clearly in the anger phase already.”
“Because at no point in time would we ever agree to spy on you for a man,” Petra assured Bree with her usual cool expression. “He didn’t call to defend himself, sweetheart. He called to ask how you were doing. When I told him I didn’t know there was anything wrong because I was under the assumption you were with him, he told me what had happened. And he was rather hard on himself about it.”
Bree hid her face in her hands. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“And you don’t have to,” Rachel told her. “Please tell me those aren’t the same scrubs you wore to work last. Cooper said this happened days ago.”
They were the same scrubs. The same socks. The same everything. When she touched her hair she realized it was still partially braided, although quite a bit of it had come loose in the seventy-two hours since she’d put it up.
“Go take a shower and brush your teeth,” Petra said. “We’ll still be here to not talk about it when you get out.”
So she did. She ran a shower so hot it made her undernourished body feel weak and her head spin dangerously. She had to sit on the edge of the tub to dry off and put on pajamas, and brush her teeth twice to get them clean, but she felt something close to human again when she joined her friends in the living room.
They’d brought a bottle of wine, subs from a place in the city they all liked and a stack of movies. Rachel and Petra chatted about all kinds of nonsense while Bree picked at her sandwich halfheartedly and tried to follow along. No matter how hard she tried to focus, or how many times they tried to drag her back to the conversation, her thoughts kept returning to Cooper.
After awhile they poured the wine and settled in to watch something that was supposed to be funny, each of them snuggled under afghans hand knit by her mother. The opening credits started rolling and she realized they’d stuck to their word and hadn’t tried to force her to talk about the disaster that was her love life.
Bree told them, “I love you two, you know.”
Rachel, who was draped across the big, comfy armchair across the room, gave her a huge smile. Petra reached over from her corner of the couch and patted Bree’s leg.
“We know,” they said.
Chapter Eleven
Cooper stood on Bree’s front porch under the umbrella she’d given him, waiting.
He didn’t have any idea how long he’d been there, standing in the rain, but he was willing to wait for as long as it took her to come home. He had no idea where she’d gone or when she would be back, and he didn’t care. He was going to be there when she returned, come hell or high water. Which was starting to look like a real possibility.
It was well after dark before headlights appeared at the four-way stop. In the light of the streetlamp at the corner he could see it was her car. She sat there for what felt like an eternity, something he took to mean she’d spotted him and couldn’t decide if she wanted to go home and talk to him or keep driving and leave him there.
Eventually she pulled into
her driveway and got out of the car.
It had been two weeks since he’d seen her. She’d had the end of that first week off work, then he’d taken one, knowing he wasn’t going to be able to leave her alone when he saw her. He’d wanted to give her space, but the fear that she would never come around and give him the chance to make things right had gotten the better of him.
He was so happy to have her standing close enough to touch again that he almost threw the umbrella aside and pulled her into his arms. The look on her face stopped him, though. She was clearly not happy to see him.
He spoke before she could ask him to leave. “I could stand here and make excuses all night, Bree, but the fact is I was doing my job.”
When she didn’t say anything he took a chance and stepped close enough she was under the umbrella as well.
“Carrie was making a lot of dangerous mistakes and you were her biggest supporter, so I went to the board and told them I felt it would be in the best interest of the hospital to look into your work performance as well. I was simply doing my job.”
She simply looked at him a moment. He had no idea what she was thinking. Nothing about her expression changed. Then she moved past him and went inside her house. He waited for the sound of her closing the door and locking him out, but it didn’t happen. When he turned and looked, the door was wide open.
Cooper shook the rain out of the umbrella outside before collapsing it and standing it in the base of her coat tree. A box holding his things was sitting on the tile floor. He could only hope it was a positive sign that she hadn’t given them back yet.
“I’m going to make some coffee.” She hung her jacket without looking at him. “Would you like some?”
“I would.” He wanted her coffee. He wanted to come home and leave his shoes and his coat next to hers after work every morning. He wanted her. Period.
“Please tell me you believe me when I said I thought you knew it was me who went to the board,” he said, leaning on the counter to watch her make coffee.
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