“I asked the hospital board why I was being investigated when it first started and they told me they were simply looking into everyone who’d worked with Carrie during specific incidents.” She looked up at him. “If the board had been more forthcoming and told me it was you specifically who’d turned me in, I can assure you I never would have let you in that night, tornado warning or no tornado warning.”
He nodded and crossed his arms. “Fair enough. Then tell me you believe me when I thought enough time had passed that you’d at least forgiven me.”
She sighed as she scooped fragrant grounds into the filter basket. “Fine. I’ll give you that one.”
“Good. Here’s one you probably don’t know. I was completely stunned when you came to Carrie’s defense so quickly. You and I had been working together, what, six months at the time? I thought you were one of the best nurses I’d ever worked with. You’re whip smart, you thrive under pressure and you make every patient feel as if he or she the only person you have to take care of, even when the department is short staffed and you’re running your ass off.”
She’d stopped what she was doing and put her hands on the counter, looking straight ahead at the cabinet in front of her, listening.
“Yes, I felt guilty for siccing the board on you afterward, especially when they didn’t find a single thing wrong with your work performance, but I didn’t feel as if I had any other choice at the time.” He shifted closer to her and leaned into her peripheral vision. “And me wanting to get to know you outside of work has always been something completely separate from that incident.”
He took a chance, peeled one of her hands off the counter and held it.
“I thought you were one of the most adorable, funny, sexy women I’d ever met the first time I laid eyes on you.” His heart skipped optimistically when she looked at her hand in his. “I would have asked you out much sooner if I hadn’t been going through a divorce when I first started at the hospital. And in spite of the fact that I thought you hated me, maybe justifiably so, that attraction never went away.”
She turned her big, dark eyes up to his again and he held her hand to his chest over his heart. “I made a terrible judgment call when I reported you, and I apologize, but you didn’t lose your job because you’re one of the best nurses out there.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but she remained silent.
“Forgive me because you love me.”
She pulled her hand out of his and wiped the tears that rolled down her face.
“Forgive me because I love you, and I refuse to do it from a distance.”
She sighed and looked away, wrapping her arms around her middle. “Cooper…”
“Don’t tell me to go. We can go back to having coffee and talking about whatever you want to talk about instead of this, but please don’t tell me to go.”
She hung her head and laughed without humor. “You’re such a jerk.”
Now that was a good sign. “I know, baby.” He touched her face and she turned her cheek into his palm. “I’ve missed you so much, Bree.”
“You took a week off work to avoid me.”
“I was not avoiding you.” He took a step closer. “You asked me to leave you alone, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that once I saw you again.”
Her eyes opened and she lifted her head out of his touch. “So what are you doing here now? Coming here isn’t respecting my wishes.”
“If you thought I was just going to stay away, you were mistaken. Giving you some space was one thing, but walking away without a fight just wasn’t going to happen.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have any fight left in me.”
“So if I kiss you right now there’s a pretty good chance I’m not going to get slapped again?” he asked sliding his hand under her hair to cradle the back of her head. “You’ve got a mean right hook, and I’d rather not be on the receiving end of it again.”
She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. He moved in anyway.
“Cooper, who is Lara?”
He stopped, straightened, dropped his hand. He’d been so happy that she’d let him in her house that he’d forgotten about Lara.
“Your timing couldn’t have been worse when you walked into my office.”
That earned him an arch look. “Or maybe my timing was perfect.”
“She and I used to be friends, but that’s finished. What you walked in on was her making one last effort to get me to become something more than friends. I was telling her that she and I were never going to happen because I’d fallen in love with you. She lashed out at you because she was angry with me.”
“And how did she know it was you who’d spoken to the board?”
“Her mother is the secretary to the hospital director.”
She blinked at him. “Oh.”
“I was just as surprised that she knew anything about it as you were, because I’d never told her. I’ve never talked to anyone about it.”
She covered her face and took a deep breath, then ran her hands through her hair.
“I’m so tired of this,” she huffed impatiently. “I’m so tired of not knowing which end is up, and I’m tired of still wanting you in spite of the mess.”
“There is no mess.” He took her face in his hands and drew her close. “There is no mess, there is no Lara and the investigation is a thing of the past.” She wrapped her hands around his wrists but didn’t try to free herself. “There is only you and me, baby.”
She hated herself for loving it when he called her baby.
She hated herself for giving in so easily when he kissed her—covering her upper lip with his mouth in a way that made his full, soft bottom lip become the only thing that existed for her in the whole world—because she’d missed it.
She’d missed him. All of him. Even the part that had betrayed her, although she couldn’t deny that he hadn’t really betrayed her at all. Once she’d let herself think about it with a clear head, and after several long talks with Rachel and Petra in which they’d let her ramble on and on about it, she’d known he’d just been doing his job.
And she’d known the second she saw him standing on her porch under that umbrella that her fears about what might have been going on between him and Lara were unfounded. She’d known it without a doubt.
“You’re a jerk for staying away so long,” she whispered against his mouth.
His answer was to come back at her more urgently. She let him because she didn’t have a choice. She loved him with every single fiber of her being, especially her heart currently trying to hammer its way out of her chest so it could fling itself at him.
He could have the damn, traitorous thing.
As long as he never stopped kissing her that way, it was his for the taking.
“Take me to bed and let me make it up to you,” he murmured against her neck.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, tightened her stomach and brought her legs up and around him. He got his hands under her ass and lifted. Familiar with the way now, he made it to her room without bumping into anything or knocking any pictures off the wall, the way he had early on.
They fell onto the bed, wrapped tight around each other. They barely parted to undress, each of them tearing their own clothes off to be quick about getting naked.
And then his incredible body was on her, his weight, his scent, his heat familiar and welcome and missed more than she’d realized. He fit himself into her perfectly with his eyes holding hers steady and a promise on his lips. “I love you,” he said.
The words were there, right on the tip of her tongue, but he’d stolen her breath and rendered her half senseless with the long pull and quick thrust of his cock.
She couldn’t get enough of the feel of his skin stretched tight over lean muscle. She explored the deep channel down the middle of his back, ran her hands over the taut muscles of his ass, feeling him tighten and release as he fucked her. She wrapped her legs around his and brought her hips up off th
e bed to meet every thrust.
He tucked his face into her neck and she whispered his name in his ear. His hips jerked and sent her racing toward orgasm when she stroked the tip of her tongue around the shell of his ear and then bit down on the lobe. She shifted, moving farther beneath him so he went deeper, bumping against her clit with every stroke, and licked the salty, damp skin of his neck. Her teeth grazed along his collarbone, then sank into the meat of his shoulder and he groaned.
She could feel the shift of his weight as he adjusted his arms, never losing the steady, perfect momentum of his cock pounding into her. He spoke her name and she looked up at him. He told her he loved her again, but the words weren’t necessary. She could see it, right there in those amazing hazel eyes of his.
How she’d ever thought she’d have been able to live without him, she didn’t know.
She brought her legs up so he sank deeper and they both groaned. Her toes curled and her nipples became tight and aching as pleasure radiated out from her pussy to every other point in her body.
“I love you, Cooper,” she told him when she could, her hands framing his face.
His eyes closed for a moment, as though he couldn’t bear it. And then he was kissing her more, pushing so deeply into her she could hardly believe he’d found yet another depth to explore. But it existed, and fuck if it wasn’t incredibly good to have him there. And when she came, she came with her head pushed back into the bed and a cry of pleasure loud enough to make her next door neighbor’s outside dog bark.
She could feel him throbbing, thick and incredibly hard, inside of her as she crested and her orgasm started to subside. He stayed inside of her, kissing her as though his life depended on it for a long while afterward. He could have stayed there for days. In fact, she would have liked it very much if he did.
Eventually he rolled onto his side, taking her with him. He tucked a pillow under their heads and smoothed her hair back from her face.
“Don’t ever ask me to stay away again,” he told her, looking unusually vulnerable.
Too emotionally drained to cry and too physically exhausted to argue that she wouldn’t as long as he didn’t give her a reason, she kissed him. “We’ll see.”
“I won’t go again,” he warned.
Spent and happy to have him back, she let the warmth of his smile work its way under her skin and fill the emptiness inside her with peace and love. There was probably still a lot more to talk about, but it could wait.
“Give me another good reason to let you stay,” she challenged.
“I’ll give you as many reasons as you need,” he promised, and spent the rest of the night giving her at least three more.
* * * * *
“Bree.” She launched out of sleep because he was shaking her. “Baby, wake up.”
He had her phone. It was vibrating as though it had been made at a sex toy factory.
“I went to make sure the front door was locked and it was ringing. It looks like someone’s been trying to call you for quite a while.”
She sat up and checked the display. He wasn’t kidding. There were twelve missed calls from Rachel and Alex, and one from Jude. Without listening to the voicemails, she dialed Rachel first. She didn’t need to speak, she just listened while Rachel talked.
“I’ll be there as quickly as I can,” she told her friend, then hung up.
“I have to go,” she told Cooper, her heart sitting heavy in her chest. “Petra came home from work this morning to find Jude had packed his things. He’s leaving her.”
“What? They’re such a solid couple.”
“Yeah, I thought so too.” She touched his hand, stopping him from getting back out of bed. “I’m sorry, Cooper. I have to go to her.”
On the night she’d gotten her lover back.
He took her face in his hands and kissed her, calming her.
“They’re your friends, and they’d do the same for you.”
They had done the same for her.
“I’ll drive you in.” He kissed her fingers before he got up and found his jeans.
She followed him off his side of the bed and slid her arms around his waist.
“Thank you,” she whispered, lips and nose pressed to the center of his chest.
She wanted to purr like a kitten when he ran his hands up and down her back.
“For what?” he asked, his mouth touching the top of her head.
“For not listening to me when I asked you to stay away.” She went up on her toes and kissed him. “For understanding,” she said when they stopped.
“I understand that I love you,” he said with a smile that earned him another long kiss. “And I’ll be here to pick up where you and I left off after you help Petra through what she’s going through. No matter how long it takes.”
She drew in a deep breath and her heart promised her he was telling the truth.
“You are an incredibly cool man, Cooper Bennett,” she told him with a sigh.
He kissed her as though he simply couldn’t help himself, then smiled.
“Yeah, and don’t you ever forget it,” he said, and then he kissed her some more.
About Jayne Kingston
Jayne Kingston was born, raised, and has always lived in the Northwest Ohio area. Her job gives her lots of free time to let her imagination run wild – it’s boring, but she rather likes that freedom of thought – and unlimited access to paper so she can jot down ideas as they pop into her head. (Seriously, the office supply nerd in her loves that part.)
She’s an avid fan of erotic romance and erotica of all genres who’d been writing rather vanilla contemporary love stories for years. She hadn't thought to combine the two elements in her own writing until asking herself the question 'what would happen if she showed up and put her hand down his pants?' helped un-stick the rather boring plotline of a short story she wanted to write. She was off and running after that.
Jayne welcomes comments from readers. You can find her website and email addresses on her author bio page at www.ellorascave.com.
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Also by Jayne Kingston
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Ellora’s Cave Publishing
www.ellorascave.com
Cupid’s Choice
ISBN 9781419947391
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Cupid’s Choice Copyright © 2013 Jayne Kingston
Edited by Briana St. James
Cover design by Fiona Jayde
Cover photography by vgstudio/shutterstock.com
Electronic book publication July 2013
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