“You stay at the pool all day?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No,I went over to the golf course for a little bit. The range, actually.”
“You play golf?” His eyebrows lifted in surprise.
“I have now attempted to hit golf balls two days in a row,” I said. “Results have been mixed.”
He smiled, exposing those impossibly white teeth. “You should have told me.”
“Why? Do you split your time between the front desk and the golf course? Or only when there are pretty girls involved?”
He winked at me. “Let's just say I could've come and shown you a few things.”
I rolled my eyes at his cockiness and wondered if he ever felt less than confident. I wasn't usually attracted to arrogant guys, but somehow Eric managed to make it slightly charming. I wasn't sure how he did it; maybe his boyish good looks had something to do with it.
“I got some help,” I said. “But thanks.”
“Those guys are cool over there,” he said. He folded his arms over his chest and cocked his head “So, what's on the agenda after dinner?”
“I haven't really decided,” I said.
He pressed his lips together. “Does that mean you might consider having a drink with me?”
“Not tonight,” I said, trying to sound apologetic. “I'm tired and not up for the conversation.”
He eyed me. “So you're saying there's a chance. For another night.”
I shrugged. “I don't wanna be a dream killer.”
He chuckled. “I certainly appreciate that.”
I smiled and took another sip of my drink.
“Okay,” he said, unfolding his arms and laying his hands flat on the table. “I'll give you one recommendation for the night then. We do dive-in movies at the main pool.”
“Dive-in movies?”
He nodded. “We roll a big screen out on the deck and throw a ton of inner tubes out in the water,” he said. “Once it gets dark, we show a movie on the screen. It's kind of fun. There'll probably be a lot of families, but it's cool. Think it's Finding Nemo tonight, but not sure.”
“That sounds cute.” I could picture Mimi hauling her brood out into the pool to watch if they had been there. “And fun.”
“If you're tired, it's a good way to chill, be in the water and kind of wind down the day,” he said. “I mean, if you haven't been invited out for drinks by a devilishly handsome hotel employee.”
It was my turn to laugh. “Right.”
He stood up. “I gotta get back. Enjoy the rest of your dinner.”
I watched him walk away, then stabbed a half-eaten enchilada with my fork. I wasn't sure what my hesitation was when it came to him. He was good-looking, charming and interested, all the things I'd immediately picked up from him when I'd first checked in. He was clearly looking for something fun and light, something that would end the minute I checked out of the hotel. All of those things should have held enormous appeal. He wanted something hassle-free, no entanglements, no commitments. Just fun.
But maybe that was the issue. Maybe I just hadn't cleared the hurdle of acknowledging that I wanted something hassle-free, too. Because I wasn't sure that I did. If Paige had been there, she would've told me to fuck him right there on the table. But something was holding me back. I just couldn't pinpoint what.
Maybe I just needed to cut loose and stop thinking about it so much. I still had Adam and Evan on my mind, Adam because I'd had unrealistic expectations and Evan because I felt like we had unfinished business. Maybe hooking up with someone like Eric might get my mind off both of them.
Maybe.
EIGHT
Eric was right.
The dive-in movie was cool. It looked like every person staying at the resort had come down for the show. The pool was filled with bright yellow inner tubes and more people spilled out on to the deck furniture and lounge chairs. The screen on the far deck was easily the size found in a stadium movie theater and the sound system had no problem competing with the few people who chose to talk through the movie. Swimsuit-clad waitresses moved through the pool taking drink orders. I was on my second beer, bobbing up and down on my inner tube, when I saw Eric paddling toward me in a tube, his own beer in his hand.
“Imagine meeting you here,” he said, raising his beer and smiling. “Such a coincidence.”
I fought back a smile and shook my head. He had on white and blue board shorts, the white electric against his tan skin. I tried not to stare at his sculpted chest and the rigid ab muscles on display.
“Yes,” I said. “What a coincidence.”
He chuckled and his tube bumped into mine. “I figured you might be here. You like it?”
“It's fun, yeah,” I said. “Thanks for telling me about it.”
He took a drink from his beer. “Sure. Plus, it helped me figured out where you'd be.”
“I told you,” I said. “I'm tired. No date tonight.”
He raised his eyebrows, feigning innocence. “I'm just sitting here, drinking a beer and watching Nemo.”
“Are you still working?”
“No, got off an hour ago,” he said. “Figured I'd cool off before heading home.”
I couldn't argue with that logic. The sun had disappeared an hour ago but the heat still lingered.
“My roommate's gone tonight,” he continued. “So my apartment will be lonely...” He let his voice trail off.
“Inanimate things can't be lonely,” I said. “But nice try.”
“I really can't talk you into coming to take a look at an ASU grad student in his natural habitat?” he asked. “Come on. Live a little.”
“I'm good,” I said,feeling slightly irritated by his pushiness. “But thanks.”
“At some point, I'm gonna stop asking,” he warned.
“That's kind of what I'm hoping...” I said.
He tilted his beer back and took a long sip. “Fair enough,” he said. He paddled away, stopping to chat up one of the pretty pool waitresses weaving her way between the tubes. She laughed and slapped his shoulder and he flicked her elbow with his finger. Maybe he'd gotten the message.
I went back to watching Nemo, floating in my inner tube, sipping my beer, when I felt a hand on the back of my tube.
I sighed, annoyed. “Seriously, dude. Stop asking. I'm not going out with you.”
“What?” a voice that wasn't Eric's said.
I twisted in the tube, trying to look over my shoulder.
Cooper was wedged in his own tube. His one eye was an ugly mess of red and purple. His hair was damp, shoved back on top of his head. His shoulders and chest were stark white against the tan skin of his face and neck. Small swirls of damp chest hair clung to him.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
“Glad you didn't have another club in your hand.”
The heat rose in my cheeks. “I'm so sorry about that.”
He grinned at me and shook his head. “Don't worry about it.”
“Your eye looks...” I couldn't find the words to describe just how bad it looked.
“Pretty crappy, right?” he said, then shrugged. “It'll heal. I keep telling everyone I'm taking up MMA. No one believes me, though. Go figure.” He rested his hands on the tube. “How'd it go today at the range?”
“Better,” I said. “Because of what you showed me.”
“Good,” he said. “You don't have a terrible swing.”
I laughed. “Thanks.”
“No, I'm serious,” he said. “You wouldn't believe what I see somedays.”
I thought about the guy in the red visor. “Well, then thank you for real. I feel like I owe you.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Buy me a pool beer and we'll call it square.”
“Deal,” I said.
I got the attention of one of the girls and five minutes later, we touched our plastic bottles together.
“Thanks,” he said, He took a long pull from it. “I guess it pays to take a shot in th
e eye once in awhile.”
I laughed and shook my head. “I would've bought you a beer anyway.”
“Damn,” he said. “Guess I'm not the sharpest guy in the pool.”
“Why are you here?” I asked curiously. “I mean, why did you come over here and not go home when you were done with work?”
He stared down the neck of the beer bottle for a moment. “I don't know. Just didn't feel like heading home yet, Besides, it was movie night and I needed to cool off.” He gave me a crooked smile. “And then I saw you and thought I'd say hello.”
I felt like maybe there was maybe more to his excuse than he was letting on, but I wasn't sure. Maybe I was just a huge skeptic after dealing with Eric.
“Most of the people who work here tend to hang around,” he continued. “It's a nice place to work. Good people and all that.”
“Have you been here for awhile?”
He nodded. “Six years now. I was over at another course across town. The old head pro was a buddy of mine and he got offered a gig down in Florida. One thing led to another and, before I knew it, I was running the show here.”
“I'm trying to picture life as a golf pro,” I said.
He chuckled and dropped his free hand into the pool. He scooped up a handful of water and let it trickle between his fingers. “Good and bad. Great being outside and playing a lot of golf and meeting people. Not great spending an hour with a jerk or when management is worried that the course is quiet and wants you to do something to liven the joint up.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it's all I've ever done.”
“You've played golf since you were a kid?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said, nodding. “Pretty good junior, decent college player, then washed out trying to play for money. Not much good at a lot of other things, so thought I'd try to make a living showing people how to play – and get to play a lot of pretty courses in the process.” His fingers danced in the water again. “It's worked out okay so far.” He smiled at me. “What about you? What do you do back in Vermont? Since we've already established that you don't make maple syrup.”
I smiled, pleased that he'd remembered our conversation. “Nothing, really.”
He laughed. “Well, that sounds okay. Are you independently wealthy? A socialite or something? Like that Kardashian chick?”
I wrinkled my nose. “Hardly.”
“So what do you do? Or what have you done, since clearly you're traveling right now.”
I shrugged and took a sip of my beer. “Graduated from school, got married, then got divorced,” I said, the word divorce still sounding weird coming out of my mouth. “I guess I still haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that at all. What brought you out to Arizona?”
This was not where I explained my quest to have sex with fifty different guys. “The alphabet,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
I laughed. “I'm trying to visit all fifty states. In order. Arizona was third on the list.”
His bottle was halfway to his mouth. “You kidding me?”
“Not at all,” I said. “A week or so in each state. I've been gone almost three weeks now.”
“Did you lose a bet or something?”
I laughed again. Cooper was funny. He was real. There wasn't anything forced about him, anything fake. I liked him.
“Nope,” I said. “Totally my choice. One of those things I've wanted to do since I was a kid and it all sort of came together at the right time. Now or never, you know?”
He nodded slowly. “I hear you. Well, that's cool. Good for you.” He thought for a minute. “Other than you gotta go to Arkansas next. Right? Isn't that the next one in the alphabet?”
I nodded.
“Can't you skip the crappy ones?”
“You don't like Arkansas?”
“I don't even know where it is on the map,” he admitted.
“Well, don't judge then,” I told him.
“Fair enough, Jess,” he said, smiling at me. “Fair enough.”
We watched the movie for a few minutes without talking. His elbow bumped into mine and I didn't mind. I finished my beer and stole another look at him.
He wasn't nearly as good looking at Eric. He was a lot older than the guy who'd been chasing after me, begging for a date, and he was older than me, too. His arms weren't chiseled out of stone and his stomach wasn't flat and smooth and his chest was as white as his teeth. But there was something about him that I found attractive – his sense of humor or his easygoing personality or the fact that he didn't hold it against me that I'd nearly blinded him with a golf club. He wasn't someone who would've drawn my eye in a crowd, but talking to him was the best thing I'd done so far in Arizona.
The credits started to roll on the screen and I glanced away from him. People clapped and made their way toward the edge of the pool, tossing their tubes up on the deck. Neither of us moved, just floating in the water, finishing our beers. Ten minutes later, save for a few stragglers, we were the only ones left in the pool.
“Got quiet in a hurry,” he finally said.
“Yeah it did.”
“I should probably get a move on.”
“Yeah, it's late I guess,” I said. But I didn't want to say goodbye.
He looked at me, a small smile on his face. “It was very nice to run into you, Jess.”
I stared at him for a moment, squinting at him in the dark. “Uh, Cooper?”
“Yeah?”
I winced. “I think your eye's bleeding.”
NINE
“That okay?” I asked. I dabbed at the corner of his eye with a tissue.
He sat on the corner of my bed and didn't wince. “Yeah, it's fine.”
We'd hopped out of the pool and hunted around for a clean towel to put on his eye. The towel stations were all empty, the bins overflowing with damp ones people had used to dry off as they exited the pool. I made a quick decision and directed him back to my room.
One of the stitches near the corner of his eye had either popped or come loose and a thin trickle of blood trailed down his face as we made our way to my room. The minute we walked through the door, I grabbed some tissue, a towel and the empty ice bucket, intending to run out and fill it up.
“No ice,” he told me, waving the bucket away.
I held out the towel and he pressed it against his eye for a minute, his good eye closing, too. He pulled it away and the blood had smudged around his eye.
I used the tissue and wiped some more of it away from his cheek. “I am so sorry.”
“Why? You didn't hit me a second time. The stitches just came loose or something.”
I held my hand against his face, the tissue pressed lightly over the cut. “Still. I was the one that caused the damage.”
“You bought me a beer,” he said. “And you're mailing me some maple candy. We're even.”
I managed a chuckle. “Doesn't feel that way.”
He gently pulled the tissue away. “Now how's it look?”
I watched. “Think it stopped.”
“Good. I won't bleed out.”
“Thank God. Would've been hard explaining the dead body.”
He turned and grinned at me, his face a couple of inches away from mine. “You would've come up with something, I'm sure.”
I hesitated, then reached up and touched the corner of his eye with my finger. He didn't pull away. I grazed the stitches with my fingertip, the plastic-like strands smooth to the touch. He closed his eye and I let my finger trail down the side of his cheek. His skin was warm and smooth and I felt my breath catch in my throat.
“I'm really sorry,” I said quietly.
“It's really okay,” he said, looking at me.
Maybe it was the margarita and the beers I'd drank in the pool. Maybe it was because I had hooking up on my mind because Eric had incessantly pursued me. Or maybe it was the fact that I felt bad about hurting him. I don't know why I did it, why I
leaned in and planted my lips on his, but I did. His mouth was warm, warmer than his skin, his lips like velvet and I shivered He sat there, frozen, his lips not moving against mine and I pulled away, mortified that I'd somehow misread him and had made another huge mistake.
But he didn't let me get far. His hand cupped the back of my head and he pulled me close, his mouth moving against mine, his tongue licking at my lips. I opened my mouth against his, tasting the beer and chlorine on his lips. He pulled me tighter and I pushed him back on the bed, sliding on top of him. I kissed him hard, surprised by the level of desire ramping up in me, my lust sparking to a new level when I felt something hard press into my thigh.
“Jess,” he whispered, his hands roaming over my back, his fingers digging under the strap of my bikini.
“Touch me,” I said. My lips were next to his ear and I trailed my tongue lightly along the outer ridge of his lobe. “Touch me.”
His hands found their way to my breasts, massaging them through my bikini top. I ground my hips into his and put my hands on his chest, weaving my fingers through the dark nest of hair. My fingers brushed his nipples and he moaned softly. His hands slid around to my back and then into my bikini bottoms, his fingers clutching my ass, fitting me tighter against his arousal. I pushed into him, the thin fabric of our swimsuits creating a flimsy barrier. His hands pulled at the bottoms until they were below my hips and I sucked in my breath as my skin encountered the cool fabric of his swim trunks.
I slid my hand between us, searching until I found him, gripping him through his suit. He thrust up into my hand, opening his mouth wider, kissing me harder. I squeezed him, then slid my hand up the leg of his trunks, my fingers wrapping tightly around his warm, smooth skin.
He pulled harder at my bottoms, making something like a growling noise.
I slid my hand up and down his rock hard shaft, pumping him fast. He writhed beneath me, his breathing hard. His hands roamed up my back and with one pull, my top came loose and he lifted it over my head. He caught one of my breasts in his mouth, holding it gently, his mouth covering it, his tongue working over my nipple.
Love In Arizona (The Love In 50 States Series Book 3) Page 4