“Did he say anything that might give you a clue as to what he was looking for?” Betsy asked.
“He left me a voicemail message that said that I shouldn’t worry, that he’d found a way to solve all of our problems, but it was going to take a little time.”
“I know.” Betsy’s eyes were shining. “I know what he’s after.”
“What?” They chorused simultaneously.
She had their full attention.
“The lost treasure of Lucky Levi.”
“Oh, come on. You’re taking this Nancy Drew mystery thing a little too far,” Cheyenne snorted.
“No, you morons! Don’t you know your Crooked Creek history?” Betsy reared back in her seat and looked down her nose at them like an outraged schoolmarm who’d just found out that her class had not studied for their final exam.
“Actually, little nerdling, we do not. Nor do we care, so much,” Cheyenne said. “But tell us about this lost treasure.”
“Lucky Levi and his partner finally struck a really rich vein of gold and they were travelling back to town when they were ambushed by Native Americans and shot full of arrows. They barely made it back to town, and the partner was dead by the time they got there, and Levi died a day or two later. But nobody knows what happened to the gold. There’s more to the story, but I’m going to have to go hit up the newspaper museum to see what I can find out.”
“Oh my God, for the first time ever, one of your history lectures is actually interesting! Could he have found a treasure map in that box of old stuff?” Cheyenne wondered.
Josephine frowned in thought. “I mean, anything’s possible,” she said. “That would actually make sense, in a way. Because if he found gold that had legitimately belonged to one of my ancestors, that would solve our problems. It would pay for me to go to nursing school. That’s the only way he could help me out; he knows I would never take any money that he’d stolen from somewhere. And if we had money, he could hire a good lawyer instead of relying on the public defender’s office; a good lawyer would get him off those trumped up charges in no time.”
She shook her head.
“There’s one thing that still doesn’t make sense, though. He should have just told me about it, and I’d have come up here to see if there was any truth to it. Why would he take off and violate parole?” Josephine shook her head unhappily. “I won’t know until I find him and talk to him face to face. So where do I go from here?”
Carlotta looked behind Josephine, and scowled. Josephine swiveled to look. A sheriff’s patrol car was pulling up next to Betsy’s car.
“Is that my husband? How did they find us?” Carlotta grumbled.
Two men climbed out of the car, and Josephine’s heart sank when she saw that Deputy Mancini was driving…and Cooper was in the front seat next to him.
Chapter Seven
“All right, we have to talk fast,” Betsy said. “Today when I go back to work I’ll go to the newspaper archives and research Lucky Levi. Where he lived, if he had any known compatriots, where he might have stashed the treasure. That’ll at least give us a place to start. I’ll meet you at the restaurant tomorrow and we’ll plan our next move. Cheyenne and Carlotta, I’ll need you to be on call in case we need to distract our two stalkers here.”
Cooper and Deputy Mancini were walking towards them now. The twins lit up when they saw their father and hurtled towards him, shrieking with joy. He caught them in his arms and lifted them up.
“Well, well, well,” Cooper said, with a huge grin, as he strolled towards them, followed by Deputy Mancini. “You didn’t invite me to join your little tea party? I’m hurt.”
The rays of the sun caressed him as he clomped over the grass towards them, big and handsome and infuriating. He always seemed to be bathed in sunshine, as if he’d struck a deal with Mother Nature to ensure that he was backlit at all times.
He flashed a devilish grin at Josephine.
Josephine felt her heart do a treacherous dance in her chest, and forced herself to concentrate on being angry at him.
“Seriously, Cooper, how?” Josephine glared at him. He slung an arm around her shoulders, and warmth flared through her body and her heart beat faster. She let out a tiny, involuntary gasp that she prayed nobody else heard, and stepped back away from him so quickly that she stumbled.
His gaze followed her the whole way, knowing and smug. He was well aware of the physical affect that he had on her.
“Nice to see you, Benedict Arnold,” Carlotta said to her husband, who responded with a wink and a smile, and then kissed his sons on the tops of their heads.
Carlotta turned back to Josephine. “I’ll tell you how. Lorenzo knows Betsy and Cheyenne and I do everything together. And Lorenzo put a ‘find my phone’ GPS feature on my phone, supposedly in case there’s ever an emergency, so that’s how he knew we were here.”
“Aww, there she goes giving away my trade secrets,” Lorenzo shook his head, smiling affectionately at his wife.
“Why are you helping him?” Carlotta asked sulkily.
“Why am I helping him find a fugitive who’s on the run from an armed robbery charge?” He tapped his badge. “I took an oath.”
“That’s not why he’s on the run,” Betsy said virtuously.
“Really? Please tell me. Why is he on the run?” Cooper turned to stare at her.
“Why is who on the run?” Betsy stared back, eyes wide and innocent. “Who are you even talking about? I’m sorry, we’ve decided to be on Team Josephine.”
Cooper groaned. “Do you understand that this man is wanted for sticking a gun in someone’s face?”
“Josephine says he didn’t do it.”
“Then let him come back and go to trial. I’m sorry, but cutting and running makes him look pretty guilty.”
“You don’t know everything,” Betsy said.
Cooper looked at her, narrow eyed. “I’m going to be keeping a particularly close eye on you,” he informed her. She shrugged indifferently.
“Knock yourself out,” she said. “You’re outnumbered now. You can’t keep an eye on all of us.”
Cooper let out a long, frustrated breath.
“You’d be surprised at what I can do when I’m motivated.” He turned to Josephine. “And now that I’ve found you, you’re not going to lose me again, so you’re stuck with me until your waitressing shift starts. I’m hungry. The offer of breakfast still stands.”
Cheyenne leaned close to Josephine. “He is totally hot,” she told Josephine. “If I weren’t married, I would be all over that. You should go for it.”
“Cheyenne, you are using your outside voice,” Betsy said. “I assure you, he can hear you. So can China.”
Cheyenne shrugged. “I don’t actually have an inside voice. Hello, this is me, Cheyenne. I have a big mouth. Pleased to meet you.”
Cooper grinned at Josephine and held out his hand. She took it and let him pull her to her feet, and was sorry that she did. When his hand brushed against hers, it sent tremors through her body and made her breathing quicken.
“See you around, Bounty Hottie,” Cheyenne waved at him as he walked Josephine back to the patrol car.
Lorenzo kissed his wife on the forehead, set his sons down, and followed Cooper and Josephine. He turned back to shoot his wife a stern glance. “Stay out of trouble,” he called out to her, which sent Betsy, Cheyenne and Carlotta into peals of laughter. Cheyenne laughed so hard that she doubled over and slapped her knees; Carlotta wiped tears from her eyes, looked at him, and laughed again. The twins joined in, joyfully, throwing back their heads and shrieking out peals of laughter even though they didn’t know why.
“Right,” Lorenzo said, shaking his head. “What was I thinking?”
Breakfast at the Daily Grind coffeeshop was delicious. Josephine and Cooper ate big fluffy pancakes swimming in syrup and slathered with butter, and salty links of sausage, and drank sweet hot coffee.
Cooper paid for the breakfast, waving away the money Josep
hine offered him, and then they walked out of the cool dark interior of the diner into the white hot sunlight blasting down on them. Josephine stood and blinked, temporarily blinded by the light, and Cooper moved up against her.
“Now what do you want to do?” he asked, slinging his arms around her shoulders again and pulling her close to him so she was pressed up against him, feeling his warmth and the tautness of his muscles. In the heat of the day, she shivered with desire.
Rip your clothes off, she thought. Run my fingers through you hair while you kiss me. Rub hot oil all over your –
“Ditch you,” she said, and shrugged his arm off and stepped away from him.
Every time she had to pull away from his touch, her body screamed in protest. She wanted to stay pressed up against him, wrapped in his warm embrace, to feel his smooth, naked flesh against hers.
Cooper grinned. “Not gonna happen. I want to be close to you, Josephine.”
He reached down to brush a stray lock of hair from her face and twined it around his finger, trapping her. “Really close,” he added, his voice a low sexy growl that sent lust racing through her veins and made her feel hot and tingy and itchy with need.
“I hate you,” she snapped, grabbing his hand to untangle it from her hair.
“Then you know what to do,” he said, with a sardonic smile, and she dropped his hand as if it were a red hot coal.
Of course.
He was only flirting with her because he wanted to goad her into spilling information about Jason. She wasn’t some sex goddess, she was chubby, average-looking Josephine, the weird girl, the foster kid from somewhere else.
She turned and walked away from him, down the boardwalk, hurt and angry and blinking hard to keep tears from glistening in her eyes.
It’s my own fault for letting him get to me, when I know exactly what he wants from me, she thought angrily.
“Hey, slow down! I’m trying to digest my breakfast here,” Cooper called out from behind her. She picked up her pace and he broke into a trot to catch up with her.
“You’re not going to lose me that easily,” he said from right behind her, but before she could snap out a biting retort, shrieks of fear interrupted her.
A family stood on the boardwalk in front of the Crooked Creek Mercantile, crowded around a little boy who was clutching at his throat and whose face was turning a deep shade of purplish-blue. A half eaten hot dog lay on the boardwalk at his feet.
“He’s choking! He’s choking!” his mother screamed.
Josephine dashed forward, fell to her knees behind him, circled her arms around him, and did a quick, expert Heimlich maneuver, expelling the chunk of hot dog and sending it flying onto the dirt. He made a gurgling sound, then turned and ran towards his mother, a blonde, round-faced woman in an oversized t-shirt, jeggings and sneakers.
She threw her arms around the boy and cried out “Thank you, thank you!” to Josephine, who knelt down and looked the boy up and down carefully, observing the rise and fall of his chest, listening to his heavy, clear breaths before pronouncing “He’s fine.”
“Say thank you,” the mother ordered her son, but he shook his head and hid his face in her stomach.
“It’s fine, really,” Josephine smiled.
Josephine turned and walked away, with Cooper following behind her.
“Do you have any idea how amazing you were right then? You’ve got nerves of steel,” he said.
She shrugged. “What’s the point of panicking? It doesn’t accomplish anything,” she said.
“You’ll make a great ER nurse,” he said, and she felt a twinge of regret shudder through her. She would have made a great ER nurse, that was true.
“It’s not going to happen,” she said.
“Why did you want to go into nursing?”
Damn it, why was he pretending that he actually cared about her and what she wanted? Why did he have to make this so hard?
“You know how you wanted to go into your line of work because of what happened to your uncle? When I was six, and my foster parents died in a car accident, I always wondered what I could have done to save them. That’s why I wanted to go into nursing. Which I’m not doing now. End of story.”
Before Cooper could say anything, she quickly climbed the stairs of the next building she came to, and found herself inside the Crooked Creek Historical Museum.
Inside were yellowed pictures of early Crooked Creek when it was a random scattering of shacks, old maps, mannequins of famous Crooked Creek figures dressed in 1800s clothing, glass display cases with guns and little round metal bullets and old newspapers, farm implements on the walls, a medicine cabinet showing frontier medicine…
Good Lord. The sign above one of the mannequins bore the moniker “Lucky Levi.”
Josephine cursed under her breath. She was absolutely dying to go check it out, but if she did, she was sure that Cooper would be able to tell that it meant something to her. She was one of those people who could never play poker because every emotion that she felt showed up in her face.
Granted, it would be quite a stretch for him to figure out that Levi was her great grandfather many times removed and might have hidden treasure somewhere in the area, but she didn’t want to give him any advantage whatsoever.
She quickly walked away, heading down a hallway into another room…which featured a wall full of wanted posters. Lucky Levi’s was one of them; she glanced at it quickly. He was wanted for a stagecoach robbery. She leaned in closer, looking for details…
“See anything interesting?” Cooper’s voice was right behind her. She started; damn it, the second she turned around he’d read it in her face.
There was only one thing she could do.
She spun around and before he could say a word, she pressed against him, reached up, and, tangling her fingers in her hair, and pulled him down until his lips met hers.
Of course, since he was only flirting with her to annoy her, she knew he would pull away immediately, but at least it should distract him from questioning her about the poster.
But he didn’t pull away; he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her hard, thrusting his tongue into her mouth, probing deeply. His lips closed over hers, soft and firm, and his fingers tightened, holding her face firmly in place, and she leaned up against his hardness, melting into him.
A burst of noise in the hallway brought her back to reality with a jolt, and she pulled away quickly. He released her, breathing hard.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but I like it,” he said. “If we weren’t in a public place right now…”
A family of sunburned blond tourists burst in, and Cooper groaned. “Come on,” he said, grabbing her hand, and pulling her out of the room, down the hall, and out of the museum onto the boardwalk.
He turned to face her. Her cheeks flushed red with embarrassment.
This was the part where he made fun of her. Laughed at her for taking his attempts at flirtation seriously. Made her cry with humiliation right on the boardwalk.
“I – that was-“ she stammered, struggling to find words.
“Incredibly hot. So…historical museums, that’s what does it for you?” He grinned down at her. “We could break in after dark. I’d put on one of the outlaw costumes for you…if you promised to dress up like a hooker with a heart of gold.”
Josephine smothered a laugh. “Oh, shut up,” she said. “I only kissed you because I was trying to prove a point. You keep flirting with me and I know you don’t mean it and you’re just trying to get my goat because I won’t tell you anything about Jason, and-“
“That again?” He flashed her a look of challenge. “Come back to our room with me right now and I’ll show you exactly how much I mean it.”
“Oh, right.” But she found herself following him down the boardwalk towards the motel, and her heart did a little fluttery jump in her chest when he said “our room.”
Which was stupid, because it was her room, and she desperately wanted
him to pack up and get the heck out of it.
Didn’t she?
“Why do you doubt that I want you?”
“Cooper, not to feed your already over-inflated ego, but you’re stunning. You’re like a freaking magazine ad for those supplements that give men perfectly chiseled abs. I’m – it’s not that I think I’m ugly, but I’m not some tiny waisted little fashion model, either.”
“So, you think that’s what I’m looking for?”
“Why wouldn’t you be? You could get any woman that I want.” And they were walking up the pathway towards their room, and her heart was hammering in her chest and her palms were sweaty.
“Glad to hear that.” He fished in his pocket and opened the door, and she suddenly found him backing her into the room and slamming the door shut behind them. “Because I want you.”
“I – what?” Her voice came out in a squeak of surprise.
This wasn’t going at all how she thought it would go.
The blood was roaring in Cooper’s ears, and his throbbing erection was straining against his jeans, making the fabric painfully tight.
Josephine tipped her head back, lips parted, looking at him with mingled fear and desire, and he knew that nothing on earth would stop him from having her right now.
It was wrong. It was stupid of him. He was falling for a woman who was very likely talking to her criminal brother on her cell phone every time she ducked into the bathroom, who would make a fool of him, who came from a family of liars and swindlers.
He didn’t care.
He grabbed the front of her shirt and pulled hard, ripping it open and sending buttons flying everywhere. Her soft gasp of surprise and desire sent him over the top, and he pushed her onto the bed, sliding on top of her, his knee nudging her legs open.
“I’ll buy you another shirt,” he said. “And that was totally worth it.”
And then he was kissing her again, hungrily, sucking at her mouth, claiming it with swirling thrusts of his tongue.
Curvy Girls: The Big Girl and the Bounty Hunter Page 5