by Linda Kage
Wiping his damp palms on the thighs of his blue jeans, he blew out a breath and started for the front covered porch. Halfway there, the front door came open. He saw her slim silhouette under the shaded overhang as she pulled the entrance closed behind her.
After hurrying for the steps, she descended them and lifted her face when she reached the sunlight. The bright day beamed down on her, making her dark cap of hair look glossy and glamorous…citified. She wore a conservative length, khaki skirt, and a floral top with a deep V-neck and short sleeves.
Oxygen caught in his throat when her gaze met his. Face lighting with pleasure, she burst into the most radiant smile he’d ever seen. With that smile meant just for him, she hurried her pace, her dark strands of hair flying behind her as she dashed to him.
He felt eighteen again; like he’d finally gotten a repeat of the morning he’d visited her after their drunken kiss. But this time, she flew to him, no one else. He slowed to a stop and waited, letting her close the distance.
Upon reaching him, she opened her arms and leapt into his embrace. Shock, warmth, love, and undeniable bliss filled him. He closed his hug around her and pulled her close, breathing in the hint of her flowery shampoo. And just like that, the unease and uncertainty fell away. He kissed her hair, feeling settled and calm.
“Hey,” he murmured, never wanting to let go.
She pulled back just enough to grin at him, the tops of her cheekbones flushing healthily. “Hey yourself.”
Swept into the moment, he dipped his head and kissed her. Hot damn, but she kissed him back, tipping up her chin and slanting her mouth open for him to sweep his tongue alongside hers.
He groaned against her lips, realizing just how screwed he was. Jo Ellen Rawlings hadn’t just gotten under his skin. She’d gotten into his blood, into his soul.
When he broke away, he panted hard into her hair, and continued to hold her close. “Did y’all get the new baby home okay?” he managed to ask.
He felt her face move as she nodded.
“Good. Are you ready to go then?”
“Yes.”
He drew in a deep breath, bracing for the moment he’d have to let her go, then released his hold and stepped back. She took his hand and his soul quieted, content. Their fingers interlaced as he walked her to his truck where he opened the passenger side door.
“Thank you,” she demurred, her blue eyes propositioning him under her long lashes when she smiled coyly.
His body drew taut as she brushed by. He shivered and waited for her to climb into the cab, then he gently shut her door, waited to let his internal temperature cool, and finally hurried around to the driver’s seat.
They rode to the home in silence. She only asked one question. “Have you talked to your mom yet?”
He flinched and shook his head. Jo Ellen must’ve sensed how much turmoil his emotions were in because she didn’t scold, which he appreciated. He ran his fingers over hers as she kneaded his thigh.
Once they arrived, she interlaced their hands again at the entrance, where they waited to be admitted inside. His grip on her tightened when a buzzer sounded and the door was electronically unlocked.
“Dad likes to roam, so he could be anywhere.”
As soon as he spoke, however, a nurse spotted him and smiled. “Hey, Coop. I just saw your dad. He’s taking his afternoon walk down the north wing today.”
With a nod, Coop sent the woman a smile. “Thanks, Mary Ann. Appreciate it.” Steering Jo Ellen left, he started them toward the north wing where he immediately spotted his father’s bent back as he shuffled along.
He pointed, unable to speak. Jo Ellen’s attention followed the direction of his finger, and she smiled softly.
“Morning, Dad,” he greeted, his voice raspy with sentiment.
Thad didn’t even pause, his attention focused on the gleaming tiled floor as he shambled with some unknown purpose.
“Dad?” Cooper lifted his voice an octave and touched the frail, slouched shoulder.
His father jerked, startled by the interruption. He had to shift his entire torso around to lift his face and crane his neck up to see his guest. After studying Cooper, then Jo Ellen, with a blank gaze, he dropped his head and started walking again.
Jo Ellen chuckled. “He’s never been one to stand still, has he?”
Cooper smiled wistfully, but he ached too much inside to let the smile linger.
Disregarding all attempts at communication, Jo Ellen hurried to Thad’s left side and continued down the hall with him. After a dozen feet, she glanced over her shoulder and sent Cooper a curious look. “Aren’t you coming?”
Bemused, he hurried after them. Jo Ellen grinned at him over his father’s head. “Nice day for a stroll, hmm?”
Cooper shook his head and had to smile.
So, they walked. Jo Ellen would occasionally make a comment about a picture on the wall or ask Cooper about the accommodations at the home. She didn’t try to talk to Thad and he completely ignored both of them.
An hour later, Coop couldn’t take anymore. Thad hadn’t stopped walking, though he’d found a new wing to explore, and he hadn’t acknowledged either of his guests again, not until Jo Ellen touched his shoulder and kissed his cheek.
“It was good to see you again, Thad.”
The old man lurched, and swung around to gape as if he hadn’t realized she’d been there the past sixty minutes. Following her lead, Coop kissed his other cheek, and his dad swung toward him.
Staring at him without any sense of recognition, Thad blinked at his son. Cooper cleared his throat and swiftly turned away, striding down the hall toward the exit. Jo Ellen caught up with him, slipping her hand into his. He squeezed her fingers but otherwise ignored her until they reached his truck. After helping her into her door, he marched around and slid behind the wheel, then started the engine, but just sat there.
“Cooper?” her dulcet voice rattled him into reacting.
He closed his eyes and bowed forward to rest his forehead on the steering wheel. “I feel like a total shithead.”
“Why?” Concern lacing her voice, Jo Ellen scooted to him and wrapped her arms around his waist.
He leaned heavily into her but refused to open his eyes. “Because I hate coming here. I hate seeing him like this.”
She sighed. “That doesn’t make you a shithead. Feeling pain from seeing your father’s misery makes you compassionate.”
Touching his back, she eased her fingers over his tense muscles. But her caress didn’t relax him, as he was sure she meant it to. His body only pulled tauter.
“I wouldn’t do that right now if I were you.”
When she shivered, he glanced over his shoulder, his eyes burning with emotion. He groaned when he saw the tips of her breasts hard and beaded under her blouse.
“I feel like a pressure cooker. And if you keep touching me, I just might lose my composure.”
Her lips parted. Tilting her chin up in challenge, she said, “So then lose it.” To tempt him further, she slid her hand down his back to the base of his spine where her touch slid half an inch into the gap at the waistline of his pants, pushing him past his limit.
His eyes dilated and his nostrils flared as he turned to face her fully. “I meant sex.”
She pulled in a sharp breath. “I know.”
“Right here,” he rumbled. “Right now.”
She nodded, seemingly too aroused to speak.
He scanned her face and found all the answers he wanted to see. “Jesus.” She was serious. She would. Right here.
All logic gone, he cranked the key in his ignition, killing the truck.
Jo Ellen broke down first. “Cooper,” she whimpered, reaching for him.
He met her half way, his mouth open as it slammed against hers. A part of him realized they sat publicly in the open on the parking lot of his father’s nursing home, but a majority of him didn’t care. He needed Jo Ellen. He needed her very essence to fill him where he was empty, where
he hurt.
Sinking his fingers in her hair to cradle her head, he ravished her lips as he urged her backward on top of the bench seat. Lost in her, he consumed, plundered for more, and sought something from inside her he could never extract by physical means. She kissed him back, touching him as if she wanted to give him exactly what he sought.
“Someday,” he said against her throat, barely pausing to take his mouth off her warm skin. “I want to love you on a bed full of pillows and blankets. I want to get tangled in sheets and comforters until we’re wrapped together so tight they’ll need the Jaws of Life to separate us.”
She gave a small laugh as she rained kisses along his jaw. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever made love on a bed before.”
He pulled back, frowning.
With a flush, she lifted her hand to cover her mouth, but he caught her wrist. Ducking her head, she admitted, “Travis and I never—”
When a growl gurgled from his throat, she jerked her face up, her eyes growing wide with alarm.
But he waved his hand, encouraging her to continue. “You and he…what?”
“I…I…it’s nothing.” She shook her head frantically and squirmed slightly under him, letting him know how uncomfortable she’d gotten.
“Jo Ellen,” he gritted out, his teeth strained together. “Just because I want to punch something every time I hear that name doesn’t mean you can’t say what you want to say. So please. Tell me what you and he did so I know what not to do.”
She opened her mouth…and a cell phone rang from the depths of her purse.
He closed his eyes, hissed a mutter against her neck, and groaned. “You should probably answer that, huh?”
She touched his hair. “I don’t have to.”
“No.” He sighed. “Go ahead. We can’t finish this here anyway.” He didn’t pull back but continued to pin her to the seat of his truck, slipping his hand up her waist to cup her hip before he opened his mouth and caught a bit of skin at the base of her throat between his teeth.
As he licked her pulse, fully prepared to torture her the entire time she talked to her caller, she shuddered and fumbled to dig her phone from her purse. When she lifted the display screen, she frowned at the number. “Hmm. I wonder who this is.”
Cooper’s palm found its way inside the hem of her blouse and smoothed a titillating circle over her belly, making the muscles underneath tense and quiver.
“H-hello?” she breathed the word as she answered the annoying ring.
There was a pause before Cooper heard the faint voice of the caller hesitantly ask, “Jo Ellen?”
“Yes.” She sucked in a breath and arched while Cooper moved his mouth’s attention south, finding her aching nipple between the layers of cloth. “This…this is Jo Ellen.”
“Hey, it’s Travis. You told me to call whenever I made it into Tommy Creek.”
Cooper froze as the muffled voice from her phone’s speaker reached his ears. Blood thundered through his head, making his vision blur and his cranium feel crammed tight with a buzzing roar as he lifted his face and took in the features of Jo Ellen’s guilty expression. Color leeched from her cheeks as she met his gaze with wide eyes.
“I…I…” she fumbled into the phone before clearing her throat. “Yes, but…”
Yes?
He pulled back, sitting upright in the truck’s seat. Yes? What the hell did she mean by yes?
“Why don’t we just meet at the reunion tomorrow, okay? We can talk there.”
His lips parted as she made plans to meet another man. Jesus God, not just another man, the other man; Travis fucking Untermeyer.
Betrayal, pain, shock and too many more emotions to name prickled his skin like a dozen jolts of electric current or bumblebees stinging him. She’d made plans to meet Untermeyer here in Tommy Creek?
When?
Why?
How did he know her cell phone number?
Oh, God. What if they’d never broken up? What if…
“Yes, I’ll see you then.” When she disconnected, her gaze immediately sought him. “Cooper—”
He held up his hand and simply breathed. Inhale. Exhale. One moment at a time.
Then he exploded. “Jesus Christ! Please tell me that was not Travis Untermeyer.”
She bit her lip, guilt making her eyes crinkle with unspoken apology. He cursed under his breath.
“You…” He didn’t know what to say, what to think. For a split second, all he could see was bright, blinding white before her face wavered back into his vision, fringed with spotty black misery. “You still talk to him,” he stated the obvious. “He has your phone number.”
With a discreet nod, she admitted his accusations were true, since there was obviously no way to deny them. “He showed up at the last house party I hosted in Dallas. He lives there now as some kind of campaign staffer.”
Breath whooshed from his lungs. “You two are in Dallas together?”
Her lips pinched tight. “Not together,” she mumbled. “I didn’t even know he lived there. I hadn’t seen him since he broke up with me that last day I attended Tommy Creek high school.”
“But he has your cell phone number,” Coop insisted, unable to move past that fact. Though his having her number wasn’t the problem. Untermeyer still had a piece of her heart; that was the problem. Cooper flinched, knowing it was true, would probably always be true.
“I…” She took another calming breath, which only made him want to rage. “Yes,” she started in a patient manner. “I gave it to him. He said he needed to talk to me at the party I was hosting, but I was working. It was neither the time nor the place to discuss our past. So I…I thought up the first place we could meet on level ground. At the class reunion.”
He studied her a moment. When he was ten, he’d broken his arm after trying some daredevil stunt on his bicycle. He remembered the pain being so intense his body had gone numb as a defense mechanism. As he studied Jo Ellen, his arms and legs lost all sensation, the numbness claiming him completely.
“You’re getting back together with him?”
She blinked. “What? No!” The insult in her voice should’ve appeased him. It didn’t. It just made him grit his teeth because he knew she had to be lying. “I agreed to meet him once. To talk. Only to talk.”
He frowned, utterly bewildered. “To talk about what?”
Her face filled with color. At first, he thought she was too embarrassed to say. But the color turned a hot, angry hue. “Why does everyone keep asking me that? I don’t know what he wants to discuss, but I know what I want to say to him.”
“And what’s that?” Cooper pressed.
Pinching her face up tight, Jo Ellen narrowed her eyes. “That’s really none of your business.”
Another arrow of betrayal struck him dead center in the chest. He thought they had become confidants over the last few days. He knew he’d certainly told her things he’d never told anyone else, would never tell anyone else. But obviously, she didn’t trust him enough to tell him this…probably because it meant she planned on getting back together with the asshole.
Rubbing at his face furiously with both hands, he made up his mind. He wasn’t going to be his father. He wasn’t going to try loving a woman enough for the both of them. And Jo Ellen’s heart obviously still belonged to her first love.
Cranking on his key and making the engine roar to life, he silently pulled away from the nursing home. The glacial interior of the truck made him roll his window down so he could suck in some refreshing, warm outside air.
On the other side of the cab, Jo Ellen blew out a frustrated sigh. “Cooper, I…I want…I just…I need closure...with Travis. I need to look him in the eye and feel finished. As it is, I don’t…everything’s just so unresolved.”
Because she was still in love with him, no doubt.
“…And I don’t feel as if I can move on with my life and create a full, complete future with myself until I tie up all my loose ends in Tommy Creek.”
/>
“Loose ends,” he repeated, his eyes narrowing with sharp interest. He glared at her before returning his gaze to the road. “The night you came back, you told me I was an unresolved loose end.”
When she sucked in a guilty breath, his heart sank into his knees. Everything became suddenly, awfully clear. “Oh, I get it. These past few days between us have just been closure for you, haven’t they? Give the dumb farm boy a couple rolls in the hay and he’ll forgive you for whatever slight you think you inflicted on him ten years ago?”
Her mouth dropped open. “That’s not…How could you…Cooper, you’re not being rational.”
Rational was for people who didn’t have a broken heart.
“Well, welcome to the one irrational thing about me, princess.” The sneer in his voice was filled with all the bitterness oozing through his veins.
As he wheeled his truck into her parents’ driveway and jerked to a stop in front of their house, Jo Ellen let out a world-weary sigh. “My God, Cooper. You know I...what happened this week between us…Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re flying off the handle like this because of a stupid phone call.”
Wrapping his fingers tight around the steering wheel, Cooper stared straight ahead out the windshield. A stupid phone call, huh? Is that all this argument was to her?
“You asked me before if your history with him bothered me. Well…” he glanced at her, making sure he kept his features blank. “It does.”
Or rather, it was Untermeyer’s present with her that bothered him. He could deal with what had happened in the past but the past didn’t seem to be over for her.
Drawing in a deep breath as he watched her, Jo Ellen wrinkled her eyebrows with irritation and worry. She blinked a few times, and then choked out. “Wow. You really didn’t like him, did you?”
His jaw dropped, incredulous. “I hated him,” he clarified. Mere dislike had nothing to do with it.
Jo Ellen shook her head. “No. You don’t hate anyone. I can’t see you hating...” The hard look he sent her made her gulp. “Goodness. I know he was incredibly rude to you in high school but—”
