The Irresistible Mr. Cooper
By Roslyn Carrington
1.
Was Santa for real?
Of course, Jenessa was not asking herself this question in a philosophical, Are mythological beings like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy actual living creatures or just products of the collective imagination kind of way. She was asking the question in a more down-to-earth, who the heck is my Secret Santa and is he or she for real kind of way.
Which was a perfectly reasonable question to ask, given that she’d just come in from a four-hour-long brainstorming meeting in her VP Sharona’s office, drop-dead tired, craving coffee like an asthmatic craved air, only to find that her Secret Santa had left another little something on her desk.
Jenessa plopped down into her outrageously comfy executive chair, lifted the small, hardcover book from its tissue paper nest and turned it over cautiously. Sighs and Splendor, the title read, A Collection of Erotic Poetry Through the Ages. Judging from the quality of the binding and the slight yellowing of the heavy linen pages, ‘through the ages’ had ended abruptly about forty years ago, when the book was published.
She ran her fingers across the cover, feeling the texture of it; it was almost like human skin. Warm. Alive. Her Secret Santa had slipped into her office while she was busy downstairs going through the offensive and defensive maneuvers necessary to survive in the corporate world, dodging verbal daggers tossed in her direction by the usual suspects, and responding with a volley of her own. And that someone had left her an antique book of poetry. Erotic poetry, mind you.
She wondered vaguely if she was supposed to be offended by that.
Probably, at least a little. It was hardly appropriate, as far as office politics were concerned. Which is what made it even stranger. Her personal Santa seemed to be a bit of a schizo, to put it bluntly. The way the game was played at Bianchi’s was that you drew names out of a hat—well, a metal wastepaper basket—in the last week of November, and then plied your recipient with small, thoughtful presents throughout December, culminating in a fairly decent present at the office party, which they traditionally held the day before Christmas Eve. On that evening, secret identities were revealed, everyone had a good laugh and went home with their coffee pot or planter or whatever tucked under their arm and forgot about it by the next day.
But this year, her Secret Santa was some kind of nut. Yesterday, she’d come back from lunch to find a Snoopy coffee mug waiting. Par for the course, she supposed, although she’d never thought of herself as a Snoopy sort of person. That wasn’t the weird part. Two days before that, there’d been a bottle of fine, scented body oil. Last week, she’d received a cactus nestled in the pannier of a ceramic Mexican donkey—and the day before that, a lipstick that was not only her favorite brand, but was a color that made her mouth look as though it was begging for a kiss.
This blow-hot, blow-cold game puzzled her. She looked at the embossed title on the cover again. Erotic poetry. Humph.
Then curiosity got the better of her. Shoving aside the empty box, she hit the button on her intercom with a perfectly polished fingernail. “Merlin,” she called.
“Yes, Ma’am?” The male voice on the other end was pleasant, professional and very young.
“I don’t want to be disturbed for a few minutes, okay? And please, please, could you rustle up some coffee? I’m near dead.”
“I’ll scoot down to the kitchen and get you a cup right away. And don’t you worry. I’ll hold all your calls.”
“Thank you. And Merlin?”
“Yes?”
“For God’s sake, stop Ma’am-ing me.”
She could almost hear him smile. “Yes, Jenessa.”
“That’s better.”
Merlin was a darling. Young enough to still be in training pants, and fresh out of school in his first job—as a personal assistant, no less—but a trooper. He put up with Jenessa’s back-breaking workload, and the jibes of his colleagues at being the only male secretary in the building, with humor and patience. He’d been sent up from Personnel three weeks ago when her regular secretary, Cherisse, went off on maternity leave. She was liking him so far, to the point of being willing to tolerate the kind of greenhorn mistakes that would have earned Cherisse a few sharp words.
She had every reason to be demanding. She’d held her job as Manager of Corporate Communications at Bianchi’s Italian Foods for over five years, and at thirty-two was the youngest manager in the company. This gave her the gnawing sensation that she constantly had to prove herself. Despite its name, Bianchi’s was totally black-owned, and the owners were demanding when it came to their company image, both within the east coast city of Santa Amata and the larger community. The small manufacturer had recently gone national, and in this business, image was everything.
She should have gone right back to work, she knew, but after four hours in Sharona’s purgatory, and given that she’d missed lunch, she supposed she was entitled to a break. She slipped her stockinged feet out of her nose-bleed stilettos and crossed them at the ankle, leaned back into her chair and opened the small volume.
Oooh. Somebody wrote this nine hundred years ago? They must have wound up in a dungeon, because it was explicit. She flipped through the pages, gobbling up poem after poem, getting sucked in by the eroticism and raw emotion laid bare by the writers. Merlin slipped into her office, as silent as Kwai Chang Caine treading across rice paper on the floor of a Shaolin temple. He set the cup of coffee down on her desk, looked around, murmured something she was too engrossed to catch, and slipped out again.
Jenessa read another poem, and then another, conscious of the prickle of heat that rose under the collar of her shantung suit. The warmth spread outward, going through her like a drop of red coloring in a glass of water, traveling down her tummy, to her hips and groin, to her legs. . . .
“Mercy,” she murmured. Twenty-first century humans thought they’d invented sex, but she was reading a passage written in Istanbul four hundred years ago that would have made Dr. Ruth blush.
She shrugged off her jacket and tossed it over the back of her chair, but it slipped to the floor. She didn’t bother to pick it up. She stopped only to fan herself with the book, aware that a dewy flush had spread across her brow. It had been a long, dry spell, so it didn’t take more than a few exquisitely phrased verses to get her all het up. That, and the fact that her sexual dry spell had been longer than she cared to think about. The spicy pages offered a welcome few minutes of titillation. Thank you, Secret Santa!
Which, of course, brought her to the question; who was he—because this had to be a guy—and why was he sending her such suggestive gifts? Obviously, Santa had a thing for her. That made her smile. She was easy on the eyes, she knew that, with a trim body that saw the inside of a gym at least four days a week. Her clothes always looked good on her, even if she was a little flat-chested. A regular regimen of skin care made her glow, and she was one woman who never left the house, not even to go to the store for a box of half-and-half and a pack of bagels, without ensuring her makeup was, if not perfect, at least not smudged.
Her crowning glory was, literally, her hair. She permed it bone straight and had dyed it a warm honey blonde. It fell to the center of her back, heavy and glossy, a pleasant weight that made itself felt whenever she turned her head. It threw her toasted almond skin into high contrast. Whenever she found herself riding onto the corporate battlefield, she liked to imagine herself as the mutant Storm, a beautiful black woman, a heroine with hair like a beacon and courage to burn.
Yep; Santa had good taste in women, if she did say so herself.
But who was he?
Idly, she
began cataloging the possibilities as they came to mind. Tony Goodman, the owner of Bianchi’s, was out of the question. He was an affable African-American gentleman who perhaps got a little too cheerful at parties, and enjoyed the occasional quick glance at a passing bottom, but he was a loving and faithful husband, and had never been anything but proper with Jenessa, even when they traveled to other cities together on business. Scratch him.
Merlin? Nah. The kid was a cutie, if you didn’t mind an Adam’s apple the size of a billiard ball and sticky-outy ears. Slim to the point of willowy, with long, slender hands that she could envisage plucking a lyre or some such, he was a pleasant, slightly better-than-average-looking white boy. But Jenessa was easily fourteen years older than him, and she was sure he’d run for cover if she even licked her lips in his direction. Scratch him.
For the next ten minutes or so, Jenessa amused herself by flipping through her mental catalog of male co-workers, department by department. Legal. Finance. Marketing. Lots of tantalizing possibilities, but nothing gave her that little beep of recognition that would signal a definite maybe.
Smiling, she returned to the book. Seeing the Song of Solomon in a whole new light. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense. Oh, my. Who said the Bible was boring?
There was a soft tap at her door, but Jenessa didn’t even bother to look up. Let Merlin handle it. She’d told him she didn’t want to be disturbed. She turned the page.
The door opened wide, and then: a presence in her office. In her private space. When she’d specifically dictated otherwise. She looked up from her reading with a frown. “Can I help you?”
The man standing in the doorway almost blotted out the shape of Merlin, who was hovering in the background. He was wearing faded, well-fitting jeans and a denim shirt with long sleeves that were rolled up to reveal huge hands and wrists speckled with dark hair. He held a large, heavy-looking toolbox in one hand. She recognized him at once.
The long, cool drink of water nonchalantly crossing her threshold—ignoring her “get the hell out” glare—was the new building maintenance guy. The one half the ladies in the office, white or black, married or single, had been giggling and gossiping about ever since he first set a steel-tipped boot on the premises. Seen him yet? Is he fine or what? You gotta see him smile. A billion watts, I swear. Go on, smile at him. He’ll smile right back. Yeah, she’d heard the talk.
Although she’d met him at least twice in the three months since he’d joined the company, she had to search her mind for his name. Michael something, wasn’t it?
Since the man was halfway across the floor, and didn’t give any indication of turning into a pillar of salt under her trademark dirty look, she addressed herself to her assistant. “Merlin, I thought I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed.”
Merlin looked taken aback by her tone. “Pardon?”
“I said I didn’t want to be disturbed. That doesn’t just mean holding my calls. It also means not letting people barge in on me without my express permission.”
Before Merlin could answer, Michael-something turned to her. “Your assistant called to say your thermostat was on the blink. I came up as soon as I could to fix it.” His smile was as placid as a lake. And yeah, if you put a gun to her head, she’d admit it was a pretty one. All big white teeth and deep curves at the corners of his mouth, like parentheses. Impress me, why don’t ya.
“My. . . ?”
He pointed at the vent behind her with his chin. “Your thermostat is busted,” he reiterated. “It feels like Bali in here. Aren’t you hot?” He turned his face to her. “You look a little flushed.”
She realized with a spark of insight that the heat coursing through her body was due more to the rising temperature in the room than to the steam rising from the poetry in her book. Her hand came up involuntarily to her throat, feeling the damp there. She gave a small, embarrassed laugh. “Oh, I . . . I hadn’t noticed.”
The man moved to stand near her desk, bending down so smoothly, and so suddenly that she flinched a little as he brushed past. What was he—?
He picked up her fallen, taupe silk jacket and handed it to her with a courtly flourish. “I think you dropped this, Miss Sterling.”
She took it from his hands, too overwhelmed by his proximity to thank him, or to put it down. Because he hadn’t straightened up, not all the way. What he was doing, however, was eyeballing the open book on her desk, easily reading the title across the top even though for him it was upside down. When he was good and done, he lifted his eyes, and she noticed to her shock that they were a clear, bright hazel; a dark circle of bronze surrounded by a ring of emerald. She swallowed hard.
One sable eyebrow lifted, and the broad, unbelievably sensual lips curved again. “Enjoying it?”
Of all the. . . . The audacity of the man! Her hand shot out to cover the page and she found herself blathering. “I wasn’t . . . it’s not mine. I mean, not really. . . . ” She ground to a stop. Don’t be stupid, girl. Don’t let this man—a glorified handyman, of all things—get your goat. You were reading a spicy little book. So what? She slammed the book shut and threw it haphazardly into a drawer. “You’re here to fix the thermostat?”
He straightened up, the whole long length of him, unfazed. “I’ll have it to rights in no time at all, Miss Sterling.”
Merlin, who so far had been doing nothing but bobbing around her desk and trying not to let his eyes bug out of his head, leaped at the opportunity to talk his way out of the naughty corner. “I’m sorry, Ma’am.”
He was Ma’am-ing her again! A single glare from her was all it took for him to get the message.
“I’m sorry, Jenessa. When I came in with your coffee, I noticed it was warm in here. So I called Mr. Cooper. I told you I was calling him. Didn’t you hear me?”
She hadn’t, actually. She’d had her head in a book.
“I know you didn’t want to be disturbed, but I thought . . . well. . . . ” He looked so much like a wayward puppy afraid of getting smacked with a slipper that she took pity on him.
“It’s okay, Merlin. I’m sure Mr. Cooper will be done soon.” She threw that last sentence in Cooper’s direction; a signal, an unspoken warning to hurry up, do his job, and get the hell out. Cooper was clinking unhurriedly through his tools, giving no indication that he’d picked up on her impatient undertone. Maybe he was slightly retarded.
As Cooper began poking about in the entrails of her heating system, Merlin decided it was as good a time as any to move himself out of range of her missiles, and edged his way through the door, closing it behind him. Leaving her alone with the man.
For a minute or two, she watched him as he worked, admiring, in spite of herself, the fluid ease with which he moved. But her territorial instinct got the better of her and she found herself profoundly wishing he’d “git-’er-done” as repairman types would say. And then “git” out.
Through a gap in the desk drawer she could see the cover of the book. It was calling her name like a box of Godiva chocolates, and, as with a box of chocolates, she longed to be alone with it. She scowled at him again, trying not to notice how his hair, which was a little too long for the office, in her opinion, curled at the top of his collar.
“Is there a problem?” she asked, which was code for, Why aren’t you finished yet?
Several long seconds later, the hazel eyes swept from the task at hand to her face. “Just a few more minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience.” But he didn’t seem sorry at all.
Jenessa examined her nails, clicked open an e-mail, didn’t read it, swayed in her chair, and gazed out the window. Snow-laden clouds hung low in the sky like steel wool stuck onto a preschooler’s collage. Patterns of frost decorated the plate glass like something out of a Currier and Ives print. And to think she hadn’t noticed that the inside of her office had morphed into a sauna!
She clacked about on her desk for a few more minutes, lost interest, and zoned out, returning to the here-and-now only to realize she was staring him down again. This time, because he was bending over, she was treated to an object lesson in just how well a pair of jeans could fit a man. And, to make things even more special, there wasn’t an inch of plumber’s crack in sight, thanks to a snug-fitting leather belt.
The damn man chose exactly that moment to stand up and spin around, catching her ogling his neat rear end. There was that smile again. “All finished,” he informed her, and began putting away his tools.
Maybe he was all finished. Maybe the thermostat was fixed now, but she was still hot under the collar. She swallowed. “Thank you.”
At this point, he should have excused himself and left her alone with her thoughts, but no such luck. He stood easily near her desk, regarding her with frank impertinence. “So, Miss Sterling, how’s Christmas shaping up for you?”
“Pardon?” Her tone could have turned milk into ice cream.
“Just asking how your holidays are going so far. Less than two weeks to go. You staying in Santa Amata, or are you going out of town to visit family?”
She didn’t know why she answered. “My family’s too far away to visit this year, so I guess I’ll be spending the holidays right here in the city.”
Those dark brows went up again. “Alone?”
“Looks like it,” she answered shortly. She didn’t add not that that’s any of your business, but then, her mama had brought her up to be a lady.
He looked so genuinely sorry for her she wanted to slap him. “Pity. Christmas is no time to be on your own.”
There was a crackling silence, and in it, she felt the temperature in her office begin to inch its way back to normal. He took this as a sign, collected himself, and before she could put him decisively in his place, lifted his toolbox, gave her a gallant nod, and walked that easy walk of his, right on out her door.
The Irresistible Mr Cooper Page 1
