by Terra Little
Olivia hurried to keep up with Cooper’s long-legged strides, but in four-inch heels, her efforts ended up being more comical than functional. Twice, she almost skidded out into oncoming traffic when they turned a corner, and once, when her heel got stuck in a manhole cover, she almost dragged Cooper down to the ground with her when she stumbled. By the time they finally reached a side entrance to the courthouse and Cooper swiped his ID card to unlock the door there, they were both out of breath and he appeared to be slightly afraid for his life.
“Are you all right?”
“Are you?” he shot back, gaping at her as if he were surprised to find that she in fact was. Motioning for her to precede him, he stepped inside the building after her and leaned back against the door to finish catching his breath.
“I’m fine.”
“Good. At least one of us is. They’re waiting for you upstairs,” he told her. “The elevators are down at the end of this hallway, to your right.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
“Nah, I’m parked on the lot right outside. This is where we say goodbye, Miss Carrington.”
“Oh...okay. Well, thanks for the coffee, Agent Talbot.”
He pushed his hands deep in his front pant pockets and studied her. “Don’t mention it. See you around?”
“Two ships passing in the night, right?”
Smiling, he lifted a hand in farewell and backed out of the door. She was still standing there when it closed with a soft swish in his wake.
* * *
“So?”
“So, nothing. It was...nice.”
“So nice that you’ve hardly said a word about it since?” Elise queried with a wrinkle of concern in her otherwise smooth forehead. “Did something happen in Knoxville that you’re not telling me about, Olivia?”
“Of course not.”
“You two were careful, weren’t you?”
Olivia’s eyes bugged. “Yes! What kind of question is that?”
“A logical one, and if that’s not what’s bothering you, then what is? You haven’t been yourself since you got back, which was almost two weeks ago. You’re starting to worry me.”
“I’m fine, Elise, I promise. I’m just busy with work. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you don’t get your ass back here soon, I’m going to fire you and hire an associate to take your place.”
“You can’t do that!”
“I love you and I love Broderick, but I’ve about had it with the two of you and your ongoing love affair with being in love. If I were you, I really wouldn’t try me on this.”
Speechless, Elise stared at the camera on her side of the globe incredulously. “My God,” she whispered at the screen several seconds later. “What the hell happened to you in Knoxville?”
“Goodbye, Elise,” Olivia replied as she reached for the disconnect button. “I’m working right now. I’ll call you back later.”
“Wait—”
She pressed the button.
“Was that Elise?” Olivia swiveled in her chair just in time to see Harriet cross the threshold into the study, carrying a stack of file folders in each hand. She brought them over to the antique wooden Duncan Phyfe conference table, where Olivia had set up shop that morning, and held them out to her sides, as if she were a human scale. “Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news?”
“Give me the good news.”
She set the stack in her left hand down on the tabletop in front of Olivia. “These are all closed cases. As soon as you sign off on the invoices, I can process the electronic transfers and archive the files.”
“That is good news,” Olivia joked. “Got a pen?” Harriet reached up, slid an ink pen out of the nest of hair on her head and passed it to her. Taking it, Olivia flipped through the papers in each file, quickly checking figures, dates and times before signing the necessary documents and setting them aside. “There,” she said, closing the last one, adding it to the stack and handing the whole thing back to Harriet. “Now for the bad news.”
Harriet presented Olivia with the stack of folders in her right hand with a flourish. “These are the files that you requested from Dr. Batiste, Florida Memorial University’s provost. They arrived this morning, along with your plane ticket, the keys to your new apartment and a copy of your new-hire personnel file.”
Olivia peeked inside each of the file folders and nodded in approval. They were packed with, among other things, photocopies of receipts, signed documents and personnel information, and everything was neatly sorted and categorized. “Sweet. What about the paperwork for my new identity?”
“Eli should be sending it over by courier later today.”
“Let me know the minute it arrives, will you, Harriet?”
“Sure thing. Can I get you anything else? Lunch, maybe? When was the last time you ate?”
“This morning,” Olivia said, waving away Harriet’s concern as she reached for her coffee mug and sipped. “I had eggs Benedict and toast. Go check the kitchen if you don’t believe me,” she shrieked when Harriet tsked suspiciously. “Really, Harriet? If you need proof, the dishes should still be in the dishwasher. Look, please don’t start with me. It’s bad enough that Elise is on the warpath—‘why haven’t you been eating? Why are you so tired? Why are you so cranky?’ and on and on. Now you, too? And don’t think that I don’t know that you’ve been feeding Elise information about me behind my back, because I do,” she charged, pointing an accusing finger at Harriet. The older woman had the grace to flush guiltily. “This new case couldn’t have come at a better time, because I’m starting to feel like a prisoner in my own home.”
“We’re just worried about you—that’s all.”
Olivia’s eyebrows disappeared into her hairline. “Why, Harriet? I missed a couple of meals a couple of days ago. So what? I’m tired, that’s all. Plus you keep buying those fake eggs that come in a milk carton, which you know I hate, so I don’t eat them. Oh, and also, I need a vacation—a real one. The next time you report to Elise, tell her I said that, and also tell her that you need a vacation too, because I don’t know about you, but I think we’ve both earned one. Tell her that it’s our turn now, that you would like to have some time off to go visit your grandchildren before they go away to college, and that maybe, just maybe, I might want to take a soccer class. Okay?”
Harriet appeared to be shocked into silence. “Uh...” The doorbell rang, saving her from having to say anything else. “I’ll get the door,” she said and hurried out of the room.
“Good idea.”
After she was gone, Olivia snatched her glasses off her face and dropped them onto the tabletop noisily. Okay, so maybe there was something to Elise’s working theory that she wasn’t acting like herself. Truthfully, she had been a little distracted lately and possibly a little short-tempered. But if she wasn’t eating properly or getting enough rest, it was only because she was too busy working herself to death to get around to doing either. There were only so many hours in the day, and unlike Elise, she wasn’t really in a position to wile any of them away, scuba diving and lying on sandy beaches.
Promising herself that she would have her travel agent set up something tropical and luxurious for her as soon as she returned home from working her next case, Olivia scrubbed a hand across her face, took a deep breath and put her glasses back on.
In the meantime, she thought as she took a folder from the stack on the table and opened it, working undercover on a co-ed college campus for the next couple of weeks might not be the worst assignment in the world, after all. A few days from now, she’d be flying to Florida and filling a job vacancy in the secretarial pool of the university’s finance department. Officially her job was to investigate the as yet unsolved theft of millions of dollars in university endowment funds, but unofficially she planned to enjoy the hell out of Miami Gardens, every spare minute
that she got while she was there.
In keeping with the rank and pay scale of her new job, Dr. Batiste was putting her up in a small, one-bedroom garden apartment that was within walking distance of the campus. And as if walking to work every day wasn’t going to be enough of a lifestyle adjustment, she’d also have to do without her designer clothes for the next little while. But even the obvious drawbacks, of which there were many, couldn’t overshadow the fact that the beach was nearby and the ocean nearer still.
If her brief romp in Knoxville had taught her anything, it was that she was sorely overdue for more of them. All work and hardly any play apparently made Olivia Carrington a very cranky girl.
Chapter 11
Already loaded down with his attaché case and the carryall that he’d taken on the plane with him, Cooper grabbed the handle of his suitcase as soon as it reached him on the luggage conveyor belt and emerged from the crowd of weary travelers who were gathered there. He set his suitcase down on its casters and navigated through the airport terminal, avoiding clusters of emotional families, restless children and departing soldiers as he made his way to the nearest exit with an ease born from years of practice.
Because he’d never been able to stomach airplane food, he was starving, so he stopped at a folding table that was set up along the wall in the concourse and let himself be charmed by three excited Summer Scout girls into buying a box of peanut-butter-sandwich cookies to keep him company during his drive home.
He tore into the box as he walked and was halfway through the first sleeve of cookies by the time he reached the last gate standing between him and freedom. A plane was in the process of disembarking when he cut through the gate area, so he used the time that it took to step aside and allow a throng of passengers to file past him to finish off the first sleeve and start in on the second. A profiler by nature, he watched the people around him curiously, his eyes randomly darting from face to face as he chewed and analyzed.
The first time they landed on Olivia Carrington’s profile, they bounced on to the next one without registering. She’d been on his mind for days now, consuming his thoughts during the day and haunting him between the sheets at night, playing the kinds of tricks with his eyesight that had him randomly approaching strange women, mistaking them for her, and then apologizing profusely when he realized his error. He’d done that three times now—thought he had spotted her in a crowd and made a complete ass of himself, and he wasn’t in a hurry to repeat the experience anytime soon.
The second time his gaze landed on her profile, he lingered, taking her in by degrees. He stared at her as if transfixed, suddenly remembering all sorts of odd little details about their lovemaking. Like the fact that her clitoris was unusually plump when she was aroused. Like the fact that she liked the juicy little morsel sucked the same way that she liked her nipples sucked, which also happened to be the same way that she kissed—with loose, lavish swipes of her tongue and plenty of greedy suction. It was also the same way that she had sucked his cock, he recalled, just as an image of her lips wrapped around his length flashed before his eyes.
His cock stirred and Cooper blinked to clear his thoughts. Focus, Cooper, he told himself and was almost successful at taking his own advice.
Then he realized that he was no longer staring at her profile because sometime during his trip down memory lane, she had turned her head and caught him in the act, and had apparently decided to return the favor.
His feet were moving in her direction long before his brain had cleared enough to give the command. She switched off the mini-TV that was attached to her chair and rose to meet him when he walked up. “Hey.”
“Cooper! What are you doing here?”
“I live here.” It was early, barely 6:00 a.m. In deference to the early hour, she wasn’t wearing a drop of makeup and her hair was pulled up into a giant Afro-puff at the top of her head. Thin tendrils of curly hair framed her oval-shaped face, and tiny freckles dotted the bridge of her caramel-brown nose. How had he missed those before? “I could ask you the same thing. What are you doing here?” He noticed that her eyelashes were the same color as her tawny-brown hair and they were almost translucent because of it, and then it occurred to him that he’d missed her.
“Just passing through on my way home. I’m about five minutes into what started out as a two-hour layover, but thanks to unexpected flight delays, is apparently now going to be a four-hour layover,” she explained, waving a hand wearily to indicate the other people milling around them in the gate area. Then she waved it in the direction of his suitcase. “What about you? What’s your story? Are you coming or going?”
“Coming. I just got in from Portland a few minutes ago.” He’d been there for the past three days, facilitating a criminal profiling workshop by day and meeting with the subject of a true-crime novel that he’d recently been contracted to write by night. Part of his time there had been spent teaching law enforcement professionals about the nuances of profiling criminals, and ironically enough the other part had been spent in the region’s super-max prison, huddling over notes, crime scene photos and trial transcripts with a death-row inmate who could’ve written the textbook on serial killing. Sleeping or, for that matter, eating between the two extremes was damn near impossible. He was wide awake now, though.
Dressed as she was, in ankle-length skinny jeans that fit like a second skin and a flowing, sleeveless white top, Olivia Carrington was a breath of the sexiest fresh air that he’d ever had the pleasure of inhaling. He reached up and scratched a spot at the back of his head, thinking. “Four hours, huh?” The whatever-will-I-do-with-myself? face that she made was so cute, so appealing that he suddenly had a brilliant idea. “Why don’t you come and hang out with me while you wait?”
“With you?” She looked skeptical as she glanced at the delicate gold watch on her wrist, and his cock stirred again. “I don’t know, Coop...”
“I promise to have you back in time for your flight,” he lied with a straight face. She still didn’t look convinced, so he held up a hand and arranged his fingers accordingly. “Scout’s honor.”
“Where would we go, back to your office?” She looked amused by the prospect but quickly sobered when he didn’t return her smile. It took her a second, but he saw in the slant of her gaze the exact moment that she started to get a clue.
“I’m actually on my way home. My car is parked in the airport garage.” He spied a designer carry-on sitting on the floor near her feet. Then he spied her white canvas sneakers and realized that she was wearing flat shoes. “Is this all the luggage you have?”
“Um...yeah.” She bent down and picked it up, slinging the strap over her shoulder and hefting its weight. “I sent everything else ahead of me yesterday.” They stared at each other. “So...” She reached for the cookie box and he willingly handed it over. He watched her teeth sink into a cookie. “You got any food at your place?” she asked as she chewed.
He reached out to relieve her of her bag and she handed it over just as willingly. “Would you like to come and see for yourself?”
* * *
They talked about work during the twenty-minute car ride from the airport to the private, gated community that he called home. She told him about her work and the case that she’d just closed for the provost of FMU, about the month that she had ended up pretty much living in Miami Beach while she followed a complex and corrupt financial paper trail that had led to the arrest of at least two tenured professors, one high-ranking member of the alumni board of trustees and all but one member of the university’s finance office staff. And he told her what it was like to sit just a few feet away from a convicted serial killer and listen to him recount his crimes, in great detail and with little remorse, and about how difficult it was to eat or sleep afterward.
After they passed a satellite campus for the University of Knoxville and she commented on the colorful landscaping, they began trading college war s
tories and he pretended to be shocked all over again to learn that she’d majored in Chemistry, of all things, after all of the crap that she had given him about being a nerd. The first time that he’d read that about her, which was actually a little over a month ago, when the results of her squeaky-clean background check had come back, the discovery really had shocked him. Possibly later he would think about it again and it would floor him then, too. But in the here and now, he was so distracted by the mesmerizing scent wafting off her silky-looking skin that he could hardly think straight.
Shortly after they arrived, he sent her off on a self-guided tour of his house, while he called in an order for enough breakfast food to feed a football team, shuffled through his unopened mail and set a chilled, newly opened bottle of champagne on the counter to breathe. When the unmistakable sound of liquid filling a glass reached her ears, she cut her exploration of the outdoor Jacuzzi deck short just long enough to come inside and claim the frothy mimosa that he poured for her, and then she was off again, seemingly content to wander around in his personal space, barefoot and completely oblivious to the spell that she was casting on his cock.
In addition to four bedrooms, the kitchen and the great room, there was a den, a home gym and a private lap pool. The split-level floor plan was open and airy, enabling him to stand at the granite breakfast counter in the kitchen and track her progress with his eyes as he sipped his wine and leaned. As near as he could tell, she had seen every room in the place, a few of them twice, but she hadn’t yet wandered into the first-floor master-bedroom suite. He wondered if she was purposely avoiding it and was just about to ask her when the doorbell rang. Seeing that she was headed in that direction now, he traded the delivery man a couple of folded bills for the bags in his hands and pushed the door closed in the man’s face as soon as the exchange was done.
