“Sandra? Check my schedule and see if I have any availability for a meeting this week with that blogger who’s working with my son. Thursday isn’t an option.” Based on the unflattering emphasis Mr. Cooper placed on the word blogger, it was clear where his son’s preconceived notions about her career had come from. He ended the call without a goodbye and paused in the doorway. “Next time, give my girl the right time.” The door slammed behind him so violently that the glass shuddered.
Owen traced his father’s steps, planting his oiled leather Oxfords where Mr. Cooper had been standing seconds before. The locked-eye, twin-ESP thing the brothers had going between them communicated Owen’s misery. But he took a hesitant step toward the door. Whether he wanted to side with Cooper or not in whatever was going on, it was clear his duty rested with their father. He dipped his head in Sloane’s direction, his trademark schmooze absent. “Always a pleasure, Miss Bradley.”
And then he was gone.
Just like that, the quaint memory of Sloane’s neat new desk was tarnished. The victory of getting through her presentation with reclaimed confidence didn’t matter.
Cooper turned to her, clearly struggling for words.
“I’ll get that entry mat replaced,” he said, his voice zapped of its usual strength.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“CAN ANYONE GUESS the secret ingredient in these popsicles?” Sloane asked the eight wide-eyed children with tomato sauce stains on their faces.
“Blueberries?”
“Yogurt?”
She nodded. “Those are in there, all right. But they’re not very much a secret, are they?” The kids laughed at Sloane’s wrinkled nose. “Okay, you guys have waited long enough. You can go ahead and dig in, and I’ll tell you later.”
Eager hands plunged to the middle of the table, colliding, tangling and grasping the ends of the sticks.
“Make sure to pull the popsicles out slowly and carefully.” But Sloane was a few seconds too late. Miles and Samira both held bare sticks in their hands, staring in shock at the silicon molds still filled with frozen berry-blended yogurt. “That’s okay, guys.” Sloane braced herself against the desk and wrestled to free the popsicles from their captivity. After streaming some water over the molds, the popsicles broke free, looking a little worse for wear. But the kids still gobbled them up.
For a moment, she watched them like a proud mama bear. Their excitement—their innocence despite all they’d been through—had this way of washing her with serenity like nothing else could. When Sloane was with the kids, she was not that bumbling klutz who was all over the place because of some lame presentation.
When the last stick had been licked clean and the kids were taking turns washing their hands—Sloane would make germ-conscious citizens out of them yet!—she told them the secret ingredient.
“Spinach?” Davon clawed at his tongue. “That’s nasty!”
She crossed her arms, pretending to be offended. “You sure didn’t act like it was nasty.” She picked up the empty molds to prove her point.
“I guess it tasted pretty good,” he admitted.
“Do you think you guys would eat more spinach if it tasted that good all the time?”
Yeses and Yeahs and Mmm-hmms were their responses. Except for Davon, who shook his head.
It seemed Sloane had a little project on her hands.
The supervisor saw the kids off to their respective destinations, and Sloane set to cleaning their huge mess.
Note to self: never take on homemade marinara, salad and popsicles in the same morning—in a makeshift kitchen, no less.
Davon’s ride still hadn’t arrived by the time the last pot was sparkling clean.
“My new Big Brother is supposed to pick me up today.” It was probably the fifth time he’d told her that morning, though most of the brightness had waned from his voice. She’d heard all about how much fun they’d had at the batting cages two days before. For Davon’s sake, Sloane really hoped this guy didn’t flake on him.
“Do you have a phone number for him?” She dried her hands on a towel and pulled her cell phone from her purse. When she saw the person who appeared in the doorway, the phone tumbled from her hand, landing in the sink of dishwater with a plop.
“Cooper!” Davon sped toward him. Their hands slapped together, half handshake, half high five.
“Sorry, my man. I went to the wrong place.” Golden-brown eyes narrowed at her. “Sloane, what are you doing here?” Then realization dawned. “Oh, right. My mom.”
“You know Miss Sloane?” Davon asked.
“Yeah, I’ve been subjecting these kids to my cooking for a few years,” Sloane said, trying to dispel the jitters in her stomach with a laugh. “Davon’s been here since the very beginning, and he looks okay to me. Even though I fed him spinach today.”
Cooper drew in a theatrical gasp. “Spinach? No!” He nudged the boy, who pushed him in response.
Sloane took their momentary distraction as an excuse to fish her phone from the murky bubbles. Very disgusting. And very dead.
“Oh, man!” Cooper winced. “Is it toast?”
“Toast. Do you mind if I use your phone to call my driver?”
“Driver? I didn’t know internet celebrities needed chauffeurs.”
“Perhaps.” She matched his fake upper-crust English accent. “I can just borrow one of yours, Mr. Cooper.”
He raised his hands in surrender. Good to know the right emphasis on his last name was his checkmate every time.
“C’mon. You didn’t know Miss Sloane doesn’t drive?” Davon asked as if it were something Cooper should have learned to pass kindergarten.
Her pulse pounded behind her temples.
“I do now.” Cooper furrowed his eyebrows. But to her relief, the question in his eyes never left his lips. Why?
Sloane shifted her gaze to Davon and her sputtering attempt to change the subject drew a blank. Of course Cooper would know there was a story when a twenty-eight-year-old woman didn’t drive.
But he was going to have to wonder. Maybe forever.
Cooper pulled out his phone.
“Why can’t she ride with us?”
Sloane shook her head before Davon even finished his sentence. After being caught in the cross fire of weird male domination that lived in that family dynamic, it was probably best that she limit their encounters to work settings.
But Cooper pursed his lips in agreement. Why not? said the shrug of a shoulder.
“Oh, no.” She raised a hand. “You don’t have to do that. I wouldn’t want to interrupt Big Brother time.”
“We can at least run you to the store to get a new phone. Seriously, Sloane. There’s one on the way.” Cooper’s tone told her he wasn’t going to leave her there.
She gave a relenting nod. “Okay.” She couldn’t function without a phone. And it was on the way to their destination anyway, he’d said. She followed them to the parking lot across the street, almost choking on a surprised laugh when she saw what clicked at the other end of Cooper’s keyless entry.
It was some kind of Land Rover, with the squared-off lines of a model from the ’90s maybe and a shiny silver paint job that emphasized the car had had some work done. With its racks and raised grill, it looked more suited for off-roading than navigating the urban sprawl of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“What?” Cooper asked when Sloane paused on the curb. “Why are you looking at the Defender like that?”
She snickered. “The Defender?”
Cooper rolled his eyes. “I guess it takes a man to appreciate her awesomeness. Right, Davon?”
Sloane heard the boy laugh in response as he climbed in the backseat. Her seat. “Davon, you can have shotgun,” she said.
“His mom doesn’t want him to ride in the front.
It’s all yours.”
Sloane glanced at Davon’s cheesiest grin, the one that looked so much like Aaron it twisted her insides every time. Cooper already thought she was a freak for not driving. So her last thread of pride left her no choice but to climb into the front seat.
She said nothing on the drive, eyes squeezed closed, listening to bits of their animated conversation about baseball and the Texas Rangers, which she was almost positive was the major league team based in the Dallas area.
“We’re here, Sloane.” Cooper’s voice was uncharacteristically flat, his posture trained straight ahead, the ripple of his jaw knotted with tension. Certainly confused by her death grip on the door handle.
“Cooper?”
He lowered his voice so Davon couldn’t hear. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve read, but if you didn’t feel comfortable getting in the car with me, you could have just said so.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s nothing about you. It’s just...” She sighed. “Personal.” What? Was she feeding him breakup clichés now?
Cooper’s eyes softened, as if he comprehended the significance in her words, and he nodded.
“Go easy on Coop here.” Sloane forced a grin for Davon’s sake.
“No way!”
Sloane darted one last apologetic look at Cooper before she faced the storefront, paper-towel-wrapped phone clutched in her hand. But before she reached the walkway, Cooper rolled down his window. “Sloane! Hold up just a sec!”
She turned around, crossing her arms over her chest. Bracing her already aching heart for whatever he was going to say.
Cooper jerked his head to the side, motioning for her to come to his window. “I’m sorry about your phone.”
“No big deal. I might have done it on purpose just to get the upgrade.” It had nothing to do with seeing you. Nothing at all. “See ya.”
“Sloane.” He stopped her when she started to turn around, but paused as if he’d forgotten what he was going to say. “Was he upset?” His voice was so low she could barely hear it. “That I was late?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t seen him this happy about something in a long time.” She crossed her arms and squeezed against “The Defender” as a car approached in the distance. “Just show up at the right place next week.”
An arresting grin spread across Cooper’s face. “I think it’s really cool that you work with the kids.”
“Hey!” Davon leaned forward. “Are you talking about me?”
Sloane winked at him. “I was just letting Cooper in on a little secret.” She pulled her hand sanitizer from her purse and squeezed some between her palms. “You’ll find out really soon that you’re the lucky one in this whole Big Brother-Little Brother arrangement. Davon’s a really good kid.”
Cooper nodded and said goodbye.
As Sloane walked into the store, images of their interactions rolling through her mind like rapid-fire snapshots, she was sure of something else. Davon had it pretty good, too.
CHAPTER NINE
MARIAN COOPER LIVED in a two-story, Tudor-style home on the edge of Northeast Dallas. Though she could probably fit her entire lot in just one wing of her ex-husband’s sprawling mansion, her home had a charming appeal and warmth that Cooper would never feel at his father’s monstrosity of a residence.
He climbed porch steps flanked by tall, potted topiaries, Maddie following close behind him, and knocked on the brick-red door. Footsteps approached.
His mother opened the door, wearing an oversize University of Texas hoodie, her long, silver-streaked brown hair swept into a clip. “Graham.” Her East Texas voice held a lilt of surprise even though they’d just spoken on the phone not thirty minutes before. “And Maddie came, too!” She bent to rub Maddie’s ears.
With her ceremonial sniffs, kisses and tickles out of the way, Maddie disappeared to explore, nails clicking on the floor.
Cooper kissed Marian on the cheek and wrapped his arms around her. The faintest hint of her rose perfume mingled with a buttery scent coming from the kitchen and whisked him back to his childhood. Working dough at her feet while she cooked dinner. Being on the receiving end of her discreet pinches in church. Hurried hugs on his way out the door to basketball practice. “Did somebody order a pizza?”
Marian chuckled at their longtime inside joke. “No pizza, but I did order a tall son to help me reach things and got two.”
“That’s funny, because I only see one here.”
The humor faded from Marian’s eyes, and Cooper sucked in a breath.
“I know, Mom. I’ll stop. I promise.” He knew his mother felt pulled like taffy when he and Owen weren’t getting along. And the last thing he wanted to do was stretch her, which was why he wasn’t going to think about his shortcomings while he was here. Every time she got that pained look on her face, Cooper braced himself, worried it would be ages before he’d see her smile again. That had been their reality from his late teens through his grad school years.
But some time while he was in Paris, Marian had become a different person. He’d returned stateside to a full-color version of the woman who’d been living in black-and-white when he left. Now she had her foundation to look after, tennis, social clubs, charity events.
And, well, now she had him back.
“Three bulbs are out in here.” His mother led him to her spacious living room by way of the remodeled kitchen that had been her first order of business when she moved in. The buttery scent he’d picked up grew stronger, and her restaurant-grade oven range hummed on the job.
Her home inspection apparently complete, Maddie padded into the kitchen behind them, nosed the handle of a pot on the stove and plopped on the floor next to the oven to keep guard.
From the open kitchen, Cooper saw the three canister lights on the vaulted living room ceiling that had burned out. A ladder was propped just below one of them.
“As you can see, I tried to replace them myself and couldn’t quite reach,” Marian explained. “But then I thought, Do I really want to get a taller ladder when I could call in a favor with someone I gave life to?”
Cooper chuckled. So she was pulling that card. Again. “Next time, don’t even try it, Ma. You know you can always call me first.” He mounted the ladder and reached for the lightbulb Marian offered him.
His mother waited until he’d reached the top of the ladder before pouncing for the kill. “So, what do you think of the consultant—what’s her name again? Is she meeting your expectations?”
Cooper rolled his eyes. “You know her name, Mom.” He carefully replaced the bulb and began his descent to steady ground. “And, yes, Sloane’s been very...helpful.”
“Her presentation was spot-on, don’t you think? A little rattled...” His mother studied his expression almost hungrily as she whisked something in a metal mixing bowl balanced on her hip. Maddie’s nose bobbed in and out of his vision next to her.
“Yes.” Cooper moved the ladder toward the fireplace, keeping his tone noncommittal. “She’s very good at what she does.”
He knew that look, and he wasn’t going to give his mother any shred of false hope, especially not when he was almost positive she’d engineered his placement with Davon with dual motives. If she saw some wisp of a possibility, if he faltered the least bit right now, it would be settled. She’d have him and Sloane married with two-point-five kids before he’d even entertained the idea of asking her on a date.
Not that he was entertaining the idea of asking Sloane on a date. No, he needed her for his restaurant and couldn’t even think about the inevitable ruin of another relationship.
Please change the subject. Please change the subject.
“What’s she like?” Marian squeezed a lemon over her hand, its juice trickling through her fingers into the pot.
Or you can ask what s
he’s like. He climbed the ladder again to buy himself some time. “She’s—I don’t know.”
Haunted. Grieving. Slightly unstable. A puzzle he couldn’t solve.
Sort of...gorgeous.
He landed on, “Smart. She’s very smart. And good with details.”
“I see.” Marian raised her eyebrows and pressed her lips together.
Cooper climbed down and snatched the third lightbulb from the counter. This was getting out of hand. His palms were already starting to sweat, which would do him no good when he was balancing twenty feet in the air. “What are you making? Smells lemony.” He grunted as he reached to screw in the last bulb.
“Your payment for helping me, of course.”
His stomach growled as his sense of smell and the sight of the tray his mother was pulling from the oven collided with happy memories. She had made the cookies he loved when he was a kid—dense, rich butter cookies with a thick lemon glaze.
He hopped off the ladder and pulled his mom into a hug before she could finish taking off her oven mitts. Somehow, through all the years, he could never reproduce the deliciousness of her recipe. That’s why he left baking to other people.
Sloane. He ground his heel into the memory of their conversation the last time he’d seen her, smashing it like a bug before it could surface. Maybe the cookies had nothing to do with his baking ability. They just didn’t taste right if they didn’t come from his mother’s oven.
While the glaze on the cookies set, Cooper helped Marian wash the dishes. They laughed, remembering stories that got even funnier and more ridiculous by the minute.
“Well, I have an early flight to meet with a donor tomorrow,” Marian said as she layered the cookies in a storage container. “But I’m so glad you came over.”
With No Reservations Page 8
