Head Over Heels

by Susan Andersen

  10

  KEEPING TO THE SHADOWS, COOP STEALTHILY APPROACHED Eddie’s house. He wasn’t in the best frame of mind for breaking and entering, but he sure as hell was in the right mood. Like an addict, his mind kept sneaking back to the bar and the memory of Veronica half naked on the counter, all smooth white skin, eager mouth, and responsive little tits. God, she was so soft and sweet-tasting, and she’d wanted it every bit as much as he had. No one could tell him she hadn’t.

  Not even Ronnie herself, he thought fiercely, recalling the cool look on her face when she’d said, This was a mistake. He clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached.

  Dammit all, it wasn’t as if he didn’t know that. Yet the memory of her dismissing what they’d shared as some no-account error only served to infuriate him all over again. God knows why, because she was absolutely right. He’d had no business instigating a session of the hot and heavies with her—not when Eddie was his only reason for being in Fossil. But that sure as hell wasn’t something he was about to share with Crystal’s sister, and didn’t that pretty much say it all? Other than a chemistry that unaccountably kept sparking between them, he and Ronnie had diddily squat in common.

  Go tell it to his hard-on, though. If he hadn’t been trained in stealth tactics by the best, he thought sourly, he’d probably be using the damn thing to batter down the door to his brother’s house about now.

  As he checked out all the doors and windows for a weak spot, he did his best to put himself in the emotionless, single-minded state that had earned him the nickname of Iceman in his recon unit. He concentrated on blocking all thoughts of Ronnie out of his mind and focused instead on what he had to do to get in and out of Eddie’s house without detection.

  Eventually, he found a basement door that didn’t sport the same state-of-the-art deadbolts as the main entries. He jimmied the lock with a credit card in seconds flat and let himself in, hoping to hell Eddie didn’t have an alarm system that would bring the cops down on his head.

  Aside from a need to burn off this frustration-fueled energy pumping through his veins, he couldn’t say for certain what he was doing here. A judge had undoubtedly issued a search warrant and the police were sure to have tossed it thoroughly—with a helluva lot more expertise than he could lay claim to. He’d been trained to get in and get out, to assess the lay of the land or grab the hostage and run, not how to find a needle in the proverbial haystack—so it was unlikely he’d find anything they’d missed.

  Yet he had a need tonight to touch base with Eddie, even if it was only through handling things that his brother had handled. Besides, who knew? Maybe something would speak to him. Perhaps something that had meant nothing to the cops would point him down the path he needed to take to clear his brother’s name.

  Once his eyes had adjusted, he wound through the basement’s clutter of odds and ends to a wooden staircase. The door at the top of the stairs was latched, but with the same type of flimsy lock that was on the basement door, and once again Coop used his credit card to good effect. He closed the door behind him and was about to congratulate himself when he heard a low buzzing. Next to the outside door was a security keypad with a blinking red light.

  “Shit!” He reached it in two large strides. He probably had thirty seconds, tops, to deactivate the alarm.

  Knowing it was bound to be an easy number to remember, Coop punched in Eddie’s birthday. The pad kept buzzing. Okay, too obvious.

  He knew neither his brother’s social security number nor the PIN number to his bank account. So what was the most important date in Eddie’s life? He’d never been married….

  If Coop hadn’t already been busy running other combinations on the keypad, including his own birthday and that of their mother, he would have smacked himself on the forehead. Well, duh. The day Lizzy was born, Einstein.

  Then his mind went blank. What was Lizzy’s birthday? March fourteenth? No, the thirteenth, right?

  He punched in three, one, three, but the pad continued buzzing. No, wait, not March—it was in April, because he’d sent her that Fool doll he’d picked up in Vienna. It had made him think of April Fool’s Day, which had made him remember her birthday was coming up. Coop tried four, one, three, but the buzz continued. His breath even, his nerves rock-steady, he felt like himself for the first time since Veronica had sashayed into the Tonk dressed to kill. One more try, and then he’d have to get the hell out of here and attempt it again another time. He punched in zero, four, one, three and grinned when the buzzing stopped and the red light blinked out.

  Yes! He’d forgotten the adrenaline rush of walking the fine edge of danger. Odd, considering it had once been an everyday occurrence. Amazing how fast one adapted to a different lifestyle. Coop headed for Eddie’s home office, figuring either that or his bedroom were the most likely places to pick up an errant clue…if any were there to be found.

  An hour later, he was ready to concede what he’d known all along: There wasn’t a damn thing here that the police hadn’t already had their hands all over. Nothing was going to miraculously jump out at him with the key to Eddie’s defense.

  Yet Coop didn’t feel as if he’d wasted his time. Because all around him were traces of his brother, of the warmth and the joy that made up Eddie. Unlike the furnishings of Crystal’s house, which looked like something out of an opium dream, Eddie’s home was all soothing earth tones, soft, comfortable furniture, and touches that felt homey and inviting. There were pictures of Lizzy all over the place, as well as photos of father and daughter together, sporting smiles so big you could almost reach out and touch the love. Every room in the house held mementos of Lizzy: little kid drawings framed on the wall of Eddie’s office, a disc of clay embedded with a tiny handprint on the nightstand next to his bed. Coop could only shake his head over the injustice of a man who’d only wanted the best for his daughter and had ended up on the run for a murder he didn’t commit instead. It was ludicrous.

  Coop shook off the frustration that threatened to impinge on his fiercely focused attention and opened the door next to Eddie’s bedroom.

  It was clearly Lizzy’s room, and the first thing Coop saw was the Fool doll he’d sent her on her last birthday. It sat with another doll and a couple of stuffed animals on the pink and white spread on her bed. Something hung from a ribbon around its neck, and crossing the room, Coop saw it was the birthday card he’d enclosed with it. Edging it open with the tip of his finger, he read by the light of the moon his own bold handwriting beneath the printed Italian-language sentiment. Happy Birthday from Venice, Lizzy, it read. Uncle James.

  Not Love or Fond Wishes—just Uncle James. Seeing the place of honor she’d given his gift and card, he felt like the biggest fraud in the world. Some uncle he was. Shame suffused him to know that it was one of the few birthdays he’d even remembered.

  He eased open the card again and looked at his signature. James. It always took him by surprise to see that name in his own handwriting on personal correspondence. He’d been using it for a couple of years now to sign books, but before he’d become published, he’d never been anything but Cooper or Coop…except to his mother. It hadn’t really been an issue until she’d left them for Chapman, and even after that it hadn’t escalated into open warfare until his dad died and Coop’d had to go live with them full-time.

  At first he’d refused to answer to the name, trying to force her to accept him for who he was—just plain Cooper. But his mother had proven to be even more stubborn than he, and “James” he had remained in her household. Whether he was merely there for a weekend visit or under her permanent custodianship, she would brook no blue-collar name for her son. It probably smacked too closely of her own less-than-prestigious roots.

  Consequently, it was as James that Eddie had always known him. Because Eddie was Eddie, though, Cooper hadn’t minded when his brother called him that. Eddie had said the name with love and admiration. When his mother had said it, it’d simply been a way to make Coop more acceptable in her eyes.
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  He shook himself free of the reverie, ignoring the gnawing ache low in his gut. All that was water under the bridge. Hell, she’d died disapproving of him, but that wasn’t important now. What mattered was doing whatever he could to help his remaining family.

  Which at the moment seemed to be damn little. He’d take home the folder of Eddie’s financial papers he’d liberated. And, taking one last look around Lizzy’s room before he eased the door shut, Coop wondered if there was a way to at least get his niece’s personal belongings back. It might give her a measure of comfort until she was reunited with her daddy.

  As far as being instrumental in clearing Eddie, though, Coop was beginning to harbor a nasty feeling that all he could really do was be in place, ready to take advantage, if a break should ever come his way.

  Kody awakened in slow increments the next morning, barely relinquishing unconsciousness enough to acknowledge that he felt exceedingly loose-limbed and stress-free. Honest-to-God contentment hummed through his veins, but it was the physical heat radiating against his chest and across his stomach that aroused his sleep-deprived curiosity. Body heat warmed his entire right side, in fact, and blinking groggily, he raised his head off the pillow to locate the source.

  A woman was pressed against his side, her head nestled in the hollow between his collarbone and the beginning swell of his chest. Her face was hidden from view by her sandy brown hair as it spread across his chest and over the arm she’d draped across his stomach, but now that he was more fully awake Kody knew perfectly well who this long, well-rounded body belonged to, and he couldn’t have contained the satisfied smile that curled up the corners of his lips to save his life.

  When he’d looked up last night to see Marissa standing next to Veronica, he might’ve been caught in the fallout of a megakilotron bomb, so immediate was the impact she’d had upon his senses. Just thinking about it now made him shake his head. Man. It was as if he and Marissa had been two components of a volatile compound kept on separate shelves—and for good reason, it turned out, because just look at what happened when they’d come together. Mix one part Marissa and one part Kody and—boom!—instant combustion. He’d never felt anything like it in his life.

  He wanted to keep on feeling it, though, and he eased his hand beneath the thick fall of her hair to sweep it away from her face. As he shifted to look down at her, his gaze swept across two portraits on the far wall, then snapped back to fix on them.

  His stomach sank. One was of a curly-haired little girl with a big smile and gaps where her two front teeth should be. The other was of a slightly older boy who looked to be long and lanky. He had Marissa’s eyes. Had her smile, too, minus the dimples.

  Kody tried to tell himself that they were probably her niece and nephew, but it wouldn’t wash. Not only did the boy look like a male version of Marissa, but there was an inscription in childish handwriting on the little girl’s photo. For Mommy, it said.

  Well, shit.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like kids; he liked them just fine. But he had a bit of a blind spot when it came to them. What man wouldn’t who’d watched his sister flit from one man to the next, and had watched the heartache of his nephew getting attached to the men traipsing in and out of his mama’s house? Just about the time his nephew Jacob felt safe getting comfortable with the presence of some new guy in his young life, that guy would invariably disappear. And while Kody couldn’t do a damn thing to change his sister’s behavior, he’d sworn he’d never be responsible for putting the look he’d seen too often on Jacob’s face on the face of someone else’s kid.

  So he tended to date women who came without the baggage. And the few times he had gone out with a woman who had children, he’d been careful to take her out on adult-only dates that didn’t include her kids, figuring—rightly, as it turned out—that the attraction might not last. By keeping his interaction with her progeny to a bare minimum, he at least circumvented having to feel responsible for building false hope in a child’s mind that this latest male influence to pass through his life would turn out to be something more permanent.

  No kid would ever have to watch him waltz out the door with the youngster’s heart in his hands.

  Kody swept Marissa’s hair off her face and tucked in his chin to gaze down at her. Smoothing a finger down her nose, he looked at the faint blue veins in her eyelids, at the crease in her cheek that even in repose any fool could see would turn into one of those knock-you-on-your-butt, killer dimples of hers the minute she smiled.

  Hell. He didn’t want to give her up. He wanted to explore this amazing chemistry between them to the fullest. Something this combustible was bound to burn itself out in the end, but he sure hated the idea of walking away from it before it did.

  But that’s exactly what he’d better do. Because no matter how unique this thing between them felt, he wasn’t betraying his one true, steadfast principle. He’d already forsaken one of the rules that went along with it—to never sleep in a woman’s bed when there were children in the house. His actions last night had been dictated by sheer lust, and for all he knew, Marissa’s kids were sawing z’s down the hall right now.

  He eased her off his chest and slipped out of bed.

  He’d stepped into his jeans and pulled them into place but hadn’t yet fastened them when he heard her rustling behind him.

  “What time is it?” she asked in a croaky voice, and unwillingly, he turned to face her.

  Ah, man. Big mistake. She was all flushed from sleep, propped up on one elbow, the top sheet pulled up under her armpits and stretched tightly across those beautiful, full breasts of hers. Her eyes were sleepy and her rumpled hair tumbled over her plump shoulders and down her back—all except for one long wisp dangling over her left eye.

  He couldn’t help himself: He walked back to the bed and bent down to smooth back the errant tendril. “It’s after nine. I’ve gotta go.”

  “Already?” Marissa reached out a manicured fingertip and traced the open fly of his jeans, trailing her nail along his skin down one side of the zipper and up the other. She looked up at him with sultry eyes. “Couldn’t you spare another, oh, say, twenty minutes? Riley and Dessa aren’t due home until noon.”

  And just like that, Kody found himself shucking off his newly donned jeans and climbing back into bed with her. But as he hauled her into his arms and rolled them over, he promised himself that, no matter how good the sex was, no matter how many things they seemed to have to say to each other, he was taking this slow.

  And that meant he only took her out on grown-up, no-kids-allowed dates.

  11

  WIND BUFFETED THE HOUSE THAT AFTERNOON AS Coop sat at the kitchen table with Boo sprawled out asleep on his knee and a tall glass of cold milk within easy reach. On a paper towel next to the glass sat a corned beef sandwich slathered in mustard and mayo and sloppy with overflowing lettuce and tomato. He’d drawn a line down the middle of the yellow legal pad that sat by his right hand, and between alternate bites of his sandwich and quaffs of milk, he jotted notes from a thick tome of Security Measures of the CIA on the tablet’s left side. Occasionally, he reached for the children’s science primer in the middle of the table and clarified to himself the way something worked, then made a note of that on the right side of the pad.

  By the time the sound of feet clattering down the back stairs broke his concentration, he’d made decent inroads into his research and wasn’t averse to the idea of taking a break. He glanced up and watched Lizzy whirl into the room, only to pull herself up short when she saw him sitting there. Her shiny brown hair had been braided into two neat plaits and she wore a pair of faded rose-pink leggings and an adult-sized white men’s-style button-down shirt. Its shirttail hem reached below her knees, and its long sleeves formed a four-inch cuff where they’d been rolled up several times above her narrow little wrists.

  “Hi,” she said, dipping her head and peeking out at him from beneath her bangs. She gave him one of her shy smiles. “Have you seen
my Aunt Ronnie or my kitty?”

  “Can’t say that I’ve seen your aunt around,” Coop replied honestly while he surreptitiously dumped the cat from his lap and nudged him out from under the table with the side of his foot. Unhappy at being so rudely awakened, Boo made his displeasure known with a disgruntled yowl, and Lizzy’s face lit up.

  “Oh, look, Boo’s right here! He musta been sleeping on one of the chairs.” She scooped the kitten up off the floor and held him nose to nose with her, batting her eyelashes at him. Boo watched with interest for a moment before trying to pin down the fluttering movement with a soft paw.

  Lizzy peered at Coop out of her unimpeded eye. “Where do you think Aunt Ronnie could be? She’s s’posta be here.”

  “I don’t know, Little Bit; she probably just stepped out for a minute. I’m sure she’ll be right back; you know how responsible she is that way.”

  Lizzy looked less than thrilled with his answer. Dissatisfaction wasn’t an expression Coop was used to seeing on her face, and watching her soft mouth pull down at the corners caused low-grade panic to spark in his gut. He had to remind himself he was trained to handle all manner of emergencies—so how difficult could it be to divert the attention of one little girl? Focusing his attention on her, he indicated her attire with a jut of his chin. “That’s an interesting getup you’ve got on there.”

  He succeeded beyond his expectations. Lizzy glanced down at herself, then flashed him a wholehearted grin such as Coop had only seen in her photos with Eddie. He was unprepared for the way his heart seized up with pure, undiluted pleasure at knowing he had caused that smile. Aw, God, kid, I think I’m in love.

  “This is my smock.” Lizzy shifted Boo to pinch one of the voluminous folds of her shirt and hold it out as if she were about to make her curtsy to the queen. “Me ’n’ Aunt Ronnie are gonna paint my room. Then we’re gonna stencil stuff.”