by Meg Cabot
When he turns around as Sammy closes the door behind them, I see that Cooper’s lip is swollen to three times its normal size, and there’s a mouse forming under his left eye as well.
“I’m all right,” he says when he sees the horror on my face, and hears the gasps from his twin sisters. He gently fights off Lucy’s excited leaps with the foot in the cast. “It’s worse than it looks.” He attempts a wink and a boyish grin. Both look painful. “You should see the other guy.”
Now I know why he called everyone but me. He can barely speak because of the size of the gash in his lip. His speech is garbled, the way someone whose mouth has been shot up with novacaine sounds. I’d have known instantly something was wrong and rushed to him, just as I do now.
I wrap both arms around him, taking over for Sammy. It’s only when Cooper winces that I realize he must have a cracked rib or two as well.
“My God,” I say, my heart pounding against his. “What happened?”
Cooper kisses the top of my head and whispers, “It’s a long story. I’m just glad you’re safe. I heard about what happened to the reporter.” His arms tighten around me. “Thank God it wasn’t you.”
But it was me. It was my fault, anyway.
And carrying around a gun isn’t going to change that, or make it right, whatever Cooper might think.
Now obviously isn’t the time to tell him this, however.
Nicole is even more upset about her big brother’s condition than I am—or at least she’s more dramatic about it. As soon as she sees his injuries, she shrieks, and flings herself at Cooper with as much passion as Lucy, only Nicole’s tongue isn’t hanging out and she isn’t wagging her tail.
Unfortunately, Cooper can’t nudge his sister away with his cast as easily as he was able to nudge the dog.
“Were you in a car accident?” Nicole wails. “Was anyone else hurt? Were there fatalities?”
“No one else was hurt,” Sammy the Schnozz says, trying to take some semblance of control of the situation. “Some kid was texting and rear-ended him, is all. Kid is fine, Coop is fine. Give the man some room, okay, ladies, whaddaya say?”
Sammy, who is a pawnbroker, speaks with a strong New York accent and is easily able to command a room, a must when dealing with what are probably stolen goods and hysterical twentysomethings like Nicole.
“Of course,” Nicole says, backing off immediately. “Is there anything we can do? Tea? Jessica, go make some tea.”
“Tea?” Jessica looks at her sister as if she’s gone insane. “When the hell has Cooper ever drunk tea? No one wants tea. How about a real drink? Anyone? I’ve got some Key West lemonade already poured.”
“Lemonade,” Cooper says. “Mmm.”
I can tell that Cooper is on painkillers, and also that Sammy is lying. I know injuries sustained in an accident from a fistfight when I see one. At Fischer Hall, roommate conflicts between girls result in nasty notes left on refrigerators and bathroom mirrors and social media pages. Roommate conflicts between boys result in fat lips and bruises exactly like the one blooming under Cooper’s eye.
What happened to his foot, I can’t even begin to imagine, but I know it’s not from any fender bender. This is bad. Really bad.
I don’t know how bad until Cooper looks down at me, smiles crookedly (thank God he still seems to have all his teeth), and says, “Sure, I’ll take a lemonade, Jess. And sorry I didn’t call, honey. I was a little tied up.”
He giggles. Cooper, who never giggles.
“But Heather,” I hear Nicole protest. “You told me Cooper did call—”
“Shut up, Nicole,” I snap. Her eyes widen with hurt feelings, but I’m in no mood to apologize. I’m too busy checking her brother’s wrists for rope burns, thinking he must literally have been tied up to be giggling like that at his own joke. I don’t notice anything unusual, however. Just his poor, battered, gorgeous face.
“Have I told you lately how much I love you?” Cooper asks, nuzzling my ear. “You’re so beautiful. The most beautiful girl in the world.” It’s hard to make out what he’s saying because of his fat lip, but the gist is there.
“Oh my God,” Jessica says with a horse laugh. “Screw the drinks. What’s he on? I want some.”
Unnerved, I say firmly, “No drinks. In fact, girls, I think it’s time you both went home. I need to get Cooper to bed.”
Nicole is still looking hurt. “But he’s our brother. We want to help.”
“No need. I’ve got him,” Virgin Hal says with a sigh, stepping forward from the hallway where he’s been lurking. He crosses toward us with so much deliberation that I realize he’s been waiting for this: he’s known all along that Cooper was hurt, and hadn’t told me.
I’m furious.
“Oh, hey, Hal,” Cooper says, delighted to see him. “How’s it going?”
“Better for you right now than me, old friend,” Hal says, and bends down to lift my fiancé as gently as if he’s lifting a child. Then he begins to carry Cooper up the stairs—not without some groaning on Cooper’s part, as his cracked ribs are pressed the wrong way, and some grunting on Hal’s part. Huge as Hal is, Cooper isn’t exactly a small guy.
“What floor, Heather?” Hal asks, his voice strained.
“Second is fine,” I say, though Cooper has been spending all his time in my apartment on the third floor since we got engaged. It would serve both of them right if I made them go up another floor. “There’s a bedroom on the left.”
“Thank God,” Hal says, staggering a little.
Nicole and Jessica stand at the bottom of the stairwell in the foyer, craning their necks to watch Hal carry their brother up the steps. It’s an impressive sight, and for once the two of them have been stunned into blessed silence.
Sammy the Schnozz, meanwhile, pulls a messy wad of official-looking forms from the pocket of his khaki pants and hands them to me.
“These are from the hospital,” he says somewhat apologetically. “It’s a simple fracture of the right tibia, they said. In English that means he has a broken ankle. A broken rib too. His face is just bruised. He should be fine in time for the wedding, I swear.”
“What really happened to him?” I demand. “I know it wasn’t a car accident, Sammy. And don’t say he came by that shiner while investigating a case of insurance fraud, either.”
Sammy glances at Nicole and Jessica. “Uh. Yeah. I better let him explain that to you.”
Stupid guy code.
“Anyway, he’s got an appointment to see the doctor again on Monday,” Sammy goes on rapidly, perhaps after seeing my face. “Until then he’s supposed to rest and take acetaminophen only, not aspirin, as it impedes healing or something? Who knew? There’s a prescription for some stronger stuff in there too, though they doped him pretty good at the hospital. He’ll probably need to take more later. Oh, and there’s a prescription for crutches too. You’ll need to pick some up for him. They were out of them at the hospital. They said there’s a twenty-four-hour medical supply place over in Chelsea.”
Sammy clears his throat uncomfortably. He’s a skinny guy in a short-sleeved dress shirt and a straw fedora, with the longest nose I’ve ever seen. “And may I just say,” he adds, “I’m real sorry about this, Heather. But in our line of work, you know, it happens.”
“Our line of work?”
I look down at the myriad forms, some yellow, some white, some pink. Since Cooper and I aren’t married yet, I haven’t been able to put him on my New York College health insurance plan, which is excellent. Being self-employed, Cooper is also self-insured, by some plan I believe he found in his favorite reference guide, the phone book. It is the worst insurance in the entire country. I know, because as his bookkeeper, I’m the one who’s had to deal with the company.
You should see the other guy, Cooper had said. If the other guy is worse off, we might be sued. The police might show up to investigate, or the guy’s friends might show up first, to finish the job. Maybe that’s why Cooper’s asked Hal to c
ome over with all his guns . . .
“Heather, Jessica and I have talked about it, and we’ve decided we’ll go,” Nicole says suddenly, tugging on my shirt sleeve.
I blink at her, startled. “I’m sorry, what?”
“We’ll go get the prescriptions filled, the pills and the crutches,” Nicole says, speaking to me slowly, as if I’m a child. “And then we’ll leave, I swear, if that’s what you want us to do.”
“And I swear I won’t take any of Cooper’s pills,” Jessica adds. “Even though I have nothing to do this weekend, so they’d be excellent for recreational purposes. But I’m really trying to cut down on my recreational drug use and go entirely herbal. And cut down on my alcohol intake, too, of course.”
I look from Sammy to the wad of forms in my hands to the twins. Suddenly I want to cry. Not from feelings of depression, but from gratitude, and, yes, even love. I may not have a family—one I like, anyway—but I seem to have friends.
“You’d do that?” I ask, my voice breaking a little.
Nicole’s jaw drops in shock. “Heather, yes. Of course!”
“Duh, Heather,” Jessica says, rolling her eyes. “We’re your bridesmaids, remember?”
“Which reminds me, you have your final fitting tomorrow.” Nicole bites her lower lip, then releases it, and asks in a rush, “You still want us to be there, right? Both of us?”
I’d forgotten all about the fitting. At this point I can no more imagine squeezing in time for a fitting than I can remember the dress I chose so many months ago—but really it was only last May, right after Cooper proposed, when we’d been planning on an elopement.
But I do know one thing.
I say to the twins, tears filling my eyes, “Of course I want you there. Both of you.”
I surreptitiously check the sidewalk before allowing them to leave, making sure it’s free of lurking white Escalades, then triple lock the door behind the twins and turn to demand of Sammy, “All right, who was it who did that to Cooper? Tell me the truth. Was it a guy named Hamad?”
“Hamad?” Sammy looks confused.
“Sammy, don’t play dumb with me. I know this fight Cooper got into had something to do with me, or Hal wouldn’t be here, insisting I carry a gun to work tomorrow. So tell it to me straight. Was it more than one guy? Were they foreign? Were they driving an Escalade?”
Sammy looks even more confused. “There was only one guy, and he wasn’t in an Escalade. His name was Ricardo.”
I stare at Sammy, dumbfounded. Now I’m the one who’s confused.
“Ricardo?” I echo. I’m certain I haven’t heard him correctly. “Ricardo is my mother’s boyfriend. Or ex-boyfriend, I guess. She says they’ve had a falling out . . .”
“Exactly,” Sammy says. “But not to worry. From what I understand, Coop took care of that creep good. When this Ricardo jokester is released from the hospital, where he’s currently being treated for the broken nose and pelvis Cooper gave ’im, he’ll be taken straight to the Tombs, then on to Rikers, where scum like him belongs. Coop, he knows how to handle his business, you know what I mean?”
I murmur, “Yeah, I know what you mean,” because I can’t think of anything else to say.
27
Here’s to the groom,
A man who’s lost his heart,
Though he’s kept his head.
Anonymous
Cooper and I are finally alone in his former bedroom—unless one counts Lucy, passed out in her dog bed on the floor, and Owen, the cat, perched on top of Cooper’s old chest of drawers, staring at us with slitted yellow eyes.
The painkillers they’d given him in the hospital are finally wearing off, but Cooper is reluctant to take the ones Nicole and Jessica went to so much trouble to get. Pharmacists no longer hand bottles of controlled substances over to just anyone, it turns out. They will only give them to the person to whom they are prescribed, and that person must show a photo ID, or at least a piece of identification proving they live at the same address as the person to whom the pills are prescribed.
Fortunately Jessica and Nicole have the same last name as Cooper, and also possess mighty powers of persuasion—or at least incredible powers of persistence. It’s possible they simply wore the pharmacist down with their nagging. This is how they secured ponies—one for each of them—from their parents at an absurdly young age.
“I don’t like them,” Cooper says when I offer him one of the pills. “They make my head feel fuzzy.”
This comes out sounding like “Day bake by hade beel bunny,” because of his mouth injury.
“I don’t care,” I inform him. “You need sleep, in order to heal. It’s called pain management. If you don’t take a pill now, you’re going to wake up screaming in agony in a few hours.”
“Wow,” Cooper says, obediently accepting the pill, along with a glass of water (into which I’ve inserted a straw for his sipping convenience). “Has anyone ever told you that you have a terrible bedside manner? I’m glad I was never a soldier gassed in the front lines of the Great War, and you were never my nurse.”
“I never would have volunteered to be a nurse in the Great War,” I say, taking the water glass away from him when he’s swallowed the pill and setting it on the bedside table. “I would have volunteered to be a sharpshooter, and apparently excelled at it, according to Hal.”
Hal, who’s announced he’s staying the night—and possibly the next few nights—is sleeping in Cooper’s office downstairs. The contents of his duffel bag turned out to include several changes of clothes, a toothbrush, and the book he’s currently reading, as well as multiple firearms.
I offered him the guest room instead of the couch—which folds out but isn’t as comfortable as a bed—but he thanked me politely and said he preferred Cooper’s couch. Cooper later informed me this is because his office has the best view of the street, so Hal can see anyone who might come up the front steps.
“Wouldn’t it make more sense for an intruder try to break in through the back?” I asked.
Cooper shook his head. “That’s what the alarm is for. Hal’s worried about someone disguised as a pizza deliveryman walking up to the front door and knocking. Only none of us ordered pizza, and pizza’s not what’s in the box.”
“Now you guys are being ridiculous,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Are we?” Cooper asked. “You said that blogger ate a lot of pizza, and look what happened to him. Maybe that’s how his attacker got in.”
There’s not going to be any convincing Cooper that anyone could easily have snuck up behind Cameron Ripley and strangled him—he sits with his back to the door of the Express’s office, typing with earbuds in his ears—so I let it drop. Let Hal stare at the front porch for mysterious assassins disguised as pizza deliverymen who are allegedly coming after me. I have bigger fish to fry.
“So is Hal here,” I finally ask Cooper, when his lids have become droopy from the painkiller and I know I’m likely to get the truth from him, “because you’re worried about what’s going at my place of work, or because you’re worried about what’s going on with my mom?”
Cooper shakes his head in bafflement. He wasn’t wrong about the pills making him fuzzy-headed. “What do you mean?”
“There’s no use pretending anymore,” I say, reaching out to lightly run a finger down his cheek. It’s already rough with razor stubble, and likely to get rougher as the days go by. With a broken ankle, cracked rib, and fat lip, he won’t be bothering to shave. “I know you weren’t in a car wreck. Sammy the Schnozz squealed.”
“See if I ever do him another favor,” Cooper says after a beat, with genuine bitterness. “You just can’t trust people anymore, Heather.”
“No, you can’t, can you? Cooper, I believe I asked you to leave the thing with my mother alone.”
“And I believe I told you that as a licensed private investigator, I couldn’t. Heather, don’t you get it? I couldn’t not follow her.”
“And look where it got you!
” I’ve sat down on the bed beside him. Now I spread my hands to indicate his bandaged ankle and ribs. “This is what she does. She ruins everything she touches.”
He captures one of my outspread hands, then kisses the back of it very gently so as not to hurt his badly bruised lips.
“Not everything,” he says, with a lopsided smile. “Not you. Not this time. I didn’t let her.”
“Oh, right,” I say, sarcastically. “So this time instead of hurting me, she hurts you. That’s so much better, Coop.”
“Come on, Heather. You think this is bad? Believe me, I’ve had much worse. In a couple of weeks, there won’t be a scratch on me. And this had nothing to do with your mom—”
“Oh, right!” I cry again.
“Okay, well, maybe a little. She hangs out with some rough customers, your mother.”
I shudder, then lay my head on his shoulder—carefully, so as not to disturb his rib—wrapping one arm around him. “Why do you think I told you to leave it alone? My God, Cooper, you could have been killed.”
He grins crookedly, then winces. “Glad to hear you have so much faith in my abilities.”
“I’m serious. Ricardo was never the nicest guy.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Heather, but I don’t meet a lot of nice guys in my line of work. I’m not exactly a librarian.”
“Yeah, but do librarians hang out with mobsters? Because I’m pretty sure Ricardo owed money to the Mob.”
“Well, that could explain why he was so interested in your mom. She clearly has a lot of cash to spend. I started tailing her when she came out of your dad’s apartment building this afternoon. She headed straight to Fifth Avenue to hit all the usual suspects—Tiffany’s, Bergdorf’s, Van Cleef and Arpels. It wasn’t until we got to Prada that I realized I wasn’t the only one tailing her.”
I lifted my head from his shoulder. “You mean Ricardo—?”
“Caught him behind her just as she was exiting the store. I recognized him right away. He’s aged a bit, but not that much. Plus, he’s a pretty crummy tail. He had on a trench coat and fedora, pulled down low over his face, for Christ’s sakes. Who wears an outfit like that when it’s eighty degrees outside? The guy’s clearly an amateur.”
