by Paige Tyler
At the door, Landry turned to give her a grin. “By the way. Best. Date. Ever.”
Chapter 5
Cooper was in a really good mood as he headed for another session with Delacroix, and not even the sight of Detective Coletti coming out of the doctor’s professional building could change that.
“I didn’t know you were spending time on Dr. Delacroix’s couch.” Cooper grinned. He just couldn’t resist prodding the hard ass detective. “Maybe we can arrange group therapy sessions and save the department a few bucks?”
Coletti’s faced darkened, but he didn’t respond as he brushed past Cooper and stomped off toward the parking.
“See you later, Vince,” Cooper called. “I’ll ask the doc about those joint sessions, see if there’s a discount or something.”
Coletti scowled as he climbed into his department-issued, unmarked vehicle. The guy looked like he was about to crack his teeth he was grinding them so hard. Cooper wouldn’t have been surprised if the man flipped him the bird.
Resisting the urge to return the favor, Cooper smiled and waved. The detective squealed out of the parking lot so fast there were skid marks on the pavement. Cooper chuckled. It might be juvenile, but pissing off Coletti was fun as hell.
Okay, while sticking it to Coletti had been fun, that wasn’t the only reason he was in such a good mood this morning. That had everything to do with Everly.
As she’d promised, last night had been the best date of his life. Everly was simply the most beautiful, interesting, mesmerizing woman he’d ever spent time with. It was no exaggeration to say he could have sat in that restaurant with her all night. Their conversation had flowed so effortlessly, whether they were talking about her family or the other guys on his team. He couldn’t help but notice that while she’d talked a lot about her dad and brothers, she never mentioned her mom. He assumed she was out of the picture now, and Everly would bring her up when she was ready. Beyond that, Cooper couldn’t remember a single time when they’d hit one of the awkward moments that typically comes up on a first date. It was like they’d been together for years.
Then there was the sexual chemistry thing going on between them. He’d been turned on almost the entire night—so had Everly. It had been damn difficult to control himself, especially when the scent of her arousal hit him like a runaway Mack truck. It had just about made him shift right there in Chambre Française. Control issues like that hadn’t hit him in years, not since he’d first started going through the change after leaving Iraq. But there was something about Everly that drove him crazy.
It was even worse when they went back to her apartment. Watching her ass wiggle under that little black dress and her bare thighs flash in front of him while she climbed the stairs had been heavenly torture. He hadn’t planned on kissing her the moment they walked inside, but the feel of her mouth on his, not to mention the sexy pressure of her amazing body against his hard-on had almost been the end of him. He’d come seriously close to ripping off her dress right there in the middle of the living room. And something told him Everly would have been more than willing to let him.
But he’d gotten control of himself, refusing to let a moment of temporary insanity force him into rushing this thing with Everly. It was too good to risk blowing it. So, he’d kissed her good night, then forced himself to walk out the door. His werewolf side—the part of him that only lived in the moment and never worried about consequences—had howled at him the whole way.
It was impossible not to see that there was something magical between him and Everly, no matter how much he told himself not to go there yet. Maybe he should take a page from his inner werewolf and stop overthinking things so much.
When he walked into Delacroix’s outer office, he noticed that the office assistant who’d been there the day before wasn’t at her desk. He heard sounds coming from the doctor’s office, so he headed that way.
Delacroix was at her desk looking at something on her laptop. She was so intent on whatever it was that she didn’t hear him come in. Cooper started to clear his throat, but caught himself when he realized Delacroix was watching the video of the bank robbery. It was the first time he’d seen the video, and even though Becker had blurred the images, it was hard to miss the fact that Cooper had picked up a two-hundred-pound man and thrown him at least ten feet. No wonder Coletti wanted a shrink to evaluate him. The IA detective must have thought he was on some kind of rage trip.
Delacroix’s eyes locked on the screen as she watched that part of the video over and over again. It was kind of scary, like she knew exactly what she was looking at. Could she possibly have a clue about what she was really seeing?
Cooper cleared his throat as he moved over to the chair, trying to make it look as if he’d just walked in. Delacroix didn’t jump like he expected. She merely looked at him, then slowly reached out to turn off her video player.
“Officer Cooper, I didn’t hear you come in.”
She regarded him calmly, even though she had to know he’d seen what she was watching. “Your assistant wasn’t outside,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind that I just walked in?”
She glanced at her watch. “Not at all. You’re right on time. Have a seat.”
“I ran into Detective Coletti from Internal Affairs on the way in,” Cooper said as he sat down. “Can I assume he wasn’t here for personal reasons?”
She eyed him with that same neutral expression, and for a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to answer his question. Maybe even tell him that her conversation with Coletti was none of his business.
“Detective Coletti was interested in knowing if I’d reached a conclusion concerning your fitness for duty. And before you bother to ask, I told him I hadn’t. That we’d only met one time.”
Cooper tried to get a read on whether the doctor was lying by listening for an increase in heart rate, a change in breathing pattern, or tenseness in the body. But it was no use. He’d been around laptops that exhibited more outward signs of emotions than Delacroix.
“I’m guessing he was hoping for a little more than that out of you,” Cooper said. “He seemed pretty pissed when he shoved past me.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
Cooper sincerely doubted that. Something told him Delacroix missed very little.
He sat back and rested his ankle on his knee. “Okay Doc, what’s the topic of conversation today? You going to grill me more on how my cop instincts told me the bank was about to get robbed?”
She opened a brown folder on her desk and scanned her notes. “Why don’t we talk about the real reason Detective Coletti stopped by to see me?”
The question definitely caught Cooper off guard, and it took him a moment to get his head back in the game. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why did Coletti stop by?”
“Because, after watching that video a few times, Detective Coletti seems concerned about your apparent willingness to resort to physical violence when dealing with suspects versus using your department-issued weapon. He specifically asked me to evaluate that aspect of your behavior.”
Cooper tried not to laugh, but he couldn’t help it. “Coletti is upset that I roughed up a couple suspects? Would he feel better if I’d just shot them all?”
Her lips curved into what could only be called a smirk. “Possibly. But I’m not concerned about Coletti’s opinions on your use of force. I’m far more interested in what was going through your head during those moments. I was looking at the video hoping I could pick up some kind of body language cues, but the tape is too fuzzy. Why don’t you tell me what you were thinking just before you threw that man through the window? Were you angry?”
Cooper waited for his normal defense mechanism to kick in, the one that invariably led to him saying something suitably snarky and witty. But his internal smart ass seemed to be sleeping at the moment. Maybe because Cooper realized Delacroix was simply asking the same question he’d been asking himself since the night of the robbery.
He thought back to
what had happened right before he’d tossed that guy through the window. He and the other werewolves in his pack weren’t mindless animals, but much of what they did on the job was a matter of muscle memory and instinct. Thinking too much about what to do and how to do it in a crisis usually got cops killed.
He forced himself to dig deep into his memory bank, trying to recall what had been going through his head at the time, and was shocked to realize Delacroix had been right—he had been angry. But it hadn’t been the typical anger that normally came when someone shot at him. No, what he’d been feeling then had been werewolf rage—a seriously strong surge.
All werewolves dealt with a certain amount of rage. It came as a package deal with the fangs, claws, and muscles. Immediately after experiencing their change, every member of his pack had needed to go through a period where they’d fought for control over the animal rage inside them. For some, that fight had been tough. For others, it had been pure hell. Now that he and the other members of the Pack had learned about beta and omega werewolves, and how omegas spent a good portion of their lives trying to control that internal rage, Cooper realized there were some werewolves who would have to fight that battle for the rest of their lives.
It hadn’t been like that for Cooper. Sure, he’d felt the anger, the rage, and the pure adrenalin rush that always hit alpha werewolves really hard right after their change. But at the time, he’d been flat on his back and partially paralyzed, so all he could do was lie there and deal with it. By the time his back had healed, he’d gotten a pretty good handle on his inner werewolf. That was why he’d never had a problem handling a full wolf shift, something that had taken other members of the Pack years to master, and something many of them still couldn’t do.
“Well?” Delacroix prompted when he didn’t answer. “Were you angry?”
Cooper nodded, hoping he wasn’t screwing himself by admitting it. “Yeah, I guess. I hadn’t really thought about it too much, but I was.”
At least Delacroix didn’t start scribbling frantically in her notes. Instead, she regarded him thoughtfully. “Because the man shot at you?”
That wasn’t it. Hell, he’d been shot at so many times he barely noticed it anymore. But that probably wasn’t something he should tell a psychologist.
He could count on one hand the number of times he’d even come close to losing control like he had at the bank, and in every one of those times, one of his pack mates had been in danger. Except this time, none of his mates had been around. But Everly had.
Crap. Now that it’d finally dawned on him, he felt like an idiot. And more than a little scared. He’d started losing control because Everly—a woman he’d known for a grand total of ten minutes—had been in danger.
The idea that Everly might be anything other than The One for him was harder to support by the minute.
Of course, he couldn’t say any of that to Delacroix.
Yeah, Doc, I’d just met this woman standing in line a couple minutes before the robbery started, and knowing she was in danger pissed me off so much I threw a two- hundred-pound guy out a plate glass window. But it’s all good because she and I are destined to be together.
So instead, he went along with what he assumed Delacroix wanted to hear.
“I’m sure that was part of it. I can’t imagine many people like getting shot at. But the thing that really ticked me off was the way that guy was spraying his submachine gun around in that crowded bank. Like he didn’t care who he killed. Which is stupid, I know. They obviously didn’t care who they killed. I knew that the moment they shot the security guard in the back.”
She wrote a few words in her notes. Probably: He’s full of crap. “Anything else?”
“It also didn’t help that the jerk tried to hide behind a teenage girl,” Cooper added. “I’m not sure why, but that infuriated me. I couldn’t shoot, not without hitting the girl. So I grabbed him and tried to yank him away from her. I guess I threw him harder than I thought.”
Delacroix didn’t react to that admission one way or the other. She simply asked him about the guy he’d thumped against the wall, then the jackass who’d been holding Everly hostage with a gun to her head.
“I could see on the video that you and he were speaking to each other, but there was no sound. What was he saying to you?” Delacroix asked.
Cooper caught himself just before a growl slipped out. Just thinking about the man who’d threatened Everly made his gums and fingertips tingle. He wanted to drive straight down to the county jail right now and tear the guy apart.
“The guy wanted to use her as a hostage, a shield. He thought if he walked out of the bank with her in front of him, the police would let him get away. That I would let him get away. I told him that wasn’t going to happen.”
“You didn’t think the man would release her if you let him go?” Delacroix asked.
Cooper shook his head. “I knew I’d never see her alive again if I let them walk out that door.”
“So, you just rushed him without a weapon?”
It wasn’t like Cooper could tell her that he’d had all the weapons he needed, so he nodded. “It didn’t seem like I had much of a choice.”
Delacroix didn’t say anything for a while, content to sit there and scribble more notes on her pad. When she was done, she looked up and took off her reading glasses. “You seem a bit more relaxed today. More open.”
He shrugged, as surprised as she apparently was that he was saying any of this in the first place. All he could think was that being with Everly last night had put him in a chatty mood. If he kept up like this, people were going to think he and Becker had switched bodies.
Cooper gave her a smile. “Maybe I’m just in a good mood.”
“Mind if I ask what put you in such a good mood? Yesterday you were extremely upset about being suspended during the investigation and resented our mandatory sessions. What changed?”
He considered making up something, or simply refusing to answer. But he knew Delacroix would keep digging until she figured out what he was hiding. Besides, it wasn’t like he had anything to hide.
“I went out on a date last night.”
Delacroix set her glasses on the desk and sat back in her chair. “It must have been some date because you seem like a different person than you were yesterday.”
Cooper couldn’t help smiling. Maybe he was a different person today. It was one thing accepting the concept that theoretically, there was one perfect woman for you out there in the world. It was completely different once you actually met her—and he was pretty sure he had. There couldn’t be any other explanation for the way he’d been acting and feeling since meeting Everly. It was like anything was possible now.
“It was a pretty amazing date,” he admitted to Delacroix. “In fact, I think I may have stumbled over that rare, one-in-a-billion woman I’m meant to be with.”
* * *
Cooper was still smiling when he left Delacroix’s office. Mostly, because she’d implied it wouldn’t take many more sessions before they were done, and he could get back on the job. But also because talking about stuff—even if he had to hide the dangerous details of being a werewolf—was kind of cool. Since he’d joined the Pack almost four years ago, he’d somehow become the person everyone came to for guidance and advice, or to just plain vent. It felt nice to finally be able to talk to someone about what he was thinking or feeling. He never imagined he could talk to a total stranger about anything personal—like why the date last night with Everly had been so amazing from others he’d gone on—but he could, so he wasn’t going to overanalyze things.
He glanced at his watch as he walked to his Jeep and saw that it was barely noon. If he wasn’t suspended—well, technically he was on paid leave, but it was a suspension as far as he was concerned—he would have headed to the SWAT compound. He supposed he could go home and start on the new graphic novel he had. Hell, he might even want to clean up his place, just in case he wanted to bring Everly over. He should proba
bly go grocery shopping, too. He lived off fast-food restaurants and delivery pizza most of the time. The only stuff he kept stocked in his place was beer, soda, and junk food.
He climbed into his Jeep, planning to hit the H-E-B store on the way home for some food Everly might like, but the mere thought of her had him reaching for his cell phone.
She answered on the second ring. “Hey, Landry! What’s up?”
Cooper grinned at the sound of her voice, imagining her standing in front of an artist’s easel, cell phone in one hand, a paint-smeared brush in the other, and a big smile on her face.
“Nothing much,” he admitted. “I just wanted to call and tell you I had a great time last night.”
She laughed, and he almost groaned at the sound. “Me, too. I haven’t been on a date that fun in…well…ever. I can’t wait to see you again.”
“Same here.”
“So, what are you up to today? Nothing dangerous, I hope.”
That’s when Cooper realized he’d never told Everly about the whole paid leave and fitness-for-duty evaluation. He wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her. He was kind of embarrassed about it. But it was stupid to hide it from her. It was bound to come up in conversation at some point, especially since he didn’t have a clue how long this suspension crap was going to last. The sessions with Delacroix might be going well, but Coletti could drag out his investigation as long as he wanted.
“Actually, I’m not doing too much of anything right now. Since I was involved in a shooting at the bank robbery, the department has me on paid leave until they finish the investigation. About the only thing I have on my calendar for the next couple days is my sessions with a department-appointed psychologist, and I just finished today’s. I kind of have a lot of free time on my hands right now.”
“That sounds like a pretty crappy way to treat a cop who saved so many people,” Everly said. “But their loss is my gain. You want to get together and do something?”
He could think of a thousand things he wanted to do with her. “I’d love to, but I didn’t mean you had to blow off work.”
