CupidsChoice

Jayne Kingston

Book 2 in the Mischievous
Matchmaker series.

Bree knows she’s next on her friend
Petra’s list of so-called accidental setups, but when Cooper washes up on her
doorstep during a vicious thunderstorm, he’s the last man she’s expecting.
Despite her long-standing grudge against the hunky doctor, she can’t deny the
sight of him soaked to the skin and looking sexy as hell is making it hard for
her to turn him away.

Mother Nature forces them to seek
shelter from the storm together. With her most debilitating fear exposed, Bree
finds herself in Cooper’s arms, setting off a chain of events that ignites
white-hot passion more all-consuming than either of them has known. A passion
that is fragile due to the secret hiding in their history.

A Romantica®
contemporary erotic romance
from
Ellora’s Cave

“Do not send someone to pick me up. I’m not going.”

Bree flinched as another blinding flash of lightning lit the
night sky outside her windows, knowing a nerve-splitting crack of thunder was
coming immediately after. She jumped and squeaked in spite of herself when
exactly that happened.

“Holy shit,” Petra said on the other end of the phone. “You
weren’t kidding about the storm. We don’t have anything but a little rain
here.”

Bree’s small but adorable house was half an hour’s drive
from the classy, three- story graystone where her friend Petra lived with her
long-time boyfriend Jude and Rachel, the third of her and Petra’s close trio,
in Chicago’s Lincoln Park.

“Rub it in,” she muttered, lighting another candle just in
case the power went out. “Now get off the phone and tell whoever you were going
to send not to bother. You know I wouldn’t even think about getting in a car on
a night like this.”

Petra sighed heavily. “Yes, I know, but it’s too late. He’s
already on his way.”

Bree went to the short hallway leading from her living room
to the bedroom. She leaned against the wall and pressed a hand to her forehead.
“Who’s he?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you. You sound like you’re
really freaked out and I don’t want to make it worse.”

In the lamplight reaching the hallway she could see the
ghost of her reflection in the glass of one of the framed pictures hanging
across from her. She looked like a doomed extra from a B horror movie—eyes so
wide they looked as if they might fall out of their sockets and hair a mess of
untamed curls.

She’d been getting ready for Petra’s party when the storm
hit much harder than she’d been expecting. She was still in the t-shirt and
yoga pants she’d put on after her shower, but the dress and shoes she’d planned
to wear had already been chosen. She’d just finished her makeup and was about to
begin the taming of the hair when the first rumble of thunder prompted her to
check the weather station.

“Too late. I’m freaking out worse.” She gasped when there
was a knock at the door. “Shit. He’s here already. Petra, who is it?”

“Honey, I had to send him in case the party started without
you.”

Petra had been setting up quite a few of her friends through
70’s-style key parties for more than a year. She would secretly rig the drawing
so the two people she thought would be well suited for each other ended up with
the right keys at the end of the night. So far she hadn’t made a mistake.

At the end of spring she’d switched from setting up casual
acquaintances and periphery friends and gone for the big win by fixing up their
best friend Rachel Marsh with an old college crush of hers—the super-fine Dr.
Ben Richards. Ben and Rachel had been going hot and heavy with no signs of
slowing down since.

Bree had known it was her turn and that the night’s party
was meant for her. It had only been a little less than a year since she’d left
her ex, who she referred to as The Jailer, and the relationship she now
considered her self-imposed prison sentence. She was nowhere near ready to make
another attempt as settling down, but curiosity had gotten the better of her
and she’d agreed to attend anyway. Now she wasn’t so sure that had been a good
idea.

“I don’t like the way you said that.” She peered around the
corner at the door, not willing to leave the safety of the hallway just yet.
“Who’s out there?”

There was another blinding flash, a house-shaking
thunderclap and she could hear rain starting to blow against the front of the
house in vicious sheets. There might have been some hail as well. If she hadn’t
been afraid of going anywhere near a window before the sun was shining high
again she would have checked to see who it was.

The next knock was more urgent. Whoever it was had to be
getting pretty wet. There was no roof over her front porch or awning above the
door.

“Just let him in,” Petra urged gently.

Bree stepped into the living room, flipped on the front
porch light and turned the deadbolt. She went ice cold in a way that had
nothing to do with the temperature outside as the door swung open.

“Why do you hate me?” she asked Petra. She turned her back
on both the door and the man standing outside and stalked to the middle of her
living room, panic rising even higher. “What did I ever do to you to deserve
this? Seriously, Pete. This is not cool.”

“Bree, my love, heart of my hearts, I need you to trust me,”
Petra spoke calmly.

Trust her?
Bree had just opened the door and
discovered the person Petra had intended to “accidentally” fix her up with at a
sex party—where one of the only two rules was that if you drew a person’s keys,
you had to spend the night with them—was someone she couldn’t stand.

A gust of damp wind ripped through her living room and she
spun.

“Why are you still standing out there?”

Dr. Cooper Bennett, M.D., hotshot young emergency room doc
at Northwestern University Hospital—where Bree also worked as a nurse—and all
around controlling jerkface, tucked his hands in his pants pockets as if he
wasn’t straining to keep upright in the wind at his back. “You haven’t invited
me inside.”

“What are you a vampire or something? Get in here.” She
turned to finish berating Petra, then spun back. “Wait.
Are
you a
vampire?”

“It’s too late now if I am,” he said with a smile, stepping
onto the small rectangle of ceramic tile that made up her entryway. “You’ve
already invited me inside.”

“Oh yeah,” Petra breathed through the phone. “I like him.”

Bree hung up on her.

“Listen,” she started, relaxing slightly as he closed the
door, leaving the weather outside where it belonged. “I’m sorry you drove all
the way out here for nothing. I do not get in cars during bad weather. Someone
should have told you that before they sent you.”

He held his arms out at his sides slightly, the palms of his
hands turned toward her. He looked himself over then up at her. “May I borrow a
towel please?”

She realized that he wasn’t just a little wet. He was
soaked. Water dripped from his hair and the tips of his fingers.

Long fingers. Good fingers. The kind of fingers she would
bet money had the skill to make a woman’s body tingle under their touch.

Good lord, how did something as plain as rainwater turn
someone from perfectly unremarkable to…
that
? He looked as if he’d
stepped straight out of a gratuitously erotic men’s fashion ad with his sandy
brown hair plastered to his head, button-down shirt clinging to a rather
muscular upper body and dark dress pants stuck to his thighs. Thighs she could
see were gorgeously well defined.

Had she ever thought of Dr. Bennett in terms of human body
parts before?

Had she ever thought of him as
human
before?

“Towel,” she muttered, flushing with a mixture of unexpected
warmth and embarrassment as she made a mad dash down the hallway to her
bathroom. She grabbed a clean bath towel for him and a couple of old towels for
the floor.

Thunder rattled the house and she flinched, frozen
momentarily with her face buried in all the terrycloth in her arms. When she
composed herself and looked up he was studying her, eyebrows raised.

“Don’t like thunderstorms?”

She pulled herself up to her full height of five feet
nothing and shoved a towel at him. It was one of the ones she’d meant to use on
the floor, but she didn’t care. If he didn’t stop looking at her that way she
was going to use
him
to mop up the floor.

“I’m not a big fan,” she said with as much dignity as she
could muster, tossing towels onto the water around his feet from a safe
distance.

“Normally I love them, but this one’s kicking ass and taking
names.” He scrubbed the towel over his hair and wiped his face dry. He started
to dab at his wet shirt then stopped, the obvious futility of the effort
written all over his face.

“I wouldn’t have driven all the way from Chicago in this if
I were you.” She propped her hands on her hips. “Especially if I knew who was
at the other end of the road, and how I was the last face that person ever
wanted to show up unexpectedly on their doorstep.”

“Really?” He gave her a skeptical look. “The last ever?”

Maybe not the last ever, but pretty close.

“I’m sorry Petra sent you to pick me up.” She held out her
hand for the towel. “Be careful driving back.”

“You’re sending me back out in that?” he asked, pointing a
thumb over his shoulder as the sound of hail hitting the front of her house
grew louder.

Well, he couldn’t very well stay. She hated him for siccing
the hospital board on her friend Carrie until they scrounged up enough dirt to
fire her. And she hated him because the board turned around and tried to do the
same thing to her.

And he was unnerving her, looking at her like maybe he
wanted to eat her—you know, in the good way—with hazel eyes that weren’t an
ugly mud color at all, just mostly brown with flecks of earthy green and
dark-yellow. Or maybe it was just easier to see those eyes because he was
wearing contacts instead of the black-framed glasses he usually wore.

She curled her shaking hand into a fist as she drew it back.
She’d just opened her mouth to tell him yes, she most certainly was going to
send him back the way he’d come, when the tornado siren started howling.

Cooper wondered if she was aware that he could see through
her top. It was one of those semi sheer things he was pretty sure women usually
wore in layers to make them less revealing, but she only had the one thin white
t-shirt hugging her curvy body.

And damn if her bra underneath wasn’t hot pink and only
covering maybe half of a pair of really incredible breasts. If he wasn’t soaked
to the bone and just about shivering with cold, his reaction to the sight would
have been really obvious. Of course that kind of reaction was always obvious,
but with his pants stuck to him the way they were it would have been a lot
worse.

The tornado siren went off and her eyes went so wide he
could see the whites all the way around her dark-chocolate-colored irises. Her
face went white and her chest started to heave.

“Bree?” He stepped out of his shoes and quickly peeled off
his drenched socks as her entire body started to tremble. He repeated her name
as he took her by the arms and peered into her face. She was about to start
hyperventilating. He walked her backward and sat her down on her couch with
little resistance, but she did squeak in protest when he pushed her knees
apart.

“You’ll thank me later,” he assured her, put his hand high
on her back and pushed gently until her head was between her knees. He sat
beside her and spoke quietly in her ear. “Breathe slowly. In through your nose,
out through your mouth.”

“Get your hands off me,” she wheezed, her voice high-pitched
and full of fear.

He moved his hand up to just below the base of her skull and
squeezed no harder than he would have if he were giving her a massage to get
her attention.

“I’m not trying to hurt you. You’re panicking. Breathe,” he
repeated. “In through your nose,” he demonstrated. “Out through your mouth.”

Surprisingly, she listened. He breathed along with her for a
few breaths, then let go of her neck when she started to calm. She brought her
arms up and laid them across her knees, under her head.

“This is so embarrassing,” she groaned.

“No reason to be embarrassed.” He slid his hand down her
back a little way and rubbed the space between her shoulder blades in small
circles. “If anyone should be embarrassed it’s me. I’m the one drenched to the
bone, soaking a wet spot on your couch with my ass.”

Her back shook with silent, nervous laughter.

He looked at the couch, upholstered in red faux suede. At
least he hoped it was faux. “I hope I’m not ruining it,” he muttered, running
his free hand over a cushion.

Yeah, he was probably ruining it.

She shook her head and her long curls fell in a curtain over
her face, arms and legs.

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered, still clearly shaken.

Before he thought to stop himself, Cooper slipped a hand
under that silky mass of curls and swept them out of the way, exposing the side
of her face. He’d only seen her with it down once before, and then it had only
been half down, the front pulled back and secured with a silver barrette, but
he remembered thinking her hair was absolutely beautiful.

She was absolutely beautiful.

But that had been a different time—a time that he was
apparently not going to get a chance to redeem himself for putting her through,
no matter what Petra had promised might come out of the night if he attended
her party.

The power flickered twice and then the house was pitched
into the light of more than a dozen candles that were burning throughout the
living and dining rooms.

Bree groaned and sat up. With his hand still on her back, he
could feel her start to tremble again.

“We need to get someplace safe,” he said calmly as the wind
screamed through her window screens and hail hammered the roof. “Do you have a
basement?”

“There’s a flashlight in the drawer under the microwave,”
she said.

Not exactly what he’d asked, but mostly on task.

He stood and took her hand. “Show me where.”

She led him to the kitchen and found the flashlight, made
sure it was working and then took him to the basement. In the slightly shivering
but bright beam of the light, he could see a washer and dryer standing along
the wall across the clean, dry room from the stairs. The wooden cage that was
the end of an upstairs clothes chute, painted white with a few articles of
clothing inside, hung just to the left of those.