CupidsChoice (10 page)

“I want to fool around now,” he told her, tossing his
t-shirt aside and going for the zipper of his shorts.

Heat rushed through her. “All right,” she said, quickly
removing her own clothes.

Without a word of warning he grabbed her by the backs of her
knees and pulled her so her ass was balanced on the edge of the bed. With her
face and upper body now directly in the light, she couldn’t see anything but
the dark shape of him.

“Perfect,” he whispered, parting her legs wide. She sensed
more than saw him kneel between her legs. “Play with your tits,” he told her,
then kissed her pussy right above her clit.

Oh damn she liked it when he got bossy with her. She cradled
her breasts in her hands, kneaded them, rolled her nipples to send little
shocks of pleasure straight to her clit. She looked down even though she
couldn’t see him, knowing he would like it. Her mouth fell open and she gasped
in shock when he stroked her with his tongue, dipping into her wetness and
parting the folds of her sex as he licked her.

He didn’t take his time. He parted her with his hands and
brought her to climax with an almost fierce determination, and she loved every
high-speed second of it. Her body twitched and shuddered out of control. She
writhed as she came, a high-pitched keening wail as he licked, sucked and
stroked her through an orgasm that made her eyes water and her toes curl.

And then he put his hands on her ass and pushed her back to
the middle of the bed, dropped over her and buried himself deep before she had
time to catch her breath.

“God yes,” she ground out through clenched teeth, digging
her nails into his ass, encouraging him to pump harder, faster. “Fuck me,
Cooper.”

He did. And when he slammed into her and froze, teeth bared,
face contorted in ecstasy as he came in long, throbbing waves, she was once
again right behind him.

She didn’t care when he collapsed on top of her. She loved
the weight of his hot, sweaty body crushing her to the bed. She wasn’t sure she
could ever get enough of the feel of the rise and fall of his chest and the
racing beat of his heart.

“I love you,” she told him, mouth touching the salty skin of
his neck.

He raised up to look at her, one side of the face she’d come
to adore lit.

“I love you, Cooper,” she told him again, because he looked
rather stunned.

He nodded, then shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

She pursed her lips to keep from laughing. “Why? You think
my post-coital confession is lacking in sincerity?”

He huffed out a laugh. Then another.

He kissed her and she felt his still-hard cock stir within
her.

“I love you too,” he whispered, and started to make love to
her again.

Bree turned down the hallway to Cooper’s office carrying a
piece of the chocolate-on-chocolate cake Langley had made her for her birthday,
which had actually been two days earlier. Cooper taken one look at that cake
when Langley brought it in at the beginning of their shift and gotten the
biggest smile on his face. The couple of people who’d noticed had mistaken it
for excitement about the cake—which it was, he’d eaten a big piece—but Bree
knew the underlying reason for that smile.

All throughout the shift she’d been daydreaming about taking
him a big, frosting covered piece and proposing they reenact the night of his
birthday in reverse, with her licking strategically placed dots of frosting off
his body. Sure, he’d already let her do something similar with some strawberry
preserves and a can of whipped cream on her actual birthday, but she didn’t
expect he would be opposed to extending the celebration by a couple of days.

She checked to make sure no one was looking before she
knocked once, opened the door and stepped inside.

He wasn’t alone.

There was a woman sitting on top of Cooper’s desk, on the
side where he would normally sit, with her back to the door, her skinny ass
perched right on the blotter. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a high
ponytail that curled into a pretty ringlet at the end and she was wearing
sherbet-orange scrubs. Cooper was standing in front of her with an intimate,
intense look on his face.

He straightened and took a wide step away from the blonde
when Bree went in, but his expression remained unreadable.

“Have I come at a bad time?” Bree asked. She looked from
Cooper to the blonde when she turned. Whoever she was, Bree didn’t recognize
her.

“No, Lara was just leaving,” Cooper told Bree in a dark
tone.

Lara from the card in Cooper’s birthday flowers, whose gift
he’d seemed so unhappy about receiving? The same Lara who’d apparently been the
only person in the hospital privy to the date of Cooper’s birth?

She and Cooper had been spending so much time together since
his birthday that Bree hadn’t stopped to consider he might be seeing someone
else.

Maybe she should have.

“Wow, the infamous Bree Trenton,” Lara said, catching Bree
completely off guard. She hopped off the desk and turned but didn’t come around
the front. “I didn’t realize you still work here.”

If Bree had hackles, they would have been standing on end.

“I’m sorry, do we know each other?”

“Oh no, we’ve never met,” Lara chirped. “I work up in
radiology.” She pointed from Bree to Cooper and back. “This is the same Bree
you were trying to get fired last year, am I right?” she asked Cooper.

Bree thought she was going to be sick, right there on the
floor of his office.

What the hell was she talking about?

“You must have me mixed up with Carrie Walters,” Bree said,
teeth clenched.

“No.” Lara shook her head for emphasis. “Carrie was someone
else. You were her friend, right?” She looked at Cooper. “Have I got this
wrong?”

“You need to leave.” Cooper started to usher Lara around his
desk. “Right now.”

“Is she right, Cooper?” Bree asked.

Both he and Lara stopped. Cooper hung his head and Lara
looked smug.

“
You
tried to get me fired?” The words didn’t make
sense in her head. The scene in front of her didn’t make sense. Her head was
reeling and she felt as though she needed to scream, just scream bloody murder,
to relieve some of the pressure that was building inside her at an alarming
rate.

Cooper looked up and reached for her but she took a quick
step out of reach and held up her hand to stop him. “Don’t touch me.”

“Wait.” Lara pointed between the two of them again. “Are you
dating her now? After you wanted her out of here so badly?” She snorted. “That’s
rich.”

Bree looked at Cooper. He had the most nauseating look of
apology on his face. Gray spots wavered in her peripheral vision and a ringing
had started in her ears. She saw his mouth form her name but didn’t hear the
sound. He reached for her and she backed against the closed door so fast she
hit her head.

Bree dropped the cake, turned to yank the door open and
bolted out of the room. She was aware that she was running through the halls to
the locker room. She knew people were speaking to her, asking her what was
wrong as she fought with the lock and grabbed her things, but she didn’t dare
stop moving. Her eyes and throat burned with the threat of tears and there was
no way in hell she was going to have an anxiety attack over a man in front of
her coworkers.

Bree burst out the exit doors and headed toward her car at a
full sprint. She’d almost made it when she heard the sound of running footsteps
behind her. She felt the adrenaline rush of irrational fear a second before a
hand on her arm stopped her.

She had no idea if it was that fear or blinding anger that
made her do it, but she used the momentum of her wild spin to slap Cooper hard
across the face.

“Who is that bitch, Cooper?” she screamed. “And why does she
know it was you who tried to get me fired when I don’t?” She covered her mouth
and sobbed, once. “I’m such an idiot.”

He tried to take her arm, gently this time, but she jerked
out of his grasp.

“I had no idea you didn’t know it was me,” he said, acting
as though he couldn’t feel the angry red handprint on his cheek. “Bree, I—”

“Don’t bother. I don’t want to hear it.” She turned and
headed toward her car.

It was so close. All she wanted was to get in it and drive
away. She couldn’t stand the look on his face or the sound of his voice, and
she certainly didn’t care about whatever lame explanation he was about to give
her.

“Damn it, Bree,” he called after her. “Would you please just
come back and listen?”

She rounded on him a second time and stalked back to where
he was standing.

“My job is my life, Cooper.” She felt a strange kind of calm
come over her. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. I have never had a plan B. I
was eight years old when my mom and I were in that accident. The emergency room
nurse that was supposed to help me was a nightmare. I was hurt and frightened
and worried about my mother and she hurt me on purpose. I would swear to it to
this day. She said awful things to me when no one else was around, and then she
would laugh when I cried.

“I became a nurse to right that wrong that had been done to
me. I asked to stay in a department where most nurses don’t want to work
because it’s ugly and unpredictable. The people who come through the ER need
someone who cares about them, no matter who they are or why they’re there, and
I care. You almost took that away from me.”

She’d never felt so empty of emotion as she did at that
moment.

“I don’t want to understand your reasons for having me
investigated,” she added, her heart dying inside of her. “This game you’ve been
playing, getting me to trust you so that I fall in love with you, is truly
sick.”

“Can I speak now?” he asked, his voice calm even though he
looked panic-stricken.

She shook her head. “Leave me alone, Cooper. Do not call me,
do not come to my house, and stop going to ball games with my brother.” She
looked at him a long moment. “I’ll return the things you’ve left at my house as
soon as I can.”

He didn’t try to stop her when she turned for the last time.
As she climbed behind the wheel she could see in her peripheral vision that he
was still standing there watching her, but she couldn’t look. She couldn’t bear
the heartbroken look on his face.

Let him hurt, she thought.

But that didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right.

She didn’t want him to hurt.
She
didn’t want to hurt.
She wanted to turn back the clock and go back to a time before any of this had
happened so she could sit Petra down and tell her she didn’t want to be set up
with anyone. She didn’t want to be in love, because love was only good until it
wasn’t. And once it wasn’t, it was hell.

She didn’t remember driving, but suddenly, somehow, she was
pulling into her driveway. She’d made it home without so much as shedding a
single tear, but the moment she walked through her door and saw the sweatshirt
he’d left hanging on her coat tree, her stomach turned on her. She ran for the
bathroom, and when her stomach stopped heaving she curled up on the floor and
sobbed into the rug by the sink.

It was a long time before she forced herself to stand, wash
her itchy, mascara streaked face and crawl into bed. She stared out the window
through dry, burning eyes, her mind relentlessly replaying the scene in
Cooper’s office. The perky blonde sitting on his desk, the look on his face
when she’d opened the door, the way that bitch had oh-so-casually dropped a
bomb right on the bull’s-eye of Bree’s life.

She still had no idea who Lara Young was to Cooper. She was
so stupid for not asking, and even more stupid for trusting him. She felt like
a complete idiot all around, but somehow the wretched humiliation didn’t change
the way she felt.

She was in love with him. In ways she’d never loved a man
before. She was in so incredibly deep and the day’s revelations weren’t going
to show that love a quick, merciful death. No, this was going to be a deep,
painful wound that was going to bleed for a very long time. She could feel it.

* * * * *

She called a friend from work to cover her shift the next
night. She and Cooper had made plans to drive up to his family’s cabin in
Wisconsin for three days after they got off work the next morning. She’d been
so excited to get away with him. There was no way she would have been able to
focus on her job with her broken heart and those ruined plans hanging heavy
between them. She would have been distracted and probably lost it at some point
in the night, and her patients and coworkers deserved her complete attention.

Cooper didn’t respect her request to leave her alone. Not on
the first day anyway. He tried to call often enough that Bree could tell he
wasn’t sleeping either. Which made her happy in a dark and twisted way.
Eventually she turned off her phone and put it under her mattress so she would
stop making herself crazier by looking at it.

She was watching the sun set through her bedroom window on
what would have been the second day of their trip when the knocking on her
front door started.

Bree tried to ignore it, but it persisted. It stopped after
what seemed like an eternity, and then she nearly came out of her skin when a
shadowy figure appeared outside her bedroom window.

Rachel cupped her hands over the glass and looked inside,
then gestured to someone out of Bree’s line of sight. She could hear Rachel
tell whoever else was out there that she’d found her, and then Petra appeared
in the window as well.

“Sweetie, open the door,” Rachel coaxed, speaking loudly
through the glass.

Knowing they wouldn’t go away now that they knew she was
home, she forced herself out of bed and made her way to the back door.

Rachel pulled her into her arms first. “Oh honey, I’m so
sorry.”

Petra hugged them both, sandwiching Bree between them. It
would have been welcome and comforting if she’d been able to breathe.

“Rachel, your boobs are smothering me,” Bree mumbled into
her chest.

Her friends both backed off at the same time, spun her and she
was hugged to Petra, who was shorter and a lot less well endowed than Rachel.

“Better?” Petra asked.

“Better.” Bree laid her head on Petra’s shoulder and they
cocooned her again. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said after a minute.
“Wait.” She lifted her head and looked at Petra. “How do you know?”

“Cooper called us,” Petra said.

“How chivalrous of him.” Bree wiggled out from between them.
“Are you supposed to report back after you’ve checked up on me?”

Rachel looked at Petra. “She’s clearly in the anger phase
already.”

“Because at no point in time would we ever agree to spy on
you for a man,” Petra assured Bree with her usual cool expression. “He didn’t
call to defend himself, sweetheart. He called to ask how you were doing. When I
told him I didn’t know there was anything wrong because I was under the
assumption you were with him, he told me what had happened. And he was rather
hard on himself about it.”

Bree hid her face in her hands. “I don’t want to talk about
it.”

“And you don’t have to,” Rachel told her. “Please tell me
those aren’t the same scrubs you wore to work last. Cooper said this happened
days ago.”

They were the same scrubs. The same socks. The same
everything. When she touched her hair she realized it was still partially
braided, although quite a bit of it had come loose in the seventy-two hours
since she’d put it up.

“Go take a shower and brush your teeth,” Petra said. “We’ll
still be here to not talk about it when you get out.”

So she did. She ran a shower so hot it made her undernourished
body feel weak and her head spin dangerously. She had to sit on the edge of the
tub to dry off and put on pajamas, and brush her teeth twice to get them clean,
but she felt something close to human again when she joined her friends in the
living room.

They’d brought a bottle of wine, subs from a place in the
city they all liked and a stack of movies. Rachel and Petra chatted about all
kinds of nonsense while Bree picked at her sandwich halfheartedly and tried to
follow along. No matter how hard she tried to focus, or how many times they
tried to drag her back to the conversation, her thoughts kept returning to
Cooper.

After awhile they poured the wine and settled in to watch
something that was supposed to be funny, each of them snuggled under afghans hand
knit by her mother. The opening credits started rolling and she realized they’d
stuck to their word and hadn’t tried to force her to talk about the disaster
that was her love life.