But this box had “Kellogg’s Hardware Emporium” unevenly stamped on the paper.
Julia took the box and hefted it. It was surprisingly heavy. She lifted her eyes to Cooper, heart pounding. “Thank—thank you.”
He nodded gravely.
Julia shook the box and something bulky shifted heavily inside. She had no clue what it could possibly be. Cooper’s face gave absolutely no sign. Julia cut through the twine and paper and opened the box. She stared at the huge steel and brass contraption then looked up, bewildered, at Cooper.
“Deadbolt, “he said.
“Oh,” she replied weakly. “A deadbolt. Um, thanks. Just what I always wanted.”
“Got a real flimsy lock on that door.” Cooper was frowning now, as if her lock was a special, personal affront to him.
“Do you know how—can you fit it?” Was fit the right verb? What did one do with deadbolts? Assemble? But it was already assembled, one big gleaming unit. Cooper seemed to know what she meant, though. His head moved back in surprise and his frown deepened.
“Sure,” he said, as if she’d asked him whether he could walk or read.
Had she offended him? There was absolutely no way to tell. His expression was what it always was—impenetrable. A few minutes later, Cooper was digging into his toolbox and doing something manly and competent with her door and the deadbolt.
So she went to do something womanly and competent in the kitchen. By the time a semidry rose-scented Fred and a grinning Rafael made their way into the kitchen, Julia had tea and a lemon tart she’d baked Sunday for want of anything better to do on the table.
Cooper appeared a minute later. Through the kitchen door she could see the dead bolt, huge and shiny, suitable for protecting nuclear secrets, fitted to her door.
That was so sweet of him. Julia beamed at Cooper as he stood in the kitchen doorway, filling it. “Thanks, Cooper.” He froze at her smile, but Julia was beginning to recognize the various gradations of his impassivity. Her smile widened. “Have some pie and tea.”
Rafael had already scarfed down three slices, and she’d caught him surreptitiously sneaking bits to Fred. Julia cut a huge slice for Cooper and a much smaller slice for herself. She’d flavored the tea with dried orange peel and cinnamon sticks. Cooper sniffed experimentally and drank, gingerly at first, then with evident pleasure. She smiled as she watched him chew with enthusiasm after the first bite of her lemon tart.
“Good,” he rumbled. “Tea, too.”
Good?
For a moment, Julia was incensed. He was calling her lemon tart
good
? It was her mother’s recipe and it was famous on three continents. It wasn’t good, it was fabulous. She was about ready to tell him off when she saw him slit his eyes with pleasure while he chewed, just like Fred had. She relaxed.
“Good” was clearly cowboy for fabulous.
Julia wrapped the rest of the lemon tart in tinfoil. “For Bernie,” she said, though she suspected Rafael would get most of it.
Cooper stood and Rafael stood, too. “In the pickup, Rafael,” Cooper said, without taking his eyes off her. “But first thank Miss Anderson.”
“Yessir. Thank you, ma’am,” Rafael said obediently, bent to hug Fred, then scampered off.
Cooper stood still, watching her. His dark eyes dropped to her mouth. “Not going to kiss you now,” he said. He lifted his gaze and there was pure dark heat there. “Couldn’t stop.”
Julia nodded. The intensity of his expression took her breath away. Sex hormones filled the air. She kept herself from swaying into him only by exerting iron self-control.
Cooper picked his hat up from the coat rack, flattened his hair and put it on. “Be back later, soon as I can make it,” he said, and walked out.
By this time, Julia was getting used to his abrupt leave-takings. Who knew? Maybe elaborate goodbyes were effete, city things. Still, without admitting to herself that she wanted one last look at him, she pushed open the screen door and watched as Cooper hoisted Rafael up onto the passenger seat. As always, Cooper’s movements were precise, graceful, powerful.
Though his sweater and jeans looked perfectly clean, they also looked exactly like what he had been wearing on Saturday. He was climbing into a black minivan she hadn’t seen before.
Julia wondered about a man who seemed to have more vehicles than clothes.
* * * * *
Foreplay, foreplay, foreplay
.
Cooper repeated the words like a mantra to himself as he drove back to Simpson and to Sally after depositing Rafael at the ranch. Maybe he should smack his forehead against the steering wheel to keep some blood in his brain, so he could remember.
Foreplay, foreplay, foreplay.
He was not going to pick Sally up, strip her, pin her against a wall and shove his cock inside.
Not, not,
not.
There was going to be some foreplay. There was. He tried to keep that thought in the forefront of his brain, while it was still functioning.
He’d had a hard-on for two days straight now, getting a lot of funny looks from his men as they made the rounds of the line shacks in the high country. His cock would go down for a little while and then he’d be hit—
wham!
—by a memory of something…Sally’s nipple, say, and how it tasted, or that electric moment when his cock entered the tight tissues of her cunt, parting them—and there it would go up again, harder than before.
He hadn’t slept last night, not even a few minutes. He hadn’t even dozed. They’d been trained for that in the Teams, of course. Part of the training was staying awake several nights in a row in a shallow stream after having marched all day; an endurance test using a combination of fatigue, extreme discomfort and sleeplessness. He’d aced the training sessions by sheer willpower.
This was an entirely different species of sleeplessness, completely involuntary. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go to sleep. It was just that every time he laid down, he could see—he could nearly feel—Sally’s soft little body. Her legs around his hips, her small little breasts against his chest, her soft mouth brushing his ear. When he closed his eyes in a fruitless attempt to nod off, he could smell her skin, faintly rose-scented, a unique womanly Sally smell.
So he’d been two nights without sleep, though he wasn’t tired at all. He was wired on testosterone.
There was nothing he could do, no mind games at all he could play, that could make his cock go down at night. In his normal life B.M.—Before Melissa—unsatisfied horniness wasn’t anything he’d ever suffered from after having gotten into Lory Kendall’s pants in his sophomore year of high school. Ever since then, if he felt horny, there was always a woman around, somewhere. You just had to know where to look. The only times women weren’t available, he was either deep in training or up to his eyeballs in danger on a mission, so busy scrambling to keep his cock safe that there wasn’t room for thoughts of actually doing something with that cock. And of course, during his marriage and for a year after the marriage went belly up, his cock had stayed neatly down between his legs, inside his jeans.
Now his cock just wouldn’t stay down, particularly at night. Last night he’d lain awake in his sleeping bag, sweating despite the freezing cold floor, running through fucking Sally like a huge Technicolor movie on a continuous loop in his head. He’d have jerked off, but then his men would know what he was doing.
Nothing wrong with that, ordinarily. The line shacks were as close to a barracks as it got in civilian life and men jerked off in barracks; that was just a rule of life. Soldiering was a dangerous and lonely business and if a man could find some solace in his fist, no one begrudged it to him.
But he and his men weren’t in battle, hundreds of miles from a willing woman. There were all sorts of women available, if you were prepared to drive to Rupert or Dead Horse or Boise. Beating off wasn’t really justified. It’s just that his cock wanted Sally and only Sally. She wasn’t there and it wanted to know why.
Fucking Sally once had barely whetted his appetite. Having his cock in her for maybe two minutes an hour ago didn’t count. If anything, it inflamed him even more. He’d done a lot of hard things in his life, but pulling out when he’d just got it in had been the hardest. While she was coming, yet.
He deserved a fucking medal.
Cooper’s heart rate speeded up as he rounded the corner and saw Sally’s ramshackle little house. He wanted to park right in front and make a beeline for the door, but he took the time to drive past and park a block down and over. His van was going to stay there all night, though he’d have to leave before first light to make it back in time for the dawn training sessions.
It was a vain attempt to protect Sally’s reputation, though most people in Simpson knew everyone else’s business.
He’d heard that schoolteachers had something called a “moral turpitude” clause in their contracts. If they did something that went against community morals, they could be fired.
The only person who could fire her, though, was the head of the school board, Larry Janssen, who was his second cousin. And Larry sure wouldn’t fire her for sleeping with him. Larry would be glad Cooper was finally getting laid.
Still, what he and Sally did together was no business but theirs.
Cooper’s blood was beating heavily in his veins as he walked up the porch steps, wincing at the creak. Fixing that second step was next on his list of repairs. The door opened before he could knock and a smiling Sally stood framed in the doorway. Just as beautiful as he remembered, just as fragile, just as precious. She’d opened the door to him without knowing who was on the other side.
That chilled his hot blood. “You opened the door,” he said with a disapproving frown.
Her smile slipped. She looked at him, at the door, then back at him. “Um, yes. Yes, I did.”
“I didn’t identify myself.”
Sally rolled her eyes. “Cooper, I heard you coming up the walk. I was expecting you. Who else could it be?”
Scumbags, drug addicts, rapists, serial killers—anything was possible. Cooper had a sudden chilling vision of Sally hurt, maybe dead and it hit him in a blinding panicky flash just what would disappear from his life if anything happened to her.
Cooper had had several flashes of intuition in his life, acute sensory impressions of danger. Once he’d had a vision of himself at the bottom of a cliff face with a smashed hip and shattered femur. He’d seen himself, leg bent at an unnatural angle, had felt the searing pain of bones grinding together, watched his lifeblood pumping from a severed artery. He’d felt darkness descend as he bled out. It had unnerved him so much he’d checked his gear once again, and noticed a frayed belaying rope he’d somehow overlooked.
Another time, he’d had a sudden vision of himself and his men walking into an ambush in the dense hot jungle of an Indonesian island. He’d lifted his fist, the signal to stop, and his team had obediently frozen in place. They stayed hidden for over four hours, not moving, barely breathing, fingers on triggers. Just when Cooper was beginning to wonder whether his famous intuition had failed him, a signal was given and twenty Islamist insurgents rose up out of camouflaged holes. His team took them all down. If he hadn’t stopped his men, they’d have walked straight into the ambush.
Cooper had learned the hard way to trust his instincts. It wasn’t magic and he wasn’t psychic. All his senses were keen and he was a trained observer. He picked up subtle danger signals, his subconscious put them together and sent the danger message to his head in the form of a vision.
And that was what he’d just had. A sudden searing vision of Sally lying in a pool of her own blood, limp, lifeless, gone from him forever. Something in his subconscious was signaling him that there was danger threatening Sally. She could be hurt. She could die.
Not while he lived.
Cooper stepped into the house, taking off his hat, moving so close to Sally she had to tilt her head back. He was crowding her personal space and he knew it, but he wanted this message to be burned into her brain.
“You do not open that door until you know who’s on the other side, is that clear?” His voice was harsh, hard, the voice he used with his men. The human animal remembers lessons learned the hard way, especially ones associated with pain. It’s the way we’re hardwired. Sally had to remember what he was saying and he put cold command into his voice to make sure she did.
Sally’s smile disappeared and he was sorry about that, but not sorry enough to stop driving his point home.
“Yes, Cooper,” she whispered, searching his eyes. “You’re right. That was really stupid of me.”
“Tomorrow I’m going to install a peephole and another deadbolt on the back door. Put alarms on the windows.”
“Yes, Cooper.”
“I want you safe.” The stark words fell out of his mouth, coming straight from deep in his chest, probably somewhere around where his heart would be located, if he had one.
Sally flinched and turned pale. Shit, he was scaring her.
Way to go, Cooper
. The most beautiful and desirable woman in the world, even willing to sleep with him, and he was scaring her.
Couldn’t be helped.
“Promise me you won’t ever do that again.”
“I promise.” It was a shaky whisper, those stunning turquoise eyes wide. She reached a hand up and laid it flat against his chest, over his heart. “Believe me, I promise.”