“No, you’re not. Except for one part of you.” She rubbed her lips over the tendon in his neck and cupped his shoulder. She loved the feel of him, the strength, the sureness.
Her legs curled around his backside, heels riding him as he thrust in and out. His movements were lazy at first, languid and slow. Her eyes closed as she concentrated everything she was on the spiral of electric pleasure in her loins. Cooper’s tempo gradually increased until she hung, shaking, on the sharpest edge.
A few short, hard movements and she tipped over. With a wild cry, Julia climaxed in sharp contractions that set him off, too. Cooper held her tightly as his penis swelled inside her and he came in long jets. She was already incredibly wet with his previous climaxes. Every night she slept with him, she had to change the bottom sheet.
She didn’t mind.
She held him through the shudders of his climax until he finally stilled, easing his full weight on her.
She loved everything about Cooper’s lovemaking, but this moment was special. When they’d both found intense pleasure but turned quiet, still connected in every way a man and a woman could be connected. Loins and hearts and minds.
She shifted along his long, solid length. Cooper. Her Cooper. However strong he was, he wasn’t a man of steel. He wasn’t Superman. She’d seen him tired and worried and anxious. There were several new lines in his face and they looked permanent. She knew that she was the cause of most of them, but he had never once indicated in any way that he resented her intrusion into his life.
She tried to read her wristwatch in the darkness. She couldn’t see the dial face, but it must have been close to eleven. Ranchers kept healthy hours. She hadn’t had such early bedtimes since she’d been a child.
It was a starless night, the sky blanketed with clouds heavy with the snowstorm all the forecasters were predicting. There was no sound at all outside the house. All the animals had hunkered down in expectation of snow, Cooper had said. She and Cooper could have been the only people in the world.
It was all so utterly unlike Boston. Back home, Larchmont Street would still be alive with people spilling out of the theaters and cafès at eleven. Life never stopped in the heart of Boston. It went on around the clock. The late-night revelers on their way home would meet the sanitation trucks and the office workers trying to get an early jump on the day.
Outside her backyard here in Simpson was wilderness unbroken for fifty miles.
Such an odd place to find love.
Love. Cooper had said he loved her. She loved him, too. Or at least it certainly felt like love. But surely love required a sense of a future together? Some sense of where they were headed? It was a problem that Julia couldn’t see into her future at all. Every time she tried to get a handle on her life, plan a little, a dark curtain descended in her mind. There was no future for her that she could see, only the now with its terror and with Cooper by her side.
Suddenly, she needed for Cooper to know that she cared. She lifted her head to tell him, but he pressed a finger to her lips.
“Sleep now, sweetheart,” he whispered. “Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Hey, Davis, Yuletide greetings from the FBI.” The junior assistant’s voice echoed in the empty offices of the Department of Justice.
“It’s Thanksgiving, you dork,” Herbert Davis answered grumpily as he bit into his turkey sandwich. It was 9 p.m. and he was doing overtime.
Again
. On a major holiday. “Yuletide is Christmas.”
“Whatever,” the assistant answered cheerfully, bending over and depositing a package on his desk. “’Tis the season to be merry.” Davis caught a whiff of too many beers and rolled his eyes. In his day, any hint of drinking on the job would have been enough to get you fired or so severely reprimanded you picked yourself up off the floor.
Well, times changed.
Davis picked up the vacuum-packed, sealed package marked RUSH. He felt through the plastic seal. An audio cassette. He ripped it open, then noticed the time stamp. “Hey!” he yelled at the back of the departing assistant. “This says seventeen hundred hours, November 28th. That’s twenty-four hours ago. It’s marked RUSH. What the—”
The assistant turned and waggled his fingers merrily. “Mail clerks,” he said. “On a go slow. Sorry, gotta run.”
Davis sighed and pulled out the slip of paper in the sealed container. He was tired and out of sorts. Maybe he was coming down with the flu Aaron had caught. Aaron had been home sick for two days now and Davis was feeling the pinch.
He unfurled the FBI message. It took a moment for it to penetrate his tired brain. The FBI had been bugging S.T. Aker’s private phone line on an unrelated drug case and the agent in charge had sent him the tape, thinking he might find it of interest.
Davis walked down the long, empty hall to where the audiovisual equipment was kept and inserted the tape, curiosity getting the better of his tiredness. He’d been doing overtime for too long. For a moment, even the prospect of Thanksgiving with his in-laws seemed better than being here.
He shook himself. He knew better. It was just that he was so tired. Again, Davis wished Aaron hadn’t fallen ill. He pressed “play”.
The sound was a little scratchy, and it took him a minute to realize what was being said and who was saying it. When it clicked, the hairs rose on the back of his neck. He punched the pause button, then rewound.
His finger hovered over the “play” button for a moment, knowing that he would never feel the same way about his job again. He pressed it.
There was the sound of a phone ringing, then an impatient voice. “Yes? Akers here.”
“Mr. Akers?”
“Yes, yes, who is speaking?”
“A friend of yours, Mr. Akers. Or rather, a friend of Dominic Santana’s.”
“I’m listening.”
“I know where Julia Devaux is—”
“Now wait a minute. You know I can’t receive information like this. It would be in total contravention of the law.”
“Well how—”
“But let’s imagine a hypothetical situation. Let’s imagine that I hang up now and put my answering service on. I’ll be out of the room when you leave your message, so I won’t know what’s being said. And let’s imagine—hypothetically speaking, you understand—that I take the tape recorder to visit my client in jail. Let’s further imagine that I had to play another part of the tape for him. I won’t know what’s in your message until it’s already been played and it’s too late. Do you understand me?”
“Sure.”
“Then as soon as I hang up, I’m leaving my office for a quarter of an hour. Will that be enough time?”
“Yeah, it’s just an address. But I want money. I want half the reward. I want $750,000—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. But if you have any requests, put them on the tape.”
There was the click of the phone being put down and Davis pushed the off button. He didn’t need to hear any more. He sat with his head bowed, and let the sadness wash through him. There were a million things that needed doing. Time was tight, but he allowed himself this minute of mourning.
The man who’d sold the information on Julia Devaux was going to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. He would lose his job, his pension, his friends and his freedom. Breach of security for personal profit carried a mandatory 25-year sentence. The man had already lost his family.
Herbert Davis had just listened to a man commit suicide. And not just any man. His best friend for twenty years.
For the man who had betrayed Julia Devaux to a killer was Aaron Barclay.
* * * * *
“Happy Thanksgiving, Coop, Sally,” Alice said happily. It was late in the afternoon and the first flakes of the snowstorm that had been threatening all day were finally beginning to fall. Cooper put a hand to Julia’s back, and stepped over the threshold of the “Out to Lunch”, dread pooling in his gut.
He didn’t like this, not one bit.
“Come on.” An excited Alice tugged at Julia’s hand. “You’ve just got to see how we arranged the vegetable platters, you’ll love it. And Maisie made this amazing sherry bread dressing. To die for.”
God, I hope not
, Cooper thought sourly as he relinquished his hold on Julia. He was reluctant to have her out of touching distance, even if it was to follow a chattering Alice into the kitchen. He nodded to Bernie, who got up and followed the two women through the swinging doors. Sandy remained where he was, at a window seat, his eyes sweeping the room, then tracking the street outside. Good men, both of them.
Cooper looked around. For the first time that day, he blessed the lousy weather. Very few people he didn’t know had made it in for Thanksgiving. A proudly beaming Glenn sat with Matt at a table near the kitchen. At another table were three Simpson families seated as a party, the Rogers, the Lees and the Munros and two couples Cooper recognized from Rupert, though he didn’t know their names. Then there was an elderly couple he didn’t know stuffing their faces with a selection of Maisie’s desserts, but both were in their seventies, and Cooper managed to fight down the temptation to walk over and ask for identification.
He eyed a man he’d never seen before. He looked like a traveling salesmen. Cooper stared unblinkingly at the man. After a few uncomfortable moments, the man looked around and met Sandy’s hard, hostile gaze. The man fidgeted in his chair for a few minutes, put his fork down and got up, searching his pockets for money. A few minutes later, the elderly couple followed him out.
Cooper saw the young blonde girl Julia had been talking to when he’d grabbed Julia and dragged her away by the hair. He wondered if he should walk over to the girl and apologize for his behavior the other day, but then decided against it. The hell with manners.
Cooper whirled, narrow-eyed, at the commotion from the door. He had his hand halfway to the shoulder holster before he realized it was Roy Munro’s boisterous voice congratulating Alice and Maisie. He drew in a long, calming breath.
He’d deliberately timed it so that they would arrive as the last of the customers would be leaving. He felt reasonably sure that there would be no dinner guests. Storm warnings had been going out all day. Only a madman or a fool would venture out in such isolated country during a snowstorm after dark.
Cooper seated himself at the table Alice had reserved for them and waited with resignation for Julia to emerge from the kitchen. He pulled at his shirt collar. The “Out to Lunch” was overheated and he cursed the shoulder holster that forced him to keep his jacket on.
For the thousandth time that day, Cooper regretted his impulsive decision to allow Julia to celebrate Thanksgiving here and hoped it would be over soon.
This was the last time he was going to let her out in a public place before the trial, whenever it was. And then Cooper realized that Christmas was coming. He gave an inward groan. No way could he stop Julia from celebrating Christmas with her friends. Julia struck him as the kind of woman who would consider not celebrating Christmas unconstitutional.
He didn’t give a fuck. His past two Christmases had been normal workdays just like any other.
Horses didn’t observe Sundays or Labor Days or Thanksgivings or Christmases. They needed to be fed and watered and exercised every day, without exception. Cooper had well over twenty-five million dollars in horseflesh at the Double C.
Actually, it was becoming a problem trying to juggle everything. Cooper didn’t know how much longer he could manage. If only he could convince her to stay with him…a slow smile spread across his features, his first in a week.
Oh, yeah. That would solve all his problems. If he could convince Julia to stay over at the ranch, everything would be so much easier. He allowed himself a moment’s daydreaming. She’d make the ranch house less bleak, that was for sure. Maybe he could coax her into doing a little decorating for him, like she’d done for Alice and Beth. Warm the place up. Maybe he could coax her into staying on. Maybe, if he played his cards right, he could convince her to make the arrangement permanent…
“Well, it’s sure nice to see you smiling,” Julia said as she slipped into the seat next to him, adjusting her waist pouch. “I was beginning to think those frown lines were tattooed on.”
Alice placed two enormous plates in front of them. “A little bit of everything,” she informed Cooper. “Eat up.” Cooper didn’t recognize most of what was on his plate. Thanksgiving was turkey, yams, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. Period.
But Julia seemed to know what everything was. “Mmm,” she sighed, closing her eyes and breathing in the smells. “Sweet potato soufflé. Corn pudding. Turkey with raspberry coulis. Maisie’s outdone herself.”
Alice fairly wriggled with happiness. “Yeah, she’s great, isn’t she? Try that raspberry sauce. I mean coulis. We had the editor of
The Rupert Pioneer
in here and he went wild. He said he would do a write-up.” Alice looked around. “But it’s a good thing not that many people made it in today. We haven’t got all the problems ironed out yet. We ordered too many turkeys and not enough vegetables. Also, we’re running out of coffee and pies. Still—” she shrugged her shoulders, “things’ll be on track by Christmas. We’re not doing too badly for beginners.”
Cooper dug in, though he had no appetite whatsoever. He chewed slowly, then with more interest. No, they weren’t doing too badly at all. He had two full bites before his pleasure ended abruptly.