Head Over Heels (11 page)

“What time is it?” she asked in a croaky voice, and unwillingly, he turned to face her.

Ah, man. Big mistake. She was all flushed from sleep, propped up on one elbow, the top sheet pulled up under her armpits and stretched tightly across those beautiful, full breasts of hers. Her eyes were sleepy and her rumpled hair tumbled over her plump shoulders and down her back—all except for one long wisp dangling over her left eye.

He couldn't help himself: He walked back to the bed and bent down to smooth back the errant tendril. “It's after nine. I've gotta go.”

“Already?” Marissa reached out a manicured fingertip and traced the open fly of his jeans, trailing her nail along his skin down one side of the zipper and up the other. She looked up at him with sultry eyes. “Couldn't you spare another, oh, say, twenty minutes? Riley and Dessa aren't due home until noon.”

And just like that, Kody found himself shucking off his newly donned jeans and climbing back into bed with her. But as he hauled her into his arms and rolled them over, he promised himself that, no matter how good the sex was, no matter how many things they seemed to have to say to each other, he was taking this slow.

And that meant he only took her out on grown-up, no-kids-allowed dates.

W
IND BUFFETED THE HOUSE THAT AFTERNOON AS
Coop sat at the kitchen table with Boo sprawled out asleep on his knee and a tall glass of cold milk within easy reach. On a paper towel next to the glass sat a corned beef sandwich slathered in mustard and mayo and sloppy with overflowing lettuce and tomato. He'd drawn a line down the middle of the yellow legal pad that sat by his right hand, and between alternate bites of his sandwich and quaffs of milk, he jotted notes from a thick tome of
Security Measures of the CIA
on the tablet's left side. Occasionally, he reached for the children's science primer in the middle of the table and clarified to himself the way something worked, then made a note of that on the right side of the pad.

By the time the sound of feet clattering down the
back stairs broke his concentration, he'd made decent inroads into his research and wasn't averse to the idea of taking a break. He glanced up and watched Lizzy whirl into the room, only to pull herself up short when she saw him sitting there. Her shiny brown hair had been braided into two neat plaits and she wore a pair of faded rose-pink leggings and an adult-sized white men's-style button-down shirt. Its shirttail hem reached below her knees, and its long sleeves formed a four-inch cuff where they'd been rolled up several times above her narrow little wrists.

“Hi,” she said, dipping her head and peeking out at him from beneath her bangs. She gave him one of her shy smiles. “Have you seen my Aunt Ronnie or my kitty?”

“Can't say that I've seen your aunt around,” Coop replied honestly while he surreptitiously dumped the cat from his lap and nudged him out from under the table with the side of his foot. Unhappy at being so rudely awakened, Boo made his displeasure known with a disgruntled yowl, and Lizzy's face lit up.

“Oh, look, Boo's right here! He musta been sleeping on one of the chairs.” She scooped the kitten up off the floor and held him nose to nose with her, batting her eyelashes at him. Boo watched with interest for a moment before trying to pin down the fluttering movement with a soft paw.

Lizzy peered at Coop out of her unimpeded eye. “Where do you think Aunt Ronnie could be? She's s'posta be here.”

“I don't know, Little Bit; she probably just stepped out for a minute. I'm sure she'll be right back; you know how responsible she is that way.”

Lizzy looked less than thrilled with his answer. Dissatisfaction wasn't an expression Coop was used to seeing on her face, and watching her soft mouth pull down at the corners caused low-grade panic to spark in his gut. He had to remind himself he was trained to handle all manner of emergencies—so how difficult could it be to divert the attention of one little girl? Focusing his attention on her, he indicated her attire with a jut of his chin. “That's an interesting getup you've got on there.”

He succeeded beyond his expectations. Lizzy glanced down at herself, then flashed him a wholehearted grin such as Coop had only seen in her photos with Eddie. He was unprepared for the way his heart seized up with pure, undiluted pleasure at knowing he had caused that smile.
Aw, God, kid, I think I'm in love.

“This is my
smock
.” Lizzy shifted Boo to pinch one of the voluminous folds of her shirt and hold it out as if she were about to make her curtsy to the queen. “Me 'n' Aunt Ronnie are gonna paint my room. Then we're gonna
stencil
stuff.”

“That sounds pretty cool.”

She nodded vigorously. “
Really
cool.”

“What color are you going to paint it?”

“Pink.”

“Uh-huh. Would that be Tickled Pink by any chance?” That would be appropriate, he thought, since it was what she so clearly was at the moment.

Lizzy giggled. “No, silly.
Maiden
Pink.”

“That was gonna be my next guess. You choose that color yourself, or did your aunt pick it out?”

“I picked it all by myself. Aunt Ronnie said we'd di
vide the, um…the…I forget the word.” Her brow furrowed in concentration. Then, just as quickly, it cleared. “Layber! She said we'd divide the layber—that my part would be picking the color and her part'd be paying for it. And that if she hadda paint, then I hadda paint, too.” The look on her face suggested she couldn't think of anything more thrilling. “It's gonna be really pretty—you can come see it when we're done if you wanna.”

“I'd like that. So you like pink, huh?” He remembered her room last night with its pink and white bed-spread.

“Uh-huh. It's my fave-rit.” She gave him another of her bashful smiles. “It's a
girl
color.”

“Then that would be the color for you, all right, because you're certainly all girl.”

Lizzy's smile was nothing short of dazzling, and she looked at him all bright-eyed, as if he'd just uttered the most brilliant words she'd ever heard. “That's what my
daddy
says!”

Then the back door opened on a whoosh of wind, and Coop didn't have to turn around to know who was there.

Logic dictated only one person would walk into the house without first knocking, but logic wasn't the instinct under which he was operating. Because he could be both stone deaf and blind, and still he'd know. His body seemed to possess an animal instinct that could almost
scent
Veronica the instant she came within range. Call it pheromones, call it musk—label it anything at all, but the reality was downright primal. One whiff and he was all primed to procreate. To go forth and multiply.

To propagate the earth with miniature Ronnies.

Jesus
. He sat up in his seat. He had no idea where this shit was coming from, but if that wasn't the spookiest damn notion to ever cross his mind, he didn't know what was. He'd decided a long time ago that marriage wasn't for him and had made it his mission in life
not
to carelessly populate the world with little Blackstocks. He hadn't had unprotected sex since sweating out the consequences after Amy Sue Miller had given him his first taste of heaven on a slightly mildewed lounge pad in her father's pool house when he was fifteen years old.

Lizzy pulled him out of his horror-struck paralysis when she all but danced with impatience and demanded, “Aunt Ronnie, where
were
you? I've been ready forever and
ever
.”

“I'm sorry, sweetie. I realized we only had one paint tray and went over to Mrs. M's to see if she had one that we could borrow so we'd each have our own. That way we won't have to slop paint back and forth.”

Coop hadn't seen Veronica since they'd parted on less than cozy terms last night, and he waited to see how she'd handle the meeting. Being ignored entirely wasn't one of the options that had occurred to him. But although she eyed the books on the table in front of him, she acted as if Coop himself were invisible.

Considering she'd merely had to walk into the room to have him sporting a hard-on a cat couldn't scratch, he was in no mood to let that pass. He shoved back his chair, but then thought better of climbing to his feet. Lizzy was way too young for the type of anatomy lesson that would afford her. Tapping his pen
in a rapid tattoo against his tablet, he gave Veronica a comprehensive once-over. “I need to talk to you.”

Still she refused to look at him. “It'll have to wait,” she coolly informed his reference books. “Lizzy and I have a hot date with her bedroom.”

“Yeah? I'm good in the bedroom.” Visions that were a world removed from painting floated on the peripheries of his mind, and he cleared his throat. Still his voice was rough-edged when he said, “You can use me. Any way you want.”

That got her attention, and her eyes snapped up while hot color stained her cheeks. “What?”

“To help paint. I'm handy with a paintbrush, so give me a shirt like you did for Lizzy”—he ran his gaze over the one she had on—“and I'll give you a hand painting Lizzy's bedroom.”

Lizzy giggled. “You're too big, silly. Aunt Ronnie's shirts wouldn't fit you.”

“I suppose you've got a point.” He reached for the unbuttoned plackets of his flannel shirt and began shrugging the garment off his shoulders. “I guess I could just take mine off instead, so it doesn't get paint-splattered.”

“How very thoughtful of you, but keep your shirt on, and I do mean that literally.” Not a trace of sarcasm colored Veronica's words, but the look in her eyes was anything but polite as she locked gazes with him. “Because, while the words to tell you exactly what I think of your generous offer fail me, Lizzy and I must decline. We planned this as a bonding afternoon for just us girls.”

“You can come see it when it's all pretty, though,”
Lizzy added. She grabbed Veronica's hand, effectively breaking the stare-down her aunt was engaged in with Coop. “Come
on,
” she said insistently. “We gotta get started, 'kay?”

Veronica allowed Lizzy to tow her around the corner, and only when they were out of Coop's orbit did she remember to breathe. She felt like knocking her head against the nearest wall. It was bad enough that she was all agog to know why he was reading those books that were on the table. But would this fascination with his body—his big, beautiful body—never cease?
You shouldn't have looked
, she berated herself as she followed her niece up the stairs.
If only you hadn't looked at him.

But she had. When he'd said he was good in the bedroom and demanded that she
use
him in that insinuating voice, she hadn't been able to resist. Too many images of the ways in which she could do just that had popped into her mind, and, darn it, a woman could only be so strong.

So she'd looked, and it had been every bit the mistake she'd feared it would be. He was so damn male that she invariably got a forbidden sort of thrill out of sneaking peeks at him. It reminded her of when she and Crystal used to sneak out early from their Sunday chores at the Tonk to gorge on candy at Swanson's Sweet Shoppe—she'd known they were gonna get it in the end, but had been unable to resist despite the trouble it would bring down on their heads.

The Coop she was accustomed to seeing, though, was always so spic-and-span. She had never seen him looking anything but smooth-shaven and neatly
dressed. And if she'd secretly found
that
devastating, it didn't hold a candle to seeing him barefoot and sort of rumpled-looking in his blue jeans, a brown thermal-knit Henley with its sleeves shoved up his forearms, and an unbuttoned, cuffs-rolled-back, slate-and-tan flannel shirt whose unpressed state wasn't even close to his usual spit-shined standards. Then there was the dot of mustard next to his full lower lip, and the dark stubble that shadowed his jaw.

She'd been so fiercely drawn she could have screamed. And that was
before
he'd offered to take his shirt off. Oh, dirty word—dirty, filthy,
obscene
word! She'd wanted to cup that bristly jaw in her hands, to straddle his lap and…

No! She hadn't tossed and turned all night long simply to turn around and cave the first time she saw a pair of big naked feet…no matter how much they made Marissa's words come back to haunt her.
Was
Cooper Blackstock proportional all over?

Stop that! Just stop it, Davis, and put him out of your mind right now
.

She could do that.

She
would
do it, by God.

She threw herself into the Lizzy Project and, little by little, her enthusiasm became genuine. She and Lizzy painted up a storm, talking about Barbies and best friends and Harry Potter when they weren't singing along with the radio. They finished the walls, then carefully stenciled rosebuds on the plain white dresser and generally had a fine time transforming the room from a starkly impersonal cubicle to a little-girl haven. When it was finished, they both stepped to the door-
way to admire their work. “So, what do you think?” she asked, her gaze on a few of the pretties that Lizzy had selected from her's mother's collection.

“It's bee-u-tee-ful. It's even prettier than the room at my daddy's house! I never wanna leave.”

Veronica's stomach squeezed. Oh, man, what had she done? She had feared she would screw up this new parental role she'd taken on, but never had she dreamed she would do it so swiftly or so utterly.

She'd merely wanted to do something for Lizzy that would make her feel a little bit special. Well, the good news was, she seemed to have accomplished that. The bad news, though—and the thing she hadn't even taken into consideration—was how her niece was going to feel when Veronica slapped the
FOR SALE
sign on the house. What would it do to Lizzy when her aunt told her to pack her things because they were leaving the house behind, including the room in which Veronica had just helped her become emotionally invested?

Damn. Ah, damn, damn, damn.

What had she been thinking? Had she actually believed that if she didn't bring up the reality of their situation to her niece, it would somehow work itself out or simply go away on its own? She'd been living in a dream world, obviously.

Worse, she was still half immersed in denial, because she was too chickenhearted to tell Lizzy even now. She simply couldn't bear to burst the child's bubble while Lizzy was still all aglow over the day's accomplishments.

So she did the next best thing. She called Marissa and uttered one heartfelt word.
“Help.”

There was a second of silence. Then Marissa asked quietly, “How bad is it?”

“Oh, God.” A garbled laugh escaped Veronica. “As bad as it gets. I've really messed up this time.”

“I'll be right over. Kids!” Veronica heard her yell. “Help me find my car keys. We're going to—” The connection was severed.