Head Over Heels (23 page)

It was simply too soon, he told himself. So he'd do the smart thing and let it go for tonight. Once the two of them had had a chance to sleep on it, they'd talk.

Things were bound to look much brighter in the morning.

 

The only thing that looked brighter was the weather. Sunshine poured through the windows when Coop came downstairs the next morning, and the cold that had lately permeated the exterior walls no longer emanated its pervasive chill. The temperature was definitely on the rise. As he poured himself a cup of coffee
from the half-full pot on the coffeemaker's hot plate, he heard Veronica's voice in the living room. Taking his cup, he made a beeline for the doorway.

“I realize it's late notice, but I really do need to see Mr. Peavy as soon as possible,” Veronica was saying as he walked into the room. She looked at him, then turned her back. “Lizzy Davis and I are moving to Seattle, but I thought I'd better first discuss the legalities of taking her with Mr. Peavy.”

Coop went cold. She was leaving? Without so much as attempting to work anything out, she planned to just pack up her toys and go home?

“Yes, I'll hold.”

He set his mug on a little gilt table and took the giant stride that brought him within an inch of her back. He wanted to reach out and spin her around to face him, but didn't quite trust himself to touch her.

“Go away, Cooper,” she said in a gritty little voice without turning to face him.

“The hell I will. Why are you running?”

That spun her around and her eyes sparked with temper. “
Why am I running?
Why do you
think
? You're an intelligent man—put your mind to it, and I'm sure you'll come up with a reason or ten.” She yanked the telephone receiver, which had slipped beneath her chin, back up to her mouth. “He'll give up his lunch hour for me?” she said to the person on the other end of the line. “Thank you—I'll be there at noon on Monday, then. I truly appreciate this.”

Coop hadn't moved when she turned from recradling the headpiece, and she brushed against his body. The touch reverberating right down to his toes,
he stared down at her. “I can't believe you're going to cut and run for the city.”

“Believe it,” she said flatly. “In fact, I'm driving over this morning so I can talk to someone about transferring Lizzy to a new school. Tomorrow I'll clear out a room for her at my place.”

No.
He felt hammered by all the emotions crowding in on him, clamoring for attention. She couldn't just leave. She couldn't simply turn her back and waltz away. “You're taking Lizzy out of school today?”

“No, Marissa will take her for the weekend. I'll be back on Monday for my appointment with Neil Peavy, then I'm making arrangements for a permanent move.”

“And you're going to just walk away from what you and I have without the least discussion?”

“What's left to say, Coop? I need something from you that you're not willing to give me, and you seem to need the same thing from me. This hurts too much. We need to put some distance between us before we end up tearing each other apart.”

Oh, that was good. Hands jammed deep into his pockets, he stared down at her. “Too late,” he said.

Then he turned and walked away.

R
AIN MISTED THE WINDOWS OF
V
ERONICA
'
S
S
EATTLE
condo as she let herself in shortly after three that afternoon. With a dejected sigh, she set her purse on the antique Jenny Lind chest in the tiny foyer, walked into the living room, and looked around.

She'd always been inordinately proud of her place. She'd worked hard to earn the down payment to purchase it and had patiently searched the past few years for just the right pieces to furnish it. Yet today, instead of providing her with a sense of homecoming, her pride and joy left her empty.

But then, there'd been no shine to any aspect of her day. The drive from Fossil, which ordinarily she'd swear she could do in her sleep, had seemed to take forever. Seattle traffic had been a bollixed-up mess, the
Puget Sound weather was its usual unrelentingly gray drizzle, and life in general just sucked.

Oh, perfect. A one-woman pity fest to round out my day. That certainly demonstrates admirable strength of character.
What truly sucked, she admonished herself, was her attitude. Neither the traffic nor the weather were any worse than usual—she'd simply gotten spoiled living in eastern Washington, where the sun shone much more frequently and there were fewer idiot drivers per capita.

She laughed shortly, the sound harsh in the empty apartment. Having Fossil emerge favorably in a comparison to Seattle was certainly a wild twist. If she were in a better frame of mind, she'd no doubt appreciate the irony.

Then the bravado that she'd been shoring herself up with disappeared, and she sank into the leather love seat in front of the condo's gas fireplace. Twisting her fingers together in her lap, she gazed blindly at the framed Frye Museum reproduction of a Pre-Raphaelite painting that hung above the mantel.

Who was she trying to kid, anyway? The truth was, having strength of character simply wasn't all that high on her list of priorities today. She'd stopped at the neighborhood elementary school to discuss Lizzy's transfer before coming home, and the women who worked there had been friendly and helpful. Other than that, her day had been one long blur of pain.

How could a man she'd met barely a month ago have assumed so much importance in her life? And how on earth could breaking up with him, when they'd barely had time to form a relationship in the
first place, hurt and hurt and then hurt some more? Try as she might, she couldn't foresee any relief from this agony.

Wanting answers was pointless, as well. There just weren't any answers she could live with. The knowledge made her feel leaden and old. She didn't want to move, and she didn't want to talk to anyone. She just wanted to remain right here in front of the cold fireplace until the pain became more bearable.

Instead, she had to be a grown-up. She'd been thrust in the role of parent, which meant she wasn't allowed to indulge her desire for a cathartic beating of the breast. Worse, she had to be honest. So try as she might to convince herself that this was her real life, and that her brief, magical sojourn with Coop in the garishly decorated house in Fossil had been the aberration, her heart knew the truth. And it was killing her. The only way she could see to possibly change anything was to move her and Lizzy back here as soon as possible, so they could start re-creating yet another new life together.

Until then, she didn't have a prayer of mending this awful ache in her heart.

 

“Freakin' females,” Coop muttered for what felt like the umpteenth time the following Sunday morning. “Nothing but trouble, you ask me. It's
good
to have the house all to myself.”

He'd long ago finished the research he needed to start his new book, and he should've begun the first draft by now. And he would have, if life with creatures bearing the double X chromosome hadn't gotten in his
way. But now he had all the time in the world and as much privacy as a man could use to get some pages under his belt. So what if yesterday he'd pissed away the opportunity? One minute he'd had the entire day stretched out in front of him and the next thing he'd known, it was time to go tend the Tonk and he hadn't accomplished a damn thing. Big deal. Today was gonna be different. He was planting his butt in the chair and not moving until he had five or six pages written.

Eight hours later, he shoved back from his computer, swore at the cursor blinking relentlessly on the blank page beneath
Chapter One,
and stomped downstairs. He needed fuel; that was his problem. He'd get something to eat, then this logjam in his head would clear up.

Twenty minutes later, he was back. He blew out a frustrated breath, glaring at that mocking cursor. Fuel apparently wasn't the magic bullet, either. Shitfuckhell. He needed to
concentrate,
but he couldn't seem to keep his mind from wandering. It was just too frigging quiet around here.

Lizzy was hardly the noisiest kid in town, but there were certain sounds he'd grown accustomed to hearing, and he found himself listening for them in the quiet house. Worse, he paused every few minutes to listen for Ronnie.

Dammit, he'd promised himself he wouldn't do this. She didn't want him—not without a host of qualifications to test his worthiness, at any rate—and that was that. He wasn't going to beg for her love. Face stony, he once again tried to focus on getting some work done. At this point he'd settle for one usable page.

He finally gave up around ten o'clock and picked up a book to read. Fifteen minutes later, he threw it aside. For this, they were paying the author the big bucks? What tripe. He didn't know why the hell it had seemed so intriguing the other day.

He went downstairs and turned on the television, but there wasn't a damn thing worth viewing. How was it the cable company could charge their customers through the nose, offer a hundred and fifty stations, and
still
not manage to put out one single program worth watching?

Well, the hell with it. He dumped Boo, who had climbed up onto his thigh, and climbed to his feet. He might as well go to bed. He could stand to catch up on his sleep, anyhow.

But that apparently wasn't in the game plan, either. Instead, he tore the bed apart tossing and turning. Finally, around five in the morning, he got up and went into the bathroom in search of some aspirin. He knocked back a couple and considered tromping across the street to the Tonk to get himself a bottle of bourbon. But damned if he'd let any woman reduce him to that. He was an ex-Marine, dammit. One of the few, the fuckin' proud.

He returned to the bedroom and hung a towel over the window in hopes that if he ever
did
get to sleep, the morning sun wouldn't wake him up again an hour or so later. Then he climbed back into bed, punched his pillow into submission, and concentrated on breathing in and out very slowly. When last he looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table, it read a quarter to six. Some time after that, he finally dozed off.

The sound of the door snicking open at the bottom
of the attic stairs awakened him what seemed mere minutes later. But when he looked at the clock, he saw it was nearly eleven in the morning. Quiet footsteps started up the stairs, and Coop's mood took a huge upward swing for the first time since Thursday night. Ronnie was back, and she must have had a change of heart. Otherwise, he was pretty sure she would never come within fifty feet of his bedroom. He pushed up on one elbow.

But it was golden hair, not shining black, that crested the balustrade, and a male voice that said so low as to be almost inaudible, “James? You up here?”

Shock, welcome, and a crushing disappointment all coursed through Cooper's system.
“Eddie?”
He threw back the covers and climbed to his feet, reaching for a pair of khakis. He was pulling them up his bare flanks when his half-brother reached the top of the stairs. Hastily fastening his pants, he took an eager step forward, then hesitated. He wanted to hug his brother, but he'd lived so long in a world of men discouraging of such actions that self-consciousness froze him in place.

Eddie took the step that bridged the gap between them and threw his arms around Coop. They clasped each other fiercely, then, with mutual slaps on the back, stepped back.

Coop looked at his half-brother, who was several inches shorter than he. Where Coop had taken after his father, their mother's genes dominated Eddie's makeup. He was built along slighter lines, lean and graceful, and even in exile managed to look like a
GQ
cover model. His golden hair shone in the weak light that filtered around the edges of Coop's towel-covered
window, and his cheeks sported the gleam of the freshly shaven.

It had been months since Coop had seen his brother, and Eddie's situation was about as serious as it could get. So he meant to say something profound—or at least pertinent. Instead, he heard himself say, “Jesus, your shoes are even shined. Pretty damn spiff for a guy on the run.”

“Hey, one can't let a little thing like being accused of murder lower one's standards.” Eddie's self-deprecating smile came and went, a brief showing of white, even teeth. Then he sobered. “It's really good to see you, James.”

“It's good to see you, too, little brother. But you're taking a helluva chance, coming here.”

“I had to see Lizzy, to make sure she was okay. I've been watching the house off and on since yesterday, but while I was surprised as hell to see you living here, I never caught so much as a glimpse of her. Where is she? Does Veronica have her? Did she take her to Seattle or something?”

Ronnie's name coming out of the blue made Coop flinch, and he set his shoulders against the flick of pain abrading his raw nerves. “Not yet, but she's getting ready to.” Keeping his voice level, he explained how she'd been taking care of Lizzy and was across the mountains making arrangements to move them both to her home. “Lizzy spent the weekend at Marissa's. She'll be home after school, and Ronnie even sooner, so we'd better make use of this opportunity. You hungry?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Come on down to the kitchen. We can talk while I throw together some breakfast.”

He retrieved the towel he'd hung over the window and carried it with him downstairs. He tossed it to Eddie, with instructions to pin it over the door window to block the view should anyone come calling. While his brother did that, Coop pulled out frying pans, fired up a couple of burners, and gathered provisions from the fridge.

Then he wrestled with his conscience. Feeling torn between the concerns Veronica had put in his head and the old familiar need to take care of his baby brother, he finally said, “You do realize you can't actually speak to Lizzy, don't you?” He looked up from cracking eggs into a hot pan to gauge his brother's reaction.

Eddie clearly wasn't thrilled, but he nodded. “Yeah. I'd give my left nut to hug her for a minute and find out for myself how she's holding up, but I know it'd be too painful for her if I turned right around and disappeared again.”

“Not to mention dangerous for you. You can't expect a six-year-old to keep that sort of secret.”

“I get it, James, all right?” Eddie paced to the living room doorway and back. “I can't believe I'm in this house.” He disappeared into the front room on his next circuit and returned with a framed snapshot of Lizzy in his hand. When he caught Coop watching him rub his thumb over the two-dimensional image of his daughter's face, he jerked his head in the direction of the living room and said with studied carelessness, “What happened to all the Happy Hooker shit?”

“Veronica packed most of Crystal's stuff away.” He scooped the eggs onto plates, fished bacon out of the pan on the back burner, and carried everything over to the table. “Grab some juice or milk outta the fridge, will you?” The toast popped, and he went back to get it.

Passing a piece to his brother a moment later, he took his seat and looked across at Eddie as his brother stared moodily at the photo he'd propped in front of him on the table.

“I'm sorry about the Lizzy thing,” he said. “Veronica's been carping at me about you—she's worried sick about the quality of Lizzy's life if you were to snatch her and take her on the run with you.”

Eddie shrugged, pushing his food around his plate. “Her concerns are legitimate. I did intend to grab Lizzy and run, but with all the time I've had to think things through, I've seen that'd be dumb.” He touched his fingers to the photograph again. “She'd be miserable. She looks pretty happy here. Veronica's good for her, isn't she?”

“Yeah. She cares about her, Eddie. A lot.” He pointed his fork tines at Eddie's plate. “Quit playing with your eggs and eat the damn things. You're gonna need your strength if we're going to figure out how the hell to get you out of this mess.”

Eddie took one bite, then another. Moments later, he was using the last of his toast to mop up the egg yolk on his plate. He looked across the table at Coop.

“I didn't do it,” he said in a low, fierce voice. “I mean, sure, Crystal and I fought that night—she'd been milking me for years, using Lizzy as a bargaining
chip to get more and more money out of me, and I was fed up and pissed off when I came by the Tonk to tell her she'd never see another penny once I got custody. But I sure as hell didn't kill her over it. And I can explain about my jacket—”

“Jeez-us,” Coop said, insulted. “I know damn well you didn't do it.”

“I left it somewhere,” Eddie went on, oblivious. “You know how I'm always doing that. What was it Mom used to say, that if my head wasn't screwed on, I'd manage to leave that behind, too? I've wracked my brains trying to recall where I left the coat, but I just can't remember. You can bet the bank, though, that whoever killed—” He stopped, blinked once, and then stared at Coop. “You believe me?”