Embraced by Love
Table of Contents
For my father and mother,
Fred and Lee Brockmann
ONE
I
T WAS
half past eleven when Josie Taylor unlocked the door to her Greenwich Village apartment. She lugged her briefcase into the dimly lit foyer and leaned against the door until she heard it latch. Turning back to the door, she fastened the myriad of bolts and latches and chain locks that were standard equipment on the main entrance to an apartment in this part of New York City.
Her heels made a tapping sound on the marble-tiled floor as she went into the living room.
Light from the television lit the room, making shadows jump across Cooper’s sleeping face as he lay stretched out on the couch. The sound had been muted, and she watched her husband for a moment in the stillness.
He’d given up waiting for her. She could tell that by the nearly empty pizza box on the coffee table next to the theatre tickets for the show that had started—she glanced at her watch with a sigh of frustration—more than three and a half hours ago.
Cooper had long since changed out of his expensive suit. He’d pulled his long hair free from the rather severe looking ponytail that he wore when he was dressed up. It fanned out in a golden-brown jumble of curls and waves around his face. The way he was dressed, in his ragged sweat shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, he looked so much like the wild-looking man she had first met nearly six years ago.
Who would’ve thought she’d end up married to this exotic-looking man-child that she’d first noticed riding his skateboard in Washington Square Park? He’d been wearing purple jams covered with bright green peace signs and a pair of orange Converse high-top sneakers. The spring day had been warm, his T-shirt was off, and his long, honey-colored hair was loose around his broad, bronzed shoulders. Sunlight had glinted off the hard, tanned muscles of his chest.
It was hard not to watch his antics as she sat eating her lunch. He soon realized he had caught her attention, and flashed her his quicksilver grin and winked one of his brilliant blue eyes.
He rolled closer to flirt with her, and she was surprised at his imposing height. He had moved on his skateboard with the agility and speed of a smaller, more compact man. But up close, he towered over her. He was older than she had thought at first, too, closer to thirty than twenty, anyway. She was made nervous by his sheer size, and he backed off as if he sensed her discomfort, introducing himself only as Cooper.
Cooper was there in the park at lunchtime the next day, and the next, and almost every single day after that as spring slowly turned into summer.
Each time Josie saw him, Cooper would move a little closer, until finally he sat next to her on the bench, talking while she ate. It was as if he were a wild animal, and slowly but surely she was taming him. Later on, Josie had to wonder who had tamed whom.
Although they looked like polar opposites, with Josie always dressed in her straitlaced executive skirts and jackets, she and Cooper had an awful lot in common. They both liked movies and plays. They both read murder mysteries. They both liked vacations at the seashore and rainy Sunday mornings. They both liked living in the city, with its excitement and pulsing life.
And it was clear, right from the start, that they both liked each other.
Josie found herself looking forward to lunchtime. It was definitely the high point of her day, and she started coming into the office earlier and earlier in the mornings so she could escape for longer and longer lunches.
And Cooper was always there, waiting for her. Sometimes he would bring chalk down to the park and, sitting on his skateboard, he would draw. He could draw like no one she’d ever met before, but the pictures would always be washed away with the next rain. They seemed more precious since they didn’t last.
Cooper didn’t talk much about his job, saying only that he worked near the park, and that his boss didn’t care how he dressed. She didn’t want to pry, thinking that he worked in a mail room or did menial tasks, thinking he might be ashamed since he never brought the subject up himself.
He was bright, funny, and always upbeat. Even on Josie’s worst days, he could make her laugh.
When she started daydreaming about him, it wasn’t marriage that was on her mind.
The first time he asked her out, it was to watch him play basketball in a league tournament. His teammates were nearly all Latin-Americans, and to her surprise Cooper was bilingual, firing out a steady stream of Spanish throughout the entire game.
He had lived in Puerto Rico and the surrounding Virgin Islands for ten years, he later told her. His parents were ethnomusicologists and had focused their research on the music of the Caribbean. He had grown up thinking that life was a party as he had traveled with his parents from one island festival to another.
And life
was
a party, Josie realized, as long as Cooper was around.
He taught her to mambo and dance the
merengue
and the cha-cha. The hot summer nights were filled with block parties in parts of the city she’d never dared to venture into before meeting Cooper.
And her dreams were filled with Cooper’s sparkling blue eyes and memories of the tantalizingly sweet good night kisses that he gave her each night after he saw her safely home.
On the night they first made love, he asked her to marry him. And lying in his arms, nearly blown away by both the physical and emotional storms he had the power to create within her, she told him yes.
The next day, he took her to his apartment to show her where he lived. On the way over, Josie realized that she didn’t even know the rest of Cooper’s name. Was Cooper his given name or his surname? But his name was the least of her surprises.
Cooper lived in the penthouse of an expensive apartment building in Greenwich Village, and he worked out of an office in his home. He was an architect, and not just any architect. He was the C. McBride she had recently read about in the
New York Times.
The fees he had pulled in for his last job had been more than she’d earned in three years.
At first she’d been angry, accusing him of purposely keeping his true identity from her. But it didn’t take him long to convince her that he would have told her what he did for a living if she had only asked. He told her that the things she knew about him were more important than knowing how he earned money. She knew that he loved to dance, for instance, and that he had a fondness for Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, that he still sometimes slipped back into Spanish when he was upset even though it wasn’t really his native language, and that he loved summer the best of all the seasons. She knew that he hated anchovies on his pizza, that he tried not to eat red meat even though he sometimes dreamed about hamburgers, that he always watched
Star Trek,
that “Doonesbury” was still his favorite comic strip, and that he’d rather play basketball than do just about anything else.
And she knew that out of all the things he loved, he loved her most of all.
With Josie’s brother, Brad, and his wife and Cooper’s parents as their only witnesses, they had been married in a small ceremony exactly five years ago.
Five years ago, tonight.
Josie sat down on the edge of the couch, and brushed Cooper’s tangled hair back from his face. Leaning forward, she pressed her lips to his.
He opened his eyes, eyes that still had the power to shock her with their blueness, and smiled.
“Hi,” he said, his voice husky from sleep.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right,” he said, and she knew just from looking into his eyes that it was. “It wasn’t your fault that all the trains from Philly were shut down. You couldn’t’ve made it out even if you left before noon. I’m just glad you weren’t on the train that derailed.”
“It was a freight train,” Josie smiled. “One of the cars that went off the tracks was carrying tomatoes.”
“I heard another had a load of chickens,” Cooper grinned back. “I guess it’s time to get out the hibachi in Jersey.”
He shifted his weight, pulling her down so that she was lying beside him on the narrow couch.
“I was
so
mad,” Josie said, resting her head against his broad chest. “I tried to rent a car, but everyone who had been scheduled to take the earlier trains had that idea first.”
She laughed, a low sexy chuckle that made Cooper’s arms tighten around her.
“Then I tried to charter a helicopter, but it seems they were all busy flying in circles around the train derailment,” she said.
He sat up, pushing his hair back out of his face. “You? In a
chopper
?” he said. “You won’t even get into a 747 without anesthesia.”
She pushed his T-shirt up off the hard muscles of his stomach and chest and kissed his smooth, tanned skin. “Guess how I got home,” she said, entangling her nylon clad legs with Cooper’s.
He pulled off his T-shirt and began tugging at Josie’s rather austere-looking suit jacket. “I don’t care how you got home,” he said. “I’m just glad that you’re here.”
She slipped her arms out of her jacket and lifted her chin so that he could unfasten the delicate buttons of her prim, high-necked silk blouse.
“Since all the commuter flights were booked,” she said, “I took a plane to Pittsburgh.”
That pulled his attention away from the tiny buttons on her blouse. “What?”
“The commuter flights from Pittsburgh to New York had plenty of empty seats,” she said with a smile. “It may not have been the most direct route, but it was the fastest.”
She leaned down and kissed him, and he pulled her even closer, nuzzling her neck.
“I can’t believe you flew,” he said. “You
hate
to fly. Hot damn, if I didn’t know better, I’d actually think that you love me or something.”
Josie sat up, hiking up her skirt so that she could straddle Cooper. “Or something,” she said. “There was no way I was going to miss
all
of our anniversary.”
He pulled her arm down so he could see her watch. “Only ten minutes of August twenty-fifth left,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “That’s not enough time to do what I want to do. At least not properly.”
Her dark brown eyes gleamed as she smiled down at him. “By the power vested in me as president and owner of Taylor-Made Software,” she said in her soft southern accent, “I hereby pronounce tomorrow
and
the next day to be honorary August twenty-fifths, and therefore, Cooper honey, you’ve got all the time you need.”
He stared at her. “You’re going to take two days off? In the middle of the work week?”
“Do you have deadlines?” she asked, suddenly anxious. “If this is a bad time—”
“No!” He sat up, kissing her hard on the mouth. “The hell with my deadlines. I’m an architect. I’m supposed to be late.” He kissed her again. “Take Friday off, too,” he said. “We can go up to the house in Connecticut and—”
“Have a romantic weekend in the country?” she finished for him, running her fingers through his long, wavy hair. “That sounds like a good idea to me. We can go over to that orchard, see if the apples are ready for picking and—”
“Wait a minute,” Cooper said. He looked closely at her, turning her head first one way and then the other, so that different parts of her face caught the light from the television. “You look like Josie. You
sound
like Josie.” He kissed her again. “You even taste like Josie, but Josie never once in the past five years
ever
agreed to take an extra day off without major hand-wringing.”
Josie laughed as he scrambled to his feet, hauling her up next to him.
“But only the real Josie loves to dance . . .” he lowered his voice dramatically, “. . . the forbidden dance.”
He turned on the CD player and music with an unmistakably Latin beat came pounding out of the stereo speakers. He turned the volume down to a more reasonable level and held out his arms to his wife.
Josie crossed her arms. “The real Josie couldn’t possibly lambada in this skirt,” she said. “Besides, this song has a mambo beat.”
Cooper grabbed her and began to mambo with her across the living room and into the kitchen. “It was a trick question, and you answered correctly! You
are
the real Josie,” he cried. “Champagne for everyone!”
He kissed her before he released her and pulled a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator. As he took two long-stemmed glasses from the cabinet, he pointed at Josie. “While I pour the wine,” he said, “
you
have to change out of your scary clothes. Champagne and scary clothes don’t mix.”
Josie leaned back against the kitchen counter and smiled. “But Cooper, it’s so unlike you not to want to unwrap your anniversary present.”
He looked at her sharply, pushing his long hair back from his face. Then he smiled, laughing softly. He moved toward her, the champagne forgotten.
He pulled Josie’s blouse free from her skirt and quickly undid the rest of the buttons. Underneath the silk, her bra was a shimmering shade of blue-green with black lace. He pushed her blouse off of her shoulders and fumbled for the zipper in her skirt. God, she’d had this on all day. Underneath her staid, conservative business suit, she had been wearing this amazingly sexy underwear.
He pushed her skirt off her hips and down her thighs. She had on matching panties, and oh, big God! She was wearing a black garter belt.
Cooper knelt down to help her step out of her skirt, then just stayed there, on the floor, looking up at her.
“Hot damn,” he said. “I’m speechless.”
“Well,
that’s
certainly a first,” Josie teased.
As Cooper looked at her, he realized that she was blushing. He had told her just how beautiful she was every single day for the past five years—more than five years—and she
still
wasn’t entirely comfortable with her body. She actually liked wearing those stiff, formal business suits to work. He knew she felt safe and protected when she was wearing them. And when she was kicking back, relaxing at home, she liked to wear oversized, baggy T-shirts and sagging sweat pants that hid her feminine curves.
With her brown curls framing her pretty face, she was lovely to look at. She wore her hair parted on the side and swept back. She kept it short, only a few inches below her ears, but with her natural curls, the style was soft and feminine. Her eyes were a deep, dark, mysterious brown. Her nose was straight and small, her lips were elegantly shaped and sensuously full. In repose, she was beautiful. When she smiled, she could still take his breath away.