Embraced by Love (3 page)

He had known he was second in Josie’s life when she was working to get her business off the ground. He hadn’t cared. He’d loved her enough to accept that. But now that Taylor-Made Software was turning profits faster than he could spit, he wanted equal time. That wasn’t selfish. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

“Cooper, we can talk about this—”

“That’s what we’re doing—”

“No,” she said quietly. “You’re not talking, you’re shouting—”

“Damn right I’m shouting,” he shouted. “Where I come from, people shout when they’re angry, and I’m
angry
!”

Angry and hurt.
Goddamn,
but his heart was breaking. Obviously she loved her work more than she loved him. He felt like crying.

“How can you call me
selfish—
”

“You
are
being selfish,” she said, her voice starting to get louder despite her intentions to keep herself in control. “I’m talking about making two million dollars. That’s like winning the lottery, Cooper. Better—”

“And then what?” he stormed. “What happens when the Bank of the Northeast calls and wants a new system for their twenty-five billion branches? Are you going to turn them down?”

She couldn’t answer.

“Right,” he said. “That just about sums it all up, doesn’t it?”

Suddenly, Cooper remembered that a minute ago he had thought Josie wanted to talk about starting a family. How ironic! He’s daydreaming about whether they can deal with babies in their lives, and she’s about to go AWOL for over a year. It didn’t matter that he had been leaning towards not having kids. It just seemed that compared to her business, nothing about him was important. Didn’t
he
have a say in things?

“What about babies?” he asked angrily.

Josie stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What about
what
?”

All of Cooper’s frustration, all of the carefully bottled-up feelings he’d been ignoring for the past five years came crashing to the surface. Marriage was supposed to be a fifty-fifty deal, wasn’t it? But it seemed like all he did was give. And now he wasn’t even going to be able to voice his opinion on procreating.

He erupted in an explosion of words, shooting them out at Josie like bullets from a machine gun.

Her arms crossed in front of her chest, and her eyes glinted dangerously.

“If you’re going to insult me, or curse me out,” she interrupted him loudly, “at least have the decency to do it in English. You know I can’t understand you when you speak Spanish.”

“Well, that’s just perfect,” Cooper spat, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair and heading for the door, “because right now I can’t understand
you
either.”

The sound of the slamming door echoed through the empty office.

Josie sat numbly in the back seat of the taxi, next to her briefcase and the box of lingerie from Victoria’s Secret.

She and Cooper had had arguments before, but they were nothing compared to this. This had been a fight, a battle. Hell,
war
had been declared.

She felt sick to her stomach, thinking about giving up the Fenderson contract. Could Taylor-Made Software really afford to turn work away? What if word got out? And it would, she knew it would. What if people assumed they’d turned the work down because they couldn’t handle it? What if . . . ?

It didn’t take much to put a company out of business these days. It was true that despite the recession, Taylor-Made Software had been steadily increasing its staff, but there was no way to tell how long that would last.

Cooper didn’t understand. He didn’t know what it was like to be really poor. He didn’t grow up watching his mother work herself to the bone, only to die far too young. He didn’t know what it was like to live in a town where welfare was the only hope of feeding the children, yet most of the men drank that money away every week, trying to numb the pain of failure.

She’d tried to explain, but Cooper didn’t realize that as much as she enjoyed her job, it was fear that made her push so hard. It was fear that kept her so late in the office, making sure the programs her staff wrote were perfect, each job well done.

She had thought it would ease off as the company grew, but it had only gotten worse. As she walked through the corridors of her offices, she saw all those faces, all those people, her employees. And she saw more than just her workers’ faces. She saw the faces of their families, their children. They depended on Taylor-Made Software and Josie Taylor for their livelihood. She paid their mortgages, bought their groceries, heated their houses.

Jobs were hard to come by these days, and fear of losing a high-paying job was evident in nearly everyone’s eyes.

So now, when she came close to hyperventilating at the thought of the company going under, the thought of all those people dependant upon her didn’t make her breathe any easier.

But two million dollars . . .

Two million dollars in the corporate bank accounts.
That
would give her peace of mind.

Despite everything that Cooper had said, she had to go ahead and take the contract. He had to understand. Thirteen months of hard work would be worth it, because after she had the two million dollars, she would finally feel okay. She could cut back on her hours and spend more time at home with him.

Yet there was a nagging thought in the back of her mind—what if two million dollars wasn’t enough?

Cooper sat on the floor as he rode the elevator up to their apartment. He’d stayed in the neighborhood bar breathing in secondhand smoke for more than two hours, and he hadn’t come up with any obvious answers. He’d considered getting bombed, but he’d switched to ginger ale after only one beer. His stomach was already in knots, and it didn’t take much imagination to know how terrible he’d feel drunk and spinning. And spending the night prone on the bathroom floor wouldn’t do him—or Josie—any good at all.

With a ding, the elevator reached the seventh floor, and the doors swooshed open. Cooper hauled himself to his feet and went into the hall. It was seventeen steps from the elevator to the apartment door. Seventeen more steps, and he would have to go inside and ask Josie not to take the contract for the Fenderson overhaul.

The sad thing was, he knew what her answer was going to be.

He reached the apartment and sat down again, outside the door. Why even bother going in if he already knew the answer?

Cooper rested his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, thinking about—of all things—the first time he’d kissed Josie.

It was their second date. He’d taken her to the Museum of Natural History. There had been a special exhibit on the solar system, and as Josie stood staring at samples of moon rocks, Cooper watched himself reach for her.

He hadn’t touched her before that. Not even after their first date, not even a handshake. He was afraid—afraid if he so much as brushed against her he’d be unable to keep from kissing her. And he didn’t want to frighten her with the intensity of his feelings. He was already in love with her—this woman that he barely knew. She was The One. He didn’t want her to mistake his passion for average, ordinary lust. And he didn’t want to scare her away.

But there in the museum, with dozens of giggling school children on the other side of the room, Cooper hadn’t been able to keep himself from touching her.

He watched himself gently touch her cheek—God, her skin was so smooth, so soft—and she turned to look up at him, surprise in her eyes. She wasn’t expecting him to touch her.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper.

Josie blushed. She actually blushed, looking down, away from him. Her eyelashes lay against her cheeks, remarkably long and thick and dark. Perfection, Cooper thought. Everything about her was perfect.

And then she glanced back up into his eyes and smiled. Perfection had never been so perfect. Cooper could feel his heart expanding, growing, just like that children’s story about the Grinch, and he couldn’t keep himself from kissing her. He felt himself lean toward her. He knew what he was doing, but he was powerless to stop.

His new, mega-large heart was doing cartwheels, and his stomach was doing flips, and as his mouth met hers, his entire body came damn close to going into shock.

Her lips were sweet and soft and everything he’d been dreaming about right from the first moment he’d spotted her out in the hallway in her office building. He ran his fingers through the soft curls of her hair, drawing her closer to him, kissing her mouth, her cheeks, her nose, breathing in her intoxicating perfume.

He was out of control.

He kissed her lips again, unable to keep himself from tasting them with his tongue, wanting desperately to really,
really
kiss her. He pulled her even closer, and at that contact, as her breasts brushed against his chest, she gasped, involuntarily allowing him passage into the sweetness of her mouth.

Cooper didn’t hesitate. He took advantage and kissed her, deeply, thoroughly, endlessly. And, hot damn! She kissed him back.

Heaven. It was absolute heaven.

He might have backed her up against the Plexiglas display window and kept on kissing her, if he hadn’t suddenly realized that they were standing in the middle of a public place in the middle of the day, with an audience the average age of ten.

So he pulled back. His hands were shaking as he released her, and he jammed them into the pockets of his jeans. He couldn’t read the expression on her face and he panicked. “Sorry,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry if I offended you—”

But Josie laughed. “Where I come from, if a man kisses a woman like that, it means that he likes her,” she said. “Why on earth would
that
offend me?”

Cooper had laughed, too. If he hadn’t known it before, he knew it for sure now—Josie Taylor was without a doubt the most perfect woman in the universe. And he was hopelessly, permanently, and eternally in love with her.

He wanted to tell her, but he was still afraid of scaring her away, so he told her in Spanish.
“Te quiero,”
he said softly, knowing she didn’t understand.
“Te adoro, mi corazòn.”

Sitting there on the floor, out in the hall outside his apartment door, Cooper rubbed his hands across his face, down his neck to his shoulders. Goddamn, he was tense.

Of course he was tense—his entire world was coming to an end.

True, it wasn’t the perfect world he’d imagined they’d share, back at the Museum of Natural History, back when he’d first kissed Josie. And Josie wasn’t perfect either—in fact, she was far from it. But she was human, and as he’d discovered each of her imperfections, it had only made him love her more.

Suddenly the door opened, and Josie stood there, looking down at him. She was wearing the pair of green and blue plaid pajamas his mother had sent him last year for Christmas, and she’d had to cuff both the sleeves and the legs at least five or six times. They were her favorite cold weather pajamas. Seeing her in them was a reminder that summer was over. Cooper had a bad feeling this winter was going to be colder than ever. He slowly pulled himself to his feet.

“I was worried about you,” she said quietly. She stepped back so he could come inside, but he didn’t move toward her.

Josie didn’t say another word, she just waited. And finally he walked through the door. It wasn’t until she shut and locked the door behind him that she said, “You’re still angry.”

But he shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not angry. Just hurt.”

“Cooper, you’ve got to try to understand,” she said, pressing her fingers to her forehead as if she had a headache.

He stood in the hallway, looking at her. “It goes both ways,” he said quietly. “And I don’t see you trying to understand how I feel.”

Josie had never seen Cooper look so unhappy. She had never seen his eyes so lifeless, his handsome face so subdued. He was standing in front of her, ill at ease in his own home, holding his hat in his big hands. He bent his head, looking down at the floor, and his hair fell across his face, shielding him from her eyes.

“But I
do
understand,” she said. “You don’t really think that I
like
spending all that time in the office, away from you, do you?”

“I don’t know what to think,” he said, looking up at her.

“Oh, Cooper, come
on,
” Josie said, exasperation tingeing her voice.

She could tell from the look in his eyes what he was going to say next, and she tried to stop him. She didn’t want him to say it. “Let’s go into the living room and sit down,” she said almost frantically. “Or into the kitchen. I need something to drink—a cup of tea or—”

“Josie, I really want you to turn down the Fenderson contract.”

She was silent for a long time. Then, without turning to face him, she said, “Please don’t ask me to do that.”

“Too late,” he said, with a brief shadow of his normally ebullient smile. “I already asked.”

Josie didn’t answer. The silence was so complete Cooper could hear the tiny sound the second hand made as it jerked around the dial of his watch. He began to talk, at first to fill in the silence, and then to plead his case.

“I could live with the time you gave me,” he said quietly. “Shit, I
did
live with it for five years. But you know, I always kind of thought it would get better, not worse. I kept thinking, any day now, she’s going to hire someone to take over some of the work she does. Any day now, we’ll be able to go all those places we always talked about going, see all those things we wanted to see.

“Egypt, Joze. We wanted to go to Egypt, remember? And I’ve been dying to take you down to Puerto Rico, and go island-hopping in the Caribbean. I want to take you camping on St. John, and there’s a view from the road to Coki Point in St. Thomas that everyone should be required to see at
least
a dozen times before they die. We were going to cruise to Alaska, hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon . . .”

Cooper shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “When you told me tonight about this contract, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time we went out dancing. That really scared me. I don’t want to turn into one of those people who can’t remember how to laugh.”