Embraced by Love (6 page)

She, however, was looking forward to Cooper being only a short walk down the hall from her.

Up until a year and a half ago, when she made the decision to move her offices from the Village to midtown, she and Cooper had still met every day for lunch. She missed that badly, and she suspected he did, too. She missed the wonderful breath of fresh air he had provided for her in the middle of the day. He had given her a healthy dose of insanity and laughter in an otherwise too sane and serious world.

As if he somehow knew she had been thinking about him, Cooper pushed open the door to the bedroom and peeked in. He smiled when he saw her looking at him, and came into the room, bringing the aromatic smell of fresh tomato sauce with him.

His jeans fit his long, muscular legs comfortably, and she reached out and touched the soft, faded denim as he sat next to her on the bed.

“Dream anything good?” he asked, leaning forward to kiss her lightly.

Josie thought for a moment, trying to remember. Finally she shook her head. “Nothing my subconscious saw fit to keep in my memory,” she said. “What time is it? When did you get up?”

“Four-thirty,” he said, climbing under the covers with her, “and about an hour ago. I made some phone calls, started dinner . . .”

“I could tell,” she said, snuggling up against him. “It smells great.”

She was naked and he was fully clothed, and as his hands swept up and down her body, she suspected that that was going to change very soon.

He was wearing a white T-shirt with the logo for the local Y on the front and—

Josie sat up, startling Cooper. “Your basketball game,” she said, slapping her forehead. “You have a basketball game. Oh, Lord, I forgot all about it!”

Cooper laughed, pulling her back toward him. “That game was over hours ago,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”

“It was a big enough deal for you to blow off your client,” she said.

“You,” he said, kissing her, “are not a client.”

His hands slipped around her waist, and then lower. After five years, he knew just how to touch her to make her crazy. But she pulled away from him.

“Cooper, you’re distracting me, and I want to talk,” she said.

He stared at her in mock disbelief. “Talk? We talked all morning,” he complained with an exaggerated sigh of despair. “All you ever want to do is talk.”

Josie laughed. “And all
you
ever want to do is . . .
not
talk.”

Cooper grabbed her and pinned her to the bed as his mouth roved over her breasts, his tongue teasing her nipples to life. “I come in here and find my gorgeous wife all naked and refreshed from a nap,” he said, his blue eyes lit with amusement after she begged for mercy. “Can you blame me if the first thing that comes to mind doesn’t involve much spoken communication?”

“Talk to me first,” Josie pleaded.

“What do you want to talk about?” he asked, leaving a trail of kisses as his mouth journeyed down toward her belly button.

“Yesterday, when you were so angry . . .” Josie said.

The kisses stopped. Cooper pulled his head out from under the covers. He pushed his hair out of his face as he looked at her. “Let’s not talk about that,” he said.

“I want to know what you said to me in Spanish,” she said.

Cooper closed his eyes and collapsed back onto the pillows. “I don’t remember,” he said.

“You do, too,” she said. “What, was it so awful . . . ? You called me terrible names, didn’t you?”

“No!”

“Then what?”

Cooper sighed and propped himself up on one elbow so that he was facing her. “See, when you first said that we had to talk,” he said, “I thought you wanted to talk about starting a family.”

“Starting a . . .
babies,”
she said suddenly, with realization in her voice.
“That’s
why you said that about babies. Lord, and I thought you were losing your marbles.”

He smiled ruefully. “I was,” he said. “That’s what I was shouting about when you couldn’t understand me. I was yelling about the injustice of . . . um, an emasculating woman who . . . uh, took away her husband’s right to propagate.”

“Wow,” Josie said. This was a side of Cooper that she hadn’t had a clue existed. He’d never mentioned children or having a family, and she’d just assumed that he was as content to wait as she was. It was a decision that didn’t need to be made right now, and she was just as happy putting it off. The thought of having children didn’t particularly appeal to her, but then again, the thought of
not
having children didn’t appeal to her either. But if having a family was something Cooper wanted . . .

“I went a little crazy,” he said. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“Maybe you said it because you meant it,” Josie said slowly.

He met her steady gaze, and his blue eyes were serious. “You know, I thought about that,” he said. “But, to tell you the truth, Joze, I really don’t see how we’ll be able to fit kids into our lifestyle. I mean, thinking realistically.”

“Wanting something has nothing to do with thinking realistically,” Josie said.

But Cooper shook his head. “No, babe, I really don’t think I want children.” He smiled. “Certainly not during the next thirteen months.”

Josie wasn’t sure whether to feel disappointed or relieved. “What about some day?” she asked.

Cooper kissed her. “I’m happy when you’re with me,” he said simply. “Start adding other people to the equation—people who want your time and attention, including and maybe in particular short people who can’t do things for themselves—and I start getting less and less happy. No, I don’t think I want the hassle. But hey, I’m willing to talk about it again in, oh, say, three or four years.”

Three or four years. She could keep the thought bouncing around in her subconscious, and maybe by then she’d know what she wanted. And if that was different than what Cooper wanted in three or four years, then they’d just have to compromise.

Josie sighed with contentment. They’d made it this far with compromise. They could surely work through any other problems that came their way, no problem.

“Have we finished talking?” Cooper asked, a dangerous glint in his eyes.

“I think we’ve finished all the spoken communication,” Josie said with a smile.

She closed her eyes as Cooper disappeared back under the covers. It was definitely time to
not
talk.

FOUR

I
T WAS
five minutes after ten on the first Monday in November. A dreary autumn rain was falling outside the windows of Josie’s office, and the dark, sullen sky was more suitable for early evening than midmorning.

Josie was reviewing the week’s schedule with Annie, one of her new assistants, while Frank, her other assistant, was sorting through the morning’s mail.

David Chase sat patiently across from her desk, waiting to discuss some minute detail of one of the programs the staff was designing for Fenderson Co.

The door to her office was open, and people passed in the hallway, coming and going to the stairs that led directly down to the other offices on the floor below.

“The Fenderson people are stopping by some time this week to check on our progress,” Annie reminded her. But Taylor-Made Software was only two months into the project, and there simply wasn’t much for them to see, certainly nothing to demo, not at this point. Yet the Fenderson people—the damned Fenderson people, as Cooper was fond of calling them—insisted on these regular visits.

It was the bum reputation that came with being a computer software company, Cooper told her. Stereotypically, computer programmers were all geniuses, yet they were all also societal freaks, hardly more than children in adult bodies. Those damned Fenderson people were trying to sneak up on them, trying to catch them all sitting around playing Nintendo on Fenderson’s dime.

“Call them and find out which day they’ll be here,” Josie directed Annie, as the tall, blond woman took notes on a legal pad. “And don’t hang up until they give you a firm date. Then try to narrow them down so at least we’ll know if they’re coming in the morning or afternoon. I
hate
being surprised.”

David lifted an obviously skeptical eyebrow at that, which Josie pointedly ignored. After two months, David
still
wasn’t used to Cooper’s presence in the office. And Coop could be extremely present at times.

“Andrew Simon still wants to meet with you early this week,” Annie said in her calm, efficient voice. “When he called, he wanted to set up a lunch meeting.”

“See if you can’t get him to come over here . . . Thursday afternoon,” Josie said after checking her calendar. “I don’t want to do lunch unless it’s really necessary.”

Her lunches were reserved for Cooper these days. It hadn’t taken her long to get back into the pattern of taking an hour-long break with him in the middle of the day. Sometimes they went out to eat, sometimes they picnicked in one of their offices, and sometimes—and it still felt deliciously scandalous in the middle of the work day—they retreated to their private living quarters and spent the time not eating lunch at all.

Even though Josie had made a point of moving the bed and the other furniture into the office late on a Sunday night when there was no chance any of her employees would be around, David at least knew that she and Cooper often stayed overnight, usually going home only on the weekends.

“What does David think when I tell my secretary to hold all my calls,” she had wondered aloud to Cooper.

“He thinks you’re in here getting it on with your crazy-assed, long-haired, lucky-son-of-a-bitch husband,” Coop had told her with a grin. “And if I had my way, he’d be right more often.”

It was working, Josie thought as Annie moved to the computer on the other side of the office, and Frank brought the opened mail over to her desk. True, she was still putting in long days, but Cooper was there, forcefully dragging her away from her computer whenever he decided she—or he—had had enough. They’d managed to take in several movies and even go out dancing three or four times in the past two months. She was on schedule with the work, she was managing to get enough sleep, and Lord, it was hard to believe, but her sex life was better than ever.

As Josie sifted through the pile of mail, the office intercom system clicked on.

“This is the captain speaking,” Cooper’s voice intoned in his best William Shatner imitation. “All hands to battle stations, repeat, all . . . hands . . . to battle stations. Ready photon torpedoes and brace for impact—”

He was broadcasting all over this floor, and downstairs, too. Josie could hear his voice echoing in the hall. She looked at the clock on the wall. Ten-fifteen. He was right on schedule.

“It’s time for the coffee break dance!” Cooper said. “Mr. Spock, you have the comm!” A pulsating Latin beat started playing over the intercom—it was the “Star Trek” theme, salsa style. Josie could hear whoops and shouts of laughter from the offices down the hall.

Her private door burst open, and Coop leapt into her office. He was wearing an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, a pair of Bermuda shorts, and nothing on his feet.

He pulled Josie up and began to dance with her.

“Frank, Annie!” Cooper cried. “Mambo! I insist!” He turned to David and said in a calmer voice, “Dave, feel free to sit this one out.” Then back to Frank and Annie who were clumsily, laughingly trying to oblige. “Come on, Frank, you remember what I taught you! Step on the two. One
two
three four!
Uno
dos
tres quatro!
That’s it! My God, you’ve got it!”

Cooper danced Josie out into the corridor.

Everywhere, up and down the hall, people were dancing or laughing or at the very least standing up and stretching.

As the song drew to a close, Cooper danced Josie back into her office, kissed her on the hand, and vanished behind her private door. The last few notes of the song faded out, and Cooper came back on the intercom.

“The coffee break dance is over,” he said, sounding remarkably like a smooth-voiced, sedated deejay from a Muzak radio station. “Please return to work.”

The intercom clicked off.

Throughout the office, the staff cheered and applauded loudly.

Annie and Frank were smiling, but David looked decidedly unimpressed. “Isn’t this getting a little old?” he asked. “Every day for two months at ten-fifteen—”

“Cooper lets off a little steam,” Josie finished for him. “I think you’re the only one in the office who objects.” She turned to Annie and Frank. “Am I right?”

“Absolutely,” Frank said. “Everyone I’ve talked to loves it. Cooper’s achieved a kind of a legend status here. You know, I overheard some of the junior staff saying that they can’t wait to get to work in the morning to see what your husband’s going to do next. Cooper’s ten-fifteen coffee break is being touted as one of the perks of working for Taylor-Made Software.” He grinned. “He’s even teaching a bunch of us to mambo, every day after work in the downstairs lobby.”

“Oh joy,” David said dryly.

“You should try it,” Annie said to him, pushing her long, blonde hair behind her ear. She blushed very slightly as he turned to look at her in pointed disbelief and disapproval over the tops of his glasses.

According to Cooper, Josie’s new female assistant had “a thing” for David Chase. Beauty and the Geek, Coop had called it, saying that this was, indeed, proof that love was blind.

If Cooper was right, and Josie had seen very little evidence to support his theory, Annie was going to need some help to pull David’s attention away from work and towards her. Cooper had suggested locking the pair into one of the elevators for a day or two, but Josie thought that was, perhaps, a little too extreme.

“All right,” she said, sitting down at the computer with David. “Show me the glitches you’ve found.”

Tuesday morning dawned clear and cold. Josie came out of the bathroom wrapped in her robe, and Cooper sleepily rolled over in bed to watch her get dressed.

The fancy lingerie he had bought her had become standard fare underneath her conservative business suits. Today she wore a red-orange lace bra and matching panties. Cooper liked the fact that he alone would know she had it on under her trim, mannishly-cut dark blue skirt and jacket.

Catching his half-opened eyes on her as she brushed out her wet hair, Josie smiled. “Let’s go out for lunch today,” she said. “It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow, so if we don’t get outside today, I’m gonna have cabin fever by Thursday.”

It was the only drawback to working and living in the same building. They could conceivably arrive for work on Monday morning and not breathe a bit of fresh air until they left Saturday night.

“I was just thinking how much I’d like to stay in today,” Cooper murmured, watching Josie sit on the edge of the bed to put on her pantyhose.

She glanced at him, laughter in her eyes. “Bad day,” she said. “The Fenderson people are scheduled to arrive at three this afternoon. It would be just my luck if they were three hours early.”

“We can tell everyone we’re going out, then sneak back in,” he suggested.

“Let’s compromise,” she said, crossing to the closet to pull her blouse on. “If I work through lunch today, I’ll quit by six. We can go to that little health food restaurant down in the Village, maybe take in a movie. Sleep at the apartment tonight . . . ?”

Cooper held out his hand. “Deal.”

Josie eyed his outstretched hand suspiciously as she zipped her skirt. “You’re going to pull me down onto the bed,” she said, “and get me all messed up, aren’t you?”

He smiled up at her angelically. “Yes.”

She laughed. “Well, at least you’re honest.” She put on her jacket and her heels, then checked her makeup in the mirror. Her hair was still damp, but fifteen more minutes in the office air and it would be dry.

“You look gorgeous, and very scary,” Cooper said. “Those damned Fenderson people will be shaking in their shoes.”

“Speaking of the Fenderson people . . .” Josie started, turning back to him.

“Don’t worry.” Cooper smiled. “I won’t do anything to embarrass old Dave. I promise.”

Josie crossed to the bed and kissed him. “See you later.”

She went directly into her office, closing the door gently behind her.

It was still early, a few minutes before seven, but Annie was already in. She could smell coffee brewing from the little kitchen down the hall.

Annie and Frank took turns coming in early in the morning. Frank was young, single, and right out of college. Annie was closer to Josie’s age, but hadn’t finished college and was a single mother of a twelve-year-old girl. Josie had taken to her instantly, and to date hadn’t regretted hiring someone without the prerequisite liberal arts degree.

When Josie had hired her assistants, she had told them that she was prepared to pay more than twice as much as they could expect to make anywhere else, but that they’d have to work twice as hard, at least for these first thirteen months.

As if on cue, Annie carried in a steaming mug of coffee, and a bowl filled with slices of cantaloupe and banana. She set them both on Josie’s desk.

“Morning,” Josie said, her eyes glued to her computer screen. “Let me know as soon as David comes in, will you?”

No sooner had Annie left the room than she stuck her head back in the door.

“He’s in,” she said.

“Tell him I need him,” Josie said, “as soon as he can get his bod in here.”

“And all this time I thought you didn’t care,” David teased, coming into the office.

Surprised, Josie looked up from the computer to see him smiling at her. “Heck,
you’re
in a good mood today,” she said. “What’s the occasion?”

“The rain stopped, I guess.” He shrugged, sitting down next to her and looking at the computer screen. “Annie, can you get me some coffee, too?” he asked, already absorbed by the information on the screen.

Josie and David worked without stopping for three solid hours, with Annie and Frank flitting in and out of the executive office like silent ghosts.

Suddenly, midmorning, despite her orders not to be disturbed, Josie’s telephone rang. At a nod from her boss, Annie turned on the speaker phone.

“Yes?” Josie said curtly, raising her voice to be heard.

“I’m sorry to interrupt.” It was the front receptionist, and the woman sounded flustered. “But Mr. Saunders and Mr. Blake are here—from Fenderson?”

The Fenderson people. Josie glanced at her watch. Almost five hours early.

“Oh, damn,” Josie said. “All right. Send them up.”

Frank was on the other side of the room, sorting the mail. He stood suddenly, nearly knocking his chair over, and ran out of the office. Josie stared after him in surprise, and Annie quickly picked up the opened letters and envelopes that fluttered to the floor in his wake.

David got to his feet, adjusting his already adjusted tie, and checking his perfect hair in the reflective glass of a framed poster on the wall.

Josie stood up, too, and moved toward the door, opening it wide just as the Fenderson people were ushered up the stairs. She greeted Saunders and Blake politely by name and showed them into her office.

“Can I offer you gentlemen some coffee?” Josie said. “And perhaps a donut?”

Saunders, the older of the two men, smiled benignly. “That would be nice. After all, it
is
just about time for a coffee break.”

Josie heard David inhale sharply at Saunders’s words, and saw him move his head to look up at the clock on the wall. She followed his gaze.

Ten-fourteen.

David’s eyes were panicked as he looked toward Josie’s desk, toward the intercom system sitting there. For one brief instant, she could picture him throwing himself on the intercom, as if it were a grenade.

The sound of the clock’s big hand moving down one minute echoed in the stillness of the room.

Ten-fifteen.

Silence.

One second, two seconds, three seconds, four . . .

David was frozen in place, still staring at the intercom.

“Well,” Josie said, with a nervous laugh, “Annie, if you wouldn’t mind getting us some coffee—”

The intercom speaker clicked on.

“Good morning, staff,” Cooper’s voice said calmly, pleasantly. “It’s ten-fifteen, and time for our coffee break.”

Cooper sounded like, well, Cooper. Josie could see the muscles in David’s jaw working as he clenched his teeth, waiting for the bomb to drop. But Cooper continued in exactly the same vein.

“We’d like to welcome Misters Saunders and Blake from Fenderson Company, Incorporated, to Taylor-Made Software this morning and ask them to join us as we stand up, stretch our legs, and have another cup of decaf while we listen to the allegro movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto number four in G major.”