8. Cooper
CHAPTER EIGHT
cooper
When Cooper emerges from the water the next morning, he’s greeted by two long bare legs and one perky ass barely covered by the smallest spandex shorts he’s ever seen.
He nearly crashes back into the ocean.
Honestly, he sort of wishes he had. It would have been better than what he actually does, which is hover suspended on the edge of the deck for he has no idea how long with his jaw hanging open like a deranged fish. The shaking of his strained biceps finally snaps him from the daze and he swings his feet onto the wooden planks before standing.
“Good swim?” Sam calls politely as she smoothly glides her body from downward-facing dog into upward-facing dog and looks over her shoulder with a knowing smile. Victory flashes in her warm eyes. It lights a spark in Cooper.
Well played, Samantha Peters.
Well fucking played.
After last night, he’d thought their little game was done. The moment they returned to the bungalow, Sam disappeared inside the bedroom, only emerging once to grab her plate of dinner, and even then she wouldn’t meet his eyes. He’d thought maybe establishing some rules and some deadlines had ruined the entertaining rapport they’d built.
He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t been disappointed by the thought.
So when he woke up to find her bedroom door still firmly shut this morning, he’d come out for a swim more to clear his head than anything else. But it seems that even without his trying, the sight of him in the water affected her enough to prompt a counterattack.
The realization leaves him grinning.
“Excellent swim,” he answers and stretches his arms overhead, drawing Sam’s focus. Her gaze burns a path up his deltoids, along his forearms, all the way to his fingers. He draws in a deep breath, and she zeroes in on his chest, then slides farther down to the ridge of his abdomen, and farther down still, until she distantly swallows. He folds his hands behind his neck with a smirk and flexes his biceps for extra measure.
She snaps out of the daze and finds his eyes with a heated scowl. Next thing he knows, that ass is right back in prime view as she rises hastily into downward-facing dog again. Under the guise of stretching her calves, she wiggles her hips suggestively. One leg kicks into the air before plunging forward in a deep, deep lunge that lets him know exactly how flexible her lithe body is. She lifts her torso and arches back, giving a sneak peek at those two swells hiding beneath her sports bra. Cooper suddenly finds it difficult to swallow.
“I, uh, didn’t know you did yoga.”
The edges of her lips twitch. “When the mood arises.”
Something is definitely a-rising, and it sure as shit ain’t a mood.
Dammit.
He adjusts his feet, trying to stop his body from reacting. Unfortunately, his wet bathing suit clings like a second skin, hiding nothing. A smug look crosses over Sam’s face before she folds herself back over and repeats the process on her other side.
Rather than stand there and continue ogling her like a creep, he goes back inside, grabs some water, and watches from the other side of the glass like any self-respecting stalker would do. When she finishes and starts rolling up the mat, he hastily grabs a nearby book and dives onto the couch. He tucks a hand behind his head to give the illusion of comfort before she walks back inside. Sam pauses briefly in the doorway and sweeps her gaze in his direction. He keeps his face resolutely still.
“Good book?” she asks, tone far too innocent.
What’s her angle? “Yup.”
“Hmm. Looks a little out of your league.”
“Why? Because cowboys can’t read?”
“No…” She pauses for effect. He can’t help but flick his gaze in her direction. She smirks the moment their eyes make contact. “Because it’s upside down.”
He cuts back to the book.
Well, shit.
Soft laughter trickles in her wake as she makes her way to the table where her work is already waiting. He stuffs the book beneath a pillow and watches her fill a glass with water, then take a seat. His cover is blown anyway. He might as well be honest with his interest. Sam doesn’t seem to mind. Without glancing in his direction, she takes a long sip, neck arching back as her muscles work to swallow. Then she eases open her laptop. Within seconds, the quiet fills with the steady clicking of keys. She stares intently at the screen. It’s admirable how quickly she sinks into whatever she’s doing—or it would be, except the more focused she becomes, the more she seems to fold in on herself, shrinking, shrinking, shrinking until the beautiful, confident, challenging woman he spoke to minutes before all but disappears. It’s different from simple concentration, deeper somehow. He’s not sure how he knows, but he can just tell her soul is weary as her shoulders hunch and her lips bend into a slight frown. Energy that was once infectious just seeps away. Gone.
Cooper’s never been one for life behind a desk. He’d rather spend the day fixing a hundred yards of barbed wire than sit for half an hour crunching numbers. Both are necessary evils, but only one allows for fresh air, sunshine, and the ache of a job well done. He can appreciate that not everyone thinks like him. But all he wants to do is shake her and say, Look where you are! What the hell are you doing?
He should just leave her to it.
He should walk away.
He should let it go.
He should .
But he can’t.
“Working?” he inquires softly.
“Mm-hmm,” comes the distracted reply.
“Can I ask why?”
“My boss is meeting with a client in about six hours. I need to finish inputting his changes to this deck and then double-check a few projections for the report he’s presenting. It’s this big acquisition we’ve been working on for months. He’s already pissed I’m not there, but Em needed me, so…” She trails off before clearing her throat. “Anyway, I should be done by the time we need to leave for jet skiing.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
A slight crease forms between her brows. “No?”
“I meant, why this job? What about it do you love so much that you’re okay giving up all your time? Because if you can’t take a break in a place like this, then I imagine when you’re home, it’s even worse. And I get it. When I’m home, the ranch comes first. Work comes first. I barely have time to get off the property. But I know why I do it. So why do you?”
She snorts. “Money.”
“Money?” He doesn’t know why he expected more. “That’s it?”
“That’s everything in this world, cowboy.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so.” She finally glances up from the screen, a bit of that spark returning. “It’s what got you here, isn’t it? Money to help your ranch. And my sister. Money to build her business. And probably everyone else on the show, willing to play whatever role and spill whatever secrets for a little access to some cold, hard cash. Money makes the world go round. And when you have it, you get to choose what direction everyone else has to spin. I made a promise to myself a long time ago that I’d be the one to control the merry-go-round, not ride on it.”
He stares at her pensively as she refocuses on her computer. There’s more to that story, he’s sure, but he knows better than to push. The worst thing to do with a spooked horse is force it. A little patience works wonders.
“But why banking?” he asks instead, keeping it surface. “A lot of jobs are lucrative. Doctors. Lawyers. Agents. Techies.”
“I like numbers.” She shrugs, then offers a sudden grin. “I was probably the first prom queen in Georgia to also be a Mathlete.”
“A Mathlete?”
“You know, on the math team? Mean Girls was practically my autobiography.”
He arches a brow.
She shakes her head with a laugh. “We went to states, and would have won if one of the guys on my team hadn’t been so hungover he could barely see straight let alone solve a differential equation. If you think football players know how to party, you’ve never met a nerd on a Saturday night with access to an empty house and a fully stocked liquor cabinet.”
“No, can’t say that I have.”
“Consider yourself lucky.” Then under her breath, she adds, “His naive parents. Bless their foolish hearts.”
“So math, then? Math and money?”
“And the simplicity.” She chews on her bottom lip for a moment. He’s mesmerized by the sight of her teeth biting into that plush pink skin. “It might not seem like it, but banking is pretty black and white when it comes down to it. I don’t need to make life-or-death decisions like a doctor. I don’t need to dissect every possible meaning of a single word in a contract like a lawyer, or worry about representing the wrong guy. I thought about tech for a hot second in college, but I can’t code worth a damn. Businesses are relatively simple. They either make money or lose it. The math either makes sense or it doesn’t. The numbers don’t lie. They don’t cheat. They can’t leave you. Can’t hurt you. They don’t get sick. They’re problems that can be solved. And I like that, I guess. I like knowing there’s an answer.”
Sam blinks and her pupils shrink as she returns from wherever it is that she went while she spoke. Her eyes widen slightly before she swallows. A hint of worry etches into the lines of her face, as if she’s said too much. She takes a deep breath before plastering on a forced smile.
He wants to know who lied to her. Who cheated her. Who hurt her. Who got sick. Every word out of her mouth is a revelation, but he knows enough about her to know that if he asks now, she’ll cut and run. So he offers a little bit of himself up instead to put them on even ground.
“I can understand wanting answers. I used to search for them in all the wrong places. On the back of a wild bronco. At a bar. In a stranger’s touch. Anywhere and everywhere but the one place I eventually found them—home. My mom used to say, Not every cowboy needs to ride alone . And I heard her. I knew what she meant. But I didn’t get it, not really, until she was gone.”
“Gone?”
“She passed away six years ago. Early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I appreciate that.”
“So what did she mean?”
“That I could be standing in the middle of a crowded room and still be alone. That I could be engaged, or married, or surrounded by friends, but if I didn’t open up to any of them, if I kept riding alone, I’d always be that way when I didn’t have to be. And my dad didn’t have to be. And guess what? You don’t either.”
“Me?” She rears back. “I’m not.”
“Numbers might not lie or cheat or leave, but they can’t hold you either, Samantha. And neither can money.”
A frown curves her plump lips before a sly expression overtakes her features. He watches her walls refortify in real time. “You’ve clearly never met any of my colleagues.”
“I suppose not, but—”
“Cooper?” She stops him. “Rule four.”
Nothing personal. No sharing secrets. No going deep. He shuts his mouth, respecting her wishes. But even though she gets her way, a sigh spills out. It’s a reluctant, heavy sound pulled directly from the crevice he knows exists somewhere in her heart.
“I really do need to get back to work,” she says, tone almost apologetic. “I’ll meet you for our jet ski in a few hours, okay?”
“Whatever you say, Cuj.”
She snorts and rolls her eyes before getting sucked into her screen. He watches one moment longer, then turns away. It’s too painful a reminder of all the time he lost being angry, being lonely, being too wrapped up in his own feelings to pay attention to the things that really mattered. All the time his dad has wasted too, like father like son. They were so preoccupied with each other, with the ranch and his rebellion and the legacy his father was determined to fulfill, they didn’t even notice his mother was sick until she was too far gone for it to matter.
Maybe if he hadn’t joined the rodeo for a year, he would’ve seen the signs. Maybe if he hadn’t moved out, and gone to college, and done anything and everything to get away, he would’ve noticed how odd it was that she kept forgetting the secret ingredient to Nana’s raisin pie or how strange it was that the wranglers had needed to help her find her way back to the house that had been her home for nearly thirty years. And maybe if his father hadn’t been so focused on trying to bring him home, he would’ve had time to realize it wasn’t normal he had to tell her the same story three times for her to absorb it and it wasn’t quirky that she kept having trouble keeping track of the date and it wasn’t a simple case of growing older that made her forget her words in the middle of a conversation. These little tidbits seemed so innocuous because they weren’t the focus until one day, so suddenly at the time but so painfully obvious in hindsight, the woman he thought of as his mother had all but slipped away.
He came home then, to fragments and moments and slivers of clarity—time he would treasure forever—but it wasn’t enough to ease the guilt of not being there when it mattered.
Not every cowboy needs to ride alone.
She tried to tell him. Over and over again, she tried to tell him. The old Westerns didn’t have it right. That romantic image of a lone man and his horse trotting off into the sunset was a sham. A lie. And even when he thought he understood, when he found a sweet girl and brought her home to meet his parents and tried to promise his mother he wouldn’t be alone, she still patted his cheek and lovingly called him a fool. It wasn’t until she died and he saw the utter devastation in his father’s eyes that he understood. He would always be alone, in a crowded room, in a marriage, in his empty home, until he found someone who wouldn’t just be on his arm, but at his side and in his heart and wrapped so tightly around his soul he didn’t ever want to let go.
Cooper hasn’t found her yet, but at least he gets it now. At least he knows. At least he’s looking.
And he hopes one day, Sam will be too.
But it won’t be today.
Today, she’s too blinded by her laptop and those dollar signs and a fear he doesn’t quite understand.
So he leaves her to it and retreats to the suitcase tucked into the corner of the room to retrieve the Canon EOS 5DS carefully resting near the top. It’s been seven long weeks since he held the professional-grade camera in his hands. When he originally packed it, he had no idea that the “no pictures” rule on set would apply to this too. He figured his phone would be confiscated since the social media and communications bans in the contract had practically been underlined in red ink, but when Jake found the camera nestled in his things, to the vault it went. Cooper nearly had a conniption. The once state-of-the-art, now mildly outdated camera had belonged to his mother. It was one of the few pieces of her he had left, and he planned to honor her by taking pictures all around the globe the same way he still did whenever he had time at the ranch, capturing little moments she would have loved. Instead, he found himself muttering “Careful. Careful. CAREFUL!” as the producer slung it over his shoulder and carried it away. He sent a silent prayer to the heavens to keep it safe during filming.
Cooper turns the camera over in his hands and inspects it for damage, but finds none. Relief lifts an invisible weight from his shoulders. The only thing he missed more than this camera is his horse, Nutcracker—a sorrel American quarter horse with a white stripe down her nose. To the uninformed, her bright red coat would seem the source of her name. Unfortunately, it’s not. Not even close. She earned her name by completely busting his balls during the eight weeks it took to break her in. Literally, busting his balls. The wranglers used to line up along the fence to watch him hold on for dear life while she bucked like a beast possessed. The name was their idea.
God, I miss her.
He’s never spent this much time away from her. He’s never spent this much time away from a horse, period.
She’ll probably kill me when I get back. Out of spite.
He chuckles softly to himself and dips his head beneath the camera strap. It feels good to have something familiar in his hands, a little taste of home. He’s surprised how much he misses it. The ranch. The animals. The memories.
Cooper waits until he leaves the bungalow before switching the camera on. Like always, he takes a steadying breath before he lifts the viewfinder to his eye. A warm tingle spreads across his chest, equal parts pleasure and pain. He never feels closer to his mom than he does like this, with her prized possession a gentle weight against his cheekbone, and he never misses her more. Photography was her passion, her calling. When her camera is in his hands, it’s as if she’s alive again through his eyes, whispering in his ear to line up the composition and test the light and fiddle with the exposure. Even in her darkest days, she never lost her talent. She couldn’t always remember his face. She couldn’t always remember her age or their house or when and where exactly she was. But she remembered this. Right until the very end, when she stopped registering the sound of his voice and lost the ability to speak and could do little more than shuffle on unsteady feet while he kept an arm around her to keep her from falling, she could press the shutter on the camera, her whole body relaxing with that subtle…
Click.
Tension oozes from his body.
Click.
His stress melts away.
Click.
The world somehow both fades and comes into sharp focus, worries replaced by lines and shades and shapes and colors.
For you, Mom.
He presses the button.
And also for me.