Page 44 of Boss Me
“Yeah. When I was in high school. Even before that. My dad—” He shuddered and looked at my hand, which still rested on his sleeve.
I jerked back like he’d burned me. I’d forgotten about the no-touching rule.
“Never mind,” he said. “Take that dog under those trees. I don’t want him to get in the way. And watch where you step. Roofing nails are a bitch if you’re not wearing work boots.”
“I can help,” I protested. Weakly. I was the son of a lawyer and a teacher. When things needed fixing around the house, they hired a contractor. I’d never built so much as a birdhouse in my brief career in Cub Scouts. I quit the program after I found a spider as big as my hand in my sleeping bag during our first campout.
“You can help by keeping that dog out from underfoot. And make sure you stay hydrated. I’m not carrying you back.”
He stalked away toward the side of the building, loaded up one trowel with a mudlike substance, and smeared it over the mesh like it had insulted his mother.
Me? I did what he told me to do. I sat in the shade with Coco. Well, and I brought the rest of the guys bottles of water from the cooler as the sun rose high overhead. And if my gaze didn’t leave those sculpted muscles of Cooper’s as he bent and lifted the heavy mud, as his arms arced across the side of the new community center, as he squatted to scrape the metal bar that smoothed the surface of the stucco, who could blame me?
17
COOPER
I toiled on the community center until my muscles ached and the crew brought out a cooler full of celebratory beers.
I could practically taste the bitter coolness numbing the back of my throat. But I thanked the guys and left, saying I needed a hot shower.
Make that a cold shower. I’d felt Ben’s gaze stuck to me all day like a caress, and I’d practically pressed myself against the tacky side of the building to hide the bulge in my basketball shorts.
I sent him to the resort bar with a request for something refreshing. Whatever he brought back was sure to be disappointingly nonalcoholic, but it would give me time to settle myself and remember that Ben was still my assistant and not someone I wanted to taste.
But when I returned to the house, it wasn’t empty. Someone was on my deck. A tall someone.
I rolled my shoulders, then I unlocked the gate to the back and stepped through. “Security is shit around here.”
Jamila whirled from where she’d been studying the trellised bougainvillea, her white skirt flaring out around her brown thighs. A grin broke out on her face.
“You’re right. All it took was a little of this”—she demonstrated with a hip-swinging sashay toward me—“and one of these”—she fluttered a wink—“and I was in your compound. With lunch.” She gestured at the spread on the patio table. Two plates for a tête-à-tête. “Or maybe it’s dinner. After traveling all day, I have no idea what time it is.”
I winced. She was worried about me. I knew well what a CEO would have had to reschedule to spend a day away from her business. “Mila, you didn’t have to—”
“The fuck I didn’t. Last we spoke, you were on your way to Boston. My friend Cooper goes on an unplanned vacation exactly zero times in the fifteen years I’ve known him. I’ve got to check that you haven’t been body-snatched. What’s something only the real Cooper would know?”
I snorted. “You have a yellow-rose tattoo on the inside of your—”
“Okay, fine. Though a surprising number of people know about that tattoo.”
“Surprising?” I raised my eyebrows. “This from the woman who, the first time I met her, was sitting in my dorm room in her underwear?”
“I didn’t know then that Jackson could count cards.”
Jackson. My face must have shown some of the bleakness that had blackened my insides because she U-turned off Memory Lane.
“Tell me you’re not glad to see me.”
I kissed her cheek, and her familiar jasmine scent flooded my nose. “Of course I am. But I texted you, I’m fine.”
“Fine?” Her brows arched up. “I suspect you’re anything but. Now. Sit your ass down and tell your BFF Mila all about it.”
I glanced at the gate. Ben would arrive any minute with drinks and that flirty smile of his. And Jamila would see it all. I didn’t need to give her any more ammunition for the stern talking-to I saw in my immediate future.
“Normally, I would—”
“Normally? What’s going on? You’re not drinking again?” She sniffed me, wrinkled her nose, then shook her head. “A secret, then.” She tapped her lips, darkened with deep violet lipstick. “A secret affair! Where is she? Or he? Or they?”
