payback.”
She stilled. “What do you mean?”
Cooper bent toward her, using the opportunity to run his gaze over her perfectly suited features. The extra color he’d put in her cheeks made her even prettier. The fear in her eyes, though, grabbed at his guts. He really shouldn’t have shot the messenger. He knew what it was like when something didn’t go as you’d hoped.
That kinship he felt with her had him explaining gruffly, “Honey, they say revenge is sweet. Well, guess what? It turns out I have a monster sweet tooth.”
With her earnest face turned up to him, Cooper was struck with the strongest urge to kiss her. He brought his face closer still, until he could feel her quick, warm breaths on his lips.
As much as he’d love to stay true to his nature and succumb to the urge, instead he pulled away. “Sorry, honey, but I have to go. I’ve a company to ruin.”
A BOLT OF LIGHTNING couldn’t have stunned Sara Barnes more. The combined force of Cooper Anders’s wholly unexpected and inappropriate behavior and parting statement kept her fused to the spot. She watched him saunter down the rest of the stairs and away from the county-jail facility in a powerful, confident way only a rare few men could honestly claim.
She purposely chose to label the hot, zinging sensation raising goose bumps all over her as discomfort, stubbornly discounting the undeniable sexuality radiating off his big, fit body and black-haired, blue-eyed masculine beauty.
The pain she’d seen in his eyes and heard in his words I’ve a company to ruin replaced the heat with icy cold dread and set her in motion.
“Mr. Anders!” she called as she hurried after him.
This was going all wrong. Joseph had honored her with his trust to handle retrieving Cooper as quickly and as quietly as possible. Joseph had said he trusted her, as he’d trusted her father, to do this for him. He’d even praised her for being her father’s daughter, which allowed him to count on her completely. There was no higher praise in Sara’s mind.
She couldn’t mess up after finally achieving what she’d worked so hard for. Granted, she’d initially been given her current position at McCoy Enterprises because Alexander, the youngest McCoy—at the time—had been needed to fill the role Marcus had rejected, but she refused to let Joseph down. Especially in this.
Despite her yelling his name, Cooper Anders didn’t slow his pace, turning left when he reached Dependable’s quaint Main Street. Sara broke into a trot and prayed she wasn’t drawing attention to them. Currently, no one seemed to be around and there wasn’t much traffic on the two-lane road, but that didn’t mean someone couldn’t be watching through a window of the municipal buildings or the little deli-and-copy shop on the opposite side of the street. She wasn’t as well known in town as the McCoys, but she should still be careful.
Clearly aware that she was chasing after him, Cooper said over his shoulder, “Do you suppose they’ll make me change my name to McCoy?”
Before she could reply, he continued with a shake of his head. “Nah, that would let the scandal out of the bag for sure.”
As loud as she dared, she answered, “Joseph doesn’t intend to hide your paternity.” Exactly. Not for the first time, she mentally wrung her hands over Joseph’s plan to make public the existence of Marcus’s unplanned children while keeping private as many details as possible.
Cooper came to an abrupt stop beside a flowerpot filled with red petunias, staring at a bus-stop bench displaying McCoy Enterprises’ core advertising slogan, used since Joseph McCoy moved from Kansas City, Missouri, to Dependable and opened his first general retail store, selling everything from toothpaste to tires, forty-five years ago: Don’t trust it if it’s not from the Real McCoy. And in the Show Me State, that trust had had to be earned.
The letter she’d given Cooper crinkled in his tightening grip. “I find that a little hard to believe. Everyone knows how much stock old Joe puts in his upstanding reputation.”
He glanced at her, his disturbingly deep blue eyes so turbulent her heart clutched with empathy. “What I won’t do is drag my mother’s name through the mud with them. The only thing she did wrong was fall in love. A mistake you’ll never catch me making.”
Sara inwardly cringed, appreciating his motivation a little too well. She, too, had learned the hard way that girlish fantasies didn’t translate well to reality.
Then he was off again, his long, muscular legs eating up so much sidewalk Sara had to practically race-walk to keep up. “But, Mr. Anders—”
“Cooper. Mr. Anders was my mom’s dad.”
Considering he’d stood so close to her their breath had mingled, she supposed she could call him by his first name. Besides, he was Joseph’s grandson. “All right, Cooper.”
She dodged water dripping from one of the large flower baskets hung from the lampposts and maintained by McCoy Enterprises’ gardeners as part of Joseph’s town-beautification program, and darted to Cooper’s other side to avoid the next dribbling basket. “This is not about assigning guilt or blame. The fact is, you are Marcus McCoy’s son and your paternal grandfather wants you to take your place in the family.”
Cooper sent her a shrewd glance. “And the family business, right?”
Despite what Cooper had said about having a company to ruin, she couldn’t lie about the stipulations in Marcus’s will. “Yes, and the family business.”
Cooper stopped dead again in the middle of the sidewalk, right in front of the Dependable post office, remodeled years ago to match the municipal building, and faced her. “Why?”
Joseph had trusted her to keep this discreet. With that in mind, she pitched her voice low. “You can ask him yourself. I’m supposed to take you to see him right now. But I imagine he’ll tell you he’s bringing you into the fold, so to speak, because it’s the right thing to do.”
“And he always does the right thing?”
She bristled. “As a matter of fact, he does.”
“Ah.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest. The muscles in his forearms, visible because of his rolled-up sleeves, corded. They’d discovered he was part owner of a construction company. Clearly, he was the working part.
He nodded sagely. “So you think paying a scared, young, pregnant woman to disappear and somehow convincing her to never reveal the identity of her baby’s father is the right thing?”
Despite her sympathy for what Cooper and his mother had gone through, she adamantly shook her head. “Joseph wasn’t a part of that. After the first time, Marcus kept—”
“Oh, yeah, because a million dollars is so easy to—The first time?” he nearly shouted. “There were other—?”
“Not here!” Sara grabbed his arm, his biceps thick and hard beneath her fingers, and pulled him away from the post office door. “I think it’s time I finish what I was sent to do and take you to see Joseph at The Big House—”
“Babe, I just escaped the risk of ending up in the big house.” He aimed a thumb back at the county jail.
“No! The Big House is the name of the McCoys’ home on their estate.”
“So there’re Little Houses?”
She shook her head in frustration. How had she allowed him to fluster her so? “Please, Cooper. Come with me and meet your grandfather. Then you’ll understand everything.”
He dipped his shoulder and lowered his face close to hers again, his breath warm and frighteningly disarming on her cheek. “Honey, like I said before, I understand perfectly. And normally I’d be more than willing to let a cute thing like you drag me off somewhere more private. Hell, I’d let you drag me anywhere. But today is the beginning of what I was put on this earth to do.”
Every