The Bad Boy. Leah Vale
you have any idea how good you smell?” and indulged himself by rubbing his cheek against her hair, remembering too late that he hadn’t shaved since before he’d gone to watch the ball game at the bar.
She relaxed against him and her fingers started moving in his hair. He could have sworn he heard her murmur, “Oh, crap.”
Footsteps sounded on the hardwood floor out in the hall, clearly heading toward the den, and they both froze.
Cooper released her and stepped away, but a few strands of her hair followed him, leaving her looking like someone had rubbed a balloon against the side of her head. She fixed her wide, surprisingly censure-free gaze on him just before Joseph reentered the room.
“Hopefully, Alexander will be joining us soon,” Joseph said, returning to his chair behind the desk and allowing Cooper and Sara time to regain their respective seats. His smile of encouragement suggested he was oblivious to what had just been going on in his den. “Do you have a better grasp of things now, Cooper?”
A cough sounded from the chair next to him, but Cooper simply smiled and shrugged. “There’s still so much to know. But I’m eager for the chance to feel my way along.”
Old Joe nodded sagely, definitely oblivious to what Cooper was really referring to. “You’ll get to it all, I’m sure.”
Cooper couldn’t keep from glancing at Sara, who was staring straight ahead, doing a bang-up job of appearing only mildly interested, aside from the raging blush on her cheeks and elegant throat. He added, “One can hope.”
She didn’t look at him, but her nostrils flared and her chin went up a notch.
Joseph asked, “Did any of our divisions snag your interest?”
Cooper cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “Well…”
From the doorway behind them a deep voice said, “I know the perfect place for him in the company.”
Cooper’s pulse jumped and he turned in his seat, seeing Alexander McCoy up close for the first time.
In the past, Cooper had always thought of Alexander’s physical appearance as nothing more than a younger version of Marcus’s, though their similarities weren’t striking. Now he realized Alexander was more an older version of himself. They were roughly the same size and put together the same way. Definitely the same hair and eyes. Guilt and remorse sparked white hot. How could he have doubted his mother for a second?
But because of that doubt, he’d generally tried to avoid anything having to do with the McCoys, doing his damnedest to pretend they didn’t exist. Though he was aware that the media had portrayed Alexander as the serious, down-to-business McCoy, well equipped to take the corporation into the next era.
Jaw tight, he stood and met the other man’s gaze.
Alexander’s expression was just as wary. This man didn’t trust easily. No big shock there, considering recent revelations. He wasn’t going to embrace anyone without question for a long time, if ever. Maybe making the McCoys pay wouldn’t be as easy as Cooper had thought. Alexander looked as though he wouldn’t miss much.
But Cooper never could resist a challenge.
Apparently equally clueless to the tension between the two younger men, Joseph said, “Excellent. Where?”
Not breaking eye contact with Cooper, Alexander answered, “With his construction experience, he’d do well handling the new stores—”
Sara made an odd sort of noise, but Cooper couldn’t tear his gaze away from his half brother’s. There was so much of himself in the other man’s eyes, and so much he’d never seen before. Primarily, what it was like growing up a McCoy in name, as well as blood.
Cooper thought it amazing that Marcus had looked at this guy every damn day and lied like the dog he was.
Shifting his attention finally to Joseph, Alexander concluded, “Under the guidance of the VP of Operations, of course.”
“Of course,” Joseph concurred, sounding pleased. “At least, at first. So what do you think, Cooper? You interested in working for Ms. Barnes?”
Cooper glanced at Joseph. “Ms. Barnes?”
Alexander came to stand behind Sara’s chair, a suspicious glint in his steel-blue eyes. “Let me guess—no formal introductions were made. Allow me. Cooper Anders, I’d like you to meet Sara Barnes, vice president of Operations. Your new boss.”
Cooper had to snap his mouth shut for the second time that day.
Damn. He’d nearly felt up his boss.
Chapter Four
Monday morning, Cooper unbuttoned his charcoal suit coat as he turned the desk chair he occupied away from the bucolic view out the office window of Vice President of Operations Sara Barnes on the fifteenth floor of McCoy Enterprises headquarters. He faced the expanse of her orderly desk.
Just as he’d expected: no messy piles of papers, In basket clearly tackled on a regular basis, a crystal candy dish half full of red heart candies sharing a corner with a photo frame that matched the dark burgundy of her desk chair and the other pieces of upholstered furniture in the spacious corner office. The picture was of a fresh-faced Sara with her arms wrapped around an older gentleman sporting the same wide smile.
Probably her dad. The twinge of an ancient hurt made Cooper pull his gaze away. There’d been no father-son photo-ops in his life.
The day’s agenda, typed on McCoy corporate letterhead, awaited her front and center. Meetings, meetings and more meetings. My, but she was a busy girl. Hopefully, too busy to notice whatever he might be up to.
He figured she’d come blasting through the door any second, furious that he’d slipped out of The Big House—he still couldn’t believe they called their mansion that—and made it to the office while she waited patiently downstairs for him to roll out of the sack.
He’d been up and ready long before dawn, prowling his new home. Sleeping hadn’t exactly been easy since old Joe had insisted Cooper move his stuff into a suite of rooms in The Big House, accommodations that were larger than Cooper’s whole apartment. He’d roamed around, feeling like a thief with a burning desire to take the one thing he couldn’t get his hands on: what was to him a false veneer of moral purity and trustworthiness still clinging stubbornly to the McCoy name.
Sorry, but in his book, if you were willing to do the crime you had to be willing to do the time. After his mother’s death, he’d made the bad choice more often than he cared to count, but at least he had always owned up to the mistakes. Unlike his hound-dog father.
Cooper fisted his hands on the arms of the chair. Marcus had gotten off way too easy becoming a grizzly snack. And clearly Cooper had a much different definition of the right thing than had Joseph.
And he’d see to it that there were consequences.
Since Sara always seemed to be around, he’d initially been concerned that she’d dog his every step. But the housekeeper, Helen—Alexander’s mother, no less, still working for the McCoys as a glorified servant—had told him the first night that Ms. Barnes lived in a quaint apartment above the carriage-house–style detached garage. He supposed that qualified as a “little house.”
If he hadn’t seen firsthand the adoration for the McCoys shining in her big green eyes, he would assume her loyalty stemmed from a desire to keep her cozy digs. Which happened to be located a little too close for Cooper’s comfort and did absolutely nothing to help him sleep.
But thinking about her silky hair beneath his cheek, the sweet, cinnamony smell of her breath—he jerked his gaze to the candy dish and smiled—beat the hell out of remembering the feel of Joseph’s hand on his shoulder and the warmth in the old man’s eyes. A look he’d never seen once from his mother’s father.
His smile