The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River) Read Online Free Page B

nothing better than to get a drink with Cooper, to continue this innocuous conversation, to be easy. But Cooper wasn’t like the guys she usually had drinks with, and her belly was beginning to churn.
    “Come on, it will be fun,” he said.
    Emma couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so attracted, so tempted. But this attraction was impossible for her, for all the secret reasons that, for a brief moment, she had thought he knew. What did he really want, anyway? To be friends? Please, men never wanted to be friends. So what did he want? A grope in a back room? Probably. It was always that, always physical, wasn’t it? Men always wanted to touch her body, to push it, squeeze it, knead it.
    Emma suddenly moved closer, so that her body touched his, daring him to do it, to put his hands on her. Come on, show me what you want! she silently shouted at him. She tilted her head back and said, “Do you want me to come?”
    Cooper looked confused. His brows dipped as he studied her, but still, he made no move to touch her. “I’d like you to come, yes,” he said, sounding uncertain.
    His response was so different than what Emma expected that she didn’t know how to react. He’d just complicated things completely by proving he was not like other men. He’d passed up the opportunity to grope her, to kiss her, to fill his hands with her breasts, and Emma did the only thing she could think to do in that confusing moment—she turned away from him and started for the door. “Sorry,” she said, “but I have to work.”
    She walked out of the kiddie lounge and left that gorgeous man standing there.
    Emma didn’t see Cooper again until the end of the evening, when almost all the guests had gone home. By then, she was in Reggie’s limousine, his wife and daughter having been sent home in another limousine. Reggie smelled of bourbon and cigars and his hand was between Emma’s thighs. He was leaning toward her when something outside caught his attention, and he rolled down the window to yell at an underling. Cooper happened to be standing on the sidewalk, waiting for his car. His gaze caught Emma’s as Reggie rolled up the window.
    “Fucking morons,” Reggie said, and slid his hand up, between Emma’s legs.
    “Stop it,” she said, and pushed his hand away. She looked out the window and imagined Cooper’s eyes.

ONE
    One Year Later
    Los Angeles, California
    The day Carl Freeman’s call for help came into Thrillseekers Anonymous—something to do with his very public, level-five, megadeath divorce—Cooper and his partners decided who would manage the request with corporate sophistication: Rock-paper-scissors. Eli McCain’s rock crushed Cooper Jessup’s scissors, and as a result, Cooper had to get on the 405 on a Friday afternoon and drive to Carl’s Wilshire Boulevard office.
    It would be an understatement to say that Cooper was not a happy camper when he arrived at the low-slung, nondescript office building. First of all, he hated stuff like this. TA had done a lot of lucrative stunt work for Carl’s studio and they wanted to keep doing that work for him. Which meant that occasionally, they had to do things they weren’t exactly set up or eager to do. Cooper couldn’t imagine what Carl wanted, but “divorce” and “thrillseekers” did not seem to him to go together.
    Second, Cooper hated to see a grown man cry, especially over a messy marriage.
    Third, he was beginning to wonder where his life was going. He was thirty-eight years old and he’d just driven through some of the nation’s worst traffic to talk to this guy about that messy marriage. This was definitely not something Cooper had thought they were signing up to do when he and his best friends had established TA. But lately, this sort of thing seemed more the norm than the exception. And if this was the norm, Cooper wasn’t sure where it left him or TA.
    Carl was on the phone when his secretary showed Cooper into his office. It was done up in