Mistresses: The Consequences Of Desire: Beach Bar Baby / Walk on the Wild Side / Claiming His Own. Heidi Rice

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       SEVEN

      ‘Ouch. Damn it!’ Coop yanked his hand out of the casing, and threw the wrench down on the deck. Blood seeped from the shallow gash at the base of his thumb, through the thick black smear of engine grease. He sucked on it, getting a mouthful of grit to go with the metallic taste of his own blood.

      ‘What’s all the cussing for?’ Sonny’s head peered out from the captain’s cabin.

      ‘That damn propeller just took a chunk out of my hand,’ he snarled. ‘Cussing’s required.’ He boosted himself onto the deck. Tying the rag he’d been using to clean off the drive shaft around the injury, he sent his friend an angry glare. ‘That lug nut won’t budge—probably because it’s been rusted on for thirty years.’ With his hand now pounding in unison with his head, after one too many drinks last night at The Rum Runner, he was not in the mood to be dicking around with Sonny’s ancient outboard motor.

      Sonny tilted his head to one side, sending him a calm, searching look. ‘Someone sure got out of bed the wrong way again this morning.’

      Coop ignored the jibe. So what if he hadn’t been on top form lately? Ever since a certain English girl had left him high and dry, her lush body and eager smile had got lodged in his frontal lobe and it had been interfering with his sleep patterns.

      Going back to The Rum Runner last night for the first time since Ella had run out on him had been a mistake. Henry had started jerking his chain about ‘his pretty lady’, and he’d somehow ended up challenging the guy to a drinking contest. Staggering home at three a.m., and being violently ill in his bathroom had only added injury to the insult of too many tequila slammers and too many nights without enough sleep.

      No wonder he wasn’t at his sunniest.

      ‘Isn’t it about time you got rid of this bucket?’ he said, letting out a little of his frustration on Sonny’s boat.

      Sonny stroked the console with the affection most men reserved for a lover. ‘My Jezebel’s got plenty good years in her yet. And with Josie’s wedding to pay for, she’s going to have to make them count.’

      Coop knotted the rag with his teeth, his temper kicking in. They both knew The Jezebel hadn’t seen a good year since Bill Clinton had been in the White House. And that he’d offered to bankroll Josie’s wedding a million times and Sonny had stubbornly refused to accept the money. But after a morning spent with a raging hangover trying to fix the unfixable when he should have been going over his business manager’s projections for the new franchise in Acapulco, he wasn’t in the mood to keep his reservations about Josie’s nuptials to himself any longer either.

      ‘What is Josie getting hitched for anyway? She’s only twenty and they’re both still in college. What are they going to live on?’

      ‘Love will find a way,’ Sonny replied with that proud paternal grin that had been rubbing Coop the wrong way for weeks. Hadn’t the old guy figured out yet he was shelling out a king’s ransom to kick-start a marriage that probably wouldn’t last out the year?

      ‘Will it?’ he asked, the edge in his voice going razor sharp.

      Sonny nodded, the probing look sending prickles of unease up Coop’s spine and making his thumb throb. ‘You know, you’ve been mighty bitchy for months now. Wanna tell me what’s going on?’

      Months? No way had it been months since his night with Ella. Had it? ‘This isn’t about me, Sonny,’ he said, struggling to deflect the conversation back where it needed to be. ‘This is about Josie doing something dumb and you not lifting a finger to stop her.’

      ‘Josie’s known her own mind since she was three years old,’ Sonny said without any heat. ‘Nothing I could say would stop her even if I wanted to.’

      Coop opened his mouth to protest, but Sonny simply lifted up a silencing finger.

      ‘But I don’t want to stop them. Taylor’s a good kid and she loves him. And it’s not them I’m worried about.’ Sonny rested his heavy frame on the bench next to Coop, his steady gaze making the prickles on Coop’s spine feel as if he’d been rolling in poison ivy. ‘You’re the one hasn’t been right ever since the night you picked up that tourist girl in the Runner.’

      ‘What the...?’ Coop’s jaw went slack. How did Sonny know about Ella? The old guy was always butting into his personal life, because he was a romantic and he thought he had a right to. But he’d never spoken about Ella to anyone. Did Sonny have X-ray vision or something?

      ‘Josie says you seemed real taken with her the next morning. But she’d run off? Is that the thing? You miss her?’

      Damn Josie—so she was his source.

      ‘It’s not what you think.’ Coop scowled, trying to cut the old guy off at the pass before this conversation got totally out of hand.

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