Loe raamatut: «The Bad Boy»

Chapter One

Dear Mr. Anders:

It is our duty at this time to inform you of the death of Marcus McCoy due to an unfortunate, unforeseen encounter with a grizzly bear while fly-fishing in Alaska on June 8 of this year, and per the stipulations set forth in his last will and testament, to make formal his acknowledgment of one Cooper Anders, age 30, of 785 Westmark Street, Dependable, Missouri, as being his son and heir to an equal portion of his estate.

It is the wish of Joseph McCoy, father to Marcus McCoy, grandfather to Cooper Anders and founder of McCoy Enterprises, that you immediately assume your rightful place in the family home and business with all due haste and utmost discretion to preserve the family’s privacy.

Regards,

David Weidman, Esq.

Weidman, Biddermier, Stark

Cooper rocked back on the heels of his black work boots, the air stalled in his lungs. Shock nearly made him plop right down on the concrete county-jail steps. Instead he looked up from the letter to the cloudless, late-morning sky, then thought better of it and dropped his gaze to the space between his feet. Marcus McCoy, you son of a—

“Mr. Anders?” The gorgeous, petite brunette who’d handed him the letter drew his attention, a touching concern sharp in her bright green eyes. “Are you all right? You weren’t hurt during the, er, altercation last night, were you?”

He waved off her worry and his reaction to it. “No. No one laid a hand on me.”

“But I thought you’d been arrested for involvement in a bar fight.”

Cooper snorted. “I mostly just sat on the biggest guy so it’d be a fair fight.” He raised the letter and his brows. “So this is why you bailed me out of the klink? You were sent by them?”

She smiled as if they were a good thing, showing white teeth to match the rest of the pretty package. “Yes. I work for McCoy Enterprises.”

Eyeing the curves beneath her brown sweater and beige slacks, he snorted again. Seemed it was a snorting kind of morning. “So much for a favorite male fantasy coming true.”

A frown marred her smooth forehead. “Excuse me?”

“You know, the one about being sprung from jail to become some babe’s cabana boy?”

She blinked, then her eyes widened and splotches of red spread over her high cheekbones. On any other day he would have tried for a full-body blush.

On any other day he would have sworn this day would never come.

He looked back down at the inarguably official letter. Adrenaline surged and his heart started to pound. He hadn’t had a clue how to deal with the news of Marcus’s death when he’d first heard of it on the news a few days ago. Now he did. “Though an altogether different fantasy of mine is about to come true.”

“I can imagine.”

Something in her tone, a wistfulness, made him look back up, but her smile implied he’d simply reassured her. She probably wasn’t the only person in town who’d think that suddenly becoming a part of the McCoy family would be a dream come true. But for a very different reason from his. Appearances could be so deceiving.

He eyed her glossy brown hair, cut so the ends flipped up just as it reached her slender shoulders, her subtle makeup, her lack of jewelry other than a tiny gold anchor on a necklace and her business-casual outfit. Her appearance, though extremely attractive, screamed corporate drone. He seriously doubted anything deceptive was going on with her.

He nodded at the letter. “So you are aware of what this says?”

She cleared her throat. “Yes, actually, I am.” She folded her hands in front of her, all professional-like, but her discomfort sneaked through in the way she held her neck stiff and her gaze darted from his to the letter and back.

A strong sense of kinship stirred in him. He knew all too well what it felt like to be caught after doing something he shouldn’t have. “I admire your honesty.” But since he’d yet to completely shake the habit of acting how he was expected to in this town, he once again let his interest roam over the conservative sweater and slacks that failed to hide the curves underneath. “Among other things.”

She made a soft, strangled sound that brought his attention to her wide eyes. She must not get out much.

He kicked up a corner of his mouth and shrugged. “I suppose you can’t be blamed for taking a peek, since they didn’t bother to seal the envelope. And I doubt the vaunted McCoys bail people out of the slammer on a regular basis. That would get anyone’s curiosity up.”

Her sculpted dark eyebrows came down and she shook her head. Her nicely formed lips, accented with a subtle brownish lipstick, opened to protest.

He raised his hand to stop her. “No big deal. Really.” Though a very big part of him would have just as soon kissed her. She was so his type. Great eyes, hair, shapely, and roughly his age. A woman who’d know how and still consider it fun. ’Cause fun was all he was ever after, thanks to what his mother had experienced.

“But you don’t understand—”

“Unfortunately, I understand perfectly.” He stopped her once more, and gestured at her with the letter. “The McCoys send a pretty piece of fluff—a secretary with an eye on moving up, I bet—to be sure I’d realize just how lucky I am, on the off chance that being told out of the blue that I’m a member of one of the richest families in the country isn’t enough.” He winked and smiled tightly. “No offense, of course.”

Obviously offended, anyway, she pulled her chin back and her frown deepened into a scowl. “First of all, please don’t interrupt me. Second, I beg your pardon.” Her tone confirmed it.

While he’d never purposefully ticked off a woman before, finding many more benefits to having them like him, the bitterness that had festered far too long deep inside him gurgled to life and kept him from apologizing.

But since she had saved him the embarrassment of having to call his business partner, Ted, to bail him out of jail, the least he could do was explain. He lifted the letter held in his tightening grip. “The thing is, I already knew about my paternity.”

Her jaw went slack.

He leaned toward her, and despite his surging resentment, the sweet floral scent of her perfume went straight to his head after the bleach-laced stink of the jail and the bar scum he’d tangled with the night before.

“You see, when I was thirteen years old my mother told me—on her deathbed, mind you—that I was a Real McCoy, that Marcus McCoy, the only man she’d ever loved, was my father.” Cooper straightened and grappled for control over emotions that had always been at least an inch beyond his reach. Emotions that had led him to test any and all boundaries placed on him by those who didn’t understand his torment. “And all that time I’d thought I was just another kid whose dad hadn’t cared enough to give him his name. But mine had paid to keep it a secret.”

He pasted on a stiff smile. “Funny how no one would believe me. But my mom didn’t have the best reputation for credibility.”

Shock, empathy—no, make that pity—flared in her eyes, and she opened her mouth as if to say something, but snapped it shut.

He clenched his back teeth against the old, cankered hurt. Only years of practice allowed him to loosen his jaw enough to continue. “And oh, how they tried to talk me out of it.”

He puffed up his chest beneath his light blue denim shirt, mimicking Grandpa Ned’s gravelly voice. “‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, boy. This town wouldn’t be what it is without the McCoys.’”

Cooper gestured to the large building he’d just exited, built in the colonial style, with lots of brick and white shutters and emblazoned with the words Joseph McCoy Municipal Building. Pretty much all the public buildings in the modest town of ten thousand souls had that name attached to them somewhere. “‘We’d have nuthin’ if it weren’t for the McCoys, so you’d best shut your yap and keep it shut.’” Joseph McCoy had taken a Podunk town with very little going for it but a symbolic name and built it into a heartland postcard.

She blinked several times, obviously unsure what to make of his outburst. Finally, she asked, “Who said that to you?”

“Ned Anders, my mom’s dad. Had the joy of spending five years under his roof.” Cooper looked back at the jail, a place he’d finally grown smart enough to avoid once he’d squeaked his way past high school. Mostly. “That is, when he wasn’t rightly kicking me out for acting up. Something hurt, angry teenagers tend to do.”

Pushing memories of the cause of his hurt and anger aside, he slapped the letter against his jeans, met her stunned gaze and smiled mirthlessly. “I have a sneaking suspicion Marcus didn’t plan on the truth coming out so soon. Though why it did at all is beyond me. To think I owe it all to a hungry grizzly bear. That’s the sort of cosmic justice I really like.”

At the mention of justice, determination surged through him. Cooper turned and started down the steps.

The tap of low-heeled pumps on concrete chased him as she hurried to catch up. “Mr. Anders, please. I’m sure everyone was simply acting for your own benefit.” Her tone was so lacking in conviction Cooper didn’t bother to argue the point. Apparently, she was one of the rare few who “got” where he was coming from. A real pity she was from the enemy camp.

She jumped down a step ahead of him and faced him, blocking his descent. The late-morning sun caught in her hair and set the deep, chestnut-brown strands aglow. Damn, she was a pretty piece of fluff. But nothing was going to distract him from making the most of this little revelation she’d delivered to him.

Regret seared his lungs. His mom hadn’t been lying after all. She hadn’t illegally earned the money they’d lived on as they’d bounced from place to place throughout Missouri, then used to pay for her medical treatment—something he’d secretly feared, thanks to Ned’s implications.

Pointing to the letter in his grip, she said, “Marcus did acknowledge you in his will. There’s no disputing that. You now have the chance to take your rightful place in the family, a family more than worth the admiration they receive.”

“No, what I have is the chance for 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 bit of her that was forever in debt to the McCoys told her she didn’t want to know, but because of that debt, she had to ask, “Which is?”

“Bring the arrogant McCoy machine to its knees.” He lowered his head yet farther, as if he really was going to kiss her, making the muscles low in her stomach contract. But this time she was prepared.

And mad.

She jerked away, releasing his arm. “How can you say such a thing? Especially without even speaking to Joseph?”

He straightened and gave her an unconcerned shrug. “Easy. And I found out all I needed to know a long time ago. Thanks for bailing me out, babe.” Saluting her, he started walking again.

Irritated that this was turning out so wrong, not to mention a little scared by the determination in his dark blue eyes, she called, “Where are you going?”

“To the office, babe. To the office.”

Her heart pounding from fear that he had thought of some way to damage McCoy Enterprises so quickly, she spun away and ran to her car. She’d get to the McCoy corporate headquarters just outside of town before Cooper and figure out a way to bar his entry without creating a scene.

Hopefully, she could defuse the situation and change Cooper’s mind about the McCoys before Joseph found out the grandson he was at home eagerly waiting to meet meant him harm. Because harming McCoy Enterprises was one and the same as harming Joseph personally. The company was his lifeblood, as it had been her father’s, Joseph’s right-hand man.

As it was hers.

Which made the fact that she was failing this seemingly simple assignment even worse.

How could the employee Joseph had placed so much trust in nearly melt beneath the hot gaze of the grandson who wished them ill?