Thirteen
So, Ray Anne wanted to talk about his property? He didn’t even stand up. “What’s on your mind?” he asked, half his attention focused on Sarah jogging across the beach with her dog. He fully realized he wasn’t being polite. His mother would twist his ear for this kind of behavior. Cooper wasn’t typically like this around a lady, but first of all, Ray Anne was no lady. Second, she wanted something and at his expense. Third, she had foiled what he considered to be an important move with Sarah.
“Why don’t we go inside,” she suggested. “It’s a little cold on the water.”
“I think it feels good out here. And there’s too much construction going on in the shop for us to have a conversation there.” He wasn’t about to get behind closed doors with her. He was quite sure she wouldn’t attack him, but he was in no mood for innuendo. “Why don’t you just tell me what brings you to my humble dock.”
With a heavy sigh, Ray Anne continued. “The rumor is you’re planning to sell this beautiful property. I’m hoping for two things. Number one, that you’ll give me a chance to represent you and, two, that you’ll let me bring you an interested party.”
He lifted both eyebrows. “You already have an interested buyer?”
“Hank, there’s been serious interest in this property for twenty years,” she said. “This is primo beachfront with a lot of attached land.”
“But it’s all uphill!” he exclaimed. “What can anyone do with a beach at the bottom of a hill?”
“I guess you’ve never seen Newport Coast, California. Look it up on Google later—it’s gorgeous, one of the best resort properties in the U.S. Ben and his father wouldn’t consider selling even a portion of this land and it could’ve made them wealthy.”
“I see,” he said. “Who is the interested party?”
She laughed. “Hank, this is business. I can’t disclose that information without a contract to represent the sale.”
“Ah. Of course,” he said. “And why would I want to be represented in the sale by the agent for the buyer?”
She smiled very broadly. “Because, darling, there could be a substantial discount in fees. No matter who represents you, no one can make you sell at any price, so you’re always in the driver’s seat. And I always represent the seller, even when I can find a buyer.”
“Interesting.”
“Have you never sold property before?” she asked.
“Not personally. But I bet I’m a pretty quick study.” He finally stood, towering over her five-foot-two frame. “The thing is, Ray Anne, I’m really not there yet. Right now I just want to get Ben’s personal effects taken care of and fix up that shop. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet.”
“What are some of the options you’re considering?” she asked.
“I’m considering just renting it,” he said, and watched her face fall. For just a moment, he felt kind of bad—that hadn’t been one of his considerations at all. Obviously, there was no big commission if he did that. “Or I might sell the structure and the land it sits on. Or—” he shrugged “—who knows? I have plenty of time to think things over.”
“But you’re not interested in staying here, operating the business?”
He shook his head. “Not that it’s not a beautiful place. It’s just not the work I want to do.”
“And just what work do you want to do?”
He found it hard to believe she didn’t know. He suspected Ray Anne of superior investigative skills. “By trade, I’m a helicopter pilot. For the last fifteen years, since the Army.”
“Really?” she asked. “No kidding? I guess you know Sarah Dupre is a helicopter pilot.”
“It seems we have that in common.”
“Fantastic! Okay, listen, Hank—”
“Cooper,” he said. “People call me Cooper.”
She ignored him. “It doesn’t matter to me how long you think this over, but can I just show you some numbers? You should be fully aware of your options. And can we please get out of this wind?” She patted her hair, as if to keep it from blowing.
He grinned at her. Her short blond hair wasn’t even moving in the wind. She wanted to be inside with him. She wanted to corner him. “Sure,” he said. “We can sit on the deck.”
“The deck? If it’s too noisy inside the shop, maybe we could go in your trailer?”
“Nah, it’s not a good idea. The maid hasn’t been in today yet. But if you’d like me to come to your office someday...”
“The deck it is,” she said, heading for the beach stairs.
He smiled as he watched her head up the stairs. She wasn’t going to let him get away if she had his attention. He knew too well that she fully intended to impress and excite him with some appraised values and comparisons. So they would sit on the porch with the sound of saws and hammers drowning out their conversation. But he would not make any kind of commitment.
He held a chair beside one of the deck tables for Ray Anne and sat opposite. She pulled a stack of papers out of her leather briefcase and began explaining some of the appraised values of beachfront property in the area. Cooper tried to keep his expression flat, as if he already knew the staggering amount this inheritance could be worth, as if he was not at all surprised. In fact, he was blown away. It could be worth millions to a big hotel or resort chain.
It briefly crossed his mind that any fool would stop the building inside the shop and just hammer up a for-sale sign.
“Impressive, wouldn’t you say?” Ray Anne asked.
“Very nice,” he said. “And who is this interested party?”
“Again, Hank, I’m not willing to disclose that without a contract to represent the sale of the property.”
“And I’m not ready to make that decision yet,” he said.
“Well, here’s what we can do. We can make an agreement that when and if you do make the decision to sell—which of course you must, if you’re not planning to stay here and operate a business on this site—that I will be your agent.”
“There is no must about anything, Ray Anne,” he said. “I haven’t decided what I’m going to do, when I’m going to do it, if I’m going to do anything at all.”
“But you’re not planning to take up residence here?”
He shrugged, tilting his head. “There are so many possibilities. I might just hold the title for forty years, let my heirs make that decision.”
“Heirs?” she asked with piqued interest.
“I have a large family,” he said.
“Children?” she asked.
His phone tweeted in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the caller ID. “Excuse me, Ray Anne. I have to take this.”
* * *
When Sarah walked into her small house, Ham went straight for the water bowl. Sarah could hear the shower running. Two seconds later, she heard the blow-dryer. Landon’s pocket paraphernalia sat on the table—wallet, truck keys, loose change, iPhone.
She scrolled through his contacts, found Cooper’s name and number and jotted it down on her grocery list, stuffing it in her pocket. Within five minutes, Landon was in the kitchen, scooping his gear off the tabletop.
“Where are you off to?” she asked.
“Homework at Eve’s,” he said.
Complete waste of a Saturday unless you were helplessly in love, she thought. “Will you be home for dinner?”
“I hope not,” he said. “You’ll be okay, right?”
“I think I can manage,” she said with a smile. “Maybe I’ll go out. Or get a pizza. Or hit the leftovers.”
“Don’t cook for me, okay?”
“Okay.” She laughed. “Can you let me know your plans?”
“Don’t I always?” Landon asked.
When he was gone, she pulled her list and her phone out of her pocket. She put in the numbers. When Cooper answered, she said, “Now you have my number. And obviously, I have yours.”
He chuckled. “How’d you manage that?”
“I peeked in Landon’s phone directory. He’s gone to do homework with Eve, looking more like he was going for a job interview.”
Again with the laugh, which was altogether too sexy and low. “I’m in the middle of something, but almost finished. Can I call you back? Five minutes or so?”
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything...important.”
“Nah. Perfect timing. Talk to you soon.”
She disconnected, but held the phone in a tight grip. It’s okay, she thought. I’m a big girl. A grown-up. I can handle this. And then she shivered, right before she felt a warm flush spread through her.
She’d had a week to think about it. It scared her to death, but she wanted to check it out. She would just have to guard her heart with every fiber of strength she had.
* * *
Shaking Ray Anne hadn’t been too hard. He merely stood and said he should get back to work. She concealed her disappointment well, hiding behind her agent’s smile. “I’ll just leave you these papers, because I know you’re going to think about this and change your mind.”
“Anything is possible.”
When she was gone, he tore up the agreement and made a dinner date with Sarah.
Cooper took Sarah to a small, family-owned Italian restaurant in Bandon, not too far from Thunder Point but definitely out of the way. There was a pizza counter in the front and twelve booths and four tables in the back. It was kind of dark and strung with plastic grapes and fake greenery. Even though it was a Saturday night, it wasn’t crowded but the pizza counter was busy. Pop was the chef, with a son helping.
“Nice,” Sarah said as she slid into a booth across from Cooper. “Very nice. Just the thing.”
“Not real fancy,” he pointed out.
“I’m telling you, this is what I like. Small, quaint, friendly and hopefully delicious.”
Of the hundred things Cooper had discovered about this Thunder Point adventure so far, Sarah Dupre was the one that really got his blood pressure up. She looked good enough to eat. “Did you call Landon? Tell him where you’d be?”
“Sort of. I texted him that we were going out for Italian. He texted back to have fun and he wouldn’t wait up.”
“Smart-ass,” Cooper said. “Wonder where he gets that.”
She ordered a cabernet, he ordered a beer and they pored over old, plastic-covered menus. “God, I want one of everything,” she said.
He ordered a calamari appetizer first, then she settled on linguine alla vongole—clams in white sauce—while he ordered cioppino. When the waitress, presumably one of the daughters or daughters-in-law, left, he raised his glass. “To small, dark, Italian restaurants.”
She clinked his glass, took a sip and then said, “Just to be clear, I’m not getting involved with a man.”
“I believe you’ve made that clear several times now.”
“I’m serious. I like you, Cooper, but I’m essentially a single mother and just postdivorce. You understand.”
“I told you I understood,” he said.
“I just don’t want you to have any expectations,” she said.
“Did I put you through all these protests when you bought me dinner?”
“I’m not just talking about sex, I mean I’m not in a position to get emotionally involved. I’m not girlfriend material.”
“Sarah, I’m going to say this once—that’s up to you. I’m not worried about whether you get emotionally involved. As long as I get the sex.” At that exact moment, the waitress stood beside their table with the calamari. She hesitated slightly before putting it down. Then she withdrew quickly.
He smiled slyly. Winked. He had done that on purpose.
Sarah started laughing and her entire face lit up, her dark eyes twinkled, her cheeks turned pink. He had known he wanted her from the first second he saw her, when she came to the trailer and tried to pin his ears back for being Landon’s friend. The truth was, fierce or silly, she turned him on. He really didn’t care whether she got emotionally involved. It might be better for her if she managed to avoid that. But he definitely hoped they could get physically involved.
“Well, you’re not getting that, either,” she said.
“Mmm, wait till you taste this,” he said, chewing a piece of calamari. “This is so excellent, you might change your mind!”
“How’d you find this place?” she asked.
“Mac. The man is like a walking Yellow Pages. Anything you need, from mold removal to good restaurant, he’s your man.” He plucked another piece off the plate, but before he put it in his mouth, he asked, “How in the world did you end up flying for the Coast Guard?”
“I didn’t expect to fly, to tell you the truth. I just wanted to be on the water. I had fantasies about rescue swimming, but then I thought, instead of jumping out of the chopper, how about commanding it, flying it. I had no idea whether I’d like it. I did a lot of swimming, diving and sailing growing up, but the highest I’d ever gotten off the ground was a zip-line.”
“When did you change your mind?”
“In college. I joined a USCG scholarship program when I was nineteen. When I looked at the different places I could go as an officer, I got dazzled by the helicopter.”
“Was it the right choice?” he asked.
“It was. We’ve had some real adrenaline-pumping missions. Especially out of the Bering Sea.” She shook her head. “I didn’t think I was ready for that.”
“And?”
“Kodiak was the best experience of my life.” She glowed a little bit when she said that. “It was my first permanent move with the Coast Guard after flight school. I had lost my parents a year before, had a little six-year-old along for the ride, it was one of the most challenging rescue locations in the U.S., and it was awesome. Sometimes a rescue station is as good as its commander, and ours was incredible. That’s where Landon started playing ball with the commander’s youngest son. Commander Titchke took us under his wing. He not only helped us settle in, and his family helped me with Landon, but he trained me in the Bering Sea. I did things—the team did things—I never imagined we’d do. Once we had two ships taking on water on opposite sides of the island in a storm so violent we couldn’t even drop a line. Seven souls on one, four on another, plus injuries. And we brought them in. It took four crews, it took pulling crew members off vacations or days off, but we saved eleven people that day. Risk management for that operation was tight as I’ve ever seen. There was no room for error or we’d not only lose the vessels and injured, we’d lose the rescue crews. I think my heart pounded for a month.” She took a bite. “I have a lot of stories like that from Kodiak. I could bore you for hours.”
He couldn’t help but grin at her. “It sounds scary fun.”
“It gets in your blood, I think. That rush.”
“You like the edge. You’re a wild woman.”
“Nah. I never take unnecessary chances, never. It’s precise and sometimes I can be a perfectionist and...”
“Sometimes?” he asked with a laugh as their salads arrived.
“I let you eat calamari while I bored you with Coast Guard stories. It’s your turn—tell me about your flying. About Iraq and your civilian gigs.”
Even though Cooper had gone to Iraq in a Black Hawk right at the beginning of the war, somehow it just didn’t seem as wildly exciting as what Sarah had done, was doing. But he told her about it. He was six years in the Army, then got out to pursue civilian flying. Since work was hard to find, he worked for civilian contractors hired by the U.S. in foreign countries—an expatriate, a mercenary. Eventually, he ended up working for oil companies.
“Was it good work?” she asked just as their main courses were delivered.
“I’d say so. And the money was good. It was easy work most of the time, good people. And then there was a big oil spill. Major. National news for months, billions of dollars of damage. It made the Valdez look like a dress rehearsal. A couple of the platforms I was flying to shut down—we pulled all the people off. I’ve never seen anything like it. Of course I’d watched news reports of spills before, but there’s nothing like actually seeing it. The company had to downsize and I was more than willing to walk.
“I worked for two more companies after that, flying to offshore wells, but I couldn’t stop seeing what might happen. It wasn’t my business—I was flying—I didn’t compromise safety. My boss, the chief pilot, didn’t compromise safety. But...” He shook his head. “Once you see what a major spill can do to a few towns on the coast and a big piece of ocean, it just gets to you. You know?”
She smiled patiently. “The Coast Guard is the environment’s friend, Cooper. You know that.”
“I know. So I quit that last job and planned to take a few months off, meet Ben and another friend to hunt in the mountains. I was looking for a break long enough to decide where to go and what to do next. Then everything changed with Ben’s death. I’ll get another flying job,” he said. “But I think it’ll have to be a different kind of flying job.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. After Christmas, maybe. After the bar’s looking good and I can sell it. I have to figure out how to deal with that.”
She grinned. “Ray Anne will help you unload it, I’m sure.”
“How did you know?” he asked, because he hadn’t said anything about Ray Anne’s real estate ambitions.
She gave him a slow smile. “I’m just brilliant, that’s all.”
“What about you?” he asked. “How long will you be here?”
“In about a year, I’ll be looking at assignments. Landon will be a senior. If it goes the way we’ve planned, Landon will know where he wants to go to college by then. With any luck, he’ll have an early acceptance. I can manage to sit tight until he graduates. And I’ll try my best not to be too far away.” She looked down at her pasta. “He’ll need family close enough to visit while he’s in college. It’s different when it’s just two of us.”
He could only smile at her, give her a nod. She was a remarkable woman. She did a difficult and demanding job, but it didn’t change her first priority—her brother.
He admired her. That hadn’t happened to him in a long while.
* * *
On her second glass of wine, Sarah forgot to be afraid of her feelings toward Cooper. She experienced a lift in her spirits that she hadn’t felt in too long. She’d been so hurt and angry she’d forgotten how wonderful it was to laugh, to have something in common with a date, to feel friendship growing. To lust, because she was feeling that, too. Her evening with Cooper was perfect. They listened to each other’s work and flying stories intensely, they laughed over foibles and family issues—Cooper had a fairly large extended family and while she had no one to speak of, raising Landon had been worth a laugh or two. They growled in unison when the conversation turned to Jag Morrison and his family. She enjoyed him. He was intelligent, funny and, oh, mama, was he handsome. Although he was mostly flirtatiousness and wit, there was a warmth about him that embraced her.
And he’d be moving away soon. Perfect.
The food was delicious, the small restaurant perfect. Sarah realized this was the thing she’d been missing. A companion.
As they walked out to his truck, she said, “Thank you, Cooper. I enjoyed that.”
“Good. We’ll do it again.”
She laughed softly. “My first date since...well, since my ex moved out. Over a year ago.”
He threaded his fingers through hers. “My first date in a while, too.”
“Who was your last date?” she asked.
He stopped walking. “I have to think. It was probably Judy, a woman I met in Corpus Christi. About a year ago. Interesting woman. But it was one date. I don’t know how to explain why. It just didn’t click.”
“Well,” she said with a laugh, “I was pretty pissed at our first meeting. And I take this to mean you think we clicked. Or maybe you like angry women? Either that or there aren’t any other women in this town you’ll take a chance on.”
“There are plenty of women around,” he said. He touched her cheek with a gentle finger. “It’s early.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Come back to my place for a while. It’s not much, but it’s comfortable. Your house is vulnerable—could be teenagers there, taking advantage of the fact that you’re out for the evening. I could make you a cup of coffee. Or a drink.” He shrugged. He grinned. “I’m flexible.”
Sarah thought, We both know what we want.
He leaned down to put a soft kiss on her mouth. “Take a chance on me, Sarah. I can play by your rules.”
It had been so long since a man seemed to know her, know what she needed, wanted. She nodded. “I think a cup of coffee at your place would be all right.”