Cooper couldn’t stop smiling. “You’re a giant teddy bear.” He knew he was pushing Neil’s buttons. There wasn’t a soft anything on the man’s body.
Any teasing, if you could call it that from Neil, was gone from his next message. “If you hurt her, I’ll be forced to hurt you.”
Cooper could accept that.
With a moment of quiet understanding, he broke up the heavy air with one question. “Does this mean I can call you Dad from now on?”
And Neil grinned.
Claire sat in silent reflection as Sasha drove to the decoy house. Much as she would’ve loved to be thinking about the case, the only thoughts in her head involved Cooper and the churning he’d caused in her body.
She glanced at Sasha, who hadn’t uttered a word.
“Aren’t you curious?”
Still there was silence.
“Surprised?”
Claire leaned her head back and broke up the quiet. “I was. Did you know Cooper went to Europe to stay away from me? How was I so clueless?”
“You’re not clueless now,” Sasha finally said.
Claire ran her fingertips along her mouth, still felt the press of his lips. “Am I making a mistake?”
“I’m not the one to deliver advice on personal relationships.” Sasha made a turn off the freeway.
“That doesn’t stop you from having an opinion.”
When it seemed Sasha wasn’t going to say anything, Claire pushed. “C’mon, Sasha. You’re a sister to me.”
That title had grown on the other woman in the past six years. When Claire used it, she usually got what she wanted.
“I was preoccupied at the time Cooper left for Europe. The time I spent overseas and the few occasions Cooper and I worked together, his questions centered on you. It was easy to deduce why. Him leaving was the right thing to do.”
“I’m still not so sure about that.”
“Time and wisdom will change that opinion,” Sasha said.
“You still haven’t said if you like the idea.”
Sasha glanced over and a smile crested her lips.
That was all the approval Claire needed.
“Now, I have a question for you.”
These moments with Sasha were rare. Claire ate them up. “Go for it.”
“How is the sex?”
She blurted out a laugh. Not at all surprised about the question. If there was one thing Sasha had taught her, it was to be open about her sexuality and what her needs were. “I don’t know.”
“Excuse me?”
“We haven’t.” She cleared her throat. “Cooper wasn’t lying when he said we had done nothing to create suspicion. In fact, tonight was the first time we kissed.”
Sasha was smiling. “And how was that?”
Claire curled up in the front seat. “Freaking amazing.”
They pulled down the street that Claire needed to become more familiar with, very quickly. “What about Neil? What does he think?”
Sasha shook her head. “Neil is a man. And protective about you.”
“He’s not happy.”
Sasha shrugged. “Let me know if Cooper is bruised tomorrow and I’ll talk to him.”
Claire lost her smile. “You don’t really think he’d do—”
“I’ve brought him off a ledge more than once these past years. The man loves you as his own, even if he never says it.”
That had unexpected tears filling the back of her eyes.
Gwen had told Claire that more than once, but to hear it from Sasha made it more real.
“Thanks, Sasha. We don’t do this enough,” Claire said.
“It appears that is about to change.” Sasha turned the corner. Neither of them looked directly at the car that had a man watching in the shadows, but both of them saw it.
Sasha signaled a garage door opener with her phone.
“Burst out of the car and yell at me and slam the door into the house. Make sure he sees you but don’t give him a target.”
Claire smiled. “Showtime.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Leo Eastman lived in a gated apartment complex. Or at least, the man posing as Leo Eastman lived there. Lars followed Eastman until he pulled into the employee parking lot at the school. And Cooper took charge of planting a tracer on Eastman’s car.
While Claire experienced her first day back in homeroom, the apartment above Eastman’s experienced an unexpected odor that required a team to identify and fix the issue. By the time Claire was delivering her revised report on Macbeth, Eastman couldn’t so much as burp in his apartment without someone at headquarters hearing or seeing it.
With a renewed desire to see the case find some resolution, Claire systematically spent time in the principal’s and vice principal’s offices, and Coach Bennett’s classroom, long enough to plant an audio device in each of them.
By track practice, Claire was linked in and listening to clips of conversations.
Her first glimpse of Cooper was on the field. It took colossal effort to avoid searching him out and looking at him. But in doing so, she found a rhythm in watching everyone else.
The sprinters, which she was technically a part of, stayed together. They stretched together, ran together, and gossiped together. As age and grade tended to be a hierarchy, and only permeated by a younger student if their skills stood out, it was easy to identify the students like Marie Nickerson.
She texted Cooper from across the field, didn’t look his way. Find a way to make me run with the distance runners today.
He didn’t text back, but she could tell the message had been received.
Without shifting her routine, she joined the three girls she ran the relay with and started her warm-up stretches. The girls were talking about prom dresses and hairstyles. Considering Claire hadn’t had a senior prom, she found herself wrapped up in their excitement, even though the prom was over two months away.
They moved from stretching to warm-up laps, and the conversation never stopped. “What about you, Claire? Anyone ask you yet?”
“Why does the guy have to ask?” she responded.
“Right? That’s what I’ve been saying.”
And so the conversation circled.
When they stopped to catch their breath, and the team started to segregate, Claire found herself face-to-face with Cooper for the first time since he reminded her what it felt like to be kissed. Thankfully she was flush from the run, and any blush while looking at him wouldn’t look out of place.
She found herself squinting to see if there was in fact any bruising on the man.
Coach Bennett clasped his hands, Cooper at his side.
Bennett huddled them up. Most of them sat in the grass, stretching. “We’re going to run full relays today. I want to see clean starts and smooth passes. The invitational is a week from Saturday, our first competition of the season. This will set the pace for the year. We have some strong teams. Solid teams. Chelsea, I want you taking Claire’s place as anchor today.”
A hush went over the group. Chelsea wasn’t on their normal relay.
“Why?” Claire asked, speaking out.
Coach Bennett stared her down, his lips a thin line. “Because she needs to practice in case your English grade doesn’t pull up and you let your teammates down.”