Get a Clue(33)
She smiled but looked away. “Obviously I have a terrible decision-making mechanism. I’m working on it. But believe it or not, there’s a silver lining here.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“I won’t be fooled again, not by another pretty face and hunky body, not by sweet words, no way, no how.” She shook her head, her eyes luminous in the dark “Love does not exist.”
“You really believe that?”
“Yes. You?”
He shook his head.
“You’ve been in love?” she asked.
He lifted a shoulder. “I guess I thought it might become love.”
“Did it?”
“Nope.” He shot her a smile. “Got my heart crushed like a grape about six months ago.”
Her gaze softened. “Oh, Cooper.” She reached out and touched his chest over his heart. “I’m sorry.”#p#分页标题#e#
“I’m over it.”
Shifting up on her elbow so she could see his face, she left her hand on him and looked at him intently. “So you got hurt, and yet you’d give it another shot?”
The vulnerability in her voice made him ache. It’d been easier, far easier, to resist her when she wore her sarcastic edge like a coat, because this softer, kinder, caring Breanne tore through his defenses in a way he hadn’t anticipated. “Hell, Breanne, I’m just saying it exists.”
She flopped to her back, staring up at the ceiling. “Well, it can exist all it wants, as long as it stays far, far away from me.”
Cooper lay back down as well, joining her in the study of the ceiling. He’d spent much of the recent past feeling exactly the same, but for some reason he didn’t like to think that this vibrant, exciting woman, who had so much to offer, was going to hold back from love the next time it came around, simply because she’d been burned.
“Cooper?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you really unemployed?”
The sixty-thousand-dollar question. “I am.”
“Where do you live?”
“In San Francisco.”
“So what are you doing out here in the mountains? Alone?”
“My brother thought I needed to ski my brains out for a week and get over myself.” And get laid by a pretty, warm, sexy ski bunny.
“Why?” she asked.
“Too many reasons to get into.”
“We have all night.”
“Maybe I’m tired.”
“I thought guys liked to talk about themselves.”
“Not this guy. Tell me about you. What do you do?”
“Bookkeeping for a big CPA firm.” She frowned. “At least at the moment.”
“At the moment?”
“I’m going to have to find another job.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll have to see Dean there—that’s rat fink bastard to you and me—and I still have an uncontrollable urge to kill him. That won’t look good in my review, plus it’ll be hard to get another job from prison.”
He tried to see her in the dark. “You’re not going to let him take that job from you, are you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said with a sigh. “You should see my resumé. It’d make you dizzy.” She sighed. “Truth is, I don’t sit still for long anyway.”
“No? What jobs have you held?”
“Receivables, payables, payroll—you name it in accounting, I’ve done it.”
“So you like numbers,” he said, nodding. “Makes sense. You like order.”
“How do you know that?”
“This whole setting makes you nervous because it’s not what was planned.”
“You can say that again,” she said with feeling.
“And I’ve seen your journal. Very organized. Like an accountant’s brain.”
“I wasn’t that organized when it came to staying with one job.”
“Nothing wrong with that, as long as moving around makes you happy.”
Now it was her turn to come up on her elbows and peer through the dark. “You really believe that?”
“Sure,” he said, leaning in closer for a better look, because for a second he’d have sworn that her eyes went suspiciously bright with a sheen of tears. But then it was gone. “Breanne?”
“I’m tired,” she whispered. She turned over, curling up into a tiny ball facing away from him. “’Night.”#p#分页标题#e#
“’Night.” He was confused as hell, but when it came to women, that was really nothing new. Nothing new at all.
He was just drifting off when he heard her soft whisper. “Cooper?”
“Still here.” Maybe she’d changed her mind about the sheet. The thought made his body twitch. Yeah, she was going to toss that damn thing aside and roll toward him. She’d wrap that hot little bod tight to his, and he’d—