Beach Bar Baby Read online

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.

  He didn’t miss Ella, and he wasn’t ‘taken with her’. Whatever the heck that meant. It was nothing like that. She’d just got under his skin, somehow. Like an itch he couldn’t scratch. He could wait it out. Give it a couple more weeks and surely the almost nightly dreams he had, about those bright blue eyes wide with enthusiasm, that sunny smile, that lush butt in the itsy-bitsy purple bikini...

  He thrust his fingers through his hair, annoyed by the low-level heat humming in his crotch as the erotic memories spun gleefully back—and the weird knot under his breastbone twisted.

  ‘It was a one-night hook-up,’ he continued, trying to convince himself now as much as Sonny. ‘We hit it off. But only...you know.’

  Just shoot me now.

  He shrugged. He wasn’t about to get into a discussion about his sex life with Sonny. The old guy had given him chapter and verse as a teenager about respecting women, and he didn’t need that lecture again. One thing was certain, though: Josie was dead meat next time he saw her for putting him in this position. Whether she had a ten-grand wedding to attend in five weeks or not.

  ‘I don’t think Ella and I are going to be declaring any vows,’ he said, going on the defensive when Sonny gave him that look that always made him feel as if he had a case to answer.

  He did respect women. He respected them a lot. Sonny just had a quaint, old-fashioned idea that sex always had to mean something. When sometimes all it meant was you needed to get laid.

  ‘She lives thousands of miles away, we only spent one night together and she wasn’t looking for anything more than I was. Plus she was the one who ran out on me.’

  Sonny’s eyebrow winged up, and Coop knew he’d said too much.

  ‘I see. So you’re the boy that can have any woman he wants. And she’s the girl that didn’t want you? Is that what’s got you so upset?’

  ‘I’m not upset.’ Coop flexed his fist, his hand hurting like a son of a bitch. ‘And thanks a bunch for making me sound like an arrogant jackass.’

  Sonny smiled, but didn’t deny it, and Coop felt the flicker of hurt. ‘You’re a good-looking boy with more money than you need and a charming way about you that draws women like bees to a honeypot. You’ve got a right to be arrogant, I guess.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Coop said wryly. He didn’t kid himself, Sonny hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

  Money wasn’t something that floated Sonny’s boat; it was the one thing they still argued about. Because as far as Coop was concerned, money mattered, more than pretty much everything else. It made everything easier, oiled every cog, gave you options, and that all-important safety net that he’d lacked as a kid. He’d craved it for the first twenty years of his life. But now he had it, it meant more to him than just the luxuries, or the good times he could buy with it. It meant respect. Status. It showed people that he wasn’t the worthless little trailer-trash nobody he’d once been. But best of all it meant he didn’t have to rely on anyone but himself.

  He liked Sonny, respected the guy more than any other guy he had ever known, but, the way he saw it, Sonny had way too many responsibilities in his life—to his five kids, his three grandkids, all his friends and acquaintances, not to mention Rhona, the wife he’d had by his side for over thirty years. Maybe that worked for Sonny, he certainly didn’t seem to mind it, but, as far as Coop was concerned, that wasn’t something he was looking for. A man could be an island—if he worked hard enough and had enough money to make it happen—and life was a lot easier that way.

  ‘Aren’t you headed to Europe next week?’ Sonny pushed on, not taking the hint. ‘Why not look this girl up and see how she’s doing?’

  Coop stared blankly at his friend. He’d thought about it; of course he had. He had a meeting with some financiers in St Tropez who wanted to talk about franchising options for Dive Guys in the Med. It was only a short hop from there to London, where Ella lived. But...

  ‘I don’t know. if I went all the way out to London just to hook up, she might get the wrong idea.’ He sure as hell didn’t want Ella thinking this was more than it was.

  ‘Why would that be bad?’ Sonny’s rueful smile made Coop feel about as smart as the lug nut he’d been trying to shift all morning. ‘If she’s the woman of your dreams.’

  ‘Damn, Sonny, Ella is not the woman of my dreams,’ he shot back, getting exasperated.

  What was with Sonny? Was all this wedding garbage messing with his head and making him even more of a romantic than usual?

  He hardly knew Ella. And he didn’t have dreams about women. Well, not apart from R-rated ones. For the simple reason that he was more than happy being an island.

  ‘If you say so.’ Sonny shrugged, undaunted. ‘But my point is you need to go get your sunshine back.’ Sonny jerked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating the glimmering turquoise water that stretched towards the horizon. ‘And
if it’s across that ocean that’s where you oughta be.’ His smile thinned. ‘Because until you do, you’re not a heck of a lot fun for anyone to be around.’

  Coop frowned as he finally got the message. So that was it. Sonny wanted him out of the way while him and his family geared up for Josie’s big day.

  He felt the sharp stab of hurt. But guessed the old guy had a point. He had been pretty grouchy the last couple of months. Sleepless nights and sexual frustration could do that to a guy. And whatever was going on between him and Ella, it didn’t seem to be getting any better. ‘Have I really been that bad?’ he asked.

  Resting a solid hand on his shoulder, Sonny gave it a fatherly pat. ‘Boy, you’ve been bitchier than when you were working all hours to set up your business.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Sonny squeezed his shoulder. ‘Don’t be sorry, man, go do something about it.’

  Coop nodded. What the hell? Trying to talk some sense into Josie and her folks about the wedding was a lost cause. And he could do with more than the two-day break he’d planned for his trip to the Med. Why not book a flight that routed through London? Stop over for a few extra days, book a suite in a classy hotel, see the city, and if he happened to be in Ella’s neighbourhood at some point, why not look her up? If she wanted to throw some more sunshine his way—and maybe give him an explanation as to why she hadn’t stuck around to say goodbye—why should he object?

  As Sonny had said, he’d never had a woman walk out on him before now. That was most probably all this was really about. And if that made him an arrogant jackass, so be it. He needed to do something to get himself the hell over this hump he seemed to have got hung up on. So he could come back to Bermuda ready to smile through his teeth during his best friend’s daughter’s wedding.

  What was the worst that could happen?

  * * *

  ‘Stop eating the merchandise! I don’t care if you’ve got a cookie craving.’

  Ella hastily wiped the white chocolate and macadamia nut evidence off her mouth. ‘Sorry, I can’t help it.’

  Ruby sent her a superior look from the cappuccino machine, where she was busy whipping up a storm of decaf lattes and skinny mochas for the tennis foursome who had just arrived after a grudge match at the heath.

  ‘You should be sorry. I’d love to know how you’ve barely gained an ounce.’ Her gaze dipped to Ella’s cleavage, displayed in the new D half-cup bra she’d splashed out on the previous week. ‘Except on the bust.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Despite having consumed your own weight in confectionery in the last week.’

  Ella grinned as she arranged the freshly baked passionfruit florentines on the ‘treat of the day’ display. ‘I’m simply making up for lost time. I could barely keep anything down for three solid weeks.’

  Ella stroked the compact bulge that made the waistband of her hip-hugger jeans dig into her tummy. Even though she could not have been more ecstatic about the pregnancy, revelling in every change it brought to her body, puking her guts up every morning had got old fairly fast. And running a cake shop, where the cloying aroma of sweetness and the bitter chicory scent of coffee had been hell on her hypersensitive sense of smell, had been a particular brand of torture she had been more than happy to see the back of. Now she could simply enjoy all the other changes—well, all except one.

  Her sex drive seemed to have mushroomed at the same pace as her bosom—if the lurid dreams she had most nights, in which a certain Cooper Delaney was a key player, were anything to go by.

  Only last night, she’d woken up in a pool of sweat, her skin tight and oversensitive, her already enlarged nipples swollen and her engorged clitoris pulsing with the need to be touched. She’d never been all that self-sufficient, sexually speaking, before she’d met Cooper, but she’d had to take matters into her own hands more than once in the last few weeks, while visualising Cooper’s honed, ripped body driving into her and hearing his deep laconic voice growling ‘touch yourself’ in her ear.

  Heat boiled in her cheeks, at the memory of last night’s frenzied and sadly dissatisfying orgasm. And the guilt that had followed. Was it possible that her body was playing tricks on her, constantly bringing up these carnal memories of her child’s father to push her into contacting him the way she’d planned to do weeks ago?

  But that was before she’d done an Internet search on him. And a simple investigation to discover his contact details had brought the panic seeping back.

  Because putting Cooper Delaney’s name and the words ‘Bermuda’ and ‘snorkelling’ into the search engine had brought up ten whole pages of references, not just to him but to Dive Guys, the phenomenally successful franchise he owned and operated in most of the Caribbean. A company that had been listed on the New York stock exchange for over three years and was—according to an article in Time Life magazine—one of the fastest-growing start-ups in the region.

  She’d been in shock. Then she’d been upset that he hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her the truth about himself... Then she’d thought of the secret child in her womb and she’d begun shaking so hard she’d had to lie down.

  Coop Delaney wasn’t a part-time boat captain and all around beach bum living a free-spirited, laid-back, itinerant existence on a Bermuda beach—he was an exceptionally rich and well-connected businessman with the money and influence to buy and sell her and Ruby’s little cupcake bakery several hundred times over.

  How could she tell a man like that she was carrying his child? And not expect him to make demands? Demands she might not want to agree to? If he’d been the Coop she’d thought he was, she would have phoned him weeks ago. But now...

  ‘Check out the suit in the window.’ Ruby’s appreciative whistle woke Ella from her stupor. ‘That guy’s got shoulders even a happily married woman can appreciate.’

  Ella’s gaze skimmed the top of the cookie display to see a tall man, with closely cropped hair step into the café. Recognition tickled her spine, then thumped into her chest as he lifted his head and shockingly familiar emerald eyes locked on hers.

  She blinked rapidly, sure this had to be an apparition conjured up by her guilty conscience—but then his sensual lips quirked and the warm spot between her legs ignited.

  ‘Hi, welcome to Touch of Frosting, Camden’s premiere cupcake bakery. What’s your guilty pleasure this morning?’

  Ella vaguely processed Ruby’s familiar greeting through the chainsaw in her head. ‘Coop?’ The word came out on a rasp of breath.

  ‘Hey there, Ella.’ The apparition winked, which had heat flushing to her hairline, before it addressed Ruby. ‘You must be Ruby. The name’s Coop. I’m a friend of Ella’s.’

  He held out a deeply tanned hand in greeting as Ella heard Ruby’s sharp intake of breath.

  ‘Hi.’ Ruby skirted the counter and grasped his hand in both of hers. ‘Cooper Delaney, right? It’s so fabulous to actually meet you.’

  Ella heard the perk of excitement in Ruby’s voice and the laconic ease in Coop’s—and everything inside her knotted with panic.

  ‘Ella told you about me, huh?’ His voice rumbled with pleasure as the green gaze settled on her.

  Say something.

  Her mind screamed as she absorbed the chiselled perfection of his cheekbones, the tawny brows, the twinkle of amusement in those arresting eyes, and the full sensual lips that tilted up in a confidential smile. Arousal gripped her abdomen as blood pumped into her sex.

  But then she noted all the things about this man that didn’t fit: the slate-grey single-breasted suit, the clean-shaven jaw, the short, perfectly styled hair that was several shades darker with fewer strands of sun-streaked blond.

  She shook her head, a bolt of raw panic slamming into her chest as he passed his palm in front of her face. He was speaking to her.

  ‘Hey there, Ella, snap out of it. How you doing?’

 
I’m pregnant. And I should have got in touch with you weeks ago to tell you.

  She opened parched lips, but couldn’t force the words out.

  ‘Ella’s great, she had her first—’ Ruby began.

  ‘Shut up, Ruby!’ The high-pitched squeal shot past the boulder lodged in her throat. Ruby’s eyebrows rose to her hairline but thankfully she obeyed the command, while Coop’s grin took on a curious tilt.

  Ella skidded round the counter, galvanised out of her trance.

  Get him out of here, then you can tell him. Sensibly, succinctly, and privately, without an audience of tennis players, yummy mummies, two giggling schoolgirls and your super-nosey best friend.

  She owed him that much.

  ‘I’m taking a half-day, Rubes.’

  Ruby’s brow furrowed.

  Oh, dear, she’d have some explaining to do to Ruby, too. But that could wait, she thought, as she came to a halt in front of Cooper.

  She tilted her head back, the effect of that lazy smile shimmering down to her toes. How could she have forgotten how tall he was? Taking a deep breath in, she got a lungful of his delicious scent.

  He smells the same. Hold that thought.

  But then the aroma of spicy cologne and soap and man triggered a renewed pulse of heat and the shudder of reaction hit her knees.

  She grasped his arm, as much to stay upright as to propel him back out of the door before Ruby spilled any more confidential information. The bulge of muscle flexed beneath the soft fabric of his designer suit—which didn’t do much for her leg tremors.

  He glanced at her fingers and grinned, pleased with her haste. ‘It’s great to see you too, Ella.’ That he didn’t seem particularly fazed by her fruitcake behaviour helped to calm some of the tension screaming across her shoulder blades. ‘I was just in the neighbourhood,’ he added. ‘And I figured we could catch up over....’

  ‘That’s wonderful, Coop,’ she interrupted. ‘But let’s go somewhere private so we can talk properly.’

  ‘Sounds good.’ His hooded gaze suggested he had made a few assumptions about her eagerness to get him alone. And talking was not at the top of his current to-do list.