First Star I See Tonight (Chicago Stars #8) - Susan Elizabeth Phillips Page 0,82

took one look at the insect bedlam and headed for the hallway, too. “I am so out of here.” She spun back. “If any of those get up in my apartment, you’re a dead man.”

***

Coop barged into her apartment a few hours later. She was sitting on her couch, curled over her laptop. The exterminator was already at work downstairs, but Tony had been right. They’d be closed at least a week. Exactly seven days too long.

“You’d better have shaken out your clothes before you came in here,” she said.

He stalked across the room. “You’re one hell of a bodyguard.”

“I’m not your bodyguard, remember? And I’ve been doing what I had to do.”

“Hiding from a few bugs?”

She shuddered. “I’m not proud of myself.”

There it was again. That refusal to defend herself over anything she perceived as a personal weakness.

“I’ve been doing some research,” she said as he started to pace. “You can buy cockroaches by the hundreds on the Internet. Did you know their severed heads can survive if they’re refrigerated? Only for a few hours, but still.”

“I didn’t know that. And I wish I didn’t know it now.”

“I’ll start tracking down dealers tomorrow, but finding out who placed the order is a long shot. They even sell them on Amazon.”

But his mind wasn’t on Amazon, and neither was hers. “With Keith out of the picture,” she said, “we both know who the next most logical suspect is.”

He didn’t ask who she meant. He knew.

She closed the lid on her laptop, stared at it for a moment, then rubbed her eyes. “He’s in Miami.”

16

South Beach was a twenty-four-hour carnival of swaying palms; Latin rock music; Easter-egg-colored art deco buildings; and shapely, long-haired women strolling along Ocean Drive with hoop earrings the size of bracelets and colorful thongs showing through tight white shorts. She and Coop arrived early the next afternoon at the Setai hotel, a Collins Avenue sepulcher serving the very wealthy, where Coop had booked a suite with a nightly room rate that could have bought her a set of tires and a new laptop.

Prince Aamuzhir had left London three days earlier for Miami and his five-hundred-foot yacht. Piper had wanted to go see him alone, but Coop had loudly vetoed the idea, pointing out that she couldn’t get to Aamuzhir without him. She’d attempted to dissuade him, but he wasn’t a man to hide from his enemies, and she couldn’t put her heart into it.

Coop had no trouble wrangling an invitation to the yacht, and exactly one month from the day he’d caught her spying on him at the club, they were back in his old stomping grounds. Everyone from the skycaps to the food truck vendors selling empanadas greeted him as a returning hero. She did her best to stay in the background and was disheartened to realize that some part of her wanted to tell the world he was her lover.

While he worked out in the hotel gym, she took in the ocean view through the massive wall of bedroom windows and changed from her travel clothes into one of the outfits she’d picked up in a rush shopping trip. They were meeting some of his former teammates for dinner, an invitation she’d tried to get out of.

“I’m only pretending to be your girlfriend when we’re on the yacht tomorrow,” she’d reminded him. “Tonight you’ll be with your old teammates. You don’t need a fake girlfriend.”

For some reason, that had irritated him. “You’re a little more than a fake. We’re sleeping together.”

“A technicality.”

“You’re going with me,” he’d retorted.

She came out of the suite’s luxury bathroom as Coop returned from the gym. The guilt that had been dogging her once again nipped at her heels. If she hadn’t talked him into helping Faiza escape, he wouldn’t be in this situation.

He stopped inside the door of the suite and stared at her. “Where the hell did you get that?”

She gazed down at her short hot-pink A-line jersey dress. “What’s wrong with it?” The spaghetti straps that crossed in the back hadn’t come undone, and the stack of silver bangles encircled her wrist in the proper place. She’d put on makeup and traded the sneakers she’d worn on the plane for barely-there sandals. She’d even pieced out her hair with what was left of an old jar of hair gel. So what if she’d bought her dress at H&M instead of one of his ridiculously overpriced boutiques?

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” he said, circling her. “That’s why the world as