First Star I See Tonight (Chicago Stars #8) - Susan Elizabeth Phillips Page 0,89
lost. She was getting drunk.
She should never have taken his ring. She wouldn’t have if she’d been smart enough to come up with another plan. But she hadn’t been smart enough—not as smart as he’d been. Some detective she was turning out to be. And now here she sat, drowning her ineptitude in liquor.
She polished off her third drink. Ordered a fourth. She was swilling old-fashioneds, but with no cherry, no orange, straight bourbon whiskey, extra hard on the bitters.
Duke Dove would never have done anything so half-brained. But then, Duke had been a pro, while she was still an amateur.
Her fresh drink arrived. She thought she might be getting double vision, but she sipped it anyway. The ice cubes clinked against the side of her glass as the chair next to her squeaked on the wooden floor. She didn’t look up. “Get lost.”
A familiar hand—a familiar, ringless hand—plunked a bottle of Sam Adams on the table. Another mistake on her part—asking the hotel doorman for directions to the nearest cheap bar. She’d never thought Coop would follow her.
She stared up at the soccer game. “I’m not a team player,” she finally said, her speech only slightly slurred.
“I’ve noticed.” The words crackled with hostility.
Her fresh glass sported a waxy lipstick imprint that hadn’t come from her. She took a sip from the other side. “I don’ know how to be.”
“You against the world, right?”
“Tha’s the way it’s always been.” She stuck her index finger in her drink and shifted around the ice cubes. “Today I hit the downside.”
“Way down.”
“I’m not looking for a pass, if tha’s what you’re thinking. I did something stupid because I din’t have a better idea. I’ll figure out how to pay you back.”
He scraped his thumbnail down the middle of the beer label, ripping it in two. “Like you said. Not a team player.”
She couldn’t take it any longer, and she began to stand so she could escape to the ladies’ room. When she wobbled, he caught her arm and steered her back into her chair.
“Do not be nice to me,” she said fiercely. “I screwed up, and I know it.”
“Yeah, you did.” His jaw set in that way he had when he was furious. “Here’s the most challenging part of being a leader. Understanding you may not always know what’s best for the team.”
“Right now, all I know is I have a client—or I used to have one—who’s being threatened, and I don’ have any idea who’s behind it.”
That wasn’t a great way to try to salvage her job—a job she didn’t deserve to hold on to—and he didn’t reassure her. Instead, he pushed back his chair. “You’re going back to the hotel.”
***
He had to get rid of her. Coop knew exactly how it felt to call an audible and have it backfire, but Pipe had thrown out the whole damned playbook, and that meant she was out.
The wheels of the 747 hit the tarmac at O’Hare, but she slept through it. She was impulsive, but she wasn’t stupid, and she had to know what was coming—had to know he couldn’t keep her around. He had no room for a blue-eyed badass who went off half-cocked doing whatever she damn well pleased.
Yet, despite the fact that he couldn’t trust her judgment, he also trusted her more than anyone he’d ever known. No person he’d ever worked with had cared more about his welfare. Sure, his teammates and coaches had cared, but they’d had ulterior motives. Piper, on the other hand, would protect him in her own screwball way even if he weren’t paying her a dime. Because that’s the way she was made. Loyal to the end. And that’s what this was. The end.
The plane pulled up to the gate, and she began to stir. Being her lover made this more complicated than it should be. He’d known the affair was a mistake, but he’d gone ahead and done it anyway. Now he had to break it off and fire her.
He’d made tough calls before, but none as tough as this.
***
WHAT’S BUGGING COOPER GRAHAM?
Cockroaches! Thousands of them are swarming the former Stars quarterback’s hot new nightspot, Spiral. “They’re everywhere,” an associate who asked to remain anonymous says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The club is closed while exterminators try to eradicate the vermin, but whether the party crowd will return is the big question. Maybe Spiral should be renamed Death Spiral?
The news was all over the Internet. Piper sat at her office desk and