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Chapter Twenty-Four
Coop
“Time to wake up, Precious.” I trailed my index finger along her naked spine.
With a girlish sigh, she grappled for the rumpled white sheets. The king-sized bed swallowed her small frame now that she was alone in it. “It’s still dark out,” she groaned.
My response was an ominous click of the bedside sconce and allowing the sudden bright light to hit her eyes.
“It’s too early,” she bemoaned.
“It’s after.”
She rubbed at her eyes and blinked a few times.
“You owe me that secret.” The sternness of my tone had her furrowing her brow or perhaps it was the fact I was fully dressed and sitting on the vanity chair I’d pulled in from the master bathroom.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to ask you a few questions and you’re going to be honest with me, Princess.”
She clenched her teeth, though I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d bared them at me. “I’ve asked you repeatedly to stop calling me that.”
“Question one. Why do you hate it when I call you a princess?” I took a sip of the black coffee I’d snagged from the crew mess after I’d snuck out and changed clothes. “Truth.”
Pushing herself more upright, she snagged the corner of the sheet and covered herself with it. “If we’re going to do this, could you hand me a shirt or something? Please.”
As much as I wanted her off-balance and vulnerable, I didn’t want her to ever look back at this moment and mistakenly believe I took any pleasure in doing it. I found a T-shirt for her, handed it over, and resumed my interrogation pose.
“There are actually two reasons,” she said, pulling the shirt over her head.
I couldn’t help but notice she managed to shield her breasts from my view with her bedsheet as she did so. Good. I liked that I had her backed on her heels a bit.
“First, I love it when you call me Presh. It makes my day every time you say it, because I know you went out of your way to research my name’s meaning just so you could call me something special that was all yours. Second, the nickname Princess is bittersweet for me, because my father used to call me that.”
I slowly clapped my hands. “Nice evasion tactic with the personal details, the compliment, and the sentimentality. I appreciate the sprinkle of honesty as well. But let’s try this again, why did your father call you a princess?”
“Don’t many fathers think of their daughters as princesses?”
“What’s your real name?”
She pursed her lips, which were beautifully flushed and darkened from our hours of ravishing each other’s bodies. Her eyes flicked to mine like she was not amused by any of this. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
“I’m serious, Zee,” I assured before taking another slow drink. Though from the set of her chin, I suspected she was serious, too. I didn’t doubt for a second Zee would put me down if I didn’t handle this properly.
“It’s too bad you can’t shine that sconce right in my eyes or waterboard me in the bathtub. You know we have a CIA-grade lie detector machine back on the island, if you prefer?”
I flashed my dimples. “I trust you’ll answer my questions honestly. It’s how much you’ll try to omit that concerns me.”
She treated me to an airy, mocking laugh of the ‘I’ve got nothing to hide’ variety. “My real name is Aziza. My legal name is not.”
I sipped my coffee and flagged my hand to encourage her to keep going.
“Just like your real name is Coop, but your legal name is not.”
“Presh, let’s not go there. You’re better than these basal evasions. Besides, this isn’t a game or an interrogation. This is us putting everything on the table so that we can have a real chance. Isn’t that what you want, too?”
She was slow to answer. Zee didn’t trust me, and from my activity in the Amazon, I didn’t blame her. Still, she relented. “Yes, I want us to have a real chance.”
