“Will you have time?” For the tattoo, he meant.
“Yes, I will.” But Darcy meant something else. Time enough to flush Beck Rivera out of her system once and for all before she headed to warmer climes—and a fresh start.
chapter 5
The pots of money invested in Sunnyvale couldn’t quite mask the astringent smell of disinfectant, marking it a place where old people went to pass on to the other side. Sort of morbid, Darcy admitted as she quickly navigated the slick floors of the lavish care facility, where her grandmother was camping out while she recovered from her stroke. The old girl was richer than God and could have afforded around-the-clock care at the mansion, but the docs had recommended she spend her rehab here. Something about socializing her way back into regular life.
Lord help the other residents, was Darcy’s answer to that.
Darcy entered her grandmother’s room without knocking. “Hey, Grams, how’s it hangin’?”
Eleanor Cochrane’s regal gaze landed with a thud on Darcy’s bustier-molded cleavage.
“You trying to catch a cold or a man in that outfit?”
“Oh, a man. Most definitely a man.”
She’d gone leather today from the waist down, and maybe it was too sexy for her grandmother, but it sure as hell wasn’t for Beck Rivera. For that man on fire, it was the perfect temperature. She had plans for him later.
Bending over Grams, Darcy kissed the wax-papery skin of her cheek. The woman had aged so much in the last three months it scared the shit out of Darcy, which is why she loved when her grandmother showed flashes of spirit—even if that spirit was laced with acid.
Darcy plopped down into a comfy armchair near the bed. “Looks like you might be on the hunt yourself, Grams. In that nightie, you’re flashing enough bosom to send the boys here to their graves with big smiles and bigger hard-ons.”
“It’s a peignoir, Darcy. Your expensive education was clearly wasted on you.” She inhaled a breath with difficulty, causing Darcy some difficult breathing of her own. “But at least you’re here. Not a single visit from the rest of them. All waiting for the call that I’ve croaked and my money is ready for distribution.” Them, meaning her cousins. The rest of the Cochranes found it hard to fit tongue lashings from the family matriarch into their busy schedules.
“I’m only here in the hopes you’ll change the will and drop it all on me,” Darcy said with a grin, knowing that despite Grams’s diatribes against the younger generation, she would never do such an outrageous thing. Blood is king was her mantra when she wasn’t damning the lot of them to hell.
“He’ll cut you out for good if you’re not careful.”
At the mention of her father, Darcy stiffened in the plush chair, but recovered with a wave. “Guess I should continue to be careless, then. I don’t want it. Any of it.” Her father’s cash-rich approval came with strings so tight they made the bustier she was wearing feel roomy. Since she had dropped out of college and became her own person, she had felt free. Rootless, a little lonely, but liberated. She loved Chicago, but there wasn’t an umbrella big enough to weather her father’s toxic rain.
“He misses you,” Grams said, and Darcy’s heart melted. Not because she believed Sam Cochrane truly missed his daughter, but because Grams sounded so forlorn.
“I miss you, too.” That earned Darcy a geriatric scowl. Gaudy shows of emotion were unacceptable from a Cochrane.
They spent ten minutes chatting about the upcoming fund-raising gala for homeless women that Grams organized each holiday season. Darcy was playing proxy for her grandmother, and had discovered that ordering people about in the name of Madam Cochrane was the ultimate power trip.
Her grandmother turned on the dowager countess stink eye once more. “So who are you flashing all that skin for?”
Heat scalded Darcy’s cheeks. “Do you remember Jack’s friend? The boxer from about seven or eight years ago?”
Grams screwed up her pinched face, calling deep on her memory reserves, and Darcy held her breath. Just how much damage had that stroke done to her?
“Serious boy. Broken nose.”
Phew. “That’s him. Beck.”
“Ah, my favorite ladies.”
Darcy’s muscles locked up as the deep, resonant tone of her father both warmed and chilled the room. Sam Cochrane had a marvelous speaking voice, which he used to great effect encouraging his employees Trump-style—and crushing their dreams, when any of them dared step out of line. It was the same tactic he used to control his family.
Self-pity, thy name is Darcy Cochrane.