“Well, Princess, shall we go up to bed?” Coop looked at her as he took off his jacket and loosened his tie. He was incredibly handsome, and looked as impeccable at the end of the evening as the beginning.
“Am I a pumpkin yet?” Alex asked sleepily, as she carried her shoes in her hand and walked up the stairs with her satin gown trailing behind her. She looked like a very tired princess.
“No, my darling,” Coop said softly, “and you never will be.”
It was like a fairy tale being with him, and at times it had a feeling of unreality to it. Alex had to remind herself that she worked in a hospital with sick preemies, and lived in a studio apartment filled with dirty laundry. Although she had other options, but she had long since decided not to use them. The glamour in her life, and the extravagance, was provided only by Coop.
She was asleep in his arms in less than five minutes, and when the alarm went off at five, she almost turned over and went back to sleep, but Coop pushed her gently out of bed and told her he'd call her later. Twenty minutes later, she was grinding down the driveway in her ancient car, and wide awake. The night before seemed like a dream. Until she saw herself in the morning papers. There was a big photograph of her with Coop on their way into the Oscars.
“She looks like you,” one of the nurses said as she ogled it, and then looked up wide-eyed when she saw the name under the picture. Alexandra Madison. Coop had forgotten to tell them she was a doctor, and Alex had teased him about it. She told him she had worked hard for her title, and expected him to use it.
“Can't I just tell them you're my psychiatric nurse?” he had teased her back. She looked radiant in the photographs, and Coop was holding her hand and beaming. It was a message to the world that all was well with him, and he wasn't hiding. It was exactly the message he had wanted to convey, and his press agent congratulated him later that morning.
“Good for you, Coop,” he said. Without saying a word, it countered all the filth and rumors in the tabloids. The subliminal message was, so what if he had gotten a minor porn actress pregnant, he was still who he was, and involved with respectable women.
There was another photograph of them in the afternoon paper. And when Coop called her, he told her that several of the gossip columnists had called him, from the respectable press, not the tabloids.
“They wanted to know who you are.”
“And did you tell them?”
“Of course. And this time, I remembered to tell them you're a doctor,” he said proudly. “They also wanted to know if we're getting married. I told them it was much too early to comment, but that you are the special woman in my life and I adore you.”
“Well, that should keep them busy,” she smiled as she sipped a Styrofoam cup filled with cold coffee. She had been working for twelve hours by then, but fortunately it had been a relatively easy day. She was more tired than she'd expected. She wasn't used to carousing all night and working all day. Coop had slept till eleven, and then had a massage, a manicure, and a haircut. “Did they ask about the baby?” she inquired, sounding concerned. She knew how much that upset him.
“Not a word.” And he hadn't heard anything from Charlene either. She was too busy talking to the tabloids.
But two weeks later, he heard from her lawyer. It was early May, and she claimed to be three months pregnant. She wanted support for the duration of the pregnancy, and she was ready to start negotiating child support and palimony with him.
“Palimony? For a three-week fling? She's crazy,” Coop complained to his lawyer. But she was claiming she was so sick she couldn't work until after she had the baby. According to her attorney, she was unusually nauseous. “Apparently not too nauseous to give interviews. Christ, this woman is a monster.”
“Just pray the baby isn't your monster,” his lawyer told him. And they agreed that whatever Coop offered her temporarily, had to be offset by a promise from her to have an amniocentesis that included a DNA test. “What are the chances it's yours, Coop?”
“I guess about fifty-fifty. As good as anyone's. I slept with her, the condom broke. Depends how my luck is running these days. What would be the odds in Vegas?”
“I'll have to check on that for you,” his lawyer said, sounding somber. “I hate to be crude, but as one of my clients put it, ‘You stick it in, you pay forever.’ I hope you're being careful now, Coop. That was a very pretty woman I saw you with at the Oscars.”
“And a smart one,” Coop said proudly. “She's a doctor.”
“And hopefully not a gold digger like the last one. The prospective mom is good-looking too. Eurasian or something, isn't she? But whatever she is, she has a heart like a cash register. I hope the rest of her was worth it.”
“I don't remember,” Coop said discreetly, and then hastened to defend Alex. “My doctor friend is anything but a gold digger. With her family background, she doesn't need anything from me. Not by a long shot.”
“Really? Who are they?” he asked with interest.
“Her father is Arthur Madison. None other.” The attorney whistled.
“Now that is interesting. Have you heard from him yet about the baby?”
“No, I haven't.”
“I'll bet you will, sooner or later. Does he know you're dating his daughter?”
“I'm not sure. He and Alex don't seem to talk much.”
“Well, it's no secret now. The two of you are in every paper in the country.”
“Worse things could happen.” And had. Charlene was in all the tabloids.
And a week later, so was Alex. They were rehashing the same news, only now they added Alex's photos to Charlene's and Cooper's. She looked like a young queen in the tabloids, and the headlines were predictably ugly. Mark kept buying all of the papers to show Jimmy, and Jessica was enamored with Alex, whom she ran into at the pool regularly, whenever she wasn't working. The two had struck up an easy friendship, and Alex liked her, although she didn't say anything to Coop. She knew how he felt about them, and he had enough on his plate for the moment.
He was getting calls from Abe these days too, reminding him that he was spending too much money, and concerned over the child support he was going to have to pay Charlene. “You can't afford it, Coop. And if you miss a payment, she'll put you in jail. That's how those things work, and from the look of her, she'll do it.”
“Thanks for the good news, Abe.” He was spending less money than he usually did on Alex because she had simple tastes, but his overhead was still too high, according to Abe. He kept assuring Coop that the reckoning was coming.
“You'd better marry the Madison girl,” he said, chuckling, wondering if that was why Coop was going out with her. Given who she was, it was hard to imagine Coop didn't have an ulterior motive, and he was still examining his own conscience. He was daily more convinced that he loved her.
And Liz had also called him about the furor in the tabloids. She was outraged.
“What a rotten situation! You never should have gone out with her, Coop!”
“Now you tell me,” he chuckled ruefully. “How's marriage?”
“I love it, although San Francisco takes a little getting used to. I'm always cold, and it's awfully quiet.”
“Well, you can leave him, and come back to me. I always need you.”
“Thank you, Coop.” But she was happy with Ted, and loved his daughters. She was only sorry she had waited so long to get married. She realized now how much she had sacrificed for Coop. She would have loved to have children of her own, but it was too late for that now. At fifty-two, she had to content herself with Ted's daughters. “What's Alex like?”
“An angel of mercy,” he said, smiling, “the girl next door. Audrey Hepburn. Dr. Kildare. She's terrific. You'd love her.”
“Bring her to San Francisco for a weekend.”
“I'd love to, but she's always working, or on call. She's the senior resident. It's a big responsibility.” It was an odd match for him, Liz couldn't help thinking, but she was obviously very pretty. And the papers said she was thirty, which was the outer limit of the age he liked them. Anything between twenty-one and thirty was fair game for Coop.