Cooper by Nhys Glover Page B

or both people would enter the kitchen and she’d be caught. There was no escape. All she could do was tear off her coat, stuff it under the bench and try to act as if she’d just come down for a snack. Opening the fridge seemed a good plan.
    Both sets of footsteps approached at the same time. She heard Juanita ask Fred how he was going. The stiff reply told her what she already knew: this guard would not be willing to bend the rules for her. He was always coldly aloof, even with his peers.
    "Miss Amy, you are up late," Juanita declared, her face still flushed from the cold outside. She carried the empty mug. “If you wanted a late-night snack you should have called down and I would have brought it up.”
    Amy breathed another breath of relieved air. So Juanita was non-the-wiser to her activities. But she wasn’t wearing a dressing-gown or slippers. Surely her clothes should give her away.
    “I have been working on my laptop and didn’t realise the time. And I didn’t want to disturb you.”
    “You work too hard, Miss Amy,” she admonished lightly before turning to Fred, who was hovering in the doorway to the kitchen. The fridge door blocked him from seeing all but Amy’s head. “Get on with you. Mario says it is time for the shift change. You are taking advantage of the new guy to get more time in the warm.”
    Fred grumbled and turned on his heel, heading down the corridor towards the front of the house. Again Amy huffed out a relieved sigh.
    “And you get upstairs, too, Miss Amy. I will bring you up a snack in a few minutes when you have changed.” Juanita waved her out of the kitchen as if she was shooing chickens.
    Amy was happy to comply. As soon as she heard the front door open, she dashed to the corridor and up the back stairs. She’d be in her room before Mario took over the interior route.
    But that still left Juanita. Was the woman wise to her night-time escapade, and if so, could she be bribed?
    As she hurriedly shucked off her clothes and donned PJs, Amy suddenly felt a sickening sense of loss replace her fears of discovery. It was stupid, but she was already missing Cooper. How was she going to last without him, even for a couple of short days?
    This was madness. She shouldn't feel this way so quickly. After all, it was only a few hours ago that she'd first set eyes on him.
    Sprawling on her back across her still-made-up bed, Amy let out a deep sigh as she tried to calm her fast heartbeat. The adrenalin that had been pumping through her system since she left the van was now dissipating, even though she still had Juanita to deal with. But somehow she knew the maid wouldn’t give her away. Hadn’t she caught her frowning with concern at different times when her father attacked her? No, not her father; Hays. When Hays attacked her.
    How could a person's life change so suddenly and so completely? Less than eight hours ago she'd been anxiously wondering whether Marquez could heal what was broken inside her. Now she knew there was nothing broken. In fact, she was the very opposite of broken. She wasn’t Hays’ stupid, ugly daughter, she was something extraordinary, with a mate who thought her more beautiful than anyone he'd ever met.
    It had been weird seeing versions of Cooper surrounding her. Had she doubted his stranger than fiction story of clones, she would have believed him after that demonstration. They were quite remarkably alike, except for small cosmetic differences. Yet their personalities were as dissimilar as individual normally were. There was serious, authoritative Chase; moody, bad-boy Colt; sexy, playful Connor; and three other tough guys who looked like they belonged to a motorcycle gang, not an elite team of super-soldiers.
    When those tough guys had come prowling towards her like she was the Blue Plate Special arrived early, she'd been terrified. But that terror had turned to fury when the Goth one had insulted Cooper. How she managed to find the courage to make that comment she