Sawyer tried not to feel guilty, relieved, or any other useless emotion. No matter what went down, Todd would blame him. And with some effort, Sawyer hoped he wouldn’t blame himself.
Not your fault…
Chloe had told him that, not even knowing the full story. She was like a spring storm—wild and unpredictable, and yet somehow also a calm, soothing balm on his soul. He didn’t understand it, not one bit. Nor did he know what to do about the fact that they hadn’t burned out on each other as he’d supposed they would.
He still wanted more of her. And he had a sinking feeling that he always would.
And he was back to thinking about her. Perfect. He shook it off as he was called by dispatch to a house where some drunk guy was allegedly punching out all of his mother’s windows. When Sawyer arrived at the house, the front door was open. The woman who’d made the call was standing on the porch. “It’s my son,” she said, voice trembling. She leaned in to whisper, “Tommy’s got a drinking problem.”
“Is he still inside?” Sawyer asked her.
“Yes.” She was wringing her hands. “What are you going to do to him?”
“I’m going to have Tommy come outside to talk.”
“But not arrest him, right? He didn’t threaten me or anything.”
“Ma’am, he’s committed malicious mischief with the windows, and that’s domestic violence. Plus those windows are probably at least three hundred bucks a pop. If you add it all up, it’s a felony. I have to arrest him.”
“Oh, God. He’s going to be really mad.” She bit her lower lip. “I think he needs rehab,” she whispered. “Can you take him to rehab?”
Sawyer looked inside the house. Tommy was mid-thirties but looked fifty, like someone right out of a Cops episode. He was sitting on his couch in the living room, and in front of him on the coffee table were two rows of at least twenty empty beer cans. On top of one of the cans was perched a pair of sunglasses.
“What are you doing?” Sawyer asked him.
Tommy just kept staring at the cans with the intense concentration of the extremely inebriated. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Humor me,” Sawyer said.
“I’m testing my sunglasses. They say they’re polarized, but I think the manufacturer is full of shit. I’m gonna sue.” He bent, peering through the lenses, then unexpectedly slashed out with his hand, sending the cans and glasses flying against the far wall. “Fuckers.”
“Okay,” Sawyer said. “How about we go outside?”
“How about I punch you in the face?”
Sawyer hauled him up to his feet.
For the first time, Tommy looked up at Sawyer. And up, taking in Sawyer’s size and bulk, exaggerated by the Kevlar vest. The suspect lost some of his aggression. “I was just testing my sunglasses,” he said with far less attitude.
Thirty minutes later, he was testing out the bench in lockup, sobering up.
And Sawyer was at career day at the junior high school. God, he hated career day. He didn’t mind the no-drugs speech so much, or the kids’ questions. No, what he hated were the censorious looks from teachers who remembered him from his own junior high school days.
When that was over, Sawyer had a baseball game, and to his great satisfaction, they kicked the firefighters’ collective asses. Then he had a late dinner with Jax at the bar where he pretended not to be watching the front door for Chloe, who didn’t make an appearance. At some point, Sawyer was reminded by Jax that as upcoming best man, he’d better be planning a righteous bachelor party.
Sawyer called Ford and told him to get on that.
The next day, Sawyer was trying to catch up on his ever-growing paperwork when dispatch sent him out to talk to a woman who was claiming she’d been robbed. But when Sawyer got to the beauty salon on the pier, the woman wanted to tell him about her twelve-dollar manicure.
“Ma’am,” Sawyer said. “You said you were robbed.”
“I’m getting to that. The place is all new on the inside, you see?”
“So?”
“So there’s no way they can possibly be making it work with twelve-dollar manicures; clearly it’s a front for criminal activity.”
Sawyer nearly arrested her for being annoying. Instead, he told her if she stopped talking, he might see his way to being charitable enough to not ticket her for making a nuisance call.
Then, since he was there on the pier anyway, he went into Eat Me for food, where Amy took one look at him and promptly served him a double bacon blue burger and a huge helping of pie. “Oh, and heads-up—Chloe’s here.” She hitched her head in the direction of the table behind him, where Chloe was sitting with Anderson, the guy who ran the hardware store.
Amy left Sawyer alone to eat, and he forced his gaze away from the couple. It was no business of his who Chloe ate with. But as he sat there with his burger, Sawyer wondered how he’d feel if she were seeing other people.
Shit, he knew the answer to that without even putting his mind in gear. Two months ago, he’d have laughed at anyone who suggested he’d be this attracted and confused and crazy over a woman. But he felt like he was in a f**king tailspin. When he got a call from dispatch, he jumped on his radio so fast he nearly spilled his soda. Used to eating on the road, he grabbed the second half of his burger and ordered himself not to look over at Chloe as he exited the diner.
But he totally looked.
She smiled and waved as if she were truly happy to see him, and his dumbass heart lightened. It took some effort to stop picturing her face as he drove to Delilah Goldstein’s house. Delilah was eighty-nine, and alone, and once in a while she called in odd reports to 9-1-1. Lucille had adopted her into her posse, but Delilah wasn’t as mobile as the other blue-haired hellions that Lucille hung out with.
“What’s the matter, Mrs. Goldstein?” Sawyer asked when he stood on her porch.
She peered at him through the screen. “Sawyer? Is that you, dear? Have you been playing doorbell ditch again?”
He bit back his sigh. “No, ma’am. Not in about twenty-five years. I’m a sheriff now, remember? You called in that you needed help.”
“Yes, I do need help. I keep hearing Frank Sinatra singing through my TV when it’s turned off.”
Sawyer paused a beat, then glanced through the screen into her living room. Her TV was definitely off. “Huh.” He scratched his chin. He’d seen and heard it all, or so he thought. But this was a new one even for him.
He walked into her living room and squatted in front of the TV, which was at least fifteen years old. The surface didn’t have a spec of dust on it, which took a definite talent. But he wasn’t hearing any Frank Sinatra. “Do you like Frank Sinatra?” he finally asked Mrs. Goldstein.
“Oh yes, of course. My Stan—God bless his soul—loved Frank. We used to listen to him every afternoon at this time of day. Sometimes we’d dance in the living room.” She sighed, the sound an expression of grief as she pressed her hand to her mouth.
To give her a minute, Sawyer made a pretense of checking out the back of the TV, but Christ, sometimes this job sucked golf balls.
“Why do you think it happens?” she whispered. “Do you think it’s Stan’s ghost, or Frank’s? Because as fond as I am of Frank’s music, I don’t want him here in my house, watching me. It feels…scary.”
Sawyer straightened and looked her right in the eyes. “It’s Stan,” he said. “Not Frank.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. And I think that you should just enjoy the music, Mrs. Goldstein. Don’t be afraid.”
She smiled at him, her voice tremulous. “You’re a good man, Sheriff.”
At least she hadn’t said sweet.
She made him stay for coffee and a brownie. “Are you ever going to corral in that wild child Chloe Traeger and marry her?” she asked, bagging up a brownie for him to take with him.
He was so thrown by this question that he just stared at her.
“I only ask because Chloe comes over when I get the headaches. She massages my temples with this fantastic homemade balm she creates. It’s wonderful. She’s wonderful. She’d make such a great sheriff’s wife.”
Chloe, a wife? The mere thought should’ve made him laugh, but it didn’t.
He knew better. Chloe had to be free to do as she wanted; it wasn’t in her nature to be “corralled.” And it wasn’t in his to try to do so. “I’m not exactly marriage material myself, Mrs. Goldstein.”
“Oh, hogwash. That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. You young people have no sense of romance. Why, in my day, if you wanted a girl, you went after her. You made her yours.”
Yeah, and wouldn’t that go over well with Chloe. She just loved it when someone told her what to do. Sawyer moved to the door. “Have a good day, Mrs. Goldstein.”
“Don’t you mean ‘mind my own business’?”
Sawyer grimaced, and she laughed. “Listen, dear. I’m old, and probably far too sentimental, but I’m not dead. Not yet. Don’t close yourself off to what could be. Or when you’re as old as I am, what will be coming out of your TV?”
Metallica sounded good to him.
It was late afternoon, and he was on the road when he got the call that the convenience store that had been robbed several weeks back had set off their alarm again. He raced over there, lights and sirens blaring, to find the owner and the clerk standing outside waiting for him. When Sawyer got out of his SUV, the owner looked at his watch. “Wow, seven minutes,” he said, sounding impressed. He smiled at Sawyer. “We just had a new alarm system installed, and this was our dry run. Nice job, Sheriff. Thank you so much.”
Christ. Sawyer did his best to unclench his jaw before pointing out that he wasn’t the convenience store’s personal security consultant, and they couldn’t call 9-1-1 unless there was a true emergency. And then, what the hell, he also took the opportunity to buy two candy bars.
By the time Sawyer pulled up to his house that night, a rainless lightning storm had moved in. Not good. With how dry it had been, it was like playing Russian roulette with lightning-bolt-sized matches on dry timber.
His place looked dark and empty. Empty, he knew, of food, of warmth, of anything remotely welcoming, new paint or not. He walked through his front yard and stopped short at the sight of Chloe sitting on his porch.
She was wearing a long coat and tight leather boots up past her knees but was still huddled into herself for warmth, and without letting himself think, Sawyer pulled her upright and wrapped his arms around her because she wasn’t dark and empty. She was the opposite, and as she leaned in to him, a feeling surged through him that felt startlingly like relief. And need.
So much f**king need. “You’re frozen solid,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”
She simply shook her head and pressed her icy nose to his throat, making him suck in a breath. He opened his front door and ushered her inside, where he cranked the heat before turning back to her.
She stood there hugging herself and flashed him a very small smile. “So, um, have you ever done something stupid and then had regrets?”
His heart contracted painfully. If this was where she said she’d just slept with Anderson, he was going to have to shoot the guy, which would suck because Sawyer’s department tended to frown on excessive lethal force. “I try really hard not to do anything stupid,” he said carefully. “But it happens. Ditto on the regrets. What’s this about, Chloe?”
She looked away, but Sawyer hooked a finger under her chin, turning her face back to his. “Me?” he asked. “You regretting us?”
“No. Never.”
He nodded like he understood, but he didn’t. “You and Anderson?”
Her eyes widened. She looked startled, then insulted. “Anderson gave me his twenty-percent employee discount for materials for the spa, so I bought him lunch.”
Sawyer let out the breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding, pulled her in again, and kissed her, his body reacting so quickly that it caught him by surprise, and he heard himself groan into her mouth.
Chloe lifted her head. “Do you remember when I said sometimes I need to feel? And that sometimes I do stupid things to get there, like pierce a nipple or hang glide or—”
He ran his gaze over her, thwarted by her damn coat. “Are you hurt? Are you—”
“No.” She fumbled with the buttons, then dropped her coat. Beneath she was utterly, gorgeously na**d. And beautiful. So f**king beautiful that Sawyer lost his words and his mind. “God, look at you,” he said hoarsely.
“Welcome to my latest crazy,” she whispered, wearing nothing but those knee-high boots and an unsure smile. “Oh, and you should probably know, I’m quite possibly hypothermic.”
“Luckily I’ve been trained to handle this situation.”
Chloe smiled, and he realized she was nervous. He was nervous, too, which made no sense to him whatsoever. They’d been here before, right here. He pulled off his shirt and reached for her at the same moment she leaped at him, wrapping her legs around his hips. He had one hand on her ass, the other high on her back and in her long hair as he carried her to his bedroom. Lying her on the bed, he stepped back only to get rid of his gun and phone, then strip out of the rest of his clothes, which he did in less than five seconds. Mother of God, let nobody have an emergency tonight, he thought.
He had a moment where he stared down at her on his bed in nothing but those fuck-me boots, not wanting to take them off. But then she shivered, and he reluctantly tugged them from her feet and dropped them to the floor before shoving her beneath his thick covers and following her in. “Step one,” he said. “We conserve body heat.”