Jill Shalvis - Head Over Heels

He held up a hand, listening. Dispatch had been trying to reach him. Agent Morris had been trying to reach him. Everyone and their mother had been trying to reach him. In the forty minutes he’d been out of range, all hell had broken loose. There’d been a reported drug deal before the DEA could mobilize. They had a witness, a hiker, who claimed that he’d seen the whole thing but by the time the authorities had arrived, everyone had scattered.

It’d been only a few miles from here.

The DEA had gone to Todd’s place to discover that not only had they missed whatever had gone down tonight, Todd had cleared out entirely, probably holed up waiting until the heat was off.

No doubt thanks to Sawyer going to Todd, trying to interrogate him about his drug source and offering him a deal. Instead Todd had packed up his shit and vanished.

“Sawyer?”

“I’ve got to go.” He strode back to his truck, vibrating with anger. Jamming his key in the ignition, he tossed his cell on the seat, then peeled out of the parking area, furious at himself. He’d known he was the only one on the DEA task force actually stationed in Lucky Harbor, and he’d also known better than to be out of cell service that long, but as always, being anywhere near Chloe stole his good sense.

Not her fault. Nope, this one was all on him, and it’d been at the expense of the job that meant everything to him.

Chloe stared after Sawyer’s truck, Maddie’s headlights cutting through the cloud of dust in his wake.

“What the hell was that?” Maddie asked. She sat in the backseat, a towel wrapped around her hair. She didn’t sound drunk now. “He seemed mad.”

“He wasn’t angry before,” Tara said from her shotgun position in the front seat.

Now that the dust had settled, Chloe pulled back onto the road, replaying the evening in her head. “It wasn’t about us,” she said. “I think it was about his messages. Something must have happened.”

“I hope everything’s okay,” Maddie said. “I’d hate it if he missed helping someone because of us.”

Chloe, too. She’d never seen Sawyer react like that before. It wasn’t his style. Usually when things went to hell, he got calm and quiet. Steady as a rock. It had to be something bad. Her thoughts went first to his father, but that didn’t hold up. If he’d had a heart attack, Sawyer would have been concerned, not angry.

“He sure was surprised to find us in the mud,” Maddie said. “I can’t imagine what he was expecting, but I can guarantee it wasn’t the three of us in war paint.”

Chloe thought of Sawyer’s expression when he’d come into view at the edge of the trail and found them. He’d been irritated, then relieved to find them. Then he’d looked right at her and hadn’t even tried to hide his affection.

The memory brought an unexpected lump to her throat. Jax and Ford had known Sawyer forever, and yet he hid his emotions from them all the time. His emotions and his weaknesses…

But not from her.

He let her see him, all of him. It was a gift, she realized. The gift of himself.

She’d never had such a thing offered to her before, and she was still thinking about it, marveling at it, when she dropped Tara and a very groggy Maddie at the inn. No one even bothered to suggest cleaning out the car tonight. Jax and Ford were waiting to pick up their women.

Chloe parked and walked around back to the cottage. It was with mixed feelings that she went inside, alone.

She stripped there in the doorway and stepped gingerly to the bathroom, where it took her nearly an entire bottle of her own shea butter body wash to get clean. Afterward, she slid naked between the soft sheets of her bed and listened to the quiet creaks and groans of the place around her. Several months ago, she and Lance had joked about the sounds coming from a ghost, a lonely one.

Chloe knew the feeling…

No. Life was good, she reminded herself firmly. She and her sisters seemed to be in sync. The inn was doing well. Her past was her past, and her present was actually moving along.

It was only her future in question. A future she couldn’t quite see or imagine. She flopped over and told herself she’d never given her future much of a thought, so why the sudden worry now?

The answer was terrifyingly simple.

For the first time, she was feeling content. And she wanted the feeling to last, even though she knew from experience that nothing lasted.

Sleep didn’t come. Just more concern. She debated calling Sawyer, but…but she had a bad feeling about whatever it was that had happened tonight. She didn’t want to interrupt him from something important.

But on the other hand, he could already be home, and not calling her because he thought she was asleep.

Which settled it. She’d go to his place, see if his truck was there. If he was mad, he could tell her in person.

When she pulled into his driveway twenty minutes later, she let out a breath at the sight of his truck. Parking the Vespa next to it, she headed up the walk and knocked softly.

Sawyer opened the door in low-slung jeans and nothing else but a decent amount of testosterone-driven attitude. For the first time since they’d been doing this, he didn’t seem happy to see her, and dread enveloped her heart. “Is it too late?” she asked much more mildly than she felt.

“Since when has that stopped you?”

She stared at him for a beat, then turned to go. “I shouldn’t have come-”

“Chloe.” He sighed and pulled her back around. “Come in. You’re cold.”

No, she was scared. Not of him, never of him, but of what was going to happen between them.

Or not happen.

With butterflies flying around in her gut, she shut the front door and leaned back against it. She tried to get a read on him, but as usual, his face was giving away nothing. “I didn’t think you were upset about the mud springs,” she said. “Which, by the way, wasn’t my idea.” She winced. “Okay, so it was, but I’d been just kidding, and then Maddie was all over it, and-”

“It’s not about the mud springs.”

“Are you sure, because-”

“Not everything revolves around you, Chloe.” And at that, he walked away.

“Well, I know that-” But he wasn’t listening. He was gone. Her initial thought was to walk out the door, just let everything go. The old Chloe would’ve done that in a heartbeat. But she didn’t want to be that Chloe anymore, that person who skipped town rather than face hard reality.

So she pressed a hand to her nervous stomach, dropped her purse in the entry, and forced herself down the hall after him. That’s when she saw the low wooden coffee table, and against the wall, an entertainment unit.

Sawyer had been busy making the place look more like a home.

She found Sawyer in the master bathroom, reaching through the shower to open the window there. To her surprise, one wall was half painted. It’d been a rather outdated shade of green, which he was covering up with the wildly imaginative off-white. “How did you decide on a shade?” she asked.

“It was on sale.”

She might have smiled if it hadn’t been for the knots in her gut. “It’s two a.m.”

“Yep.” He reached for the roller.

Every part of her wanted to run for the door, say what the hell, it’d been fun while it lasted, because she’d known, God, she’d known, that this couldn’t last.

But the hell with being a big, fat chicken. She was braver now. She didn’t understand. She needed to understand. “So what was that call about earlier? More crazy women skinny-dipping by moonlight somewhere?”

“No.” He rolled a careful stripe of paint, perfectly even. No crooked walls tonight.

“Your dad okay?” she asked.

“He’s fine. Blowing me off, but fine.”

“Blowing you off?”

He shrugged. “He told me to stay away, that he’d got some kid to do odd jobs around his place. A really great kid who’s always on time and doesn’t try to screw him and is a fucking pillar of virtue.”

“Well, good for him,” she said. “Those pillars of fucking virtue are really hard to find.”

He tossed the roller down. “There’s no damn kid, Chloe. He’s making him up.”

“Maybe he’s trying to save you the time or save face.”

“Save face?”

“Yes, you know, stupid male pride?”

“You don’t understand,” Sawyer said grimly. “And how could you? I’ve never told you about who I used to be.”

“So you were a punk-ass kid,” she said. “So what? A lot of us were.”

“You don’t know.”

“I know who you are now,” she said. “And that’s all that matters. You’re loyal, strong, caring-”

He snorted and went back to painting. Clearly they were done discussing this. Shock. She stared at his broad, expansive back, watching with avid interest as the muscles there flexed and bunched while he stroked the walls with the roller. “Do you have another roller?”

“No.”

She squeezed in between him and the wall. “Hi. My name’s Chloe, and you might not have noticed, but we’re friends. Naked friends, sure, but friends nevertheless. And friends share. If it wasn’t your father tonight that pissed you off, what was it?”

He met her gaze. “We’re more than just messing around naked friends,” he said.

She did her best to squelch the burst of emotion those words caused. “Then talk to me.”

He made a restless movement with his shoulders, like he was to-the-bone exhausted. “If you’re mad at me,” she murmured, “I think I deserve to know why.”

He stared at the wet paint on the wall above her head. “It’s not you I’m mad at.”

“Then who?”

“Me.” He drew a careful breath. “I’m between a rock and a hard place here with what I can say.”