Someone being Chloe, naturally.

“Know what I think?” Sawyer asked.

“I have no idea. I never do.”

He was leaning against the back of the bench, all six feet three inches of brawn at rest. “I make you nervous.”

“You don’t make me nervous.” Okay, he so made her nervous. She turned to the water and tried to take a deep, relaxing breath. With the ocean in front of her—a much more relaxing view than the one of the gorgeous, smug bastard behind her—it should have been no problem. But it took a few tries, and she had to close her eyes. When that didn’t work, she added a stretch, rolling her shoulders, then lifting her arms high.

A low sound of male appreciation came from behind her in mid-stretch, and she turned to face him.

Sawyer’s eyes lifted from the vicinity of her ass. “What are you playing at now?” he asked softly.

And wasn’t that just the thing. “I don’t think I’m playing,” she said back, just as softly.

He studied her carefully, clearly searching for half truths.

But she never dealt in half truths. Or lies for that matter. Too much to remember. Nope, she liked her life dealt straight up. Possibly the one thing they had in common.

Sawyer stepped toward her, something in his stance making her feel like Little Red Riding Hood facing down the Big Bad Wolf. With the pier rail at her back, she tilted her head up to meet his gaze. “What?” she whispered.

“Is there something going on with you and Lance that I should know about?”

“No. Why?”

“Just trying to figure out if last night’s fake caterwauling was a warm-up.”

“For the real thing? No.” She paused. “Caterwauling?” He was giving her a complex. “It happens, you know. Screaming during sex.” Although not to her, dammit.

“Does it?” he wondered. “Moaning, I get.” He stepped even closer. Since she had nowhere to retreat to, his body touched hers. “Panting? Definitely.” His voice dropped an octave. “Some dirty talk? Oh hell, yeah. But not that horrendous sound you were making, no.”

He was warm, so deliciously warm. “It happens,” Chloe repeated, having to lock her knees so they didn’t wobble. She put a hand on his chest because he’d moved into her personal space and suddenly there wasn’t nearly enough air.

“When?” he asked, his hand circling her wrist, and as he’d done once before, he let his thumb brush over the tiny tattoo there. “When does it happen?”

“Well…in books.”

His eyes softened slightly at this and so did his mouth. “What kind of books are you reading, Chloe?”

“Er…” Okay, so maybe she’d been reading a lot of romances lately, so what? And maybe some erotica, too. There was nothing wrong with that, or daydreaming about being those women in the stories, the women who had enough breath in their lungs to scream in passion. “Not the point,” she said, no longer certain what the point was.

And why the hell was he standing here teasing her instead of running? And…“Why did you ask about Lance?”

Sawyer stared into her face for a long, speculative moment. “So that I could do this.” He cupped her jaw, then lowered his head until their lips nearly met. Not hesitant, not uncertain.

The opposite, in fact.

There was a beat of stillness, during which his gaze held hers prisoner while all her parts came alive and her eyes drifted shut. Their mouths brushed lightly, then not so lightly, and when his tongue touched hers, she moaned. At the sound, he threaded his hands in her hair and deepened the kiss.

She melted into him. There was no other word for what happened. One minute her bones were there and then in the next they were gone. Then as quickly as it’d started, it was over, and she was blinking up at him, her breathing nowhere close to under control. “Okay, what…what was that?”

Sawyer shoved a hand through his hair, leaving it tousled. “I don’t know. You drive me crazy.”

Just what a girl wanted to hear. She used her inhaler, and he frowned. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you back.”

“I can walk myself.”

Her phone vibrated. She pulled the cell from her pocket and stared down at the ID. Todd. Because she hung out with Lance so much, she ran into Todd often. Occasionally he called her to see if she wanted to go out—his euphemism for hooking up.

Chloe might have earned the moniker the “wild child” here in Lucky Harbor, but she wasn’t the “stupid child.” Everyone knew there was simmering tension between Sawyer and Todd, and she wasn’t going to be the cause of seeing it burst into flame. She hit ignore and shoved her phone back in her pocket.

“Problem?” Sawyer asked.

“Nope.”

Their gazes met and held. He didn’t say anything more but stubbornly stuck by her side all the way back to the inn. He waited at the bottom of the steps while she climbed them and reached for the front door, making the mistake of looking back at him.

He was quite a sight standing there, muscles tense and gleaming from his run, sweats riding low on his hips. He looked dangerous, alluring, and hotter than sin. “I’m going to pretend that didn’t happen. The kiss,” she clarified.

“Can you?”

Her ni**les were still hard so she sort of doubted it. It’d been a hell of a kiss. “It doesn’t matter. The fact is that we experimented, got it out of our system. We’re done with that now.” She paused. “Right?”

“Yeah.”

Not even a nanosecond of a hesitation. Ouch. “Okay, good,” she said, lifting her chin. “Good, then.”

Sawyer turned and began jogging back the way they’d just come. She watched him until he’d vanished from sight, then let herself drop to the top step, completely unsettled. Because for two people who valued the truth over all else, they’d both just lied their asses off.

Chapter 5

“When you don’t know what you’re doing, fake it.”

Chloe Traeger

Chloe stepped inside the inn and came face-to-face with a pissed-off Tara. “What?” Chloe asked, still a little off her game from kissing Sawyer. Sawyer. Holy smokes.

“Where were you?”

“On a walk.” Making out with the sheriff. “Why?”

“Because you were supposed to be here.”

“I was gone for an hour before sunrise. We didn’t have any guests.”

“No, but when a family of four stopped by, who’d been driving all night, you weren’t here. They were just leaving when I drove up.”

“So you caught them in time.”

“They didn’t stay,” Tara said. “They said they didn’t feel comfortable staying in a deserted inn.”

“Shit. I’m sorry, I—”

Tara held up a hand. “If it’s too much, sugar, just say so. You can’t fake your way through this.”

“It’s not too much.” Goddammit. She swallowed the urge to get defensive. “I’ll do better.”

Tara nodded and went into the kitchen, leaving Chloe alone to wrestle with that promise.

A few days later, Sawyer was off duty and running errands, which rated right up there with paperwork on his hate-to-do list. It didn’t help that he’d spent the last twelve hours on a special task force working for the DEA. Under Agent Reed Morris, they’d tracked and rooted out a known drug dealer who’d holed up in Alder Flats, a particularly isolated, rugged area on the edge of the county. Ric Alfonso had been just one piece of a bigger puzzle they were working on, but despite their best efforts, it had ended badly.

Ric was now on a slab in the morgue, and Sawyer was questioning the sanity of his chosen profession. It wasn’t the first time he’d been present at a death shot, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but Christ.

Ric had been nineteen years old.

At nineteen, Sawyer hadn’t been dealing drugs, but he had been on the fast track to becoming a criminal. Which begged the question—what made the fragile difference between a life lost and a life won? Was it sheer guts and determination? Hard work? Karma? The question was too deep for him at the moment, stuck at a red light when he’d rather be flying over the water on Ford’s boat, or lying on a warm beach with a woman, skimpy bikini optional.

Neither was in the cards for him, not today. He got some food, picked up his mail, and then drove to the heart of town, to a square block of small, ranch-style homes built back in the 1970s. Most had been repaired and renovated. Sawyer pulled into the driveway of one that hadn’t. The garage door’s springs were broken. The owner said he was having a guy take care of it, and though the owner’s only living relative, a son, had offered to fix it numerous times, the offer had been firmly rebuked.

Tough. Sawyer spent the next half hour doing it himself in spite of the fact that he wouldn’t be thanked. The grass needed mowing again as well. He stretched the kink out of his neck as he went for the ancient lawn mower on the side of the house. It was a stall tactic, and he usually wasn’t much for stalling, but he mowed the entire lawn and side yard, and finally, with nothing left to do, turned to the front door.

Nolan Thompson stood in the doorway. Sawyer’s father was dressed today, which was an improvement over last week, when he’d faced Sawyer in his underwear. It was hard as hell to take the old man’s righteous anger seriously when it was delivered with plaid cotton boxers sagging over a body ravaged by alcohol and fifty-plus years of physical labor.

“I told you I’d hired a kid to do this shit,” his dad growled in the same low, gruff voice that once upon a time had struck terror to the depths of Sawyer’s troublemaking soul.

It’d been that way until the day he’d realized he was bigger and badder than his father. Instead of taking his punishment for whatever stupid thing Sawyer had done that day—and Sawyer had no doubt it had been stupid—he’d shoved back.

He’d been sixteen. After that, the two of them had resorted to stony silence for Sawyer’s last year in the house. Contact had remained rare and estranged until Sawyer’s twenty-fifth birthday, which he’d spent in the hospital at his father’s side after Nolan’s first heart attack. That had been ten years ago. Now their visits were still spent in silence, but there’d been two more heart attacks and a new frailty in his father that Sawyer hated.

Because it meant that every time Sawyer looked at him, he had no choice but to feel. Compassion, regret, guilt, whatever emotion bombarded him, he hated every minute of it. He looked around his father’s yard. “So where is this paragon of virtue you’ve hired?”

“He’ll be here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, if he said he’d come, he’ll come. He shows up on time, doesn’t give me attitude, and doesn’t rip me off.”

Sawyer had stolen a twenty off his father’s dresser exactly once. He’d been twelve and an idiot, but he’d been twelve, for God’s sake. His father had never forgotten about it. But at least that infraction had been real.

Yeah, Sawyer had been a rotten-to-the-core kid and an even worse teenager. But Jesus, he’d been working his ass off ever since trying to make up for it, which should count for something.

It didn’t.

Time had stopped for Nolan as far as Sawyer was concerned. “The garage door is fixed, so you can park in there again. And the grass needs watering.”

Another gruff sound, maybe one of grudging appreciation, but that was probably wishful thinking on Sawyer’s part. He took a peek inside the house. It was a mess again. Odds were the housekeeper that Sawyer had hired was chased off by Nolan’s bad temper. Since the woman had also brought in the groceries, this meant his father was undoubtedly eating crap, not good with his restricted diet. “Didn’t Sally come this week?”

“She’s out of town.”

Bullshit. Sawyer brushed by his father into the house and was bombarded with unhappy memories. He checked the fridge—nearly empty. Pulling some money out of his wallet, he set it on the kitchen table and turned to leave.

His father was blocking his way, eyes bright with anger and something else. Shame.

Shit. “I’ll be back tomorrow with groceries and someone else to clean up,” Sawyer said.

“Don’t bother. I have the kid.”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” Nolan snapped, then paused uncomfortably. “I, uh, have to get another angioplasty.”

Sawyer’s own heart skipped a beat. “When?”

“Friday.”

“I’ll be there.”

“It’s just a routine thing, no big deal.”

“I’ll be there, dammit.”

Sawyer left feeling like shit. Nothing new there. Needing a caffeine kick, he parked at the convenience store, and for just a moment, leaned back and closed his eyes. He needed something, and caffeine wasn’t it.

Balls-to-the-wall sex had a nice ring to it.

A shout interrupted the thought. Glass shattered, followed by running footsteps, which was never good. Sawyer straightened just as a guy came barreling out of the convenience store, hugging his sweatshirt close to his body as if protecting something.

A piece of paper fluttered from the sweatshirt.

Aw, Christ on a stick, Sawyer thought, catching a flash of green. Not paper.

Money.

The guy hopped into a banged-up Celica and sped away with a show of squealing tires and smoke.

Goddammit. Sawyer hit the gas to follow as he called dispatch to report that he’d caught a robbery in progress. The piece-of-shit sedan in front of him turned right at the end of town, obviously headed toward the open highway. At the freeway entrance, there were two delivery vans, moving slow as molasses. The car swerved around them, heading directly into a small, quiet neighborhood filled with midsized houses, hard-working people, and kids. Lots of kids.