“You didn’t mention you had a passenger when you called me,” Sawyer said.
“I didn’t.” Lucille glanced at Chloe. “She just got dropped off.”
Sawyer turned to Chloe, who was back to studying the highway like her life depended on it. “What does she mean, you just got dropped off?”
“I believe I have the right to remain silent,” Chloe said.
Shaking his head, Sawyer crouched at Lucille’s side by the back rear tire and took the lug wrench.
Lucille backed up and smiled knowingly at Chloe’s condition. “Mud springs, right?”
Chloe nodded.
Sawyer narrowed his gaze on Chloe. “You were at the mud springs?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get here?”
Before she could answer, Lucille cut in with, “I used to take my stud muffin up there, back in the day. That mud has healing effects, you know. And also, it’s an aphrodisiac. Not that you need an aphrodisiac with this one,” she said to Chloe, gesturing to Sawyer with a sly smile.
Sawyer grimaced, but Chloe cocked her head and studied him. “You don’t think so?” she asked Lucille doubtfully.
“Honey, just look at him.”
Both women studied him now, and Sawyer, afraid of nothing except possibly these two, found himself squirming.
“Where’s your uniform?” Lucille asked. “I like looking at you in it.”
“I’m off duty,” he said.
“Aw, and you still came out to help me instead of calling someone else to do it.” She patted him on his arm. “Such a sweet boy.”
Chloe made an indistinguishable sound, but when Sawyer looked at her, she was all green-eyed innocence.
“I talked to Suzie today,” Lucille told Sawyer. “She told me what you did for her boy this week, how you stepped in for him.”
Suzie Tierman worked with Sawyer in dispatch. She was a single mom, and she had an eight-year-old terror named Sammy who’d gotten caught last week cutting off a girl’s ponytail in class. Her parents had wanted to press assault charges even though their little “princess” had been mercilessly tormenting Sammy for months about being a “stupid loser.”
At Suzie’s request, Sawyer had stepped in and mediated. Sammy would be doing hard time pulling weeds, and the girl had written an apology for calling Sammy names. Sawyer would have liked to see her do some hard weed pulling as well, but the letter would have to do. “I didn’t do much.”
“According to Suzie, you’re being a father figure to the boy. You call him and take him to your baseball games, and last week you went to his class for career day. She says she couldn’t do the single-mom thing without your help.”
Uneasy with the praise, Sawyer shrugged. “Being a single mom’s hard.”
“And you don’t want her to give up,” Lucille said softly.
“Sammy’s a good kid,” he said and fixed his attention to the flat.
Lucille and Chloe talked amongst themselves. He wanted to talk to Chloe about the mud springs, but she was doing a damn good job of avoiding the subject. He had no intention of letting it go, but somehow she and Lucille had gotten on the subject of Sawyer at the age of eight. Lucille was telling Chloe about the time when he and Jax had urinated their names in the snow in front of the pier and gotten caught by none other than Lucille herself. And then how several years later, the two of them had moved on to delivering flaming bags of dog poop to the residents on Mulberry Street-until one of the bags had tipped over and caught Mrs. Ramos’s dead rosebush on fire. The flames had leaped up to her awning and nearly burned her house down.
Sawyer finished with the tire just as Chloe asked about his teenage years. Christ, that was the last thing he wanted her to hear about, and he tensed.
But Lucille gave him a reassuring smile, a glint of understanding in her kind eyes as she shook her head at Chloe. “He figured things out,” she said. “He had a big heart, even then.”
Bless her for lying through her teeth.
“He’s one of the good guys,” Lucille said, and patted him again.
“Lucille,” he started.
“What? It’s true. Yesterday alone you saved the peace in town at least twice.”
“What happened yesterday?” Chloe asked.
“Honey,” Lucille said with exasperation. “Facebook! I have all the good stuff up there, including today’s blog on Cute Guy. Someone got a picture of him jogging shirtless on the beach this morning. I’m telling you, if I were thirty years younger-”
“Okay, we’re all done here,” Sawyer said, gently but firmly ushering Lucille to the driver’s side of her car.
“Lucille,” Chloe said. “Could you give me a ride?”
“Of course, dear. I can’t believe Todd just left you on the side of the road like that. I-”
“I’ve got her, Lucille,” Sawyer said, giving the older woman the bum’s rush, shutting Lucille’s door on whatever it was that she was going to say. He turned to Chloe, every line of his body saying pissed-off cop.
Well, crap. “You just chased off my ride,” she said casually as Lucille drove off.
“Yeah. You’re coming with me. Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No.”
He pulled off his sunglasses and looked her over for himself, taking in the way that every inch of her skin was covered in mud except for her clothes, which were relatively clean. She knew the exact second when he came to the realization that she’d been skinny-dipping because the carefully blank look vanished. “You and Todd were in the mud springs together.”
A logical assumption, she supposed, but she’d had a rough enough day that it pissed her off. “No. I-”
“He’s dangerous, Chloe. Stupid dangerous.”
No shit. She thought about mentioning what she might or might not have seen in Todd’s truck, but Sawyer cut her off.
“I realize you like the dangerous part,” he said. “But I never pegged you for stupid.”
Oh no, he didn’t. She reached for the Zen calm she’d found at the mud springs. It was a total stretch. “I don’t know exactly how stupid I look, but even I know Todd’s nothing but a player.”
He didn’t bend an inch. “Lucille said you were in his truck.”
“He gave me a ride.”
“So you were with him.”
“Oh my God!” So much for Zen calm. He was like kryptonite to her Zen. Whirling from him, she stomped along the highway with no concern for how she must look, only knowing that she could feel the steam coming out of her ears. Maybe it’d melt the mud from her body. “Moronic man,” she muttered, prepared to walk all the way back to town to avoid talking to Sawyer. “Moronic men, all of them, the entire gender is a complete waste of good penises-”
A big, warm hand grabbed her arm, and she spun willingly around, stabbing Sawyer in the chest with a muddy finger. “And you-”
“Moronic,” he said mildly. “I know.” With a firm grip, he pulled her back to his truck and stopped at his passenger door. “Stay,” he said.
“Oh, hell no. I don’t do ‘stay.’ I-”
But she was talking to air because he’d moved to the back and pulled a blanket from his emergency kit. Which he wrapped around her shoulders. It was thick wool, and she snuggled into it even as she shook her head. “I’ll get it all dirty.”
“Done deal,” he said. “Get in the truck.”
“What about my Vespa?”
“Did you crash it?”
“No. I think the battery is dead. Which is how I ended up in Todd’s truck, you…you Neanderthal.”
He ignored that. “Your Vespa can wait. You need to get dry and warm. Get in.”
She was really quite over the ordering around. “I’m walking.” Even to her own ears, she sounded ridiculous, but the words were out. She realized that she was completely contradicting her commitment to being more mature and grown up, but she decided that a few mistakes along the way never hurt anyone.
Sawyer considered her for a brief moment. She’d seen him handle a variety of situations without ever appearing so much as rattled, without even the slight indication that his patience was stretched, yet it seemed ready to snap now. It was in the grimness of his mouth, the narrowing of his eyes. Oh, and his jaw seemed to be bunching and unbunching at random.