Head Over Heels Read online

Page 33

  Author: Jill Shalvis

  Maddie put her hand on Chloe’s arm. “Honey, what she means is that you’ve never been all that interested in toeing the line, and Sawyer’s life is that line, you know?”

  Yes, Chloe knew. She knew exactly. And wasn’t that just the problem.

  Chapter 18

  “Sex is like air; it’s not important unless

  you aren’t getting any. ”

  Chloe Traeger

  Sawyer’s week was an exhausted blur. His counterpart, Tony Sanchez, had been taking a lot of time off because of the new twins, leaving Sawyer overworked and facing too many double shifts. So he wasn’t in the best of moods when he should have been getting off duty but instead was heading into an all-nighter and found a car parked oddly on the side of the highway beneath a grove of trees. Sawyer exited his vehicle to check it out, but it roared to life, speeding off, tires squealing, narrowly missing two cars passing by.

  Bonehead move. Sawyer jumped back into his vehicle, flipped on his lights, and pulled the car over.

  There were two guys in the front seat. Sawyer didn’t see anything suspicious inside the car, so he wrote a ticket for reckless driving. The driver bitched about it, then proceeded to pull away, once again squealing his tires and laying down tread, barely missing yet another car.

  Sawyer was just pissed off enough to pull him over again, calmly issuing the Idiot of the Day his second ticket.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” the driver yelled. “Another ticket?” He thrust his car into gear.

  “Careful,” Sawyer warned him. “I have all night. ”

  The guy muttered “asshole” beneath his breath but pulled onto the highway more carefully this time.

  From there, Sawyer was called to traffic duty. Construction crews were working on the main street in town and had closed the road. There’d been a flashing sign all week long warning people, and the crew had carefully barricaded the road in several places, posting up “road closed” signs as well as detour signs. And yet several people still managed to drive around the barricades and then get angry with Sawyer because they couldn’t get through.

  “This is ridiculous!” one woman screamed at him. “I can’t get out of this mess to save my life. You’re all assholes!”

  She’d had to drive on the wrong side of the road to get past the barricades—and he was the asshole. “See that barricade you ignored and drove around?” he asked her. “You want to drive back the way you came. Go by each of the road closed signs that you passed—I believe there were three—and follow the detour directions. ”

  Flipping him off, she turned around.

  The next guy to come through the barricades was—oh perfect—Todd. Todd had been questioned after the diner incident as a matter of course and hadn’t reacted well. He’d been running his mouth in town, telling anyone who would listen that Sawyer was abusing his power, and that Todd was going to bring him down. The guy wanted a fight, but Sawyer wasn’t going to give him one. No way was he going to allow Todd to jeopardize his job or be a menace to innocent people. It’d been years; it was time for Todd to get over himself and get his life on track. Unfortunately, Sawyer knew better than anyone that you couldn’t make a person do what they didn’t want to do. He couldn’t save Todd any more than he could gain his own father’s approval. There was just some shit that had to be let go.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Todd said now, not bothering with his usual charm, not for Sawyer. “The road’s closed. Why can’t you douche bags do this at a more convenient time?”

  Sawyer didn’t respond to the fact that he wasn’t actually working on the roads. He was simply attempting to direct the idiots driving on them. Not to mention that it was midnight, how much more convenient of a time could they get?

  “How the fuck do I get out of here?” Todd asked.

  Sawyer flicked his flashlight into the cab of Todd’s truck, knowing he wasn’t going to get lucky enough to find a bag of dope in plain sight. “Well, here’s the thing, Todd. If you can’t follow the detour directions you’ve been passing, I don’t know how you’re going to be able to follow the directions I give you to get out of here. ”

  “Fuck you, Thompson. Or maybe I’ll just go fuck Chloe. ”

  Sawyer had to work at not reacting at that one.

  “Yeah,” Todd said, knowing Sawyer enough to see right through him. “She’s a sweet piece of ass, and you know what? She’s hot for me. ”

  “Stay away from her. ”

  “Or?”

  Or I’ll kill you wasn’t exactly the way to keep his job. And he’d never even had this problem before, the urge to say fuck the job and dive through Todd’s window and strangle him.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Todd said on a grin. “Behind the badge, you’re all pussy. ” He shoved his truck in reverse. “Think of us tonight, cozy in my bed while you’re out here playing hall monitor on the roads. ”

  Sawyer gritted his teeth and worked the rest of the night, doing his best to remind himself that Todd was just an angry asshole.

  An asshole who knew which buttons to press.

  Just past dawn, Sawyer drove to the B&B. It was seven in the morning, and he’d been up for just over twenty-four hours, but he told himself he needed some of Tara’s coffee.

  “You look like shit, man. ” This helpful statement was from Jax, who was out of his Jeep and putting on his tool belt.

  “Damn,” Sawyer said. “And I was planning on going straight to a photo shoot from here, too. ”

  Jax grinned and whistled softly. Izzy, his three-year-old brown Lab snoozing in the passenger seat, scrambled to her feet and barked. When she saw that nothing exciting was happening, she collapsed like a wet noodle, closing her eyes again.

  “Come on, lazy girl,” Jax said.

  Izzy cracked open one eye and stared at him balefully.

  “Tara’ll have breakfast,” Jax coaxed. The dog leaped out of the Jeep and trotted to the B&B’s front door.

  Sawyer shook his head. “You working on the day spa?” He looked around for Maddie’s car. “Or you and Maddie just going to play Contractor and the Missus again?”

  “Hey, you’re not supposed to know about that. Maddie hates it when people know about our sex life. ”

  “You’re the ones who got caught in the attic by Lucille and her damn camera phone. ”

  “Fucking Facebook. And I’d lost a bet with Maddie and the deal was I had to strip. It’s not like I do it all the time, but hell, when a pretty woman tells you to drop ’em, you drop ’em, you know?”

  “Just be thankful Lucille stuck her head into the attic before you stripped down to just that tool belt,” Sawyer said.

  Jax sighed. “She didn’t even get Maddie in the shot. Just me doing the strip dance waving my shirt around. Someone should lower her estrogen dose or something. ”

  “Or you could keep your strip tease to your own bedroom. ”

  “What fun would that be?” Jax shut his Jeep door and took a longer look at Sawyer. “Rough night?”

  “Long night. ”

  “You stopping by to catch a glimpse of Chloe under the guise of getting coffee?”

  Sawyer narrowed his eyes.

  His friend gave him the same bland stare that Izzy had given Jax a moment before.

  Sawyer blew out a breath but admitted nothing. He hadn’t been here in two days. He’d told himself that he was cutting back on caffeine, that he was late, that he didn’t need to waste the extra gas. He told himself whatever he’d needed to in order to make it work in his head.

  But it didn’t. Work.

  Jax walked into the inn’s kitchen with him. Jax got a very friendly kiss from Maddie. Sawyer got coffee. While Jax headed to the sunroom, Sawyer looked around the kitchen for signs of Chloe and found none.

  “Looking for anything special?” Tara asked from her perch at the stove.