Head Over Heels (17 page)

“Oh, she won’t tell us,” Chloe said. “Whatever it is happened this morning, I think, but she’s mum on the subject. He probably left his underwear on the floor. Tara’s OCD about that kind of stuff. But then again, I’m still on the fence that Ford actually
wears
underwear.” Chloe grinned into Tara’s narrowed eyes. Hey, maybe she’d promised to grow up, but she’d never promised to stop poking at her sisters.

“Maddie thinks maybe he’s the one who sneaked a piece of Tara’s Very Berry Pie without asking, but it wasn’t him.” She pointed at herself and mouthed “me.”

Allie eyed Tara speculatively. “You look so…with it. He had to have done something bigger than leave out his underwear, right?”

Tara gave Chloe a meaningful glare but said nothing. The Steel Magnolia wasn’t talking.

“Did you ask him how you look and he said fine without taking his eyes off the TV?” Allie asked. “Or did he ogle a woman in the frozen foods aisle at the grocery store because her nipples were hard from standing in front of the ice cream display? Did he tell you that your mother is a pain in his ass?”

“No,” Tara said and paused. “He asked me to elope with him to the Greek Islands on his boat.”

“Bastard,” Allie said, sniffing, while both Maddie and Chloe gaped in shock at Tara.

“
What
?” Maddie whispered, a hand on her heart, a slow smile curving her mouth. “Did he really?”

“Yes.” Still looking calm, Tara took a cupcake, cool as she pleased. “The other night, after the bonfire.”

Allie was double-fisting cupcake number three and four, mascara smeared on her cheeks. “It’s a lot of pressure, isn’t it?” she said, mouth full, inhaling sugar like she hadn’t eaten in a week.

“What are you going to do?” Chloe asked.

“Well, I could jump off a bridge,” Allie said dramatically. “Or maybe I ought to try being a lesbian for a while.”

“No bridge jumping,” Chloe said firmly. “And the lesbian thing? Two menstrual cycles and double the PMS. That’s a big commitment. But actually, I was asking my sister.” She looked at Tara. “Are you going to elope with the sexiest man on the planet, or what?”

“Hey,” Maddie said. “My man’s sexy, too.”

Tara patted Maddie’s hand, then followed Allie’s lead and grabbed yet another cupcake. “I think I have to.”

“No,” Allie said, eyes glossy from the sugar high. “You don’t have to do anything. You can run away to…here.” She laughed softly. “I’ll share my room. We can do the lesbian thing together.”

Tara shook her head. “Got that out of my system in college, sorry.”

Maddie choked on her cupcake, but Chloe just grinned. “And they call
me
the wild one.”

The phone rang, and Chloe jumped up to take the call. It was a woman wanting to make reservations for her and her sisters for a long weekend.

“How many rooms would you like?” Chloe asked her.

“All of them.”

Chloe blinked. “What?”

“We’d like the whole inn for ourselves. It’s a reunion, you see. Two of us have been overseas in the military, and another has just gotten her doctorate, and the baby’s getting married. We haven’t all been together, the eight of us, in five years.”

“The whole inn,” Chloe repeated, stunned.

“Yes, for at least four days. I hope that’s not a problem. We want to utilize the day spa, too. Oh, and do you have yoga classes?”

“Yes.” Or they would…Chloe cleared her throat. “How soon are you looking at?”

“What’s the soonest you have?”

“Hold on a sec?” Dizzy with excitement, Chloe covered the phone and turned to Tara and Maddie.

“Problem?” Tara asked, rising to her feet at what surely was a look of shock on Chloe’s face.

“No. Yes. I don’t know.” Chloe laughed. “I have a request for a four-day exclusive stay for a family of sisters who wants the entire B&B and day spa at their disposal.
ASAP
.”

Tara and Maddie stared at her. “Honey,” Maddie said gently, “there is no day spa yet.”

“Not yet,” Chloe said. “But it’s coming.” She went back to the phone, catching the warning look in Tara’s eyes, the one that said don’t you dare be impulsive. Chloe grinned at her while calmly telling the woman on the phone that the spa would be open for limited service in two weeks, or they could wait for the full range of services to be offered in a month. She made the booking, not unhappy that the woman had settled for limited service. “No worries,” she said to her sisters when she’d hung up. “Jax promised he could handle it.”

Allie sighed. “They all think they can handle it. So there’s a day spa?”

Thirty minutes later, Chloe had shown Allie to her room, then headed into the sunroom, where she was joined by Tara and Maddie. “I think Allie’s going to be okay.”

“You were good with her,” Tara said. “I might have just given her the room key and stayed out of it.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Maddie said. “You were the first one on board when I was running away from my life and needed to stay here, remember?” She hugged Tara, then reached for Chloe’s hand, pulling her in close, too. “I called Jax. Told him we had reservations coming in, that we need this room done yesterday. He said he’d do it at material cost only, and that I could pay the labor later.”

“
I’ll
pay,” Chloe said, trying to figure out how long was long enough to stay in the group hug without being rude. “Whatever it is.”

“I’ve got it,” Maddie said. “No worries.”

“No, I—”

“Chloe,” Tara said dryly. “I’m pretty sure the debt can’t be paid in money.”

Maddie blushed to the tips of her toes.

“Oh. Gotcha.” Chloe laughed. “Well, then, thanks for paying up, sis.”

Maddie rolled her eyes and hugged her again. Jesus. Tara was still right there, too, so that now Chloe was sandwiched between them. “Okay…Well. I have things to do.”

“You always do when we’re having a mushy moment,” Tara said, not letting go.

Dammit. “Seriously?” Chloe asked. “Because we
just
mushed all over each other a few months back when Maddie got engaged, and I’m still recovering from that.”

“That was a year ago,” Maddie said. “And now Tara’s engaged. It’s definitely mush time.”

Tara shook her head. “No, first we mush on this.” She looked at Chloe. “We owe you an apology.”

“Whoa. Can you repeat?”

Tara sighed. “You might be the youngest, but you’re not a baby. You’ve really changed, Chloe. Grown up.”

“Okay, thanks. Can you let go of me now?”

“No,” Maddie said, tightening her grip, laughing when Chloe swore.

“We’re trying to tell you that we’re sorry it took us so long to realize,” Tara said. “And that though you march to a different drummer, you have it together just fine.”

“Sometimes even more than us,” Maddie added.

Chloe narrowed her eyes. “Okay, what do you guys want? You’re both going away with your lovers this weekend, right? Leaving me with the inn? Is that it?”

Maddie laughed. “No. We love you, Chloe. That’s it.”

“Oh, good God.” She dropped her head to bang it repeatedly on Maddie’s shoulder.

Her sisters both laughed, but Chloe didn’t feel quite in on the joke. Her mother had been a free spirit and had flung the L-word around to anyone and everyone, so much so that it had lost its meaning. And then there’d been TV and in movies, and everyone knew
that
love wasn’t real either, just an easy antidote to bad stuff suffered in the story. Family betrayed you? I love you. All better. Man ripped your heart to shreds? I love you. Perfect Band-Aid. World destruction imminent and you’re going to fly into the asteroid leaving your daughter an orphan? I love you. Buck up.

No, to Chloe it seemed like people used “I love you” when they meant “I’m sorry” or “Could we please forget about what a moron I’ve been?” They weren’t words to be used like a Band-Aid, or to be said to make someone feel better in the moment, like the time Phoebe had left a seven-year-old Chloe at a stranger’s house for four days or when she’d spent the entire Christmas money on gifts for her boyfriend.

Chloe might not be the smartest kid on the block, but she’d learned early on that those three words had power. No way she would ever let that power be wasted. That would be a sacrilege. Her sisters could joke all they wanted, but Chloe knew deep in her bones that when it was time to say the words, she’d know. There’d be some cosmic sign. Problem was, she was starting to wonder if her cosmic receiver was faulty.

Wonder if Jax knew a contractor for that?

In any case, she was grateful for what she did have with Tara and Maddie. More than they could possibly know. They were all she had as far as stabilizing forces. They were her only blood ties.

And if she let herself think that way for too long, it made her sad. Lonely.

Afraid.

So she didn’t think on it.

Ever.

She just enjoyed having them in her life. And as she’d come to realize in the past year, the more of herself that she gave to the inn, the longer that might be.

“She’ll say it when she’s ready,” Maddie said to Tara. “And we shouldn’t be teasing her. Chloe, honey, you’re pale. Are you okay? Are you having trouble breathing?”

“It’s blood loss from my brain exploding.” Chloe jammed her hands into her pockets, suddenly extremely and uncomfortably aware that they were both staring at her with concern. “Not everyone wants to sit around and discuss feelings. Not everyone is in a relationship.”

Silence, and she grimaced. When would she learn to stop talking?

“Sugar.” Tara’s eyes were unusually soft and, dammit, full of sympathy. “Is this about us both getting married?”

“No,” Chloe said. “Of course not. I’m thrilled for both of you.”

“Is it about you wanting a relationship?” Maddie asked gently.

“If I wanted a relationship, I’d have one.”

“Is it about Sawyer?” Tara asked. “Are you’re falling for him?”

Yes.

No.

Christ, she had no idea. She shook her head, hoping that covered all the options. “That would be stupid.”

Tara let out a breath and nodded. And this, of course, put Chloe in defense mode. “Why are you nodding?”

Tara looked at Maddie, then back to Chloe. “Because,” Tara said carefully, “you said it yourself.”

“Yes, and
I
know why I said it, but why did
you
say it?”

“Well, there’s the whole he-wears-a-badge thing and your whole hate-authority thing. And—”

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

S
awyer’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.

Sawyer glanced out the window. No Vespa.

“She’s not here,” Tara said dryly. “She’s been sneaking away for a few hours here and there, needing to regroup.” She paused. “It’s because she lets things build up inside of her. She tries to hide it, pretend nothing gets to her. But things get to her.
People
get to her.”

“Tara,” Maddie said quietly from the kitchen table.

“
He
gets to her,” Tara said to her sister, pointing at Sawyer with a wooden spatula.

“What’s wrong?” Sawyer asked. “What’s happened?”

Tara shook her head. “Nothing. At least nothing specific.”

“Any idea where she might be?”

Tara shook her head. “She said she goes somewhere that gives her peace and quiet, a place where she can think.”

At that, some of the tension left Sawyer’s shoulders. He had a decent idea where she might be.

“Sawyer?”

“Yeah?” Impatient to be gone, he looked back at Tara.

Her eyes were fierce and protective. “Don’t make me sorry I told you.” There was an unmistakable threat in her voice.

Normally that would irritate the hell out of him, but he kept his gaze level with hers and shook his head. “I won’t.”

As he walked out, he heard Maddie say to Tara, “Look at you, meddling like a mother hen.”

“She won’t thank me,” Tara said.

“Depends on what happens next,” Maddie said, which was the last thing Sawyer heard as he left the inn.

Sawyer drove through town, hoping he was right about Chloe’s location.
Somewhere that
gives her peace and quiet
. Hell, if he thought about it too much, that could be anywhere. The mud springs. Lance’s house. Hang gliding…

He shuddered. Christ, he hoped she wasn’t doing anything like that, but when it came to Chloe, one never knew. Her idea of peace and quiet was decidedly left of center.

But her partner in crime, Lance, had been seen all over town with his new girlfriend, which hopefully meant they’d all been too busy to get into trouble.

So Sawyer headed home. In the middle of the night, with no traffic and no red lights, it took fifteen minutes to get through town and up the hill to his house. This morning, as the sun rose above the tall mountains cradling Lucky Harbor, bathing the town in a golden glow, he made it in seven.

He idled in his driveway, staring at the Vespa parked there. Not wanting to examine the odd feeling in his chest, the one that felt suspiciously like relief and also something more, he got out. He didn’t go inside, but walked around the side of the house. He flicked a glance at the outdoor shower, and as it had every other time since he’d been in there with Chloe, his dick twitched at the memory of her pale skin gleaming, water running in rivers down her curves…

He moved to the cliff and took the stairs to the beach. The sun had risen a little more, casting the overhang in black shadow, the rocks indistinguishable from one another.

At the bottom of the stairs, he kicked off his boots and socks and turned to face the cliffs. The sun was in his eyes, blinding him to anything but the outline of the granite. The beach was utterly empty and completely isolated, especially at this time of year. There was a salty breeze but the waves were subdued, soft and quiet. A lullaby, gently rolling against the rocky sand. A bird squawked. Its mate squawked back.

But there was no sight of a petite, redheaded, wild beauty named Chloe.

When he saw the single-track of small, feminine footprints, he sucked in a breath of pure relief. “Gotcha,” he murmured, and followed the prints up the beach and around a large outcropping of rock, heading for the cliff.

Where they vanished at the face of the rock.

If it hadn’t been for the footsteps, he’d have missed her entirely. Because even tilting his head back as far as he could, she was invisible to him. But he knew she was up there.

He could feel her.

Shaking his head at himself—he could
feel
her?—he began to climb, telling himself that this would be a hands-off talk.

Halfway up, he levered himself over a large, flat rock that jutted out and found her.

Silent, gaze hooded, arms clasped around her knees, her lovely face was in profile but still projecting a loneliness and darkness that called to him.

Because it matched his own.

He crouched in front of her. “Hey.”

Chloe turned her head and studied him, from his bare, sandy feet, to his wrinkled uniform, and finally his face. Whatever she saw there had a small smile curving her mouth. “Long night, Sheriff?”

“Jax asked me the same thing.”

“It’s because you look like shit.”

“Yeah, he said that, too.”

She nodded and scooted over, a wordless invitation to join her. He crawled in next to her and mirrored her pose.

They watched the waves for a few minutes in easy, companionable silence. He’d gotten the feeling from Tara that Chloe had been upset, but he wasn’t getting that vibe from her at all.

No, just that same sense of needing that vague something that he felt deep in his own gut. “Are you all right?”

“Always.” She smiled, but it didn’t quite meet her eyes. “Same question back atcha, Sawyer.”

She didn’t often use his given name. He liked the sound of it coming from her lips way more than he should. “Your sisters are worried.”

She blew out a sigh and sank farther back against the rock. “They shouldn’t be.”

“Want me to take you home?”

“Are you asking, or planning on cuffing me and dragging me back?”