Head Over Heels

Chapter 24

Every muscle in Sawyer’s body tightened as he heard Chloe’s attempt at a hoarse scream and then the beep of the call being cut off. A dozen horrible images raced through his mind, but he cut them off, swerving around slower cars as he called Morris.

The DEA agent was still pissed at Sawyer for not being available when he’d been needed last night, and when Sawyer told him he wasn’t waiting for backup as he raced toward Chloe’s last-known location, the man started to tear Sawyer a new one.

Sawyer didn’t give a shit. The job, the bust, the drugs, none of it mattered. The whole world could go fuck itself if something happened to Chloe. He waited for Morris’s rant to end, confirmed the location one more time, and clicked off.

Raybo-he’d been the missing link, the big dealer the DEA had been looking to nail. It made perfect sense. Sawyer knew Morris’s team would get Raybo on the road or at his compound. Sawyer was certain of it.

What he wasn’t certain of, what he was terrified of, was what was happening to Chloe right this very second. He wasn’t far from the B &B, but every second felt like an hour. If that fucker touched one hair on her head, he was going down. Sawyer had no more mercy left. He cut the sirens and the lights as he approached the turnoff. When he pulled up at the inn, Tara was standing on the porch holding her cell phone. “Chloe called,” she said. “I think she’s in trouble.”

“Which trail?”

Lance came around the corner. “I’ll show you.” They moved to the marina building, Lance doing his best to keep up, but he was breathing hard. “There,” he said, pointing the way. “That one.”

Sawyer knew the trail all too well. It was the same one that he, Ford, and Jax had taken the night they’d seen the odd flare. It was also the trail to the hidden clearing where he and Todd had partied through their high school years. “Stay here,” he said to Lance. “More are coming. Tell them which way I’ve gone.” He drew his gun. No matter what happened, Chloe was coming out of this in one piece, but he’d make no guarantees about anyone else.

Todd had his arm across Chloe’s throat. Just tight enough that a regular person would have trouble breathing. She’d passed trouble halfway to his truck.

“This is just great,” Todd was muttering, dragging her along with him. “Fucking great. I spent a year trying to get your fucking attention, and you could give a shit. And now that I’m headed out, you want a piece of me.”

“I don’t-”

He tightened his grip on her, cutting off her words. He smelled of sweat and fear, and his body shook with tension as he walked her forward. There was a gun in his free hand, a semiautomatic, and she hoped the safety was on because he was swinging it around like a laser pointer. “I’m not going back to jail,” he said, his jaw pressed to hers. “Not even for your sweet ass. But I can’t let you go, either.”

“Yes, you can. It’s Raybo, right? It’s all him. You-”

Again he tightened his grip, and she choked. “Shut up,” he said. “Shut up and listen. I’m not taking the fall for Raybo. Hell, no. And I’m not narcing him out, either; the fucker is crazy. He’d kill me for sure.”

“No-”

“You should be worried about you, Chloe,” he said. “Our fun is over. I could have had you that day at the mud springs. That pisses me off. You were hot for me up until then, but something changed.”

“I was never hot for you,” she managed.

“Liar. But after that, Sawyer had you. That pissed me off, too. You’re not his usual type.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know what it is about you, but you jump knee deep in shit all the time and still come out smelling like a rose. I fucked with the boats at the marina,” he said. “I told everyone that you were pissed off at your sisters and wanted to get out of this place. I thought everyone would blame you, but no one did, no one even believed the rumors. Nothing sticks to you. Too bad you can’t teach me that trick,” he said almost wistfully.

“I don’t-”

He tugged viciously on her hair. “We’re gonna load up now, and then we’re getting the hell out of here. Just be a good girl. That’s all you gotta do.”

Todd marched her past a burnt-out tree, then headed for a wild mass of Manzanita bush canopied by two-hundred-foot pines. There was something about the lush growth. It looked like the rest of the forest, but then it kinda didn’t, and she struggled to inhale again. She didn’t know what would happen if she passed out. Todd wouldn’t lift a finger to help her; she knew that.

“Stay,” he said, and the minute he removed his arm from her neck, she dropped to her knees. She was gasping, shaking, sweating, and freaking out in general, but he pointed the gun at her, and she sat back on her haunches.

“Jesus. I’m not gonna hurt you as long as you shut up.”

“I…can’t help it.”

“Do you have to gasp like that? I’m not even touching you. Shut the fuck up.”

She was trying. Not that she believed him about not hurting her. God, she hoped Tara wasn’t following the trail at this moment, trying to find her. Or Sawyer. She was afraid Todd would shoot anyone who came upon them. Hell, she was afraid he’d shoot her. She was going to die, either by Todd’s hand or by suffocation, and she hadn’t told anyone how she felt about them. She hadn’t said the words because she was a goddamn chicken, and now she was gonna die, and they’d never know. Not Sawyer, and not her sisters. It wasn’t right, and she was so mad at herself and Todd that she could shoot him herself.

“Get up,” Todd said. He was holding several bundles in his arms. “Chloe, I fucking mean it! Get up or I’ll drag you.”

If she could, she would. She’d get up, punch his lights out, and run like hell.

Except she couldn’t run. Not even on a good day, which this wasn’t shaping up to be.

She couldn’t do anything but attempt to inhale. She certainly couldn’t get any more terrified, which sucked. She’d thought she’d been afraid of three little words. What a joke.

Todd dropped the load in his truck and turned back to her just as she caught some movement out of the corner of her eye. At first she thought it was a deer, but then she realized it was Sawyer. It had to be.

In front of her, she heard the unmistakable sound of a belt being pulled loose from denim. For a second, she got frightened in a whole new way, then realized Todd was going to tie her up using his belt. Still holding his gun, he moved behind her. Vision wavering, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the little air that she was getting, waiting for an opportunity to help Sawyer. Mostly, she wanted to get Todd before Sawyer shot him. She wanted first blood, dammit.

The snap of a twig sounded loud as a gunshot. Todd grabbed her by the throat and spun her around.

“Let her go, Todd,” Sawyer said, stepping right into Todd’s line of sight, gun aimed, face so fiercely determined that Chloe forgot to breathe.

Until Todd squeezed her throat again. He hadn’t gotten her hands tied, and she clawed at his arm around her neck, her vision graying at the edges.

“Drop your gun,” Todd grated out. “Or I’ll shoot her dead.”

Not going to be necessary, Chloe thought hazily…

“There’s no reason to hurt her,” Sawyer said, moving slowly but steadily forward. “The DEA is five minutes away. They’ve got Raybo. They got him on the highway and he’s in custody. It’s over, Todd. Don’t make things even worse.”

“Worse? How could it be worse? You’ve fucked me over for the last time, man. I’m not going back to jail. You know what they did to me in jail? You were still seventeen. Why the hell didn’t you tell them that you were driving? All you had to do was say you were driving!”

“I was unconscious, you asshole. We both were. They found us in the car. We never should have been drinking and driving. You know it as well as I do.”

“Yeah, well, easy for you to say. You got juvie, and I got hard time for second-degree murder. You think I ever had a chance for anything after that? Eighteen, and my life was fucking over.”

“It’s only over if you don’t walk away from this. Let Chloe go, and I’ll do what I can for you. I swear it, Todd. I know you didn’t mean for Sammy and Cutter to die. Nobody wanted that. I’m sorry it was you driving. I am.”

Chloe’s eyes drifted shut. She felt Todd look down at her, and she used the last of her strength to twist and bring her knee up hard between his legs.

He let out a strangled, high-pitched cry, and then she was free.

Free to tell Sawyer that she loved the stupid kid he’d once been, that she loved the man he’d become now, that she always would. But free of Todd wasn’t the same thing as home free.

She fell, bracing for the hard ground rushing up to meet her, but she never felt it.

Sawyer had spent lots of time in the ER. He’d brought in injured suspects, he’d gone to interview witnesses, and he’d been there not three months ago after a power tool incident when Jax had accidentally stapled his thumb to a shelving unit he’d been building.

But until now Sawyer had never sat in a tiny, cramped ER cubicle with panic gripping him by the balls. He stared at the woman in the bed. Pale and clammy. Him not her.

Though Chloe was pale, too.

Her hair still had flecks of dirt in it. The silky strands had long ago escaped the hair band to riot around her face. Sawyer might have stroked it back, but the nurse was hovering, moving like a busy bee around them: giving Chloe a breathing treatment, hooking up the monitors, checking the nebulizer, supervising oxygen levels. And all the while, the nurse’s mouth was moving, too, though she may have been speaking Chinese for all Sawyer was paying attention. He couldn’t do anything but look at Chloe, because if he took his eyes off her she might stop breathing again.

So he pulled a chair as close as he could get next to her bed and watched her struggle. Even with the nebulizer and the corticosteroids and the Beta-2 agonists, she still wasn’t out of the woods. But at least her lips weren’t blue, and she was starting to get some color in her cheeks.

Christ, it’d been close, too fucking close, and he’d never been so scared in his life.

The nurse finally left and in her wake were the beeping monitors, hissing oxygen, and the steady patter of people moving up and down the hallways on the other side of the curtain. Chloe opened her eyes, and Sawyer took his first real breath in the past hour of hell. He had no idea what to say. He was still struggling to think of something when she pulled the mouthpiece of the nebulizer from her mouth and spoke first.

“Did I miss the Jell-O? I really like it when they give me Jell-O.”

His throat constricted. “I’ll get you an entire tray.”

She reached out and took his hand, running her icy fingers over his knuckles, which were raw and red and a little swollen from where he’d punched the outside wall of the hospital. His form of stress relief.

“Chloe,” he said, but her eyes were closed again.

She’d replaced the nebulizer and fallen back to sleep.

Two minutes later, Tara and Maddie arrived. Tara sat in the chair that Sawyer vacated for her. Maddie moved to Chloe’s other side, the two of them staring down into her face.

“She’s so damn much a part of me that I feel like I can’t breathe either,” Maddie whispered, hand to her own heart.

“Luckily, she’s stubborn enough to breathe for the both of you,” Tara said.

Sawyer nearly smiled at the truth of that statement and looked down at his vibrating phone. Morris was here and needed to talk to him. Code for yell at him. Sawyer rose and met him in a hallway, where he spent the next ten minutes explaining exactly why he’d broken protocol and hadn’t waited for backup. Morris listened, both pissed off and acknowledging that Sawyer had nailed Todd.

Of course, it hadn’t been Sawyer at all, but Chloe and a well-placed knee, leaving Todd in possession of one dislocated nut and relieved of possession of his entire stash.

The DEA had their case and the drugs, and there were a lot of drugs. Raybo had been even bigger than they’d thought, and he was already singing. Todd had been making some side deals, storing most of his own shit in his duplex attic, but when Mitch ratted him out, he’d had to change his plans and quick.

Todd had rigged up some duck blinds in the woods, the way they’d done with their booze when they’d been kids, covering it with the military camouflage netting.

Stupid. But Sawyer was done wasting a single second of his time thinking and worrying about Todd.

Life was too short.

Chloe woke up with a little start. “I got him in the nuts!”

Tara and Maddie, seated at her side, smiled. “You sure did,” Tara said. “Proud of you, sugar.”

Chloe smiled, relieved it was over.

“So is it that you don’t have enough work at the B &B and the spa that you had to add crime fighting to your résumé?” Tara asked.

Chloe choked out a low laugh. She sat up a little, testing her lungs, and was relieved to find herself in relatively good working order. “I, um, thought of something when I was out there.”

“Before or after you spoon-fed Todd his left family jewel?”

Chloe smiled. “Before. Actually, way before. I thought of it a while back, but…well, to be honest, I can’t explain the why or how of what took me so long.” That’s how love worked, she thought. It was confusing and messy and wonderful and real. God, so real. And she’d meant it. It had been growing in her for a while. But right here, right now, looking at her hodgepodge family crowded around her, she felt it expanding inside of her even more, like her chest was going to explode. In a good way for once. “In the mud springs last night, Tara teased me for having an epiphany. She was right, I was having one.”

“You ’bout done with it yet?” Tara asked.

“Yeah, I believe I am. But I want you to know, once I tell you, it’s not an all-access pass to any group hugs. Those need to be put on the schedule in advance.” She drew a deep breath, or as deep as she could anyway. “I love you. I love you both.”

“Well, would you listen to that.” Tara’s tone was dry, in direct contrast to her suspiciously wet eyes. “You just emotionally compromised yourself and lived to tell the tale.”

There was a knock on the open door, and they all looked up at Sawyer standing there, eyes locked on Chloe. Yes, she’d just emotionally compromised herself.

And she was about to do it again.

“The nurse says you’ll be out of here in less than an hour,” Sawyer said. “Need a ride?”

Chloe looked at her sisters. Maddie jumped up, grabbing Tara by the hand. “Oh, that would be great. We’re expecting a few scheduled guests, and…”

“Just say good-bye, sugar,” Tara said, shaking her head. “And remind me to teach you how to lie better than that.”

And then they were both gone.

An hour later, Chloe was dropped down on Sawyer’s couch and gruffly told to “hang on.” She sat on the couch, shivering. “I’m n-not c-cold. It’s just what happens sometimes after a bad asthma attack and all the meds.” Her heart raced, too, like it was trying to get outside of her chest, and it pissed her off.

Sawyer wrapped her in a blanket, then carefully lifted her into his arms. She cuddled in, absorbing his body heat as her eyes locked in on the nebulizer on the coffee table. “What’s that?”

“A nebulizer.”

“I know that. I mean, what’s it doing here?”

“I bought one.”

Her heart squeezed. “When?”

“What does it matter?”

“When, Sawyer?”

“A few days ago.”

She stared into his eyes. “Why did you buy a nebulizer if you were going to dump me?”

“I believe you dumped me,” he said lightly.

She stared at him. “Okay, we’re going to circle back to that in a minute. Sawyer…” She looked around at the living room. Painted walls. Furniture. “Up until a week ago, you didn’t have anything in here, and now you have a nebulizer. Do you know what that means? It means,” she went on without waiting for an answer, “that you like me.” She smiled, feeling the warmth of the knowledge chase away the chill. “You really, really like me.”

“Don’t get excited. I like all my house painters.” He settled her head against his chest. She knew he was giving her time to settle. And also, she realized as he stroked a big hand up and down her back, he was giving her his heat, strength, and reassurance-the last of which wasn’t exactly second nature to him. She knew his job didn’t allow for much softness, or a lot of emotion for that matter. Obviously he’d let that spill over into his life, but she knew he was trying his damnedest to offer her what he thought she needed.

Damn. Damn, she was a goner, and she curled into him, tracing little patterns on his stomach with her fingers, enjoying the hard ridges of his abs. Wriggling to get comfortable, she pressed her face into his throat and inhaled him, then rested her head on his chest. Unlike her, he wasn’t trembling or shaking at all. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I can’t stop shaking.”

“Adrenaline letdown.”

“What about you?” she asked. “You ever get adrenaline letdown? Because I just can’t imagine anything getting to you.”

Sawyer tugged her hair until she met his gaze, his own clear and unguarded. “You,” he said, shockingly gently. “You get to me. You scared the hell out of me today.”

“Makes two of us.”

His grip tightened on her. “If anything had happened to you…” He shook his head and cut the words off.

“I’m okay.” She touched his scruffy jaw. “You make a comfy chair, Sheriff. Sure you’re a little hard in spots, but-”

“Chloe.” He laughed and pressed his forehead to hers. “You get to me,” he said again quietly. “I want you to know that. You get to me, just the way you are.” He leaned in close. “No changing.”

She absorbed the words as she’d absorbed his heat and felt a weight lift from her shoulders. “What if being myself isn’t always pretty or polite?” she whispered.

“Well, Christ, I hope not,” he said. “Polite is fucking exhausting. Chloe, listen to me. You being you is who I fell for. Now, as for who you fell for…” He drew in a deep breath. “What Todd said today, about when we were teenagers.”

“I don’t care. It doesn’t change how I feel about you.”

“Be sure. Because most of it was true.” He ran his thumb over her fingers. She stared down at his large, tanned, callused hand against her much smaller, pale one, which looked almost frail in his. “It’s not easy to talk about.”

“It’s me, Sawyer. You can tell me anything. You know that, right?”

“I do now. But until recently, my life was all about work. Only work. I figured I owed it to everyone here for the second chance the town gave me.”

“Sawyer, you do realize that the reason no one talks about your past. And that the reason it’s not plastered on that damn Facebook page isn’t because they’re asking for penance. It’s because they’re protective of you. They care about you and respect you.” She hugged him. “So stop punishing yourself. It’s over and done.”

He was quiet a moment. “Is everything over and done?”

Her breath caught, and she pulled back to look into his eyes. “I don’t want it to be.”

“What do you want?”

“To know you,” she said without hesitation. “All of you. I want to know what makes you feel good.”

“Your laughter,” he said without hesitation. “Feeling your hands on me. The way you look at me, whether I’ve been a complete dumbass, or just made you come-”

With a laugh, she ducked her head, but he dipped his down until she was looking at him again. “You want to know what scares me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He leaned even closer and slid a hand to the nape of her neck. “The thought of never having those things with you again. I’m a little slow but not an idiot, Chloe, and I learn from my mistakes.” He cupped her jaw. “I love you, Chloe.”

“Dammit!”

He blinked. “That wasn’t quite the reaction I’d expected.”

“No, it’s just that I meant to say it first!”

He stared at her. “You could say it now.”

“I love you. God, I love you.” She let out a breath. “Whew. That’s more exhausting than an asthma attack.”

He smiled. A real slow, glorious, sexy-as-hell smile. “Maybe it just requires practice.”

She returned his smile, feeling so light and happy she could float to the ceiling, although that might have been all the drugs in her system. “Or confirmation.”

“Confirmation?”

She pulled out her phone, and he appeared puzzled. “You say I love you, and it reminds you that you have to make a call?” he asked.

“You knew loving me was going to require patience.” She accessed her Magic Eight Ball app. “How about it?” she said to the screen. “Me and Sawyer. Yes?”

“Christ, Chloe.” Sawyer straightened with a scowl. “You know what it’s going to say, what it always says when it’s referring to me.”

“It’s been right every single time with us.” She looked at him. “Are you scared?”

“No. But if it says Try Again Later, it’s going out the window.”

Absolutely yes