Chapter Ten #2
But the sound, echoing out across the empty, quiet space, seemed to snap Sawyer out of it.
His head jerked back slightly as his fingers released my nipple.
His hand stayed there, splayed over my breast for a long moment before sliding downward over my waist to settle at my hip.
His fingers curled in, giving me a squeeze.
He let out a long breath, the sound eerily similar to a sigh.
“You’re a bit too much of a temptation, Riya,” he told me, his voice still sexy-rough.
Then he released me and moved around the counter again, picking up his chopsticks and putting a piece of sushi in his mouth.
He chewed for a long minute, silently mulling something over.
“So, you worked front desk at the clinic, right?”
“Right,” I agreed.
He nodded, chewing, thinking. “Might have a job for you.”
My head snapped up, the insistent throbbing of my desire between my thighs ebbing away at the idea of having some semblance of a life again. “Really?”
“Yeah. My brother, well, there’s no nice way to say this.
He’s a fucking slob. His office is a disgrace.
You can dig him out from under his mess, I’ll have him pay you.
For now, under the table since you don’t seem to exist right now.
But I think we should have that handled by the middle of the week anyway.
Figure you’ve got to be going stir crazy sitting up here all day. ”
“That’s not untrue,” I agreed. “Is your brother like you?”
“You mean unfairly good-looking, charming, and…” he started, trailing off when I let out a laugh. “You should do that more.”
“What? Laugh?”
“That,” he agreed, nodding. “And smile.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. No, is he cocky and confrontational and…”
“Barrett is,” he smiled a little, a mix of brotherly love and big-brother annoyance on his face.
“Barrett is in his own head a lot. It makes him great at what he does, but it makes him a little clueless on the interaction front. And it means that he has about ten used coffee cups on his desk at all times, usually almost spilling over onto the endless piles of paperwork he has stacked all over.” He stopped to push a platter of food at me, and I reached for my chopsticks again to put a piece in my mouth.
“Oh, and you’re probably going to have to learn some basic Polish. ”
“To polish?” I mumbled over a mouthful of food, sure I misheard him.
“Well, that too. But no, babe. Polish. The language.”
“Does he not speak English?” I asked, brows drawn together. There wasn’t even a trace of an accent in Sawyer’s speech.
“Oh, he speaks English. Tends to use pretentious words and all that shit. No. He does it as a precautionary measure so no one can read his files. But you will need to be able to read at least the subject lines so you know where to file shit.”
“Was Barrett in the military too?”
Sawyer chuckled, the sound low and deep and way too flipping sexy. “God, no. Nah. Barrett was wrapped up with his computers and his true crime books and, apparently, learning some Slavic language.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a PI too.”
“What? Really?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah. He started out working for me but didn’t much like that and went out on his own.”
“I can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want to work for you!” I drawled, teasing him, and he smiled at it.
“Barrett has no training. Not like me and Brock or even Tig for that matter. He belongs in the guts of the operation, tracking down leads, not putting his neck on the line. He didn’t like that I wanted to keep him in the office all the time so one day I came in to find him gone.
When I tracked him down, he opened this shoebox of a place and was taking clients. ”
“Is he any good?”
“He’s fucking phenomenal. At his specialties.
He is who I went to compile a folder on you.
I could have done it myself, but it would have taken twice as long and probably wouldn’t have been as comprehensive.
He’s a lot better with the social media aspect.
I was overseas when that shit all really exploded.
I still don’t have a goddamn Facebook profile. ”
“What? You mean you don’t repost a bunch of silly cat memes and bullshit pseudo-science articles? No way.”
“Think I’m stuck up, huh?” he asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but it’s implied. You think I think I’m too good for cat memes.”
“No one is too good for cat memes,” I insisted.
“I’m more of a dog person, babe,” he said, waving toward his giant beast, again asleep with his legs up in the air.
“Dog memes are funny too.”
“Never gonna happen, slick. I don’t give a flying fuck what half the people I went to high school are up to. I didn’t like them then, and I damn sure don’t care who they married or what their kids look like. And I sure as fuck don’t care to look at pictures of what they ate for fucking lunch.”
“You’re such a cynic,” I said, but smiling.
“And you like that about me.”
“Well, I don’t dislike it,” I hedged, not wanting to admit that, thus far, I hadn’t found too much to not like about him.
He wasn’t Mr. Congeniality. He was moody and grumpy and lost in his own thoughts a lot.
And when he wasn’t doing that, he was invasive, prying, sarcastic, and borderline rude.
But somehow, it mixed all together to create a good man. I wondered who had made him that way.
“What?” he asked, as if sensing my line of thinking.
“Do you have any other family? Aside from your brother.”
“We got an old man around somewhere. He pops into town every now and again, throws back a couple shots with us, then heads right back out.”
“Your mother?”
“Was a saint. Really. I was a little fuck, a real pain in the ass growing up.”
“Shocking.”
He small-eyed me for a second and shrugged.
“Didn’t matter how many times I got my ass dragged down to the principal’s office or how many times a neighbor would threaten to call the cops because Brock and I were pulling some shit or another; she always just shrugged it off and said we would be good men if we got our ‘bad boy-ing’ out when we were young. ”
I smiled at that, seeing a bit of logic there. “She passed?”
“Third year after I was deployed. Didn’t even get a pass to come to the funeral.”
“That’s… awful,” I said, shaking my head, remembering my own mother’s funeral. I was pretty sure I had buried a huge chunk of myself with her that day.
“Not a big believer in the ceremony of death, babe. Neither was my mom. If she knew any of us stood by a hole in the ground and cried as she got lowered in, she would have come back to life just to beat the ever-loving shit out of us for being so stupid.”
“I take it you are a lot like your mother.”
“Got a healthy dose of both. Got my mom’s cynicism and my dad’s tenacity. He was military too.”
“Are you and your brother close?”
“Depends on the day. We are oil and water a lot of the time, but there is a lot of love there. He comes here, and we do the holiday thing, eating food Marg drops off because she feels bad for us.” He paused, and I could feel him watching me. “What’s the matter?”
I looked up, finding I needed to share, not caring that I was giving him more pieces of me when it was probably not a good idea.
“I missed Christmas,” I confided. “And Thanksgiving, and New Year’s and my birthday, and Valentine’s Day…
” I trailed off, taking a deep breath to fight off the tears I felt stinging my eyes.
“I have no family left, but my mother had always instilled a deep love of the traditions of each holiday in me. Maybe I was alone, but for Thanksgiving, I made a small turkey and all the trimmings. I watched the parade. I ate until I had to take a nap. And for Christmas, I put up a tree and decorated it while listening to obnoxious Christmas music with the smell of cookies baking. I made a gingerbread house. I lined my apartment windows with twinkle lights. On New Year’s, I had champagne, and I watched the ball drop.
On my birthday, I treated myself to something ostentatious because my mother taught me it was important to spoil yourself sometimes… ”
“And on Valentine’s Day?” he prompted when I trailed off.
I smiled a little. “Well, I was single for the last one. But I never liked going out anyway. I liked eating a ton of chocolate and watching a movie while snuggled up on the couch and…”
“And?” he asked, knowing damn well what was going to follow.
But I raised my eyes and met his. “And have sex or make love or fuck until it was no longer Valentine’s Day anymore.”
“Solid way to celebrate.”
“How do you usually celebrate?”
“I work,” he said, snorting.
“You’ve never been with someone on Valentine’s Day?”
“I’m not a slut, Riya, but I haven’t exactly been the settling-down sort either. So I don’t promise women things I don’t think I am capable of.”
“Fidelity,” I guessed, starting to wonder if that was the entire male sex that wasn’t capable of it.
“Not fidelity,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I can keep my dick in my pants. I’m not some fucking teenager.”
“Then what?”
“A steady schedule. A shoulder to sleep on every single night. A guarantee that I won’t have to sneak out of some family gathering because something came up.”
“So you just aren’t the settling-down type.”
“I think everyone is the settling-down type in a way. But my work isn’t a nine to five.
Sometimes I need to drag my ass out of bed at 3 AM on a Sunday to go drag some junkie out of a crack den and drag his ass to rehab.
Sometimes I need to follow some dickhead businessman across the country to catch him banging his mistress.
Or, more likely, a hooker. Many women aren’t okay with that. ”
“Especially if you have kids,” I agreed.
“Speaking of,” he said, delving into the seaweed salad. “You got your tubes tied at eighteen?”
I shrugged at that. “I know. That’s everyone’s response. It’s usually followed by ‘what quack doctor would do a procedure like that on someone so young?’”
“You genuinely don’t want to have kids?”
“I genuinely don’t want to have kids,” I said, lifting my chin, keeping my voice even. I had been having the ‘kid talk’ for as long as I could remember. It was amazing how many people thought they had a right to comment on my reproductive choices.
But who will take care of you when you’re old?
Someone with a prescription pad, preferably.
You’ll change your mind when you meet the right man.
Finding the ‘right’ man would mean one who respected my right to not birth babies.
That’s so selfish.
To not create more kids when there were so many unloved children already in the world?
“You’ve had a lot of practice saying that, huh?”
“Saying you don’t want to have biological children seems to be the modern-day equivalent of saying you don’t want to marry. You’re seen as some weird cat-obsessed spinster lady with no heart.”
“But you want to adopt?”
“Someday. When I am in a better place in life, yes. And only older children. I was older when I was adopted. My parents were older when they adopted me.” I paused, shrugging.
“I just think it’s illogical to think you can’t love an adopted child the way you could one who has your DNA.
That is such a cold-hearted thing to think. ”
“I think it’s something like forty percent of births worldwide are unplanned and/or unwanted.
And a lot of those kids grow up with shitty parents who never wanted to be parents in the first place.
I really respect you for making and sticking to your decision, babe.
It says a lot about you to be able to do that. ”
And right then and there, I had to press my lips together to keep the bottom one from trembling, a telltale sign that I was going to break down if I didn’t keep it together.
Sometimes, and it was truly rare, but sometimes you meet someone who just… understands.
Sawyer understood.
And there was something about that that really hit me somewhere deep.
“Riya?” he asked, addressing the top of my head because my gaze was on the counter again.
I shook my head, blinking hard a couple of times.
“Hey,” he said, lowering his arms down on the counter, getting an inch or so lower than me, and looking at my face.
“What’s with the hiding when you’re having an emotion thing? ”
“Maybe my emotions just aren’t your business.”
“Probably aren’t, but here they are in front of me anyway.”
“I’ll go to…” I said as I turned and tried to make an escape to my room.
His arm snagged my bicep from behind, pulling and turning me until I faced him again. His hand stayed on my arm; the other rose to cradle the side of my face, tipping it up and pinning me with his intense gaze.
We stood that way long enough for my heart to start slamming hard in my chest, knowing that that was the moment; it was when we stopped fighting it, it was when we gave in.
“Thanks for taking Slim for a walk,” he said instead, making me slow blink a good four times before the words fully registered.
Thanks for taking Slim for a walk?
“Also, work tomorrow. Be ready at seven so I can drop you off and circle back to get some of my shit done.”
With that, he dropped both his hands and walked back to the kitchen.
Thankfully, his back was to me as he reached up in the cabinet to fix himself a drink, because, quite frankly, I stood frozen in that spot for a good long minute before I snapped out of it and walked back to my room.
Then I spent the rest of the night actively trying to not think about how he had run his hand over my breast and rolled my nipple, about how sexually frustrated I felt almost nonstop, about how I was developing an emotional connection with a man I had only known for a few days, about how irrational that was.
But I thought about that.
I also thought about how intuitive and considerate it was for him to get me a job.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew his brother’s office had likely been a pigsty for years and could probably stay that way for years still.
But he knew I needed a focus. He knew I was going to drive myself crazy with questions about my missing year if I didn’t have something to do to occupy my time.
It also worked in his favor.
If I was out of his hair, occupied, not sitting in his apartment needing to be entertained, he could focus on work and maybe figure the mystery out once and for all so I could go back to my old life.
And as I slowly drifted off to sleep, I ignored the small, niggling little feeling inside that felt just a bit like disappointment.