CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Angela hadn’t believed Sawyer planned to find a store and wing it. She’d been wrong. They walked into a dollar store as it opened for the day. Well, Sawyer walked. Her motion was more of a limp as they shuffled by an entrance decorated with a surplus of beach toys and ice chests. With a flip-flop on one foot and cactus spindles in the bare flesh of the other, she tried to blend in beside a shirtless Sawyer, who had a blood-soaked, bandaged arm. It wasn’t working.
A teenager operated the self-checkout area. When they approached, he took a step back. “Er, welcome to Dollar Island.”
Sawyer painted on his most endearing grin. “Could you help us out?”
The teenager’s jaw dropped. “Er. Uh.” His eyes jumped from Sawyer to Angela and back again. “Are you okay?”
“Not really,” Sawyer said.
“Yeah. It doesn’t look like it.”
“Could I use your phone and first aid kit?”
“I guess.”
The teen’s bloodshot eyes fell to Sawyer’s bloodstained bandage. “You going to call an ambulance?”
“No.”
Angela wasn’t sure that their appearance was all that clouded the clerk’s mind. Maybe he smoked a bowl before they arrived and was now trying to figure out what was happening.
“Um. Phone and first aid kit.” The teen pivoted from one side to the next as though he didn’t know where either item might be. “Yeah, over there.” He pointed at a phone behind the counter. “That’s a phone,” he said as if they might be unfamiliar with the kind of telephone that was attached to a wall. “And, uh.” He looked at Sawyer’s arm again. “The first aid box is in the backroom. I’ll…” The clerk sidestepped them as though they might bite. “Go get it.”
“Thanks,” she said.
Sawyer rounded the counter, made a short call, and returned to her side. They waited for the teenager to arrive with the first aid kit.
“Did you call Parker?” she asked.
Sawyer nodded, wincing as he inspected his arm.
“What did he say?”
He tugged the makeshift bandage higher on his bicep and didn’t look satisfied with the result. “An Uber will pick us up in less than ten minutes.”
Angela could see why the teenager’s eyes had bugged out at Sawyer’s arm. It didn’t look good. “We’re going to a hospital?”
“No, we’re going to that food truck from the other day. He’s calling in and paying for an order.”
“I’m not hungry, and you need a doctor.”
“You will be hungry when the adrenaline wears off,” he said, ignoring the mention of medical treatment. “By the time we finish eating, someone will drop off a bag of clothes, shoes, and”—he grinned, though the expression was tight and failed to hide his discomfort—“sunglasses.”
Her eyebrows arched. “There’s a team nearby already?”
“No, he has a slew of gig apps to choose from. Like DoorDash from Target or something. I don’t know.”
An app? Who needed handlers when they could find an app to take care of the tedious work? That wasn’t how she operated from their Abu Dhabi office. Then again, managing sunglasses and food wasn’t Parker’s job. “Huh.”
The teenager returned with an old blue-and-white plastic kit. “Um. Here.”
Angela took it and thanked him.
“All right, let’s see what we’ve got.” Sawyer popped the lid open and set the kit on the counter.
“Did you call an ambulance?” the teenager asked again.
“An Uber.”
“On the phone?” the teen inquired. “The one attached to the wall?”
“A taxi,” Angela amended.
Sawyer read the labels on the tiny ointment tubes, collected a few Band-Aids, and held up the tweezers. “Could I borrow these?”
Some kind of calculus played across the teen’s face as he studied Sawyer’s wound, the tweezers, and the paper-cut-sized Band-Aids. “Yeah, buddy.” The boy snort-laughed. “That’s fine. You can have ’em.”
“We appreciate it,” she said, limping behind Sawyer as they left the store. “He’s going to have questions.”
“Maybe.” Sawyer moved his arm too fast and winced. “But who’s going to ask him about it? Pham’s people don’t know where we went. They won’t canvass the island and draw attention to themselves.”
“He could call the police?”
“I don’t think so.” Sawyer studied a car that rolled into the parking lot with signs reading UBER displayed in the front and side windows. “Think this is us.”
The driver’s window rolled down. He eyed them with a heavy level of uncertainty. “Sawyer?”
“That’s me.” He opened the back door for Angela. “Thanks for the ride.”
Angela ducked under his arm and into the air-conditioned back seat—and immediately winced at the cactus spines embedded in the backs of her legs. Delicately, she scooted over.
Sawyer closed them in, and after another once-over from the driver, the car rolled out of the parking lot.
“Let me see your arms first.” Sawyer focused on removing the spines while the car headed for the food truck.
The driver watched the back seat more than he watched the road. But fewer than five minutes later, Angela and Sawyer were safely deposited in another parking lot.
Angela limped to the table they’d previously used. The lunch crowd hadn’t arrived yet. She wasn’t certain that the food truck was even serving up meals, but Sawyer returned quickly with two bags of food and two lemonades.
He set up their breakfast spread, raised one of her legs, rested her bare foot on his thigh, and went to work on the spines again. She ate hush puppies and fed him fried shrimp while he removed the prickles methodically. Once he did the fronts and sides of her legs, he had her stand so he could do the backs. The food truck guys must’ve thought they were quite the spectacle. Their heads peeked out the order window every few minutes.
She sipped her lemonade. “Do you think they’re going to call the cops?”
“Do you think Parker would have taken care of that?”
Of course he would have. “It’s hard to be on this side of things.”
“Being shot at is a game changer,” he deadpanned.
She laughed. “I mean, I know what I would’ve said to make sure they wouldn’t call the cops, and Parker’s IQ is off the charts.” Angela shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you do. It’s hard to give up control.” His fingertips ran over her skin, searching for missed cactus spines. “That’s all I can see,” he finally said. “Any more?”
Carefully, she ran her palms up and down her legs. “I don’t think so.”
He handed her the tiny tube of ointment. “You should smear this on the worst spots.”
She’d thought the tiny tubes were for him. “What about you? Your arm?”
“I’ll get to it, but I’m starving.”
A car rolled into the parking lot, and a woman stepped out of the vehicle, carrying two bags from Wal-Mart.
Sawyer stood.
“I’ve got it.” Angela shooed him back to his food. “Eat.”
She approached the other woman, and, given how the woman’s eyes rounded, Angela had a solid idea of her own appearance: crazy hair, irritated red splotches covering her body, and one shoe.
The delivery woman stopped several paces away, set the bags down in a parking space, and backed away. That was fair. Angela likely appeared to have a contagious disease. Still, she smiled and thanked the other woman for the bags.
Her foot was still sore, but without the cactus needles, Angela didn’t limp back to their table.
“Anything good?” he asked then popped a hush puppy into his mouth.
“Hope so.” She dug through the bag and found the sunglasses. The UV-blockers did almost as much for her as the food. “I will feel like a new woman before we leave the parking lot.” She donned the new glasses. “What do you think?”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Aw.” She grinned, her stomach fluttering. “About the sunglasses.”
His grin hitched. “They look like the last ones.”
“Not at all.” Still, though, she beamed. He’d called her beautiful when she was a mess. Angela kissed him on the cheek. “You’re beautiful too. You know that?”
Sawyer blushed. She wouldn’t have believed it without seeing it with her own eyes. Something in society kept a certain kind of compliment away from men. Sure, they could be manly and tough. Sawyer was the living, breathing definition of that, not to mention hot and sexy, but he was also beautiful. What else didn’t men hear enough of? “You’re also sweet and kind.”
“All right, Ange. Enough, or I’m going to have you checked out for head trauma.”
“Oh, cool your jets. Beautiful, kind, and sweet, in a jumps-out-of-helicopters-and-saves-the-day kind of way.” It wasn’t that she wanted to embarrass him, but she wanted him to know.
He rolled his eyes.
“And I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”
“Angela. Enough—”
She kissed him on the cheek again. “All right. Enough.” She sipped her lemonade. “What will we do about a vehicle and a doctor?”
He relaxed now that she’d turned the subject away from him. “Wait until something shows up.”
“From Parker? We just wait?” No phone. No updates. Angela didn’t handle an absence of tasks very well.
He shrugged. “Everything that we need has shown up when it was supposed to. Why question it now?”
He didn’t mean those words the way she immediately took them. But Sawyer had shown up for her in so many ways. As much as she could help it, Angela wouldn’t question what appeared right before her.