Chapter Nineteen #2
As sand-free as they could manage, they sluiced off and dripped inside into the air conditioning. Shivering, Angela rushed upstairs. “I need a minute in hot water.”
He walked into the bathroom on the main floor, confident she’d take more than a minute. Sawyer showered away the salt water and was dressed before the water in the upstairs bathroom was turned off. He studied the law enforcement reports while he waited.
They held nothing but the facts. Two dead bodies. Gunshot wounds. Identification had been found for Mark Hathaway and Tabby Foster, Mylene’s husband and sister.
Mark and Mylene. He played the married couple’s name over in his head. The names sounded good together. Mark and Tabby? That sounded just as nice but would have been a shit move.
Sawyer picked up a photo dated a year before the murders. Mark and Mylene looked good together too, though looks could be deceiving. Had this man been sleeping with his wife’s sister? The photograph wouldn’t tell Sawyer anything. Neither would Angela’s toothbrush theory.
As he tossed the photo onto the table, footsteps came down the stairs.
“Okay, that took more than a minute,” Angela said, entering the room.
“But I rushed.” Damp hair hung over her shoulders.
“Sort of.” Her cheeks were too rosy from the time she and Sawyer had spent on the beach.
“I need to go buy a bottle of aloe after we eat. My shoulders.” She peeled the neck of her shirt down. “Might hurt later.”
Angry skin surrounded her fair tan line. “Ouch,” he said.
“Could be worse.” She scanned the table. “Has anything jumped out at you?”
“A whole lot of nothing.”
Looking further at the table, she eyed a binder labeled Welcome Guests that had an illustration of their beach house. “Did you find a place for lunch?”
As if on cue, his stomach rumbled again. “There’s a food truck we can find up the street.” Sawyer grabbed a set of car keys hanging from a hook near the door. “I checked the reviews. All pretty good. Most say to order the crab cake sandwich and let them dress it their way.”
Angela picked up her sun hat. “Sounds tasty.”
They arrived in the parking lot where the food truck had been permanently set up, and they weren’t the only ones who had searched out the well-reviewed crab cake sandwiches. A long line of locals and tourists waited. “That bodes well,” she said.
Tables and umbrellas occupied several parking spaces.
A long, umbrellaed table held coolers of drinks and condiments.
Sawyer eyed the line. Very few people in the world knew where Angela was at the moment, but it still made Sawyer nervous for her to be without a Kevlar vest, surrounded by strangers.
Angela found a table and stayed out of the sun while Sawyer ordered more food than they could eat.
Under the guise of scanning for threats, he watched her while he waited.
She was magnetic. Even though her face was hidden under a sun hat, he could picture her dark eyes and smile.
The memory of her lips had imprinted itself in his brain.
With instant recall, he remembered the way their legs had tangled and their stomachs had touched.
He could almost feel her soft curves wrap around his waist.
“Number five-eighty-two.”
The announcement of their order number pulled Sawyer to reality. He released a breath. How in the hell had he said no to Angela’s suggestion on the plane of no-strings-attached get-togethers? He rubbed the back of his neck, more than a little disappointed in himself.
He retrieved their food and delivered enough to feed a small family to the table where Angela sat. They chowed down. The reviews were correct. The sauce on the crab cake sandwich was perfect, and the hush puppies and fried shrimp were the real deal too.
Sawyer hadn’t realized how much energy the sun had taken out of him until he started to eat. Hunger morphed into sleepiness. Now, he wanted a nap.
Better than that, he wanted to fall asleep next to Angela, just as they’d slept on the jet that morning. But given… everything… that wasn’t a good idea.
Hell. His desiring her like this was getting worse by the second.
Sawyer threw a fried shrimp into his mouth.
Maybe his approach was wrong. Maybe she had the right idea.
They kissed. He’d pulled back because he was much too in his head.
They could get physical so long as they didn’t become intimate. Exactly as she’d suggested.
That was what she wanted, after all. Who was he to say no to Angela? With parameters, he could box himself in and be cautious. “Let me ask you a question.”
She recapped her water bottle. “Shoot.”
“It has to do with your question on the plane.”
Angela’s eyes jerked toward him, but she feigned unaffectedness in a way that left him wanting to peel back her layers. “Hmm?”
Sawyer took another bite of his crab cake sandwich and chewed slowly. Perhaps he should’ve considered exactly what he wanted before bringing it up. “You said practice.”
A blush further reddened her sunburned cheeks. Angela maintained a forced, practiced calmness that made his heart gallop laps around the parking lot.
“That’s what I said,” she agreed.
“Do you want to tell me more about what you were thinking?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“I asked nicely,” he teased.
She glanced at the busy tables around them. They weren’t close enough to be heard, and even if they were, most people were involved in touristy conversations or glued to their phones. “Why?”
He shrugged casually, belying the nervous electricity tightening in his chest. “You caught me off guard.”
“You caught me off guard in the water.”
His lips curled. “I don’t know. That felt like it was going to happen whether we liked it or not.” He crossed his arms and cocked his head. “I liked it, in case you were wondering.”
“You apologized.”
He couldn’t help but laugh. “I apologize for the apology, sweetheart.”
She glared, but he could’ve sworn she did so only to hide her smile.
“Will you tell me more?” he asked again.
“No.”
“Ahh.” He put a hand over his heart. “That hurts.”
“Give me a break, Sawyer. When I said that…” She wrapped both hands around her water bottle. “We were in this dark, warm, safe cocoon.” She chewed on her bottom lip. “In the light of day… that seems like a crazy ask. An inappropriate one.”
He eyed her. “Inappropriate is subjective.”
She blinked hard, and pink tinted her cheeks again. “True…”
Angela had said “practice.” That idea had an end goal he could work with. They would return home and stay friends. “Not exactly friends with benefits. But more like a situationship.”
Her unreadable stare offered no answer.
“Ange?”
“I don’t get the difference between the two.”
“Friends with benefits is more, ‘I’m bored, let’s hook up,’ and this would be more, ‘Kissing you at the beach was better than my vivid imagination, and I want to do it again.’”
Her jaw fell open.
Sawyer added his last selling point. “Given what happened in the water, I think it would be very, very fun.”
Her face broke. She half laughed. “Yeah. But here’s the catch, remember? I…” She pushed her loose hair behind her ears. “Have no experience with any of this. My last relationship was such a dud that it was a business plan I didn’t notice.”
“Ange, you fuckin’ stopped my heart with that mouth of yours. So let’s consider that you may not realize you know what you’re doing, but”—he inched closer and lowered his voice—“you’re amazing at it.”
Her jaw fell open again, and her pink cheeks turned scarlet. “Oh my God, would you stop?”
“Only because you asked.” She had no idea what it was like to be wanted. His pulse strummed in his neck.