Chapter Twenty-Four #3
They couldn’t return to their beach house. Neither of them had a cell phone or cash. Angela was missing a shoe—and a quick glance told him she was the worse for wear. “I don’t know yet. You okay?”
“I could use a cup of coffee and a pair of tweezers.” She grimaced. “There are a lot of cactus spines all over me.”
“Come to think of it, same,” he admitted.
He slowed down and drove along the beach. If there had been more people along the water, he could borrow someone’s cell phone while they were distracted by the waves. But not enough people were out for him to pull off that trick for at least an hour.
“What are we going to do?” she asked again.
Sawyer turned toward the waves. “I have to wash the blood off before someone notices.”
Angela stayed in the dune buggy, apparently inspecting her arms and legs for barbed prickles. He removed his blood-stained T-shirt and cleaned up the best he could. The pain increased as his adrenaline cooled.
When he returned to the dune buggy, a scowl creased Angela’s forehead. “You need to go to a doctor.”
He rotated his arm and tried not to tighten the muscle. “It’s mostly a flesh wound.”
“Sawyer—”
“I’ll get it checked out later.” He rolled his shirt into a bandage. “Will you tie this on?”
Her frown deepened.
“I promise I’ll get someone to look at it later.” Blood leaked down his arm.
“Someone with a medical background?” she pressed.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“You might need stitches.”
He sat behind the wheel of the dune buggy. “I don’t need anything right now except for your help.” He offered the shirt again. “Can you tie my arm up?”
She relented and took the shirt.
Sawyer placed his arm on the dashboard and let her wrap the shirt around his bicep. “Tighter.” He sucked in some air. “Little tighter.”
“Oh, come on, Sawyer. I feel like I’m hurting you.”
He dropped his head back as the pain fired through his arm muscles. “Gotta do it, babe.” He caught himself. “Sorry,” he amended. “Ange.”
Angela tucked the end of the tight bandage into itself.
“I don’t care if you call me that.” She checked her work while Sawyer studied her.
“There isn’t anything pompous or pretentious in how you talk to me.
” She raised her eyes to him. “I probably would have called you worse if the situation was reversed.”
His lips curled into a slow smile, and with his good arm, he pulled Angela in for a kiss.
She was a balm to his wounded arm. Her presence erased the morning’s troubles and wiped away his worries.
She soothed a lonely, unsettled part of him that he’d been ignoring for years.
She made him happy. It was very simple. Scary. But simple.
Their kiss lingered. His racing mind calmed, and for a moment, it was almost as though they were on a day trip to the beach and not in need of a first aid kit while sitting in a stolen dune buggy.
He placed a soft kiss on her cheek and combed her wild hair back. “How are you doing? How many cactus spines are we talking about?”
She held out her arms and gestured to her legs. “About a thousand.”
Angela wasn’t exaggerating very much. “That’s going to take a while.”
“Yeah. Do you have a plan?”
“Find first aid and then loop headquarters in.”
“If Boss Man were here, he’d bark something about those being objectives, not action strategies.”
Sawyer grinned. “Good thing he’s not—” His eyes narrowed. “I need to ask you a very important question.”
She side-eyed him. “How important? Because I’m not letting you off the hook about seeing a doctor—”
“Someone with a medical background,” he corrected.
She rolled her eyes.
“But that’s not what I’m talking about.”
Looking wary, she waited. “What?”
“You’re the note bandit, aren’t you?” Over the course of years, someone had left jokes and poems for Jared to find.
They usually made the veins in Boss Man’s neck stand out.
The content was very in the weeds, sometimes hinting at inside jokes that only ACES would know, other times busting their balls.
At one time or another, everyone had been their target, though the focus had been on Jared ninety-nine percent of the time.
“Of course not.”
The corners of her eyes tightened. Was she blinded by the sun, or had bullshit made her twitchy?
Writing those jokes and poems would be out of character for her.
Then again, Sawyer had learned more about her in the last few days than he had watching her back over the previous few years. “If you say so.”
“Can we go back to the beach house?” she asked. “I have a pair of sunglasses that I love. Not to mention all of the work we’ve accomplished.”
He would let the note-bandit question drop for now. “We don’t need any of that paperwork.” Pham’s people had probably swept through the house already and bagged the intel to pore over. “I’ll get you new sunglasses.”
“All that work’s gone,” she said, pouting.
“You know all of it without having it in front of you.”
After a moment, she seemed to agree. “Then are we off to find a first aid kit? Doctor? Something?”
He restarted the dune buggy. “We’ll find a store and figure everything out from there.”