Chapter 2
two
. . .
Armin
My breath caught in my throat. I didn’t know what I was playing at by doing this. Or I wanted to pretend I didn’t.
I waited in the doorway, stuck to the spot, watching her fiddle with her things in that hideous, banged-up micro SUV of hers.
A pang of guilt struck me on top of the mess of shame I was already carrying.
Now that I noticed how bad the rain was coming down, it was a wonder she’d made it up these roads at all.
She slipped out of her tiny clunker of an SUV and made a run for it, towards me. My stress-addled mind eased.
Could it be that she recognizes me?
I couldn’t make out her facial expression in all that rain.
She’d parked too far away from the house, nowhere near the awning, and the rain soaked her immediately, her short dress clinging to her curves, water running down her legs in long streaming rivulets.
Her jacket was a flimsy-looking thing that did nothing to protect her from the torrent pouring down.
She hesitated, and I couldn’t figure out why. Either she didn’t recognize me or she knew exactly who I was and she wasn’t happy about it. Which one was it?
Then the rain kicked up, and really drove down, so she trotted over a few steps.
By the time she was close enough that I could read her facial expression, I could tell she was in trouble.
Her heel slid in the gravel, and her ankle twisted hard.
I didn’t know if I’d imagined a faint crack.
I ran out to her, desperate to keep her from landing in the slurry of mud and forest debris rushing past my cabin door.
I made it to her in time, barely, and she collapsed into my arms. A soft grunt escaped her.
“Easy there.” I steadied her against my body, instinctively, to keep her from falling.
But she pushed back from me, with force.
Also instinctively.
And she righted herself on her own.
No, she didn’t remember the last time she was in my arms. I could see that now. I tried to shake it off, but it bothered me. I’d braced myself for this moment. I’d imagined this encounter a thousand times or more, going any which way.
You don’t start life in juvenile detention, graduate to the U.S. Army’s random directionless, endless wars, and then self-promote to local sheriff without a certain amount of pessimism running through your veins.
Still, the searing disappointment inside me suggested otherwise. I’d wanted her so bad, I’d fooled myself into thinking she’d want me too.
The past few months had been a whirlwind. Maybe it was the early retirement. Or maybe it was my $2.65 billion dollar jackpot hit, playing the lottery on a whim.
I’d tried to stay humble, to remember my limits, but it had been an uphill battle against magical thinking, and I’d gone into this particular rendezvous with my ego inflated.
Now I could tell by the hateful gleam in both her eyes, not only was she about to deflate that ego for me, but she’d more than likely stomp on it too, sprained ankle or not.
I caught a glimpse of pain on her face. She shifted the weight to her other foot and pretended she wasn’t hurt.
“We’d better get you inside,” I said. I had to shout, the rain had gotten so loud banging down against the cabin’s roof.
My sweater was soaked through already, but it was wool, so I was still pretty toasty.
Her outfit, on the other hand, was a fast ticket to hypothermia.
These mountain rains still hadn’t gotten the memo that it was summer in East Greenwich.
And it was an especially cold downpour tonight.
I sidled up next to her and stuck out my arm for her to lean on.
She didn’t move. “Where’s the gala?” She glared at me, unblinking, her hair hanging in drenched curls around her face.
“Come on inside first.”
She clutched her purse tight to her body and stuck out her chin. “Lead the way,” she said.
She wouldn’t take my arm, so I had to listen to her staggering steps trailing me, limping godawfully the whole way in, and with those torturous shoes on, until I started to feel nauseous imagining how much pain she must be in.
When we got inside the door, and I closed it behind her, she stood right next to it.
Too close. I imagined she’d yank it open and run back outside at any moment.
In her line of work, she’d probably had to do that before.
It didn’t take long before she started shivering, all over.
“You’re cold,” I said. “Can I get you a towel, or a blanket? Or we could hang your clothes by the fire,” I offered. “I mean, I’ll get you something dry, um, to wear in the meantime.”
“I can sit by the fire for a moment before we hit the road.” Her voice was hard. She clomped over to the sofa.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
“No,” she lied.
“Oh. Good.” She wasn’t going to let me rescue her this time.
I’d been lulled into a false sense of security by her cooperation last time.
Turned out that was all the smoke inhalation in play.
When she wasn’t oxygen deprived, she was all claws.
“Well, can I make you a tea, or a coffee? Something to warm you up?”
“Uh, sure,” she said.
I had underestimated how truly awkward this would be. I had never hired an escort before, and I’d never set foot in a strip club before I barged into Harvey’s to respond to those emergency calls. Wasn’t my style, to force women to endure me in exchange for money.
Until now.
And this was backfiring in the worst way.
But ever since I’d carried her out of that club, Mia was the first person I thought about when I woke up in the morning, and the last person I thought about before I went to bed at night.
I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to. And I’d be damned if I wouldn’t try my hardest to win her over despite the miserable conditions on this meetup.
I stared too long at her ankle, and I couldn’t help but notice it had already swelled up, but she was so prickly I was scared to mention it again.
“What time do we need to head out?” She asked.
“Oh, um.” I checked my watch. “I think it goes until late,” I said. “There’s no hurry. We probably ought to wait for the rain to let up a little bit. We’ll take my truck, obviously, but late last week there was a major washout. We don’t want to get into trouble.”
“No,” she echoed. “We definitely don’t.”
Her back was turned to me, and she warmed her hands by the fire, but her voice was all ice.
This had been a huge mistake, inviting her here. Hiring her.
I’d considered using my position as sheriff to see her again after the fire. I couldn’t shake the memory of holding her in my arms that first week, or the next, or the week after that.
I’d given her my number afterwards, and I’d hoped, day after day, that she’d use it, that we could come up with some way to amass enough evidence against her boss to put that crook away forever. I’d been trying for years, really. Ever since we’d managed his brother’s arson arrest.
But no. Harvey was a special kind of monster, one of those slippery criminals who brought down everybody around him one way or another but never experienced any consequences himself. And it wasn’t realistic to expect a sex worker to voluntarily call a cop. I knew that.
I knew my intentions weren’t pure, either. She’d gotten to me somehow, heated up the blood in my veins just by thinking about her. She had my mind, and my heart, and my cock all begging for her attention.
I could have reached out, could have invented some false procedural pretense to see her again. But I was a coward.
Now that I was a very wealthy man, I guess the money had made me bold.
No, that wasn’t accurate. Bravery hadn’t triggered this.
If I was being honest with myself, this whole series of events, leading up to the sodden and injured woman on my couch, had all happened because these days, I was lost. I was an even bigger coward than before.
I ducked into the cabin’s tiny kitchen and searched through my tea options. “How about chamomile?” I called.
The money was isolating, that was for damn sure.
There was no upside to suddenly coming into a billion dollars in a very small town.
It had seemed ridiculous to take a lawman’s salary now that I had more money than all the town combined and way more besides that.
So I’d caved to pressure and quit. The poisonous stares of the elderly citizens at the thought of a billionaire using their tax dollars proved too much to bear.
I’d even considered leaving town. But I didn’t want to leave Mia.
“I’ve also got hot chocolate, but not a great one,” I called to her.
I listened and waited. No response. I shuffled around the boxes in the pantry, but it was a sparse showing, exactly the kind you’d expect from a chronic bachelor.
I hadn’t been up at the cabin much since last year.
Work had kept me busy, in the before times. I sighed.
That job was all I had. I’d have thought the billion-plus dollars would be a suitable replacement, but I wasn’t a creative man.
I missed work. Work was what brought me in contact with people, on the regular.
Tonight I’d felt the cold sting of loneliness, and of a total lack of purpose in my life since I’d gotten the money and quit the force, and I’d royally fucked up and caved to it in the most craven way possible: I’d hired Mia as my escort.
I’d called her handler, a lackey to Harvey, a man I despised, a man I used to spend my days trying to convict for all the injustices and offenses he committed in this town on the daily, and I arranged to pay her to accompany me to an event I didn’t even want to attend.
I gathered up all my nerve, hidden there in the kitchen, and I blurted out, “You don’t remember me, do you?”
All this instead of being man enough to call her and invite her out to a dang coffee.
“There is no gala, is there?” Her voice didn’t waver.
“I’m just worried about the rain,” I said. I poked my head out of the kitchen, but she didn’t turn from the fire to look at me. “We don’t want to get killed—”
Mia stood up, rushed my front door, limp be damned, yanked it open, and slammed it shut behind her.
“—out there.”