“If they don’t have good adventures
in heaven, I’m not going.”
Chloe Traeger
Every muscle in Sawyer’s body tightened as he heard Chloe’s attempt at a hoarse scream and then the beep of the call being cut off. A dozen horrible images raced through his mind, but he cut them off, swerving around slower cars as he called Morris.
The DEA agent was still pissed at Sawyer for not being available when he’d been needed last night, and when Sawyer told him he wasn’t waiting for backup as he raced toward Chloe’s last-known location, the man started to tear Sawyer a new one.
Sawyer didn’t give a shit. The job, the bust, the drugs, none of it mattered. The whole world could go f**k itself if something happened to Chloe. He waited for Morris’s rant to end, confirmed the location one more time, and clicked off.
Raybo—he’d been the missing link, the big dealer the DEA had been looking to nail. It made perfect sense. Sawyer knew Morris’s team would get Raybo on the road or at his compound. Sawyer was certain of it.
What he wasn’t certain of, what he was terrified of, was what was happening to Chloe right this very second. He wasn’t far from the B&B, but every second felt like an hour. If that fucker touched one hair on her head, he was going down. Sawyer had no more mercy left. He cut the sirens and the lights as he approached the turnoff. When he pulled up at the inn, Tara was standing on the porch holding her cell phone. “Chloe called,” she said. “I think she’s in trouble.”
“Which trail?”
Lance came around the corner. “I’ll show you.” They moved to the marina building, Lance doing his best to keep up, but he was breathing hard. “There,” he said, pointing the way. “That one.”
Sawyer knew the trail all too well. It was the same one that he, Ford, and Jax had taken the night they’d seen the odd flare. It was also the trail to the hidden clearing where he and Todd had partied through their high school years. “Stay here,” he said to Lance. “More are coming. Tell them which way I’ve gone.” He drew his gun. No matter what happened, Chloe was coming out of this in one piece, but he’d make no guarantees about anyone else.
Todd had his arm across Chloe’s throat. Just tight enough that a regular person would have trouble breathing. She’d passed trouble halfway to his truck.
“This is just great,” Todd was muttering, dragging her along with him. “Fucking great. I spent a year trying to get your f**king attention, and you could give a shit. And now that I’m headed out, you want a piece of me.”
“I don’t—”
He tightened his grip on her, cutting off her words. He smelled of sweat and fear, and his body shook with tension as he walked her forward. There was a gun in his free hand, a semiautomatic, and she hoped the safety was on because he was swinging it around like a laser pointer. “I’m not going back to jail,” he said, his jaw pressed to hers. “Not even for your sweet ass. But I can’t let you go, either.”
“Yes, you can. It’s Raybo, right? It’s all him. You—”
Again he tightened his grip, and she choked. “Shut up,” he said. “Shut up and listen. I’m not taking the fall for Raybo. Hell, no. And I’m not narcing him out, either; the fucker is crazy. He’d kill me for sure.”
“No—”
“You should be worried about you, Chloe,” he said. “Our fun is over. I could have had you that day at the mud springs. That pisses me off. You were hot for me up until then, but something changed.”
“I was never hot for you,” she managed.
“Liar. But after that, Sawyer had you. That pissed me off, too. You’re not his usual type.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know what it is about you, but you jump knee deep in shit all the time and still come out smelling like a rose. I f**ked with the boats at the marina,” he said. “I told everyone that you were pissed off at your sisters and wanted to get out of this place. I thought everyone would blame you, but no one did, no one even believed the rumors. Nothing sticks to you. Too bad you can’t teach me that trick,” he said almost wistfully.
“I don’t—”
He tugged viciously on her hair. “We’re gonna load up now, and then we’re getting the hell out of here. Just be a good girl. That’s all you gotta do.”
Todd marched her past a burnt-out tree, then headed for a wild mass of Manzanita bush canopied by two-hundred-foot pines. There was something about the lush growth. It looked like the rest of the forest, but then it kinda didn’t, and she struggled to inhale again. She didn’t know what would happen if she passed out. Todd wouldn’t lift a finger to help her; she knew that.
“Stay,” he said, and the minute he removed his arm from her neck, she dropped to her knees. She was gasping, shaking, sweating, and freaking out in general, but he pointed the gun at her, and she sat back on her haunches.
“Jesus. I’m not gonna hurt you as long as you shut up.”
“I…can’t help it.”
“Do you have to gasp like that? I’m not even touching you. Shut the f**k up.”
She was trying. Not that she believed him about not hurting her. God, she hoped Tara wasn’t following the trail at this moment, trying to find her. Or Sawyer. She was afraid Todd would shoot anyone who came upon them. Hell, she was afraid he’d shoot her. She was going to die, either by Todd’s hand or by suffocation, and she hadn’t told anyone how she felt about them. She hadn’t said the words because she was a goddamn chicken, and now she was gonna die, and they’d never know. Not Sawyer, and not her sisters. It wasn’t right, and she was so mad at herself and Todd that she could shoot him herself.
“Get up,” Todd said. He was holding several bundles in his arms. “Chloe, I f**king mean it! Get up or I’ll drag you.”
If she could, she would. She’d get up, punch his lights out, and run like hell.
Except she couldn’t run. Not even on a good day, which this wasn’t shaping up to be.
She couldn’t do anything but attempt to inhale. She certainly couldn’t get any more terrified, which sucked. She’d thought she’d been afraid of three little words. What a joke.
Todd dropped the load in his truck and turned back to her just as she caught some movement out of the corner of her eye. At first she thought it was a deer, but then she realized it was Sawyer. It had to be.
In front of her, she heard the unmistakable sound of a belt being pulled loose from denim. For a second, she got frightened in a whole new way, then realized Todd was going to tie her up using his belt. Still holding his gun, he moved behind her. Vision wavering, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the little air that she was getting, waiting for an opportunity to help Sawyer. Mostly, she wanted to get Todd before Sawyer shot him. She wanted first blood, dammit.
The snap of a twig sounded loud as a gunshot. Todd grabbed her by the throat and spun her around.
“Let her go, Todd,” Sawyer said, stepping right into Todd’s line of sight, gun aimed, face so fiercely determined that Chloe forgot to breathe.
Until Todd squeezed her throat again. He hadn’t gotten her hands tied, and she clawed at his arm around her neck, her vision graying at the edges.
“Drop your gun,” Todd grated out. “Or I’ll shoot her dead.”
Not going to be necessary, Chloe thought hazily…
“There’s no reason to hurt her,” Sawyer said, moving slowly but steadily forward. “The DEA is five minutes away. They’ve got Raybo. They got him on the highway and he’s in custody. It’s over, Todd. Don’t make things even worse.”
“Worse? How could it be worse? You’ve f**ked me over for the last time, man. I’m not going back to jail. You know what they did to me in jail? You were still seventeen. Why the hell didn’t you tell them that you were driving? All you had to do was say you were driving!”
“I was unconscious, you asshole. We both were. They found us in the car. We never should have been drinking and driving. You know it as well as I do.”
“Yeah, well, easy for you to say. You got juvie, and I got hard time for second-degree murder. You think I ever had a chance for anything after that? Eighteen, and my life was f**king over.”
“It’s only over if you don’t walk away from this. Let Chloe go, and I’ll do what I can for you. I swear it, Todd. I know you didn’t mean for Sammy and Cutter to die. Nobody wanted that. I’m sorry it was you driving. I am.”
Chloe’s eyes drifted shut. She felt Todd look down at her, and she used the last of her strength to twist and bring her knee up hard between his legs.
He let out a strangled, high-pitched cry, and then she was free.
Free to tell Sawyer that she loved the stupid kid he’d once been, that she loved the man he’d become now, that she always would. But free of Todd wasn’t the same thing as home free.
She fell, bracing for the hard ground rushing up to meet her, but she never felt it.
Sawyer had spent lots of time in the ER. He’d brought in injured suspects, he’d gone to interview witnesses, and he’d been there not three months ago after a power tool incident when Jax had accidentally stapled his thumb to a shelving unit he’d been building.
But until now Sawyer had never sat in a tiny, cramped ER cubicle with panic gripping him by the balls. He stared at the woman in the bed. Pale and clammy. Him not her.
Though Chloe was pale, too.
Her hair still had flecks of dirt in it. The silky strands had long ago escaped the hair band to riot around her face. Sawyer might have stroked it back, but the nurse was hovering, moving like a busy bee around them: giving Chloe a breathing treatment, hooking up the monitors, checking the nebulizer, supervising oxygen levels. And all the while, the nurse’s mouth was moving, too, though she may have been speaking Chinese for all Sawyer was paying attention. He couldn’t do anything but look at Chloe, because if he took his eyes off her she might stop breathing again.
So he pulled a chair as close as he could get next to her bed and watched her struggle. Even with the nebulizer and the corticosteroids and the Beta-2 agonists, she still wasn’t out of the woods. But at least her lips weren’t blue, and she was starting to get some color in her cheeks.
Christ, it’d been close, too f**king close, and he’d never been so scared in his life.
The nurse finally left and in her wake were the beeping monitors, hissing oxygen, and the steady patter of people moving up and down the hallways on the other side of the curtain. Chloe opened her eyes, and Sawyer took his first real breath in the past hour of hell. He had no idea what to say. He was still struggling to think of something when she pulled the mouthpiece of the nebulizer from her mouth and spoke first.
“Did I miss the Jell-O? I really like it when they give me Jell-O.”
His throat constricted. “I’ll get you an entire tray.”
She reached out and took his hand, running her icy fingers over his knuckles, which were raw and red and a little swollen from where he’d punched the outside wall of the hospital. His form of stress relief.
“Chloe,” he said, but her eyes were closed again.
She’d replaced the nebulizer and fallen back to sleep.
Two minutes later, Tara and Maddie arrived. Tara sat in the chair that Sawyer vacated for her. Maddie moved to Chloe’s other side, the two of them staring down into her face.
“She’s so damn much a part of me that I feel like I can’t breathe either,” Maddie whispered, hand to her own heart.
“Luckily, she’s stubborn enough to breathe for the both of you,” Tara said.
Sawyer nearly smiled at the truth of that statement and looked down at his vibrating phone. Morris was here and needed to talk to him. Code for yell at him. Sawyer rose and met him in a hallway, where he spent the next ten minutes explaining exactly why he’d broken protocol and hadn’t waited for backup. Morris listened, both pissed off and acknowledging that Sawyer had nailed Todd.
Of course, it hadn’t been Sawyer at all, but Chloe and a well-placed knee, leaving Todd in possession of one dislocated nut and relieved of possession of his entire stash.
The DEA had their case and the drugs, and there were a lot of drugs. Raybo had been even bigger than they’d thought, and he was already singing. Todd had been making some side deals, storing most of his own shit in his duplex attic, but when Mitch ratted him out, he’d had to change his plans and quick.
Todd had rigged up some duck blinds in the woods, the way they’d done with their booze when they’d been kids, covering it with the military camouflage netting.
Stupid. But Sawyer was done wasting a single second of his time thinking and worrying about Todd.
Life was too short.
Chloe woke up with a little start. “I got him in the nuts!”
Tara and Maddie, seated at her side, smiled. “You sure did,” Tara said. “Proud of you, sugar.”
Chloe smiled, relieved it was over.
“So is it that you don’t have enough work at the B&B and the spa that you had to add crime fighting to your résumé?” Tara asked.
Chloe choked out a low laugh. She sat up a little, testing her lungs, and was relieved to find herself in relatively good working order. “I, um, thought of something when I was out there.”
“Before or after you spoon-fed Todd his left family jewel?”
Chloe smiled. “Before. Actually, way before. I thought of it a while back, but…well, to be honest, I can’t explain the why or how of what took me so long.” That’s how love worked, she thought. It was confusing and messy and wonderful and real. God, so real. And she’d meant it. It had been growing in her for a while. But right here, right now, looking at her hodgepodge family crowded around her, she felt it expanding inside of her even more, like her chest was going to explode. In a good way for once. “In the mud springs last night, Tara teased me for having an epiphany. She was right, I was having one.”