by Mazzy King
An EMT comes jogging toward us, Jaxson following. Damn, he works fast.
“I’m gonna have my friend here check you out real quick, if that’s all right,” I tell her. “You’ve had a pretty rough couple of hours.”
“I’ve never had a gun pointed an inch from my face,” she murmurs.
I nod. “It’s not really something you ever get used to.”
She glances at me again, but before she can say anything, the EMT reaches her and wraps a blanket around her shoulders, then leads her toward a bench a few feet away and starts asking her questions.
“You seem pretty worried about her,” Jaxson says.
I turn toward him. “Huh?”
He folds his arms and lifts an eyebrow. “You can’t take your eyes off her.”
“Bullshit,” I argue. “I just did.” But I can’t help but turn my head to check on her again. She’s getting her blood pressure checked now.
Jax snorts. “Right. Listen…she’ll probably need a ride home. Why don’t you take the car, and I’ll catch a ride with one of the guys? I’ll see you back at the precinct. Sarge will want to debrief with you. Then it’s death-by-paperwork time.”
I groan. “Sounds awesome.” Ask any cop what the worst part of their job is. I will give you my entire life savings if they don’t say paperwork.
Jaxson glances in Isla’s direction again, then back at me. “You’re welcome, Hansen.” With a little wink, he heads off toward the cluster of squad cars.
I turn back toward Isla, where the EMT removes the blood pressure cuff from her arm and hands her a bottle of water. She looks a little less shaken now, but I know from personal experience that shit can take a while to shake off. And sometimes, it’s so hard to shake off, you need professional help.
Once the EMT leaves her, I walk over and take a seat beside her. “So. How are you?”
Isla sips her water. “That’s, like, the seventieth time you’ve asked.”
I chuckle. “Well, I’m worried about you. Just want to make sure you’re all right.”
She lifts a shoulder, her gaze pinned to her lap. “I’m probably going to have nightmares.”
Yeah, she might. I did at first. But, as tactless as I can sometimes be, I know now is so not the time to share that with her.
“Hey, you were really brave,” I tell her quietly, nudging her shoulder with mine. “I needed your help, and you stepped up to the challenge. You helped save all those people’s lives.”
She gives me a little smile, and I swear I literally melt inside. She is fucking gorgeous. It’s disarming.
“What were you doing here today?” I ask. I’m curious, but also, I’m hoping getting her talking will loosen her up a little.
She clears her throat. “I own a small salon and spa a few blocks from here. I was making a deposit and I—” Her eyes go wide and she claps a hand to her mouth. “Oh my God. My clients!” Then she frantically pats her pockets as if she’s looking for something, but I’m sure there’s nothing else she can fit inside those jeans she wears so goddamn well. “I need my phone. I had three more appointments today. I’ve missed two already. Oh my God.”
Isla sounds seriously distressed, almost on the verge of tears. Instinct makes me slip my arm around her shoulders. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m sure as a business owner, this is the worst thing that could happen, but I swear to you, Isla, they will understand considering what you just went through.”
Maybe it’s the arm, maybe it’s the way I said her name, or maybe she just really needs some comforting right now, but Isla meets my eyes. Hers are wide and glistening, but the tears in them don’t fall. She gives me a one-sided smile.
“Um, I walked here. My car is at the shop. Do you think you or someone might be able to—”
“Absolutely.” I stand and offer my hand. “I’ll take you.”
She takes my hand and rises. “That’s…okay? Don’t they need you in there?” She gestures toward the bank.
I shake my head. “Crime scene will process the bank, collect evidence. I’ll have to return to the precinct, debrief with my sergeant, file a report. I totally have time for you. Whatever you need.” Then I bite my lip. Did that sound desperate?
“Okay.” She lowers her gaze to the ground.
“Follow me.” I smile, then turn to lead the way to the unmarked car I was cruising around with Jaxson in earlier.
A cool, soft hand lands on my forearm, and it’s all I can do not to shiver as I face her.
“Gunner?” she says softly.
I could drown in her beautiful green eyes and die a happy fucking man. “Yeah?”
One corner of her mouth curls up, and I have the worst urge to grab her and kiss those luscious, tempting lips.
“Thank you for saving my life.”
Chapter 5
Isla
Maybe I’m still in some degree of shock. Maybe I’m just crazy. But as I lay my hand on Gunner’s tattooed forearm and look into his ocean eyes, I swear it feels like…I’m falling. Hard.
I just met him. I just met him!
But life-and-death situations change things. Even my crazy, frightened, cloudy mind right now recognizes that. All I know is that I was literally staring down the barrel of my death. I could practically smell the gunpowder from that sawed-off shotgun. I could almost feel the explosion of fire that was about to happen in my face. I saw that masked man’s finger tightening on the trigger, the action that would end my young life at twenty-seven.
I don’t know if I had a lifetime reel flashing before my eyes. But I do know I felt a deep, overwhelming sorrow right down in the marrow of my bones. Sorrow for my parents and my twenty-year-old brother who would grieve for me. My friends. My clients. My sorority sisters. All the people I knew and loved in my life, who knew and loved me, would lose me in that moment because one person decided it was time for me to go. It wasn’t fair. There’s still so much left for me to do. So much traveling. So much delicious food to eat. So many memories to make.
In that moment of staring down the barrel of that sawed-off shotgun, I grieved, too. For myself.
Suddenly, I’m crying. Hard.
Gunner swiftly pulls me into his arms. On another day, I might be totally embarrassed for breaking down in front of a complete stranger, and then having that stranger hug me. But he doesn’t feel like a stranger. He feels like…
Home.
“It’s all right,” he says softly, stroking my back. “You’re a survivor, Isla. Not a lot of people can walk away from what you did. You’re a fighter.”
“I only walked away,” I blubber, “because you saved me. You saved my life.”
He goes still, and I swear I feel his heart beat faster beneath my palm where it rests on his chest. “I’d save you a thousand times. I took an oath to protect and serve. I’d die for you.”
I know that “you” means any one of the general public. He would’ve laid his life down to save anyone in that bank. He took an oath, like he said.
But I can’t help the shiver that goes through me when I hear that “you.” It feels…deeply personal. Specific—to me, and me alone. And how that makes me feel—this overwhelming, indescribable feeling of warmth—terrifies me more than anything I encountered today.
Gunner gently squeezes my upper arms. “Ready to head to your shop?”
I sniffle. “Is there any way I can get my bag from inside the bank?”
“Let me go look for it,” he says. “Before it gets processed as evidence.”
I describe the bag and where I last had it. He nods and walks into the bank. I pace on the sidewalk, trying not to have a massive panic attack about the fact that I stood my clients up. They likely have no idea where I was, even though I’m sure the news broadcast something about what happened at the bank. Granted, I’ve never missed or been late for one of my appointments before. I live by the rule that to be on time is to be late, so I strive to be at my shop, with everything ready to go, ten to fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. I hate being r
ushed, and I want to have a nice, serene environment for my girls to come relax in. The fact that those appointments have come and gone with no word from me makes me want to shrivel up into a ball on the sidewalk.
“Breathe.”
I whirl around. Gunner stands before me, holding my bag in one hand. He gives me a little smile as he hands it over. “Seriously. Take a deep breath before you pass out.”
I comply, drawing in a shaky breath to the bottom of my lungs and releasing it slowly, then I paw frantically through my bag to locate my phone. My already shredded nerves fray even further at the sight of a dozen texts, missed calls, and voicemails flooding the screen. They range from annoyance to concern pretty quickly, but they still make me pant.
Gunner’s brow creases and he leads me by the elbow. “My car’s over here.”
I nod dimly, trying to respond to text messages. My thumbs keep hitting the wrong buttons. I once dated a guy a year ago—in fact, the last guy I dated—for a few years. A few months into our relationship, he would text and call me incessantly when I wasn’t at home, demanding to know where I was even if I already told him where I was going. He made me call him when I was leaving for work, when I got there, before I left, and when I got home. If I deviated from these tasks, he would rail against me and give me endless shit about not behaving in a trustworthy manner and then he’d ignore me for days on end, sometimes a week or more. It would tear me up inside, would drive me out of my mind. But what bothers me most of all—even back then—was wondering how I found myself in a situation like that.
So why am I thinking about this now?
The sight of the missed communications from my clients aren’t even in the same stratosphere as the messages my ex-boyfriend would send me. And I thought I put all that shit behind me when I finally freed myself from the bonds of his control and manipulation to dump him. I haven’t thought about him in at least a couple of months—so why now?
I become aware that I’m sitting in a car. I remember this isn’t my car. I glance over at Gunner. He’s studying me with a keen look of concern.
“At the risk of sounding like a broken record,” he says lightly, “you doing okay over there?”
How do I answer that? How can I answer that? I just nod.
He returns the nod, but I clearly see the doubt written all over his face. He’s not buying it, and I don’t blame him, because it’s not true.
I give him brief directions to the shop. It’s less than a five-minute drive with the crazy traffic. The cops have the streets around the bank blocked off, but when Gunner flashes his badge—should I find that hot? I do—they wave him through.
“This is a good time to make a joke about having friends in high places,” I say, my voice cracking a little. It’s weak, I know.
He laughs heartily anyway. “If I’m considered in a high place, I’m guessing you don’t watch the news much.”
I do watch the news, and shoot him a sympathetic smile. “It’s not easy having your job these days.”
He shrugs as he slowly navigates the car around a barricade. “No, it’s not, but the shit cops who do terrible things to innocent people out of fear and stupidity make it that much harder.”
“Are you…” I hesitate, trying to rephrase my question. “Do you…”
He lifts his brows at me and smiles. “Yes?” He draws out the word.
“Do you ever worry that stuff like today will be your…last day?”
“On the job, or in life?”
“Life,” I whisper. I’m suddenly cold.
He draws in a long breath through his nose as he guides the car down the block, away from the chaos. “Of course. I’d be foolish not to.” He turns right at the corner.
“Why did you want to be a cop? It’s just up here, on the left.”
He stops in front of my little storefront. There’s a pink and white awning over the door. My logo and the shop name are on the awning: Isla Gregory Studio.
No one’s waiting in front of the shop or in cars parked in front. I haven’t gotten replies back yet from the clients I inadvertently stood up this afternoon. My anxiety ratchets up another notch.
We get out of the car and I dig in my bag for my keys. When I bring them out, my hand shakes and the metal jangles together. It shakes so badly I can’t put the key in the lock.
“I got it,” Gunner says in a casual way that doesn’t make me feel like a neurotic freak. He slips the key in the lock, turns it, and opens the door. Inside, he glances around. “No alarm system?”
I shrug, trying to get myself together as I walk inside the shop. I just need my appointment book and to make sure I didn’t leave anything hot plugged in that might burn the place down. “Not yet. It’s on the to-do list, but I always seem to forget about it.”
“Maybe see if you could move it higher up the list,” Gunner replies, turning in a slow circle as he looks around. “Hate for something to happen to this place. It’s really nice.”
It makes me feel good that he thinks so. The interior has the standard salon equipment—a styling station, two basins and chairs for hair washing and rinsing, a dryer seat, a pedicure chair, a desk for manicures, and tons of mani-pedi accoutrement. But on the other side, I wanted to create a living room, where my clients could hang out and chat if they came a few minutes early or if they wanted a comfy place to sit while their color processed. I set up a tufted, studded dark gray sofa and a matching armchair, glass, chrome, and white wood coffee and end tables, cool glass and chrome table lamps, and a coffee bar set up over a minifridge where I keep a variety of creamers and bottled water.
“Thanks,” I reply. “I’m a full-service salon, but it’s just me, so I stay pretty busy. In addition to hair and nails, I do waxing, facials, lash extensions, makeup.”
“Waxing, huh?” he says with a flirty grin.
It puts me at ease a little, and I giggle, pointing over my shoulder toward a small room, its door closed. “That’s where the magic happens.”
I’m curious what kind of lady-bush manicuring he’s into. Full Brazilian? Landing strip? Basic bikini? Natural? I keep my own situation bare except for a little triangular-shaped patch at the top. That one is listed on my menu of services as “the Martini.”
Why are you wondering what kind of pubic hair style he likes?
Now I’m even more flustered. “Um, well, that’s everything, I guess.”
“Get everything you needed?” he asks mildly, glancing at the planner under my arm.
Do I? I can’t remember my own name. My cheeks are hot. “Yep.”
We head back out to the car after I triple-check the lock. He opens the passenger door for me like we’re on a date, then I direct him to the duplex I rent a few miles from the downtown area.
“I figured you for the downtown loft type,” he comments.
“No, I like living away from here,” I reply. “The location is good for business, but there’s so much shady crime stuff that happens, too. Hell, Triple Six had a major shooting about six months ago. Well, you probably know about that. And a car theft ring operated out of some abandoned garage only half a mile from the salon.” I blush. “You—you probably know about that one too.”
He chuckles. “Yeah, a little. I worked the case for a little while.”
“You did?” I gape at him. “Man, I followed that story every single day. It was like something out of a book or a movie—the ex-girlfriend of the ringleader cooperates with the police and flips on everyone.”
“It was pretty crazy,” he admits. “She’s good people, though. Lyra, that’s her name. She’s engaged to my buddy now. He led the operation to bust the ring.”
“Wow,” I say, unable to keep a dreamy note out of my voice. “That’s kind of romantic, actually.”
Gunner casts me a sidelong look. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
He pulls into the driveway of my duplex. My garage and my neighbor’s garage are connected, putting our living quarters on opposite sides of the building, which I am A-OK with.
I moved here after breaking up with my boyfriend last year. We didn’t live together, but he moved out of the city after that and I wanted a fresh start, a place I could call my own. A place I could come and go out of any damn time I wanted. A place where he didn’t constantly rearrange things to be to his liking when he was over.
That old feeling, the one that makes me shaky and feel gross, the one I had when I looked at my long list of missed calls and texts, drops over me again.
“Isla?”
I blink. Oh, yeah. I’m supposed to get out of his car. “Sorry.”
“I’ll walk with you,” he says, hopping out. He follows me to the door, and this time I manage to work my key in the lock all by myself.
I glance over my shoulder. “You can come in, if you want.”
He steps inside the foyer. The space is small, but the landlord redid it before I moved in, adding cool gray stone backsplash in the kitchen and in the bathroom shower stall, replacing the old carpet with dark brown wood, painting the walls a cool blue-gray color that reminds me a lot of Gunner’s eyes.
My taste in furniture at the shop is similar to what I have here too. I can’t help it—I love simple, solid colors and feminine touches. And it’s mine.
He smiles. “I like it. A lot. It’s very…you.”
It’s a compliment, and it takes me by surprise. That warm, coming-home feeling lights up my chest, momentarily pushing back the darkness.
I don’t want him to go.
Gunner hesitates on the welcome mat, his hands in his pockets. “I…wish I could stay longer.”
My heart leaps up, and I take a step toward him. “I wish you could stay, too. Really.”
He slowly licks his bottom lip, his gaze locked on mine. “Times like these, the job really sucks.”
“You can come back,” I say softly, inching another step closer. “If—if you want.”
“Do you want me to?” he asks, reaching for my hand.
My heart thrums into overdrive. I swallow. “Yes,” I whisper. “I don’t want to be alone, Gunner, but I only want to be around you.”