Sawyer gritted his teeth, as clearly what he’d heard about Travis’s friends and family protecting him was the truth. “Did you know that Travis beat his girlfriend to within an inch of her life?”
“I heard something about it.” The bartender gave a mirthless grin, keeping his focus on his cloth. “I’ve also heard the cops are bugging his friends and family to give him up.” His eyes lifted, threatening. “I’ll be the first to tell you that you’ll never find him.”
Sawyer didn’t know if it was the bartender’s smug voice or the grin on his face that made him snap, but it didn’t matter. He lunged and wrapped a hand around the bartender’s throat in less time than it took him to inhale. He didn’t know how he ended up on the other side of the bar. All that he knew was that his body weight added force to his grip, pinning the bartender against the wall.
He heard nothing but the sound of his thumping pulse in his ears. His fingers tightened around flesh, squeezing with all his frustration and rage. He felt the flow of vengeance running through him for the harm that had come to Ash, for the journey of healing she’d have to endure, and even for the loss of her innocence. While Sawyer knew his sister wasn’t a virgin, Travis had raped and aggressively abused his baby sister. Sawyer wanted to make him pay.
It wasn’t until he heard Chloe’s sharp yell of his name did his thoughts abruptly withdraw from that primal place where man hunted those who hurt the ones he loved. “Let him go,” Chloe said. “Right now!”
The space between loss of control and in control began to shrink, and Sawyer felt his fingers release the man’s neck. With an effort, he dropped his hand and stepped back. He noticed the bar had gone silent, with everyone looking their way.
Chloe said to the bartender, “You do realize that not coming forward with Travis’s whereabouts means you are harboring a criminal?”
The bartender, bent over, coughed and wheezed. “Yeah, I fucking know that.” He straightened up, glaring daggers at Sawyer. “I’ll have you arrested for assault!”
Sawyer took a step toward him, loving how the bartender cringed away. “Travis’s girlfriend is my baby sister. This isn’t about the police or about helping your friend anymore.” He allowed the fury he felt hearing that Ash had been raped and abused by Travis to invade him. “If I find out he’s been here again and you haven’t called it in, I will turn you in myself.”
“You have nothing on me,” the bartender growled.
Sawyer returned the mirthless grin. “Everyone has secrets, and I happen to know people who are good at exposing them.” Before he got himself into any more trouble than he was already in, he exited the bar, sensing Chloe following him.
He made it to his truck and opened the door for Chloe. Once she was inside, he slammed the door behind her and got in on the driver’s side. He started the engine, bowed his head, and shut his eyes, breathing deeply.
Only when he composed himself and his heartbeat returned to a normal speed did he slide his glance to Chloe. She watched him for a long, tense moment, and then she began to laugh. “So, that went well.”
How she could find anything about what he’d done amusing was beyond him, but he couldn’t stop himself from laughing, too. “I lost it.”
“No, really?” Chloe mused, doing up her seatbelt. “That wasn’t obvious at all.”
Sawyer clipped in his seatbelt. “That should never have happened. I’m a cop, for fuck’s sake.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t have happened for a cop, but for a brother whose sister has been violated, it is totally understandable. You need to cut yourself a break.”
“Perhaps.” He exhaled a long, frustrated breath. “We are also nowhere closer to finding Travis than we were this morning.”
She reached into her pocket and took out her cell phone. “Give me a sec. I’ll call Shane again and put him on high alert to keep tracking things on his end.” She hit call and began talking with Shane.
Sawyer reached for his phone in his pocket and texted Kyler to report what they’d discovered: Travis was at the Cowboy Saloon. The bartender is a friend of his. The trail is still cold on our end.
After a long pause, Kyler texted back: I’ll put those notes in our files. There’s nothing new on our end, either.
Sawyer dropped his phone into the cup holder and rubbed his face, forcing down the swell of anger. It’d been so long since he’d allowed emotions to overwhelm him. He noticed how good the spike of adrenaline felt pumping through his veins. He looked at Chloe, who was still talking on the phone; she seemed as calm as when they walked into the bar. Oddly enough, he felt something freeing in that.
In Club Sin, Sawyer could never lose control. Tonight, though, he’d completely lost his shit and been violent in front of Chloe. His lack of control didn’t make her look at him with disgust, as if he’d failed her, like it would have with a submissive. It had her moving closer and offering comfort—and sympathizing with how he felt.
He liked that about Chloe. A lot.
She ended the call and turned to him. “Shane’s back on it for us. So now we have something else to do.”
When she didn’t elaborate, Sawyer arched a brow at her. “Which is…?”
“Food. My stomach is going to eat itself.” She smiled from ear to ear and pointed straight ahead. “Mr. Quinn, to my house.”
He chuckled. “What am I now? Your chauffeur?”
“It’s not too often I have someone driving me around.” She half shrugged in her cute way. “I might as well take advantage of it.”
He threw the truck into gear and stepped on the gas. “Well then, Ms. Nash, I’m yours to take advantage of.”
Her laughter warmed him in ways he’d never been warmed by a woman. The tension in Sawyer’s chest slowly began to vanish.
Chapter 7
Forty-five minutes later, back at her condominium, Chloe stared at herself in the mirror, thinking that the image of her right out of the shower was nothing compared to how Sawyer had looked earlier. She stood in her small, simple bathroom, wearing comfy yoga pants and a light blue cotton T-shirt—basically her go-to after-work clothes. Sawyer had looked as though he’d been plucked straight from the pages of a fitness magazine.
Her, not so much.
She grabbed the elastic hair band off the white pedestal sink and pulled the long strands into a ponytail. Ten minutes had whizzed by since she’d showered, and she figured that was enough time to allow all that testosterone pumping in Sawyer’s body to sizzle away.
Intending to see if he’d settled down, she left the bathroom, the hot steam following her out. Droplets of water dripped onto her back as she walked past her small kitchen. Her small condo wasn’t much, but it was hers, and it had a great view of the Vegas strip. She entered the living room, and the sight she encountered was so unexpected that she burst out laughing. “I see you’ve met Mr. Magoo.”
“You named your cat”—Sawyer glanced away from the big fat cat in his lap—“after a cartoon character?”
She half shrugged, leaning her shoulder against the wall. “When he was a kitten he kept getting hurt because he’s so clumsy. I thought the name suited him.”
Softness filled Sawyer’s eyes before he looked back at the cat, which was now rubbing his head across Sawyer’s chest and purring. “He’s a pest, isn’t he? I put him down ten times before I realized it was pointless.”
Chloe laughed. Her cat could be demanding when he wanted to be petted. “He typically gets what he wants.”
“Is that so?” Sawyer arched a brow at Chloe and then said to the cat, “We might have a problem, you and I, Mr. Magoo.”
Chloe laughed harder, hearing Sawyer say “Mr. Magoo.” Such a sexy voice didn’t suit the silly name. The cat climbed Sawyer’s chest to rub his head against Sawyer’s chin. “I think he’s in love.”
“That might mean more if he wasn’t so pushy,” Sawyer snorted as the cat rubbed his face across Sawyer’s jawline.
She swooned a little, seeing Sawyer with her cat. She
was just about to join them in the living room when someone knocked on her front door. She stopped dead, but before she could turn around, Sawyer moved the cat to the spot on the couch next to him, rose, and grabbed his wallet from his back pocket, moving to the door.
By the time Chloe realized he had ordered dinner for them, he’d paid the deliveryman and taken the Chinese food into the small kitchen. Famished, Chloe followed him and grabbed two plates from the cupboard and a couple of Cokes from the fridge, while Sawyer opened the small white boxes.
Once they’d filled their plates, Chloe led the way back to the living room, where she sat on the floor, placing her glass of Coke and her plate on the coffee table.
Amusement richened Sawyer’s voice. “You eat on the floor?”
“University habit, especially when it comes to Chinese.”
“If you say so.” He chuckled and sat on the couch, placing his plate in front of him on the coffee table.
Crossing her legs, Chloe dug in, her stomach rumbling at the smell of spicy noodles and sweet-and-sour chicken. Sawyer must’ve been hungry, too, since they ate in complete silence.
It wasn’t until Chloe reached for her Coke that Sawyer addressed her. “So tell me—what would you normally do on a case when you got to this point?” He scooped up some beef and vegetables.
Chloe finished off a mushroom bursting with flavor. “I’d wait. That’s all we can do. The police haven’t gotten much else, and Shane will uncover something soon that we can use. But it’s been a long day, so I say we get a good night’s rest and start again tomorrow with fresh eyes.”
Sawyer watched her a long moment while he chewed his food, then nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Just like that?” Chloe retorted. “You have no opinion on the matter?”
He shrugged. “You’re the expert on hunting people, not me. When I go after someone, I already know where they are. I don’t hunt people. I capture them. Like I said before at Shane’s: we’re doing this your way.”
That one statement seemed to define Sawyer, Chloe realized. He was such an alpha guy, and a confident one at that. Most men possessing those traits thought their way was always the right way. But Sawyer never treated her as though her ideas didn’t matter, the way some alpha types could. She decided that was one of the things that made him so sexy. He was powerful and arrogant, but he didn’t need to make her feel small to be that way.
She smiled on the inside and lowered her head, focusing on her dinner. Many minutes went by, and the longer the comfortable silence settled in, the more she realized that Sawyer’s silence wasn’t as comfortable as hers was. In fact, he seemed almost detached. His brows were drawn together, signaling that his thoughts were off in the distance. She sipped her Coke, then asked, “Still thinking about Travis?”
“Nope.” Sawyer grabbed an egg roll off his plate and devoured half of it in a single chomp.
She twirled a noodle around her fork and took a bite. Five minutes later, he was still quiet, not looking at her, though Mr. Magoo continued to rub against his arm.
She couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “Is something else wrong?”
He finished off the last bite of his beef and pushed away his plate. “I’m thinking I know a lot about you and you know nothing about me.” After wiping his mouth with his napkin and dropping it onto his plate, he continued, “Seems a bit one-sided. It made me wonder if you want to even things out.”
“Sounds serious.” She smiled. When his expression remained hard, her smile faded. “Wait. It is serious?” Was she about to realize that this great, sexy guy who’d walked into her world and changed it was actually a giant douchebag with a girlfriend in another city?
He nodded. “I need to tell you something, but let me talk a bit about my past first so you understand more about me. Okay?”
She put her empty plate on top of his, narrowing her eyes in suspicion. “I’m listening.”
“Did you know that I was in the military?”
“No. Porter never told me that.”
“I’m not surprised he hasn’t.” Sawyer’s voice grew softer, his eyes equally so. “It’s not something I talk about much, because honestly, it seems like it was another life. Another time.”
She wondered why he felt it was so important to talk about it now. More curious than before, she asked, “When did you join?”
“The day I finished high school.” He leaned against the couch and began petting her cat again as he climbed onto Sawyer’s lap. “My father was a military man, and ever since I was a child he trained me to follow in his footsteps.”
“Training you to do what?”
“To become a sniper.”
Chloe swallowed the sudden emotion that hit her in the chest. She couldn’t help noticing the darkness that had flashed across Sawyer’s expression when he’d admitted to killing people.
He’d been protecting his country; that’s how she saw it. “So, you joined at eighteen?”
A quick breath passed through his lips, an obvious sign of relief that she hadn’t pressed the matter. “I joined a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday and went through training. Luckily for me, a sniper position became available. I tried out, and the rest is history.”
Interesting and all, but she found herself more curious about him, not the job. “Since you got the job, I take it that your dad trained you well?”
Sawyer smiled. “I learned from the best.”
Chloe bit her lip, trying not to laugh as her cat thrust his head into Sawyer’s chin to get Sawyer to notice him. “How many tours did you do?”
“Four tours in Iraq, each ten months long.”
Surprise fluttered up. “Gosh, were you home at all?”
“Nope, and I liked it that way.” He gave her cat a rub under the chin, making Mr. Magoo purr loudly. “My job gave me purpose, and I felt like I was doing the right thing to make the world a better place. I only came home for a couple months before going back out again.”
“Geesh, you were really young to be away from home for so long.” Chloe’s heart clenched. “And to be involved in war like that…”
He nodded. “Most people involved in war are quite young.”
A sad truth, Chloe thought miserably. “So when did you leave the military?”
“One day when we were clearing a town and looking for a target…” His eyes clouded over as he became lost in a memory. “It was hot that day. So damn hot.” A pause. “A few of my team were clearing the house when another sniper hit one of our guys. He was on the ground and bleeding out, so I left my position to help him. That’s when someone threw a grenade.”
Tears welled in Chloe’s eyes; she couldn’t stop them. As Sawyer spoke, the emotion he’d felt that day, the pain in his soul, the horrific things he’d seen—it all shone in his dark expression.
He finally blinked into focus, and his brows pulled together as he noticed her wiping her tears. “The grenade blew up my knee and I had to have it replaced. That’s when the military gave me an honorable discharge.”
Chloe drew in a deep breath, controlling the tremble she knew would otherwise appear in her voice. “I’m guessing you took time off to recover?”
“It took a good year to bounce back.” Her cat rubbed his face over’s Sawyer’s lips, and he snorted, moving Mr. Magoo off his lap. “Once I was healed, I applied for the SWAT team.”
“They must’ve appreciated your sniper abilities.”
“They did.”
She considered all she’d heard, overwhelmed by this information. “It’s like you lived another life.”
“It is much like that—a life far different from the one I live now.” He hesitated, the same darkness filling his eyes. “So much so that when I left the military I felt somewhat…lost.”
“PTSD?”
“Not in the sense that I had anxiety and couldn’t fit back into the world.” He crossed his arms, watching her in the intense way he had. “But more in the sense that I’d lived a certain way
for four years, had had my orders followed, and was someone important. Then I became nothing. No one listened to me. No one looked up to me. I had no purpose any longer. It felt like I wasn’t helping anyone anymore. And that was a hard pill to swallow.” He hesitated, not seeming to notice as the cat climbed back onto his lap. “The worst of it was when I recovered from my knee replacement.”
“What did you do to get over feeling that way?”
He uncrossed his arms, leaned toward her, and said in a serious voice, “I joined a BDSM club and became a sexual Dominant.”
Chloe blinked. Then she burst out laughing.
—
Amusement. Surprise. Curiosity. Sawyer watched Chloe go through all the expected emotions until she stopped on a piqued interest. He’d been wondering how she’d take the news of his sexual tastes. Vanilla woman either went straight to horror or became curious. Sawyer had never hidden his sexual preferences, not with any woman. To be in a loving relationship that was built on integrity and honesty, a woman needed to know him. And telling the truth was necessary.
Chloe nibbled her lip, regarding him, and her cheeks flushed a dark crimson. Sawyer suspected that, like with everything she did, she’d try to get to the bottom of it all before making a judgment. She eventually asked, “You’re kinky?”
“Yes, I prefer kinky sex.”
From where she sat on the beige carpet in an oddly submissive posture—with him sitting up higher than her—she continued, “So, you enjoy bossing women around?”
“In simple terms, and in regard to sex, yes,” he explained as gently as he could, seeing from her pinched expression that the idea didn’t thrill her. “But it’s much more complicated than just bossing women around. At first I enjoyed kinky sex because it’s what I gravitated to, but the BDSM lifestyle, as I learned from going to my first BDSM club, gives me stability. It’s not only the sex, but the act of being in control and caring about people.”
Chloe hesitated, eyes pinched. “In my job catching cheating spouses, I’ve seen all types of BDSM. So what kind of kinky are we talking here? Dog collars? Humiliating women? Cages? Sex slaves? Licking feet?”
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