Hence distracting myself with worry for the dog.
It was too far out of town for it to have wandered off a property, and it had looked skinny in the small flash of my headlights before I swerved.
A stray that some careless owner had likely dropped on the side of the road when they realized what a responsibility dogs were.
My heart hurt for it.
“You’re going home,” Niles decided.
I frowned at him. “I’m not.” I nodded at the computer screen. “I’ve got three articles to go through, one to copy edit, and one more to likely completely rewrite because Anna would’ve been too busy drooling at the college boys to get anything on the game itself,” I listed. My responsibilities were more than mounting, as Niles had to continue laying off ‘nonessential’ staff in order to keep the doors open and the printers hot.
He straightened, folding his arms. “I’ll take care of it. That’s my job. And we’ve got unpaid interns from the high school. I’ll put them to work. They fuck it up, we’ll blame it on them.” He narrowed his eyes when I didn’t move from my chair, knowing me well enough to understand how stubborn I was.
“This is an order, Lauren,” he continued. “Go. Home. You’re no use to us if you pass out on your keyboard, and I can’t afford the lawsuit if you do.”
I stared at him, though I reasoned the power of said stare was hindered by the fact that my throbbing head stopped me from putting all my effort into it.
Which meant Niles won.
I sighed dramatically. “I’ve never taken a sick day the whole time I’ve worked here,” I snapped.
He nodded in triumph. “Yes, which means you’re well overdue for one. Take the day. And tomorrow if needed.” He held up his hand as I started to protest. “And I know the idea of two consecutive days off is deplorable to you, so I’ll allow you to work from home. Tomorrow. Not today,” he clarified firmly. “Today you go home, get yourself situated on the sofa with bad TV and worse junk food.”
I raised my brow. He knew me. Which meant he knew I didn’t watch bad TV or eat junk food. I was more than a little obsessive about what I put into my body, determined not to poison it, to make it healthy and live a long life that wasn’t shortened by choices that brought about short-term pleasure.
“Up!” Niles demanded, shaking me out of my thoughts before they ventured to a dangerous place.
I did as I was instructed because he was right, I wouldn’t be able to get any work done as I was right then. Even with my glasses, the computer screen was blurry at best; if I tried to edit anything, I’d likely make it worse than it was to begin with.
Niles squeezed my arm, his smile rare but warm when it appeared. He was a hard-ass, but he was also a good man. He’d treated me as somewhat of a daughter, since he made the paper his life and didn’t have much outside of it.
“You call me if you need anything, okay? And I don’t want to see you in here tomorrow if you’re wincing at the fucking light like you are today, okay?” He didn’t wait for my response. “Okay.” Then he turned, storming about the office, shouting orders and chastising people for missing deadlines, telling them they’d be working at FedEx if they didn’t “pull their fingers out of their asses.”
My eyes touched Lucy’s old desk, and inexplicably I missed my friend. She wasn’t the closest of my friends—I didn’t even have close friends—but she was important to me. She was kind. Cared about me. Didn’t judge me. Had a great sense of humor. Was just a nice person to be around.
But she was in LA, living her journalistic dream, even if it had almost gotten her killed. It had gotten her stabbed, more accurately.
To me, getting stabbed on the street after a drug lord put a hit out on you for exposing him was nothing short of horrifying.
When I’d called her, she’d been light and breezy. “It’s nothing, really. Just a flesh wound. And you’re not a real journalist unless someone tries to kill you, anyway.”
Yeah, she was fearless.
Maybe that’s what I missed most, seeing that fearless, carefree aura around me. Pretending for a couple of moments that I might be like her.
Now I didn’t have any illusions to cling to about what I was.
That was all on my mind as I walked slowly and carefully toward my apartment. It was just off Main Street, facing the ocean, and I loved it. An ocean-view apartment would’ve been out of my price range anywhere else, even here where property prices were modest, but I’d bought it when the market was good with the small inheritance I’d received from my grandmother when I came of age.
It was eight months after the thing I did not speak of or even think about, and I was twenty-one years old.
Maybe before things turned dark and gray and hellish, I might’ve used the inheritance to buy a backpack and a one-way ticket to travel the world like I’d always dreamed. Like we’d always dreamed. But then it happened. And things like taking off to Europe for a crazy adventure were more terrifying than staying in one place, which was bad enough.
So I shoved my dream away.
Or more accurately, reality did a good job of shoving my dream away, brutally and painfully.
Instead I made a sensible investment with a good mortgage rate, and had slowly been renovating my apartment above a small art gallery for the past ten years.
I gave myself exactly three seconds to look in past the glass of that gallery, feast on the paintings, the brush strokes, the pure adventure of the paintings. I gave myself two seconds to entertain other paintings hanging on the wall. Ones with familiar brush strokes, a little less adventure, more the longing for it.
And then I snapped my gaze back to my front door and forced my aching body up the stairs to my apartment. It was open plan as soon as you entered. The kitchen was straight ahead, in a corner where the windows faced away from the ocean, over the parking lot and then the town beyond. I had the back wall covered in pure white subway tiles with light polished floating wooden shelves displaying glasses and bowls on different levels with matte-black fastenings.
My fridge was my only little rebellion, my pop of personality. It was a vintage baby blue Smeg that sat at the end of my counter, by the window. The rest of my back wall had the same polished tiles, with matte-black racks hanging my matching tea cups at the perfect grabbing level. In front of that was a large square kitchen island with a huge deep white sink, matching the tiles behind it, and two black barstools tucked underneath the front of the island. There was always a vase of fresh flowers on the restored wooden coffee cart on the left of the island, and the shelves below were artfully stacked with all my favorite recipe books.
The kitchen itself was tucked away in kind of a nook, where exposed brick closed it off somewhat to the rest of the apartment, which was to the left of the stairs.
I had the original hardwood floors polished so they were gleaming and the whole space painted white, which gave my apartment a light and airy feel thanks to all of the windows. It was important to me, that openness. That brightness. I didn’t do small spaces very well. Not… after.
My living area encompassed the whole room, and it had taken me years—almost a decade, to be exact—to get it how it was. I was picky with furniture, and my budget only allowed me to purchase sporadically. But it was my absolute sanctuary. The espresso leather sofas were domed and perfectly worn, with light fluffy blue afghans thrown over both. The cushions were white and fluffy, hideously expensive but worth it. A large white patterned area rug sat underneath my matte-black coffee table, another vase of fresh flowers set perfectly in the middle.
A bookcase spanned almost the entire wall behind my sofas. It was stuffed with books I’d accumulated over the years, but there was still plenty of empty space I’d filled with photos and various knickknacks, spaced as not to look cluttered.
I threw my purse on one of the sofas, kicked off my shoes—not putting them in the wooden cubby I’d set beside the stairs for once—and padded over to my favorite area in my whole apartment.
&nbs
p; My floor-to-ceiling windows boasted an unobstructed view of the ocean beyond, a well-worn leather chair with a fluffy white ottoman in front of it. Another afghan rested on the back of the chair. The small wooden table beside it always stored whatever book I was reading at the time.
My fingers trailed over the cover of The Sword of Truth—I was a fantasy junkie. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to focus enough to read, I sank into the warm chair and let my eyes drift to the waves.
My mind wandered.
To eyes that were almost the same color as that ocean. Almost as wild. As unpredictable.
As dangerous.
A shrill ringing made me jump out of my thoughts before I drowned in them. It was somewhat of an effort—a painful one at that—to extract myself from the chair that was designed to swallow me up. I managed by gritting my teeth and rushing to the counter beside my sofa, where my landline—I was almost the only person left under fifty-five who still had one—was ringing.
“Hello, Lauren speaking,” I gritted through my teeth.
“Lauren? It’s Troy,” a smooth masculine voice replied.
I walked back over to the windows, standing in the path of the sun’s warm rays streaming through the glass and gazing out at the ocean once more.
“Oh, hey, Troy,” I said. “You’ve got news about my car, then?”
Troy was one of the deputies at the Amber Police Department. We’d been in the same grade in high school, but he barely knew who I was—I was surprised he knew my name—since we didn’t exactly hang in the same crowds.
I’d had kind of a huge crush on him back then. He was my ultimate type, after all. Quarterback. Square jawed. Dirty blond hair that was always cut and groomed perfectly. Tall, lean, but not too muscly.
Good smile.
Safe.
Evidenced by the fact that he was now a police officer.
I hadn’t entirely grown out of the crush, merely pushed it to the back of my mind since it wasn’t logical that the attractive police officer would be interested in the quiet, boring, glasses-wearing, beige-clad me.
But that didn’t mean his voice wasn’t comforting.
Though it didn’t stir anything inside me quite like the rough growl that had woken my body the night before. That had stirred something I didn’t even know existed inside of me.
Don’t think of that!
“Well, that’s exactly it,” Troy said, voice hesitant. “Would you mind coming down to the station?”
I froze. “The station? I wasn’t drinking or anything while I was driving. Heck, I don’t even drink period. And I swear I was driving the speed limit, though that probably doesn’t mean much to you, as people not driving the speed limit are likely to swear they were driving within it, but—”
A low and warm chuckle interrupted my freak-out and the visions of prison bars closing in on me. I logically knew that they didn’t lock you up for speeding, or swerving for a dog and crashing into a ditch, but my mind was still conjuring up incarceration. The mere thought of it had me breaking into a sweat. Locked doors, enclosed spaces.
No.
“Babe, I know you. Which means I know for a fact that you were driving within the speed limit, and I know you sure as hell weren’t drinking,” Troy said, amused.
All thoughts of prison left my head, making room for Troy’s words. “You know me?” I repeated on a whisper. I had been surprised he even knew my name and connected me to “the girl I had Biology with, right?” when I’d spoken to him earlier in the day.
“Yeah, Lauren, I know you,” he replied, his voice low and warm and… something else.
Something my throbbing brain likely imagined.
“So I’m not going to get put away for swerving for a dog and, like, misusing police resources or something?” I clarified.
Another warm chuckle. “No, Lauren. You’re not in trouble. And helping you out is definitely not a misuse of police resources. Best resource I’ve used in a long time, in fact.”
There it was again, that strange tone.
Was he flirting?
No. That was insane.
“C-can I ask why you need me down at the st-station?” I stuttered, trying to regain my even voice. I pinched the bridge of my nose in an effort to somewhat alleviate the headache radiating to the front of my face.
The lack of sleep probably had a lot to do with that.
Oh, and the smashing of my head against my steering wheel.
“Well, I went out to the spot this morning where you crashed, and your car wasn’t there.”
I stopped pinching my nose. “My car wasn’t there?” My previously quelled panic returned. “How is it not there? I mean, it’s not even drivable. It was in a ditch. Do you think someone stole it? Why would someone want to steal a crashed Hyundai? It’s one of the least-stolen cars in the country,” I babbled. “Well, number seven, but that’s still in the top ten. And that’s when it’s drivable—”
“Lauren, calm down,” Troy said, a smile in his voice. “We don’t know if it’s been stolen yet. Could’ve been someone saw it, decided to do a good deed, towed it themselves. But I think it would be a good idea for you to come down and make a report anyway.”
A good deed.
I froze on that thought.
An idea entered my mind. A much crazier idea than the police officer I’d had a crush on as a teenager flirting with me.
An idea about a certain motorcycle club and the garage attached to the clubhouse. The garage I assumed had the capabilities to remove a crashed car from the side of the road.
The motorcycle club whose patch was sewn onto the back of the leather I’d been clutching a handful of hours before. The man wearing the leather. The one who had held my arms pressed to his middle the entire ride into town. The one who gazed at me with a feral stare saturated with menace.
The man who’d left me on the curb at the hospital.
No, that didn’t make sense.
He wouldn’t leave me on the side of the road, anxious to get rid of me, and then do something nice like tow my car.
Troy had said “good deed.”
That man did not do good deeds.
One just had to look at him, feel the air around him, to know that much.
“Babe? You still with me?”
I jerked out of my stupor in order to inspect the fact that Troy had called me ‘babe’ twice in a conversation that had lasted less the five minutes. The longest conversation we’d ever had.
‘Babe’ was a throwaway word for a lot of men. Best not to read into it. My brain wasn’t capable of reading the pages woven by Terry Goodkind, so it definitely wasn’t ready to inspect the complexities of a hot guy’s lexicon.
“Yeah, I’m still here,” I replied, my voice little more than a whisper.
“Good,” he said firmly. “So you okay to come down to the station? Have a chat? Only if you’re up to it. I know you’re a bit banged up. I could come over to your place—”
“No!” I interrupted, horrified at the thought of the hot cop being in my space. And me being awkward and fumbling around like an idiot. Then the energy of my home would be stained with memories of my awkwardness and most likely embarrassing myself. “I mean, I’m okay to come down. Fresh air would be good for me since Niles sent me home from work. It’ll stop me from getting cabin fever,” I said, forcing my voice to be light and try to cover up the way I’d nearly shouted at him.
Another chuckle. “Well, I’d hate to be responsible for cabin fever. I’ll see you soon?
I cleared my throat. “You will be seeing me—I mean I’ll, um, be down at the station soon,” I stammered.
Speak like a human, Lauren!
“Okay, Lauren. Soon.”
I hung up the phone and would’ve banged my head against the window frame if it didn’t already feel like I was.
Some strange part of me knew there was more to come.
A lot more.
Three
“Holy shit, babe,” Troy said the second I walke
d into the station and pushed my dark glasses onto my head.
Before I rightly knew what was going on, he’d rounded the desk at the front of station and was in front of me. Right in front of me.
He grasped my chin much like another man had the night before. But his fingers were soft, gentle, barely gripping the skin—unlike the other man.
My skin didn’t burst into flames from the touch, and my breathing didn’t turn shallow.
That didn’t mean I didn’t react. My body warmed slightly from the touch and his scent of clean linen and some subtle man’s aftershave that was classy and understated.
His green eyes zeroed in on the gash on my head, the bruising on my face.
“It looks worse than it is,” I murmured shyly, not quite knowing how I’d managed to have two hot guys touching me in the space of twenty-four hours.
Two very different hot guys.
The man from last night couldn’t have even be described as hot.
I didn’t know how to describe him.
My mind went to the momentary glimpse I had of him under the streetlights outside the hospital. Everything about him was hard, rough edges. His large body seemed sculpted from steel as he’d clutched the bike, his muscled arms near bursting from the fabric of his long-sleeved henley, tattoos visible from underneath, creeping past his wrists. Tattoos that snaked up his neck, where they were buried by his blond beard. Not overly long, but a definite beard. Well groomed. Perfect, actually. Lumberjack meets biker. His hair was the same, brushing his shoulders. Or it would’ve if it’d been wild. At some point, he’d tied it into a messy bun at the back of his head.
I didn’t think man buns would’ve done a thing for me, since I was all about clean-cut.
But the mere thought of that bun had me quivering under Troy’s touch.
Troy, who was clean-shaven. Troy, who had short and expertly groomed dirty blond hair. Troy, who was tall, muscled, but leaner, a lot less imposing. Troy, who didn’t radiate menace and wear a motorcycle cut. No, he exuded safety and was wearing a neatly pressed uniform.
He must’ve mistaken my quiver for a reaction of pain to his grip, letting me go and stepping back slightly.