Love Me Reckless (Love Me Dangerous #2)

Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

KIRILEE

Sawyer opens the door for me, and we step into the quickly cooling afternoon air. The low sun casts a soft glow over the streets and shops, but the hazy scrim of clouds in the eastern sky makes me think snow.

“How did you and Zach become friends?” I ask Sawyer as we walk.

“It started with football.” He zips up his coat. “Then we were both in foster care around the same time.”

Foster care? I knew Zach and William ended up there when his family fell apart. That Sawyer did too sits heavy on my chest.

“Do you miss Alaska?” I ask.

“Parts of it, yeah, but change is good too.”

I give him a sideways glance. “Do you still have family there?”

“My mom is buried in Storm Harbor. My half-brother is still there, but we’re not close anymore.”

That he didn’t mention his dad makes me hesitant to ask. “I’m sorry about your mom.”

He releases a soft sigh. “She never talked about her people, at least not that I remember, but I don’t think they are in Alaska. ”

My family tree is traced all the way back to the seventeen hundreds. “Have you ever wanted to do one of those genealogy tests?”

“What would be the point of that? It’s not like suddenly I’d have family to spend Christmas with or grandparents to come to my kid’s little league games. They’d still be strangers.”

“Well sure, at first, but maybe it wouldn’t stay that way.”

“It’s better being on my own.” There’s an edge of defiance in his tone, as if he’s prepared to defend this mindset. But I wonder if there’s something else behind this—is he ashamed of his past? Afraid?

“It’s brave of you to drop everything and move to Finn River.”

“I can’t let Zach have all the fun.” He shoots me a sly smile.

We pass an outdoor gear store, the window display of two mannequins dressed for a day on the slopes. “Speaking of fun,” I say, pausing. “Have you given my idea some more thought?”

He gives me a look. “You teaching me to ski? No.”

“Why not?”

“If we show up there together, it won’t be long before the word gets out.”

I bristle. He doesn’t want to be seen with me, just because of who my family is? “What’s so bad about that?”

He rubs the back of his neck. “The guys think I ski. It came up the day I moved in.”

The fight drains from me, and I start laughing.

“What the fuck is so funny?”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “What were you planning to do? Fake it?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Is there another ski area close by? Someplace I can learn without my crew finding out? I’d be ex-communicated, trust me. Lord of the Flies isn’t fiction.”

I’m curious what he means by this. But also sad, because why does he feel so much pressure to fit in?

“There’ s a ski area in town called Bear Mountain. They have a couple of beginner lifts.”

He stares at the window display. “Okay, that’s what I’ll do.”

“Let me help,” I say. “We could meet there on your days off.”

“Don’t people know you there too?”

“Yeah, but they won’t know you .” An idea forms in my mind, and I can’t hold back my grin. “Let’s go in. I think I have a plan.”

Inside the shop, a fit-looking salesman with a scruffy beard and wearing a flannel and chinos comes to greet us. “Help you guys find anything?”

I scan the racks of ski clothing. “Yes please, my cousin here is visiting from Sweden and he’s going to need outfitting for the ski season.”

Sawyer makes a sound like I’ve punched him. The sales rep gives Sawyer a quick up-down assessment. “Sweden, huh?”

“Yep,” Sawyer says, flicking a murderous gaze my way as the sales guy leads us to the men’s ski clothes section.

“The tags have US and euro sizing, so finding the right fit shouldn’t be an issue,” the salesman says, then launches into a quick tour of the different choices. Insulated vs. non, bibs vs. pants. “Let me know if I can help.”

I’ve already collected several items as he gave his spiel, so once he’s gone, I move to the next rack and start flipping.

“Sweden?” Sawyer asks in a low tone.

I bite my lip. “It’s what popped into my head. And we do have distant family relatives there. Or maybe it’s Denmark.”

“Isn’t everyone in Sweden born with skis on?”

“Cross-country skis, yes. Not a lot of people downhill ski. Surprising, I know.”

“This is a terrible idea,” he says, gritting his teeth.

“Do you want to learn to ski or not?”

“I don’t like lying to people.”

“Apparently you already did, remember?”

He huffs a sigh. “You’re right. Shit.”

He looks truly distressed, so I look him in the eye and give him a reassuring smile. “It’s not like this is a lie that will hurt anyone. And it has an end date.”

I hand him the bundle of jackets and ski pants. “Dressing room’s over there. Get started and I’ll bring more.”

He gives me a pained look before spinning away and heading for the row of dressing rooms. I grab another few garments, then breeze through the thermal layers section for long underwear. My tummy flutters when I picture these next-to-skin layers being next to his skin.

Stop it. Long underwear is not sexy.

I arrive at Sawyer’s room just as he peeks out wearing a dark teal jacket and black ski pants.

“Do you like them?” I place the new items on a chair outside.

“They’re warm.”

“How’s the fit?” I ask, peering around the door.

Sawyer is looking at himself in the mirror, a blank look on his face. He lifts each knee, making the fabric swish. “Good, I guess. It’s fucking noisy though.”

I get the feeling he doesn’t like the idea of drawing attention to himself. “It looks good on you, Karl.”

He arches an eyebrow. “Karl?”

The salesman arrives. “You guys finding what you need?”

“We’re good, thank you,” I say as Sawyer closes the door in my face.

While Sawyer finishes getting dressed, I practically skip to the register. By the time I’m finished paying, Sawyer arrives, cheeks flushed and his hair that sexy finger-combed swoop over his brow.

“Enjoy your visit,” the salesman says to Sawyer as he hands me the shopping bag.

“Thank you,” I say, and head for the door.

Outside, Sawyer is quiet.

“We can drop this off at the car, if you want?” I ask.

He sighs.

I give him a glance, but he won’t look at me. Uh oh .

We walk in silence down the next block, and the next. “You don’t have to use a different name. I just thought?—”

“You’re right, it’s not a lie that will hurt anyone.”

The silence stretches between us again. “You don’t have to go through with my idea.”

“It’s not that.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “You didn’t need to buy all this stuff for me.”

I risk a quick glance, but he’s looking at the pavement, his face tense.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

At my car, I click the hatch open and set my bag from Luxe & Lush and Sawyer’s bag in the back.

“I just wanted to do something nice for you.” I glance at him as I shut the hatch.

“Just being yourself is plenty nice.” His soft brown eyes turn earnest. “I’ll take that over fancy gifts any day.”

I lean my hip against the back of my car and cross my arms. “When I was at Brown, there were kids who pretended to be my friend because of my family’s money. It got kind of hard to tell who was being sincere, actually. And I like being generous. But people took advantage of it. One girl actually stole from me. I let her crash at my place one night and when I woke up, she’d stolen my laptop. And most of my clothes.”

Sawyer winces. “Shit, that sounds awful.”

“Stuff like that happened a couple of times. So, I just stopped being friends with people.”

“Were you lonely?”

I look away because the truth is I’m lonely a lot. “The point I’m getting to is that I like doing nice things for my friends. My true friends.” I watch his face. Does he understand? “I don’t know that I could tolerate having money if I couldn’t share.”

The text message Birch sent me about the house I wanted to buy for my community art center flickers in the back of my mind. “And I don’t know how much longer I’ll have that kind of freedom. ”

His expression darkens. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That preschool building I wanted to buy… Birch said no.”

I expect him to remind me of his idea to get a loan myself, but instead, he huffs a slow sigh. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

A lump hardens in my throat, but I swallow it down. “In the time it took me to work up the nerve to get my own loan, that house sold.”

Sawyer grimaces, but his eyes stay locked with mine. “You’ll find something else.”

I try to soak up his kindness and how gentle he’s being with me.

He offers me his hand, and I let him tug me to the sidewalk.

“Zach told me that when you were little, someone took you.” He frowns, like he’s angry. “Is that why your family is like this?”

I release a breath, puffing my cheeks. “It’s a factor.”

“Are they ever going to let you live your life?”

I can’t answer this, so I don’t. “I’m sorry if buying the ski gear made you feel bad. I didn’t mean it like that.”

He caresses over my fingers with his thumb, and the sweetness of it makes the emotions locked inside me feel extra sharp. A charged energy fizzles between us.

“I’m grateful to be included in your trusted circle,” he says.

I smile. “So we’re good?”

He smiles back. “We’re good.”

I know I should try to put space between us, but I can’t seem to, or maybe I’m not trying hard enough. Sawyer sits by me in the booth at the pizza place where we get into a heated debate about the heroine in the book I gave him, then he walks close to me on the way back to the car. And watching Charlie’s Angels from the pillow fort we built on the floor of our suite, he’s the one sharing the blanket with me and making sure I don’t run out of licorice.

When the movie ends, it’s after 11:00. Sofie and Zach slunk off to her room as soon as the credits rolled, and Ava heads off to bed because of her early flight in the morning to make it back in time to start her new rotation in the pediatric cancer care unit .

“You ready to call it a night?” Sawyer asks from the pillow fort. “It seems like a shame to let that hot tub out there go unused.”

“I’m totally going in. Feel free to join me.” I fight the flutters tickling up my chest.

He rolls to his feet. “I’ll just grab my trunks.”

When he returns, I’m perched on the edge of the tub. Tiny snowflakes are drifting down from above, melting on my shoulders like tiny wet kisses.

In the dim lighting, Sawyer’s broad chest looks even more chiseled, all hard edges and firm planes. I force my eyes away, but it doesn’t stop the daydreams swimming through my thoughts. What is it going to be like to go home tomorrow and we both return to our separate lives?

“There’s beer in the fridge and ice for the whiskey if you want to make a nightcap,” I say.

“I’m set,” he says easily.

It dawns on me that I’ve never seen him with so much as a beer. He and Zach pledged to be our designated drivers and safety crew, but the weekend is almost over and we’ve landed safely at the hotel for the night. “You don’t drink.”

“Nope.” He hangs up his towel.

“Because of a bad experience?”

His face is calm but there’s a sudden stiffness in his movements. “Uh, something like that.”

This hints at a deeper story. Does someone he care about drink too much? His mom? His half-brother? He did say they aren’t close anymore. Is this the cause?

I want to ask, but maybe he’ll share when he’s ready.

“Nice tattoo,” Sawyer says, nodding at the giant rose on my left bicep.

I ease into the tub, the bubbles caressing my bare skin. “Too bad it’s going to fade in the water.”

“There’s one way to fix that.” He climbs up to the edge of the tub and steps in.

I laugh. “I don’t know if a rose is my thing.” Plus, it’s way too big.

“Butterfly?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Not me at all.”

He nods, but his eyes brighten like I’ve surprised him.

“Is there someone who means a lot to you?”

I lower the rest of the way into the water and settle onto the bench seat. “My grandma Theodora. She lives in New York, but we’re close. I visit her every summer, and when I was at Brown, I would stay with her on long weekends.”

He lowers into the tub and gives a contented sigh. “What would Grandma Theodora think about you getting a tattoo?”

I laugh. “I think she’d be all for it. Especially if it made my parents mad.”

“I like this woman already,” he says with a smirk.

I eye his forearm, the hilt of the dagger just visible above the water’s surface. “Does yours represent someone special?”

“My mom,” he says, his expression guarded. “Her courage.”

I lock eyes with him as my curiosity unspools. “What about the thorns?”

“She was only nineteen when she had me, and that choice made life harder for her. But she made sure I knew she never regretted it.”

Despite the heat from the water, a chill dances over my skin. Those thorns, then… they’re for how they struggled. How they endured. “You must miss her.”

“She died when I was fourteen, but she taught me a lot,” he says with a faint smile.

It wrecks me that he lost his mom, especially when he was so young. “Will you tell me about her?”

His expression turns thoughtful. “She loved taking these long walks. She loved wildflowers. She used to press them into notebooks and stack library books on top to flatten them. She was kind of a neat freak, but I think it was to cover up that we didn’t have much. That definitely rubbed off on me. Never take anything for granted.”

“That’s a good lesson.” And a good reminder that gratitude is a great antidote for wishing for what’s out of reach.

He gazes up at the stars. “She wasn’t much of a cook, but she liked baking. She used to make these amazing cakes for us, sometimes for no reason. And we’d try to make it last, but it never worked.”

“Sounds like she did her best to make you feel loved.”

His look turns pained. “She did.”

I want to ask how she died. If Sawyer was only fourteen when it happened… I do the math. She would have been thirty-three? It’s so young. It must have been awful for him and his half-brother. How did he survive?

But I sense that if he wanted to tell me more, he would have already.

“Last time we shared a hot tub, we spent the whole time talking about what I want.” I raise my eyebrow. “Your turn.”

He gives me a curious look. “Are we playing another round of hot tub wish list?”

I laugh. “It’s only fair.”

He shrugs. “I meant what I said last time. Being in Finn River with Zach and William, working at the ranch with a crew of guys I respect… Compared to what my life was like before, right now is pretty amazing.”

“Think beyond today, though. Into the future. What would you want? Or how would you like to see yourself in ten years? Will you still be a ski lift mechanic?”

He cups water in his palms and dumps it slowly like he’s lost in thought. “There is something,” he says, glancing up at me. “But I’m not even sure it’s an idea. Or how I’d even go about doing it.”

I cross my arms and grin. “Well, it certainly isn’t going to happen if you keep it to yourself.”

He laughs, his face lighting up. “Touché. Okay, I had this teacher in high school. He taught auto shop and robotics and 3D design, which I ended up in after failing Math and History my freshman year. He was quirky as hell, told awful jokes, and if you snuck up on him, he was kind of unpredictable… but I don’t know, he never gave up on us. Almost like he knew his classes were our last chance at staying in school. He was always super patient. He never judged us, or talked to us like we were slow.”

“Sounds like he made a difference.”

“For sure I wouldn’t be here right now if not for him.”

“What’s this teacher’s name?”

He grins. “Harold Frey, and yes, we teased him about it. He just laughed it off. Said if you can’t laugh at yourself then you were signing up for a lifetime of suffering.”

“So that’s what you’d do? Teach?”

He shrugs. “The idea of being inside the walls of a high school makes me wanna hurl. But sometimes, I think about the kids who could use someone to believe in them.” He sighs heavily. “Kids that were like me.”

The emotions swirling inside my chest prick slowly over my skin, making goosebumps rise. “Is it something you could see yourself doing?”

“Maybe,” he says with a half-grimace. “Not sure I could qualify though.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t look so good on paper.” His tone is light, but it’s easy to read his discomfort.

“Would Mr. Frey hire you?”

He shoots me a quick smile. “Yeah, I think he would.”

“Then maybe whatever’s on paper doesn’t matter.”

He nods, but I don’t think I’ve convinced him. “Maybe.”

I don’t have a right to poke further, but my curiosity is peaked. For someone who oozes courage, what from his past could hold him back like this?