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SEVEN
Jesse
In my line of work, it wasn’t surprising that there were instances that led to a feeling of tremendous relief. Sometimes, that happened as a result of my direct work, and other times, it was the result of helping one of my coworkers with a case they were working on.
In fact, it wasn’t that long ago when I’d helped Jagger locate and rescue Lily after she’d been kidnapped. The situation had been tense, and I remembered feeling incredibly relieved after it had been resolved.
But not even those situations had led me to feeling relief like this. Never did I believe that I’d wake up this morning only to wind up here—in my house with Sawyer McKinney.
Now that she was here, I was simply grateful.
Part of that was because it quickly became clear to me that we had a lot to discuss. But the other part of it, the bigger part, was that I had to be honest and admit that I didn’t want her to go.
I couldn’t deny it any longer, and there was no use in fighting it. No matter how hard I might have tried to resist it happening, keeping my personal feelings out of this wasn’t possible. Pretending I could just treat her like any other Harper Security Ops client who needed our help was foolish to consider.
She was Sawyer.
She ripped my heart from my chest years ago, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have the power to put it back.
To some degree, I had to wonder if she already did. Because standing with her in that cemetery, she easily put me through the wringer. I actually started to question whether I’d be able to convince her to stay, and I grew desperate.
In the end, I was grateful I pushed, even if it had brought her to tears. I was surprised by how much it affected me to see her so upset. I didn’t like it at all, but I loved that it led to her finally letting down her defenses enough for me to be able to comfort her and touch her again. Ultimately, I managed to convince her to stay so we could talk.
There was a lot for the two of us to go over. Something unexpected and utterly confusing had happened in the cemetery. I was just grateful for the fact that I’d managed to guess correctly where she would have gone when she left her mom’s place.
For as long as I lived, I’d never forget the sight of her when I first spotted her there. She was sitting on the ground with her body curled up into a tiny ball in front of Faye’s headstone. Then, her face fell forward onto her knees and her body shook with sobs.
Something inside me urged me to go forward, to move toward her, and to gather her up in my arms to comfort her. But something else held me back.
We were in such a bad place, and I didn’t want to risk approaching when she was feeling so much already. Eventually, I could no longer hold myself back, and I had to go to her. But the walk there had been an unsettling one, because I knew how things ended with her days before.
And if there was one thing I’d learned about Sawyer, it was that she was a determined woman. Once she made up her mind, she didn’t often go back on it.
While that steadfast attitude might have been one of the things I’d been most attracted to about her, in the cemetery, it was arguably the very thing that had me feeling so anxious.
But even if Sawyer’s mindset was as fixed as it was, her words told a different story. If one thing was clear, it was that I needed to get to the bottom of what pushed her to leave Steel Ridge twelve years ago.
Much to my chagrin, I was going to have to wait to have that conversation. We had our past between us, but Sawyer needed help from me with what I assumed had to be related to her work, based on what little she’d managed to share two days ago. While both issues were equally important for very different reasons, right now, I needed to focus on the most pressing issue at hand for her. Because I didn’t know just how serious things were and what, if anything, I might need to be prepared for.
So, I decided to tackle what was likely to be the easiest to solve, and I’d address everything else later.
Sawyer and I were sitting on my couch in my living room, and she hadn’t said a word since we got back here. In fact, she hadn’t really looked much in my direction.
“Sawyer?” I called, attempting to keep the tone of my voice neutral.
She finally brought her eyes to mine. “Yeah?”
“Can you tell me why you came back to Steel Ridge after all these years?” I asked.
“I came back for you,” she murmured.
I had to remind myself that she didn’t mean those words the way I wanted to take them. “You need my help,” I corrected her.
Sawyer nodded. “I did.”
“Do you still?” I asked.
There was so much trepidation in her expression, which gave me my answer. She needed my help, but she no longer wanted it because of how I had treated her.
