“Uh, sure,” she said.
I had underestimated how truly awkward this would be. I had never hired an escort before, and I’d never set foot in a strip club before I barged into Harvey’s to respond to those emergency calls. Wasn’t my style, to force women to endure me in exchange for money.
Until now.
And this was backfiring in the worst way. But ever since I’d carried her out of that club, Mia was the first person I thought about when I woke up in the morning, and the last person I thought about before I went to bed at night. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to. And I’d be damned if I wouldn’t try my hardest to win her over despite the miserable conditions on this meetup.
I stared too long at her ankle, and I couldn’t help but notice it had already swelled up, but she was so prickly I was scared to mention it again.
“What time do we need to head out?” She asked.
“Oh, um.” I checked my watch. “I think it goes until late,” I said. “There’s no hurry. We probably ought to wait for the rain to let up a little bit. We’ll take my truck, obviously, but late last week there was a major washout. We don’t want to get into trouble.”
“No,” she echoed. “We definitely don’t.”
Her back was turned to me, and she warmed her hands by the fire, but her voice was all ice.
This had been a huge mistake, inviting her here. Hiring her.
I’d considered using my position as sheriff to see her again after the fire. I couldn’t shake the memory of holding her in my arms that first week, or the next, or the week after that.
I’d given her my number afterwards, and I’d hoped, day after day, that she’d use it, that we could come up with some way to amass enough evidence against her boss to put that crook away forever. I’d been trying for years, really. Ever since we’d managed his brother’s arson arrest.
But no. Harvey was a special kind of monster, one of those slippery criminals who brought down everybody around him one way or another but never experienced any consequences himself. And it wasn’t realistic to expect a sex worker to voluntarily call a cop. I knew that.
I knew my intentions weren’t pure, either. She’d gotten to me somehow, heated up the blood in my veins just by thinking about her. She had my mind, and my heart, and my cock all begging for her attention.
I could have reached out, could have invented some false procedural pretense to see her again. But I was a coward.
Now that I was a very wealthy man, I guess the money had made me bold. No, that wasn’t accurate. Bravery hadn’t triggered this. If I was being honest with myself, this whole series of events, leading up to the sodden and injured woman on my couch, had all happened because these days, I was lost. I was an even bigger coward than before.
I ducked into the cabin’s tiny kitchen and searched through my tea options. “How about chamomile?” I called.
The money was isolating, that was for damn sure. There was no upside to suddenly coming into a billion dollars in a very small town. It had seemed ridiculous to take a lawman’s salary now that I had more money than all the town combined and way more besides that. So I’d caved to pressure and quit.The poisonous stares of the elderly citizens at the thought of a billionaire using their tax dollars proved too much to bear.
I’d even considered leaving town. But I didn’t want to leave Mia.
“I’ve also got hot chocolate, but not a great one,” I called to her. I listened and waited. No response. I shuffled around the boxes in the pantry, but it was a sparse showing, exactly the kind you’d expect from a chronic bachelor. I hadn’t been up at the cabin much since last year. Work had kept me busy, in thebeforetimes. I sighed.
That job was all I had. I’d have thought the billion-plus dollars would be a suitable replacement, but I wasn’t a creative man. I missed work. Work was what brought me in contact with people, on the regular. Tonight I’d felt the cold sting of loneliness, and of a total lack of purpose in my life since I’d gotten the money and quit the force, and I’d royally fucked up and caved to it in the most craven way possible: I’d hired Mia as my escort.
I’d called her handler, a lackey to Harvey, a man I despised, a man I used to spend my days trying to convict for all the injustices and offenses he committed in this town on the daily, and I arranged to pay her to accompany me to an event I didn’t even want to attend.
I gathered up all my nerve, hidden there in the kitchen, and I blurted out, “You don’t remember me, do you?”
All this instead of being man enough to call her and invite her out to a dang coffee.
“There is no gala, is there?” Her voice didn’t waver.
“I’m just worried about the rain,” I said. I poked my head out of the kitchen, but she didn’t turn from the fire to look at me. “We don’t want to get killed—”
Mia stood up, rushed my front door, limp be damned, yanked it open, and slammed it shut behind her.
“—out there.”
three
. . .
