No Going Back (Sawyer Brooks)

by T. R. Ragan

  Jesus. The woman knew more about Aria and her family than Aria knew about her. It was unsettling. “I had no choice,” Aria said in her own defense. “My mom was going to kill my sister.”

  “I get it,” Christina said. “Sometimes we do what we have to do to set things straight in the world, which is why I have to tell you, warn you, that if you and your sister don’t stop snooping around, you’re going to regret it.”

  “So you are a Black Wig?”

  Christina Farro laughed. Not a tinkling sound, but low and menacing. “I’m just a girl who’s trying to find her way through life. Just like you.” She smiled. “Now get going, Aria, unless you want to take a little walk with me through the cemetery to see if we can find Cyndi.”

  She didn’t need to be told twice. Aria turned on the engine. As soon as Christina Farro straightened and took a step back, she put on the gas and drove off. Every part of her was trembling. When she looked into the rearview mirror, Christina Farro was gone.

  Nobody could convince Aria that Christina Farro wasn’t a member of the vigilante group known as the Black Wigs. She might even be the leader. At such a close view, Aria had seen the woman’s jaw clench and her face flush. Not only was she dangerous, she was lethal.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sawyer and Derek sat at a table for two by a window overlooking Sixteenth Street. Mikuni’s, a Japanese restaurant and sushi bar, was buzzing, servers running back and forth, trying to keep up. “No more talk about work,” Sawyer said after they had both filled each other in on their day.

  “All right. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Sex.”

  His face flushed as he glanced at the couple sitting nearby.

  “My therapist thought it would be a good idea for us to talk about it since it’s been on my mind.”

  “You’ve been seeing a therapist?”

  “After everything that happened over the past few months, I thought it would be a good idea to get it all out of my system. Talking to an unbiased third party is a good outlet for me. No judgment. I think of it as self-care for my mental health.”

  “No judgment here if you ever want to talk to me.”

  She angled her head. Derek’s wife had been in a car accident three years ago. She’d died instantly. “The therapist said you might not be interested in taking our relationship to the next level because you could still be dealing with your loss—you know—trying to figure things out.”

  Their food was brought to the table.

  “What do you think?” Sawyer asked after the server left.

  “Did you talk to your therapist about my trauma, or yours?”

  “Both, I guess. If we’re a couple, that means they’re sort of connected.”

  He unwrapped his chopsticks and then set them aside, keeping his gaze on hers.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I’m trying to wrap my mind around you talking to your therapist about our sex life.”

  Sawyer leaned forward, her voice low. “We don’t have a sex life. That’s the point.” Sawyer mixed some wasabi and soy sauce in a tiny dish. “That particular session with the therapist did leave me with more questions than answers.”

  “About me?”

  She nodded.

  “Like?”

  “Like what it might be like to lose a spouse, someone you loved and were fully committed to. It must be difficult to put yourself out there, knowing you’ll never find someone quite like the woman you lost. No one you date will ever have the same characteristics or interests.”

  “I’m not trying to find anyone like Lisa,” Derek said. “She’s gone. I wish she wasn’t, but those are the cards I’ve been dealt. You’re not anything like Lisa. The opposite in many ways.”

  Sawyer wondered what that meant. She didn’t know Lisa. Had never met her before the car accident.

  “If it’s okay with you,” Derek said, “I’d rather discuss our nonexistent sex life.” He picked up his chopsticks and used them to dip a bite of sushi into the sauce before popping it into his mouth.

  She tried to do the same, but the chopsticks were not cooperating. Finally, she set them down and used her fingers.

  “The truth is,” Derek explained, “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for us to rush things. Like you said, you’ve been through a lot recently. When we make love—”

  She liked the sound of that.

  “—we should be sure we’re ready to take the next step.”

  “I agree,” she said. “As long as there are no rules or guidelines—no sex until the third date. That sort of thing drives me nuts.”

  “I haven’t been back in the game long enough to pretend to know anything about rules.”

  She chewed and swallowed. “Perfect. Because I’d prefer to go into this knowing there aren’t any.”

  “Deal.”

  They continued to eat. Sawyer snuck glances at him. She liked his face. The color of his eyes, a cross between gray and blue, thick eyebrows, just the right amount of fashionable bristle on his jaw.

  He looked up. Saw her staring. “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said with a shrug. “Just admiring my date.”

  He took a moment to do the same. Heat rose up her neck as his gaze settled on her mouth.

  “Stop,” she said, smiling.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Sawyer Brooks.”

  “I’m a lot of things, but beautiful isn’t one of them.” As soon as the words escaped, she regretted them. She’d never been good at receiving compliments, but that was one of a list of things she was working on. She was prone to swat away compliments like gnats and yet hang tight to the one negative comment said to her years ago. A therapist, not Jane, once told her she had low self-esteem. You think? If she believed she sucked, how was she supposed to believe someone else when they told her she didn’t? As she debated how to respond, Derek made it easy for her by simply letting it go.

  “What do you think about coming with me to a family barbecue at my parents’ house?” he asked, changing the subject like a pro. “The family is excited to meet you.”

  All the good tingly feels left her body.

  “Too soon?” he asked.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re as white as my napkin.”

  She fidgeted in her seat. “It’s just that I don’t do well around large crowds. And in this case, we both know I would be the object of a lot of curiosity.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  She shoved a piece of sushi roll into her mouth, chewed, and then washed it down with water. “Are they huggers?”

  “My family? No.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Okay, maybe Mom would be considered a hugger, but Dad, not so much.”

  He offered her the last of a sushi roll and finished it off when she declined. “I can warn them off. Tell them you have poison oak or something so they don’t touch you.” He chuckled.

  “God. No. I don’t want them to think I’m a stressed-out woman whose anxiety is so off the charts that she can’t even meet her boyfriend’s family.”

  His gray eyes sparkled. “So I am your boyfriend.”

  Heat rushed to her cheeks.

  He reached across the table for her hand. “It’s been so damn long since I’ve had a girlfriend. I feel like I’m back in junior high and I should officially ask you to be my girl.”

  She laughed. “Is that how it worked way back then?”

  “Hey,” he said with a smile. “It wasn’t that long ago. But, yeah, that’s basically how it worked. I would ask a girl to be my girlfriend, she would say yes, and then two days later I would get a message on the computer at home, usually from her friend, telling me she liked someone else.”

  “How many girls did you ask?”

  “Lots. Too many to count.” His smile was infectious. “How about you? I bet the boys lined up to talk to you between classes.”

  She didn’t want to think about what was going on in her l
ife when she was thirteen or fourteen. “I was shy,” she told him. “I kept to myself.”

  “Lucky you. Getting dumped over and over again is definitely not for the faint of heart.”

  She shook her head in wonder. “Who would ever dump you?”

  “Mindy Waxer, Charlene Finnigan, Deb Shady . . . the list goes on.”

  She chuckled. “Sounds horrible. How does anyone ever know when they have found ‘the one’?”

  “Easy,” he said without hesitation. “There are basically five stages to every relationship. It starts with attraction, you know, when all those endorphins are working overtime. And then reality hits, which means both people might see flaws in the other but they’re on a high and so nothing seems so bad but they know the highs can’t last forever, so it’s worrisome. And then comes disappointment.”

  Sawyer frowned.

  “The dreaded first argument. Conflict isn’t fun, so you begin to doubt what the two of you share.” He was still holding on to her hand, and he gave it a squeeze. “But if you can hang tight and make it through the disappointment stage, you can move on to stability. Stability can be a lot of hard work. But don’t worry. It can also be fun. You just have to be willing to make the effort to spice things up.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Yeah, hmm. You might get bored because the chase is over. You no longer gaze at my face overly long because you’ve seen it a zillion times and it’s the same face you saw yesterday and the day before that.”

  “So how do people get through the bored stage?”

  “It’s not easy. If there’s still a spark, it’s not easily ignited. The romance is gone. I might stop shaving or brushing my hair before you come over”—he shook his head—“that won’t happen, but I’m just trying to throw out examples of what could happen.”

  “I see. Sounds horrible.”

  He smiled. “It is. But it’s also wonderful because if you make it that far, something deeper awaits you. If you choose to be with this person, with all their flaws mingled together with all your flaws, communication is key. And compromise. It can’t work without communication and compromise.”

  She thought of Harper and Nate. Her sister and brother-in-law had made being a loving couple look so easy and doable. But then everything seemed to have imploded—all at once, in the blink of an eye. “It doesn’t sound like any fun at all.”

  “It’s magnificent. Trust me.”

  She wanted to do just that. She wanted to trust him.

  It was dark by the time Derek pulled up to the curb outside Sawyer’s apartment, set on the bottom floor of the building. Raccoon sat on the windowsill, looking out at her, judging. Always judging.

  They both got out of the car and walked hand in hand to her door. As she reached inside her purse for her key, she looked up at him. “I had a great time.”

  “Me too.” He was looking at her again, giving her that jittery feeling in her stomach. It was an odd feeling, unfamiliar. She wasn’t sure whether or not she liked it. Mostly because she didn’t know what it meant. Not really. “When do I need to let you know about Sunday?”

  “Not this Sunday,” he said, “but next. You can let me know anytime. And don’t worry, I won’t let them cross-examine you.”

  She smiled, pretending she wasn’t worried at all.

  He leaned down to kiss her, his eyes intense, smoldering—or maybe she was imagining it—but his gaze was more of a caress than it was anything else. His lips touched hers. Warm, inviting lips that heated her insides and rushed through her body like a wildfire.

  No sparks needed to set off this fire.

  She wanted him. Every bit of him. Crazy that she’d never felt anything like it before. Not ever. She’d grown up wary and distrustful of the opposite sex. Her last boyfriend, Connor, had been nothing more than an experiment. She’d never felt even a flicker of what she was experiencing at the moment.

  Derek was no experiment.

  There was no putting out the wildfire consuming her. Her only thought was to get him inside so she could drag him to the bedroom and strip off his clothes. She liked to be in control, so she imagined him on the bed, climbing on top of him, and—

  Honk.

  She ignored it. They both did.

  That quickly, the kiss had grown into much more than a kiss. With their bodies pressed close, his hand at the back of her head, keeping her steady, the kiss had become all-consuming, bordering on reckless.

  She wanted more.

  So did he. She could sense it. Hell, she could feel it.

  Honk! Honk!

  He pulled away first.

  They both looked to the street, at the source of the blasting horn.

  Sawyer narrowed her eyes. It was a white BMW. Lexi Holmes was at the wheel. The passenger window was rolled down, and Lexi was frantically waving her over. “A possible murder linked to the Black Wigs,” Lexi said loud enough for the neighbors to hear. “We have to hurry.”

  Sawyer looked from Lexi to Derek.

  “Go,” he said, nudging her along.

  “But—”

  “No buts—we have all the time in the world.”

  How could he be sure? He knew better than most that the world didn’t work that way. Hadn’t past experiences taught Derek to grab on to the good and hold on tight?

  Sawyer hopped into the passenger side of Lexi’s car, buckled her belt, and hardly had a chance to wave at Derek before they drove off.

  “You’re seeing Derek Coleman?”

  Sawyer looked at Lexi. “No, we just like making out every once in a while for fun.”

  Lexi’s smile wasn’t genuine; there was nothing in her eyes. It was a “You’re cute” or “Nice try” sort of smile. “Good for you,” she said into the silence.

  “What do you mean?”

  “After his wife died, there wasn’t a female within a ten-mile radius of that man who didn’t go after him. Baked goods left in his office, homemade dinners brought to his doorstep, pictures of women in negligees sent via email and text.”

  How would Lexi know what was sent over his cell phone? Sawyer wondered, but didn’t ask.

  “But Derek wasn’t interested,” Lexi said. “He didn’t bat an eyelash. Just kept to himself. Put all his energy into his work. He was in robot mode, and he had blinders on. I should know. I was more patient than most. I waited a year before trying a few of my best moves on him. I also sent a text or two, along with a photo.”

  Sawyer lifted an eyebrow.

  “I’m only six years older than him. Anyway, I wasn’t offended by his noninterest. I used to be friends with his wife. So I understood.”

  “Understood what?”

  “That the woman he’d lost was a natural phenomenon that doesn’t come around often. You know, like fire rainbows—a painting in the sky that’s not caused by fire or rain. Or the blood falls in Antarctica, or seventeen-year cicadas.” She looked at Sawyer. “Google it. Anyway, you get my drift.”

  “I do. She was one of a kind,” Sawyer said.

  “Exactly. And she was beautiful, smart, and kind. But somehow you managed to catch his eye.”

  “He’s just a man,” Sawyer said, refusing to be offended. “He puts on his pants like every other male.”

  This time Lexi’s laugh was real.

  Sawyer looked her way. “Are you ever going to fill me in on where we’re going, or are you more interested in my personal life?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It took only twenty-four minutes to get to Fallview Way in El Dorado Hills. Sawyer figured it would have taken most people longer, but Lexi was an aggressive driver with a lead foot.

  She pulled over a block away from the house where emergency vehicles with flashing red lights were parked. They climbed out of the car and walked together toward the one-story home with its low-maintenance landscape—a tiny square of lawn, a few decorative rocks, and a row of nondescript greenery. The garage was open. Yellow crime tape had yet to be secured around the scene. The reason could have so
mething to do with what Lexi had told her on the drive from Sacramento. Apparently the first uniformed officer to arrive on the scene had called in a 10-56, a suicide. That was before an elderly neighbor told the officer about the person she saw wearing a black wig, leaving Bruce Ward’s home. That bit of news changed everything, and a detective in the El Dorado Hills CSI Unit was called in.

  Lexi gestured toward a man Sawyer didn’t know or recognize. “That’s John Hughes, detective with the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office,” Lexi said. “I’ve known John for years. He’s the reason we’re here. He trusts me.”

  Standing next to John Hughes was Detective Perez. Sawyer was surprised to see him but knew she shouldn’t be. Although El Dorado Hills wasn’t his jurisdiction, it was in the detectives’ best interests to work together and share information to see whether there was any connection to the Black Wigs.

  Bruce Ward. The name sounded familiar. She wished she had her files with her. The past few days had been a whirlwind of activity, and her mind was spinning.

  The detectives were standing just outside the open garage. It was dark now and outside lights were being set up. Inside the garage behind the two men, Sawyer could see an old Buick and a body near the tailpipe. A woman wearing a lab coat hovered close to the deceased.

  Detective John Hughes, average in height and wearing a rumpled suit, was gray-haired and shaggy-faced. The smile that spread across his face when he saw Lexi lit up his eyes. Most detectives Sawyer had met since working at the Sacramento Independent had serious expressions permanently etched across their faces.

  Introductions were made. Sawyer shook hands with Detective Hughes, then said hello to Detective Perez.

  He tilted his chin in greeting but didn’t look pleased to see her there.

  Lexi stepped to her left to get a better view of the dead man. “Suicide or homicide?”

  “Too soon to say,” Detective Hughes said. “We certainly haven’t ruled out the possibility of either.”