by Angel Payne
My heart already warms, preparing for the endearing grin he always has at the ready. Only it doesn’t materialize. Instead, there’s a furrow across his forehead with more hills than Angeles Crest, and his gaze is the somber shade of a Crusader’s shield. “What if they bad people already, Mama?”
And there’s my cue to snatch up a shield too. And a figurative dagger and sword to go along with it. And as long as I’m at it, a can of mace and a Taser pistol. “How do you know about bad people, son?”
So now he smiles. But only a misty version of the expression. “Because Dada.”
I do my best to keep my expression neutral. It’s easier than I thought, since I’m not sure whether to be enraged or alarmed. “Because Dada…what?” I charge, struggling to keep it light. If I’ve succeeded, Lux doesn’t give it away. His composure settling once more into the realm of temperate and sober, he re-secures a gentle hold of my hand and leads the way back around the corner, into the other room.
We enter the den, where the spacious area rug is nearly invisible beneath the sea of crayons, Lego bricks and play toys—as well as a clearly uncomfortable “Unca Saw Saw” with the TV’s remote control in his hand. Sawyer sends out a grimace-grin kind of look at me, while his grip visibly tightens around the remote stick.
“Lux wanted to watch the new episode of the Loki show with his grandfather.” He reminds me of a kid attempting to explain why he line-drived a baseball through the window. “I was going to set it up for them. I had no idea the midday news was going to be on.”
I trace a small nod on the air, though to be honest I barely hear the guy speaking. Not uncommon when I’m beholding my superhero husband in the midst of kicking some evil bastards’ asses: a sight that stops the air in my body just as thoroughly as the first time I saw it, when he took down a whole crew of liquor store robbers while keeping two innocent civilians safe. This time, the illegal fuckery is a gang of horse thieves—I guess they really do still exist—who crammed five horses into a trailer only built for two. While I’m proud as hell of Reece for assisting the LAPD in the standoff with the abusive dickwads, my breath officially goes on strike watching him tear apart their old barn hideout, plank by lightning-bolted plank, while dodging shotgun blasts they’re managing to rain down on him and the SWAT team.
Yes, shotgun blasts.
On him, clad only in battle leathers and shitkickers, and the SWAT guys, who look like walking tanks in their body armor.
“Holy f…” I extend the sound, walking a verbal balance beam between the dread I need to expel and the example I need to set. “Fartballs,” I finally spit, at least staying with the theme by wadding my hands into round fists.
“Finely done,” Sawyer mutters though nods back at the monitor. “To both of you, it seems.”
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t seem like the cushy dayshift calls he promised me he’d be assisting with.” I turn my head when the news feed switches to a chopper shot, exposing the fact that Reece and the five SWAT guys are outnumbered by twice as many of the horse-stealing bastards. I hope every single one of them is slogging through piles of massive green horse shit—but more than that, I work on containing my anger at the main guy they’re still shooting at. Yes, I know his battle leathers are reinforced. Yes, I know he has the reflexes of a cheetah and the predatory prowess of a panther. But I also know that he swore to never be in a situation where he’d have to use either. At least not right now, with Faline still out somewhere in the wind.
And our son at an age to be gazing at a TV feed like this, with exactly these kinds of stars in his eyes.
“Go, Dada!”
And exactly these kinds of words bursting from his lips.
“Bad guys, no. Dada, yes!”
And those.
“Lux…”
“Dada go save horsies. Go, Dada. Go, go, gooooo!”
“Lux!”
And this kind of reprimand ripping out of me, entirely too late, as our son’s energy turns into his energy. Before I can warn him into restraining the fire, the blue-white comets that form in his palms turn into the double fireballs that shoot up to—and then through—the ceiling. This would be a great coincidence, if anyone was suddenly in the mood to smell like “Honeysuckle Heaven.” Since the master bathroom is directly overhead, my son’s found a shortcut into the caddy next to my bathtub. Everyone in the room is suddenly doused in my favorite bath salts, body talc, and skin lotion.
For a long second, I’m too stunned to react. During the next one, all my protective instincts surge, and I visually check my son from head to toe. Like the rest of us, Lux is covered in a sweet-smelling but totally gooey mush. Unlike the rest of us, his bottom lip is vibrating as if he’s about to lose every speck of his composure.
A situation not helped when my sister totally does.
But while Lux looks ready to fill Malibu Creek with his tears, his Auntie ’Dia gives up the fight against a spurt of nonstop laughter. Crazily, even Dad joins her—and Sawyer looks ready to, until I quell him with a withering glance. With Sawyer down, I pivot back to fully face my irreverent sibling, with her hair full of talc and her face streaked with lotion.
“Oh, come on, baby girl,” she chides at my glare. “You have to admit, this is way more epic than that.” She nods toward the wide screen, which has come through the craziness with nothing more than a light talc dusting. Through that fragrant fuzz, we look on as the horse wranglers, suddenly realizing they’re up against the superhero of LA as well as the SWAT team, actually come out with their hands high and their heads low. A full surrender. “Okay, maybe that is better.” She pumps a fist. “Way to get that trash, Bolt Man!”
Lux sprints to join his auntie, a trail of talc and salts scattered in his wake. “Dada Bolt,” he shrieks in joy. “Get ’em, Dada! Trash all gone. Trash all gone!”
“Oh, dear hell.” I drop my head into a hand—as my sister breaks out into louder laughs.
“That’s right, Lux-alicious,” she praises, scooping him up and then spinning in a circle. “Dada’s a regular badass. Yaaaayyy!”
“Badass Dada!” My son copies ’Dia by pumping his fist. “Bad guys gone!”
I turn away, giving my conflicted groan to the wall instead of unleashing my furious frustration on my sister. Thank God for Sawyer and the training of his drop-back-and-watch mode—from which he emerges to give me a brief shoulder squeeze before calmly walking over and taking Lux from Lydia.
“Hey, dude,” he murmurs, setting Lux back down. He gently tweaks my son’s rosy cheek. “Time for us to talk man-to-man, okay?”
Lux’s shiny blond waves shimmer in the light from his vigorous nod. “’Kay, Unca Saw Saw.”
At once, my sister changes from saucy to mushy, her face almost emulsifying as she watches her man’s tender but firm expression. She lifts her head, finding my gaze quickly, before unleashing an “are you seeing this?” stare on me. As I wink out my affirmation, Sawyer starts his little pep talk.
“So, you see your dad up there, taking care of the bad guys?” He waits for Lux’s new nod. “You want to know how he does that? Yeah, I know you do. Well, it’s ’cause he ate everything your mama told him to eat, like even broccoli and beans.” A smirk twists beneath his stubble in proportion to the scowl crunched by my son. “Dude, that stuff makes you mighty, okay? And you want to have big, strong muscles like your dad, right?” He flashes a you’re-welcome wink at me before going on. “So, there’s other stuff your dad did to get ready for kicking a—errrr, I mean beating the bad guys. Want to know what it was?”
“Yeah, Unca!”
The scene has me joining Lydia in the melt-me-now department, as Lux presses his tiny hands into Sawyer’s stubble. I’m positive my sister and I are sharing more than outward swoons, as well. Her thoughts have to be chugging on the same track as mine. Our secret-agent-man-gone-chill-surfer-dude needs to have a new hyphenation on his descriptor. Epic-awesome-baby-daddy.
“Okay, so your dad has all those slick moves because h
e did something called practice. Do you know what that means, bud?” He endures the soft smacks of gold hair as Lux shakes his head in the negative. “Well, it means that he tried out all those things, over and over again, until he got it right.” He leans his face in, ensuring he has Lux’s full and locked attention. “If you want to practice too, then I’ll help you. But”—his exhortation bites into Lux’s squee of joy—“in order to be super good at practice, you really have to eat every bite Mom puts on your plate. And yeah, that means everything green, leafy, or smelly. Can you promise me you’ll do that?”
I barely contain my jaw from dropping as my son nods in agreement—and with gusto. As soon as he’s finished, he turns and runs for the kitchen, yelling at Anya that he’d like some grapes for a snack.
Before Sawyer’s done rising back up, I state, “Unbelievably, I think I just fell in love with you a little more, dude.”
“Heeeyyy.” Lydia crowds into his side, smacking a possessive hand across his torso. “That’s my job, missy.”
“One that you accomplish very well, missy.” Sawyer’s rewarded for his declaration with a nibbling kiss along his jaw. “Hmmm. Very well.”
As the pair move together, finding each other with their mouths and then delving into an affectionate tongue tangle, I let a long groan tumble out. “All right, all right; we get it. And by ‘we,’ I mean the crowd including your father, Princess Purple Pants.”
Lydia tilts her head and tightens her gaze to slits. “Well, just for that…” And then treats Dad and me with front-row seating as she yanks a fistful of Sawyer’s hair and drags him into a kiss straight from a banned Tumblr feed.
“Aaggghhh!” I cry. “Seriously? I want to walk out of here, not wade through a puddle of your saliva!”
They break apart, taunting me with their mutual laughter, until Sawyer breaks his short by biting his lower lip. It’s a sly rogue’s move, one I’d expect more from Reece than him, making me do a double-take—even before he states, “Hate to break this to you, Em…but the lagoon might be getting worse.”
“Why?” Lydia steps back, hands on her hips. “You got another kid to pull out of the woodwork, Chainsaw? Oh, wait. Hold the hell up.” Her hands drop. “The Ducati…it was still rattling when you got home today…” And her gaze flares wide. “Holy shit. You didn’t really go out and get that fixed this morning, did you?”
His eyes twinkle until they’re the color of a damn Tinkerbell cartoon. “No, Fireball. I didn’t go get the motorcycle fixed.”
A distinct intuition niggles up my spine. I glance to Dad for confirmation of it—and he’s ready with a knowing smile. Though a lightbulb of comprehension explodes to life in my mind, I keep a careful façade plastered across my face. Lydia still has no clue what’s going on here, despite her delighted gasp and dazzling grin.
“Ohmigawd,” she rushes out. “You went back and got the painting, didn’t you?” She whips around toward Dad and me. “We hit the Roadium market on a whim the other day. It was a lot of the usual flea market stuff, but there was this one new guy there, and his paintings were out of this world. I fell in love with this one—ohhhh!”
Now I really do give in to the double-take, as Sawyer sweeps a framed painting out from behind the couch. While Lydia is right—the piece, depicting a windswept cliff overlooking a sunset-stained ocean, is beyond stunning—it’s not the payoff I was expecting for the man’s inscrutability.
“Errrmmm…wow,” I stammer. “It’s…uhhh…really pret…”
I trail off, realizing my sister isn’t listening anyhow. “Thank you,” she whispers fervently to her guy and kisses him with matching meaning. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
Sawyer smiles—still giving off that shit-eating mien that I can’t figure out. “It’s the one you liked the most, right? Is everything all right with it? You like the view and shit?”
“Of course I like the view and shit.” She crunches two seconds’ worth of a bemused frown. “And you know this one’s my favorite. I only swooned over it for—” As her voice snags, her head slides back. “What the…” And then forward again.
I step over to where she’s propped the painting on the couch, leaning it along the back cushions. “What is it, honey? It is a gorgeous piece. And hey, look; the artist even painted a bride and groom up on the cliff.”
Lydia chuffs. “Oh yeah, he did.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Besides the fact that they weren’t there when I looked at this on Sunday?”
I peer closer—and as I do, my heart beats faster. “And that they look like you two?” I say past a grin.
Lydia’s answering stare conveys that I’m stating the obvious—though she doesn’t get a chance to speak it.
“Well, would you look at that?” her guy drawls. “I suppose they do.”
’Dia’s breath snags hard. “Sawyer?”
She whips her head around, intent on impaling him with her stare—but encounters empty air instead.
Because Sawyer’s already dropped to one knee.
“Sawyer?”
I rush to Dad’s side, joining him in tearful silence as Sawyer Foley grabs my sister’s quivering left hand. He’s steady as steel, his spine straight and his gaze intent, while bringing her fingers up for a lingering connection with his lips. “I had him paint us there because that’s what I want, Spitfire.” At last his composure crumbles a little, but he hauls in a long breath and finds his fortitude once more. Damn good thing because nobody else in the room can keep our tears from flowing now. “No.” The guy shakes his head. “Not what I want. What I need. What I told myself I’d never need or never have to need—but now can’t imagine living without.” He looks like a beggar being shown the realms of heaven as he gazes up at my sister, the tender smile on his lips widening. “Because I can’t imagine living without you.”
I choke out a sob. Fortunately, Lydia’s is louder and fuller. “Sawyer Howard Foley, what the hell are you getting at?”
I’m grateful for the excuse to snicker through my tears. Holding it in after learning Sawyer’s middle name was an ordeal and a half.
“Well, I’m sure as hell not down here to moisturize my knees.” He casts a rueful look around at the puddles of congealing lotion. Lydia does the same before casting down a watery smirk.
“Technically, you could…” she hedges.
“And technically, you could still say no to me,” Sawyer volleys, yanking back her attention by taking the inside of her wrist beneath his pleading kiss. When he’s done, he doesn’t let her go. “But please don’t, sweetheart.” With her hand crushed against his forehead, he drops his sights down. “Damn it, even your father has said yes.”
Lydia’s jaw drops. “You asked my dad too?”
Dad harrumphs. “Bet your sweet ass he did.”
More disbelieving tears from my sister. “That is…so. Freaking. Cool,” she finally blurts.
Sawyer’s lips twist. “So what the hell does that mean?”
“What do you mean, what does it mean?” she counters.
“Oh, Spitfire.” He lets his head plummet. “Baby, can’t you just say yes?” Then swallows hard and mumbles, “Or…no.”
Fortunately, Lydia’s ready with a chiding chuckle. “Impossible to answer a question I haven’t been asked, buddy.”
I shoulder-bump Dad, mirroring his good-natured glance. Poor Sawyer, falling in love with a Crist sister. ’Dia’s not going to spare him an inch of leeway—though if I know Mr. Foley well enough, he’ll give back as good as he gets.
Sure enough, in the very next second, the guy locks his free arm around the backs of my sister’s knees and then yanks hard, destroying her balance. Lydia lets out a little shriek while toppling down—into the cradle of Sawyer’s sizable arms.
Before she can scream again, he douses her in a long, wet kiss.
Then the heat of his adoring stare.
Then the sigh-worthiness of his rough, reverent words.
“Lydia Ha
rlow Crist, I’ve been in love with you since the moment I first met you,” he confesses. “It was a night you were meant to be celebrating, but instead you were kidnapped and trapped in a cargo net for hours…”
Despite the tears flowing from her eyes, Lydia rolls them. “And I looked hideous.”
“You were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” Sawyer strokes a firm thumb across her cheek. “So full of courage and fire, even after what Faline had put you through…I’d never seen anyone with that kind of strength before. That kind of light.” He pulls in another breath, the air shaking with his emotion. “I was already addicted to you, and I’d barely had a chance to speak to you. And as soon as that happened, I just got downright terrified.”
“Terrified?” Lydia jerks up, her spine straightening and her brow crunching. “Huh? Of me?”
“Only of what I felt for you,” Sawyer clarifies. “Of what I was certain you could never possibly feel in return.”
I swipe heavy drops off my cheeks as my sister pulls the guy in for another mushy lip lock. Though Dad squirms a little, I’m nothing but a blubbery wet mess full of female understanding. Yeah, these Team Bolt guys are impossible to resist.
At last, she pulls up far enough to whisper, “It was never possible for me to stay away from you, mister. I’ve been just as consumed with the very idea of you. The perfect magic of you. Hell, a man who finally knew what to do with me.”
