"Relax?" I ground out, cringing at the razor blade sensation in my throat. "He's unconscious," I objected, noting that the office was empty save for the splatters of blood all over the floor. Whoever the other guy was, he was bleeding and long gone.
To this, I got a tight nod as he took a step to the side and crouched down next to me, doing a similar, but faster, check of his breathing and pulse. "It looks worse than it is."
"It looks like he was attacked by an entire gang."
"You his?" the guy asked, turning his head to look down at me and there was such an intensity in his gaze that I almost shrank away. I was pretty sure right then that he was very likely a bad, bad guy.
"His?" I repeated, not understanding.
"His. Girlfriend, side piece, fuck buddy..."
"What? No!" I exploded, cringing as my throat did the razor blade thing again.
"Yeah you're too rich-bitch for his taste."
Okay. I was getting pretty freaking sick of people commenting on me being well off. And, well, whoever this guy was, he was obviously bad. And an asshole. Completely.
"Are you planning on sitting here insulting me or getting your brother some help?" I asked with a haughty chin lift that totally screamed 'rich bitch', but I didn't care.
"He never should have gone off on his own," he said, reaching into his pocket for his phone. "Tig, it's Sawyer. Need help getting Barrett to the hospital. Right. His office. Thanks."
I was only half-listening after I heard his name.
Sawyer.
His name was Sawyer.
No way was it some kind of coincidence that the other PI that I had looked into and contacted, then ultimately decided against because I thought he was intimidating, was also named Sawyer. Looking at him now, 'intimidating' was definitely the right word to describe him. There had been no last name on Sawyer's website, just the name Sawyer Investigations. There was no way I could have known.
"Sawyer Investigations!" I blurted as I watched his profile, a muscle ticking in his jaw which I found almost sexy.
His head jerked, his eyes pinning me. "Yeah, babe."
"You're brothers and you're both PIs?"
"He used to work for me," he confided.
"Used to?" I prompted when the silence drug on and he just kept staring at me, like he was seeing something, like he knew my secrets.
Sawyer's lips tipped up then, but it wasn't a smile. I was pretty sure he wasn't the kind of man capable of smiling. It was more like a sneer. "He's a smart kid. Great with digging up leads. Fucking fantastic with computers. Can find shit that none of my other guys can. But he's a kid. He's soft. No training. He belongs in the guts of the office, not on the streets getting his fucking ass handed to him. He didn't like that. He split. Got his own game. And..." he waved his hand to Barrett's body in a way that would have seemed callous and unfeeling if there hadn't been pain in his eyes.
"And got his ass handed to him," I finished for him, feeling the guilt settle in low in my belly. While there was certainly a chance that Barrett was handling other cases while working on mine, cases that might have been dangerous, my instinct was telling me that whoever the guy was before, he belonged to Third Street. So if he belonged to Third Street, it was my fault that he got his ass handed to him. It was my fault, and Sawyer was sitting there looking like he felt the guilt. "You couldn't have prevented this. He's not a kid. He's a grown man."
"Do I look like the kind of man who can't prevent something if he really wanted to?"
Yeah, well. He had a point.
"Then why didn't you?"
"Does Barrett really seem like the kind of guy who likes being told what to do? I might have wanted to prevent this from happening, babe, but my brother would never forgive me chopping off his balls like that."
"Yo," a deep voice said, no... boomed, from behind me, making me jolt violently, my heart going into overdrive.
"Tig," Sawyer said to him but at me as he took his feet.
I sucked in a breath and followed suit, turning toward the voice and finding the largest man I'd ever seen in my life. Literally. He was six and a half feet easy with shoulders that were so wide that I was pretty sure he needed to turn sideways to fit through the doorway. He was solid muscle with a slight beer gut underneath his tight black exercise shirt. He was good looking in a giant kind of way, with strong masculine features, light brown eyes, and a deep mahogany color to his skin.
Tig and Sawyer were talking in hushed tones but my movement drew Tig's attention. His eyes did a slow inspection, but it was almost clinical, not sexual.