I’d never seen one in person before, and it was astonishingly big, at least three feet long. It was slowly making its way across the sand, back toward the ocean. Its movements were slightly clumsy, but I imagined it was more graceful in the water.
“Yep. I found her here a little while ago, burying her eggs in the sand. I didn’t want to disturb or scare her, so I’ve just been sitting here, watching.”
“Do you mind if I join you?” The last thing I wanted to do was bother him if he preferred to be alone.
His eyes lit up with genuine pleasure. “Not at all. I’d love the company.”
I took a seat beside him, with just enough space between us so that we weren’t touching. I was fascinated as I watched the creature making her way across the sand, slow and steady. Her job was done, the eggs were laid and she was just trying to get back to the water, but there was something really beautiful about the process. It was pure and simple.
When she reached the water and disappeared, I looked over at Briggs with a smile, and the one he gave me in return made something in my stomach flutter with awareness, and attraction.
This wasn’t at all what I expected to find when I left the hotel. I was just trying to escape my mother’s meddling and the advances of my unsuitable suitor. I anticipated finding a few moments to spend alone somewhere quiet, but I definitely couldn’t complain about the current company.
CHAPTER4
Briggs
Icould hardly believe that Sage had foundme. It felt almost like fate after last night, not that I believed in that sort of thing. I was a man that believed in taking control of my own life, and carving out my own destiny.
Still, this worked out well. The girl that had fascinated me from the first moment I’d set eyes on her was now sitting a foot away from me. I wanted to eliminate the distance between us, to pull her flush against me and feel those soft curves, but I settled for conversation and pretending that I wasn’t staring at her long legs, which were on full display with her short shorts.
I wastryingto be a gentleman and get to know her.
“So, you’re a pastry chef at that fancy French place?” I said, going off of what she’d just told me. “That’s impressive. I hear it’s hard to get a reservation there.”
“Well, I could always get you a table if you wanted to try the food.”
Or maybe I could come over to your place and get a taste of what I really want.
Yeah, I was getting ahead of myself, but I couldn’t help it, though I kept those dirty thoughts to myself. “I might have to take you up on that,” I replied instead. “I don’t get to eat out often since I work a lot of evenings. Most of the time, I live off of frozen pizza and TV dinners.”
She tipped her head curiously. “What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a police officer,” I said. “Part of the twenty-ninth precinct.”
I could have sworn that I saw heat flare in her eyes. Maybe she had a thing for a man in uniform, which I could totally get on board with.
“I bet you’ve seen some crazy things on the streets.”
I chuckled and shook my head. “You have no idea. Sometimescrazyis the perfect word for it.”
A light breeze blew, and she brushed a few stray strands of hair off her cheek, her eyes shining with genuine interest. “Any good stories to tell?”
“Too many to count. I just had one last week,” I said, opting for a particularly humorous situation, over some of the more grim scenarios I encountered while on patrol. “A teacher called us from a nearby elementary school to report a man standing at his apartment window across the street for hours at a time, watching the kids on the playground and making her nervous about his intentions.”
Sage’s eyes widened. “Oh my God, what a creep.”
I couldn’t help smiling at her outraged expression. “Not exactly. It turned out to be a two-sided cardboard cutout of a shirtless Channing Tatum belonging to a particularly mortified woman that liked to keep it in her bedroom, right next to the window.”
Sage laughed so hard she snorted, which I found adorable, while her own face went pink in embarrassment. “That’s unbelievable,” she said a moment later, when her giggles had died down. “Where did she even get the thing?”
“I guess it was a part of a promotion for some movie starring Channing Tatum. She worked as a manager at the theater, and when the promotion was over, she was supposed to throw it away, but snuck it home instead.”
“That’s hilarious,” she said, and I lost myself in her big brown eyes.
They were so expressive, surrounded by the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen. There was so much life to this woman, it shined through so clearly in her face and was like a breath of fresh air.
I knew that I was swooning like a lovesick teenager but even back then, when I was dealing with raging hormones and obsessed with any girl that looked my way, I hadn’t wanted a single person with this kind of intensity. I had just met her, but she already held every ounce of my attention.