No fucking way. You’re not going to be too late. Not this time.
Sawyer sprinted across the street and over to Rancho Grande so that he could circle around to the back of the shop without being seen. As he ran, he pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed 911. He wasn’t going to wait for reinforcements, but he wanted all the help he could get. He needed to get Mia out of that house safely.
If he didn’t…if he was too late…
He couldn’t even think it. He wouldn’t. Mia wasn’t going to end up like Sarah.
“Tell Ned that his niece, Mia Sherman, is being held hostage in her place on Main Street,” Sawyer said when the dispatcher came on the line, grateful for small towns and the fact that everyone in Lonesome Point knew everyone else. He could tell this woman the bare essentials and she’d have a car on its way in minutes. “This is Sawyer Kane, I’m going to try to break in the back door to her shop and help her, but I don’t know if this man is armed.”
“Sir, you shouldn’t attempt to enter the home,” the dispatcher said. “Wait for the police to—”
“I’m not waiting,” Sawyer said, breath coming faster as he turned the corner by the coffee shop and started down the narrow street that led to the owners’ parking spaces behind the shops. “She could be dead by the time the police get here.”
“Sir, please!” The dispatcher’s nasal voice went up an octave. “You can’t—”
Sawyer ended the call and silenced his phone. He didn’t want it ringing at the wrong moment and alerting Paul to the fact that someone was coming in Lavender and Lace’s back door. If he was lucky, Mia had understood his message and would be ready to run for the front door when Sawyer came in the back. If he was really lucky, the back door would be open and he could sneak in unnoticed and get to Paul while his guard was down.
Sawyer was already imagining how satisfying it was going to feel to bring his joined fists down on the back of Paul’s head, when a car started up farther down the street. Sawyer froze, praying it wasn’t Mia’s truck, but a part of him knew it was, even before the vehicle lurched out of its parking spot and the yellow headlights swept across the alley, blinding him for a moment.
A moment was all it took for the truck to roar past him, the water kicked up by the tires spraying into his face as he was granted a one second view of a terrified Mia clinging to the steering wheel while a man matching her ex’s description—dark hair, slim build—held a gun on her from the passenger’s seat.
“Mia!” Sawyer spun to see the truck weave unsteadily back and forth, nearly hitting the dumpster behind Brew You before it turned left and then made a quick right onto the Old Town highway.
In the moment before the truck disappeared, a single gunshot echoed through the alley. Sawyer dove for the ground as something whizzed by over his head, close enough for him to hear the whine of the bullet as it streaked through the air.
CHAPTERSIXTEEN
Sawyer isn’t dead.Sawyer isn’t dead. He can’t be dead. He can’t be.
The mantra thrummed through Mia’s head, over and over, as she guided the truck down the Old Town highway with Paul’s gun aimed at her midsection, and Paul—the man himself, the monster she’d been waiting to crawl through her window—in the cab beside her.
But this time he hadn’t come in the window. He’d come out from underneath the bed, where he must have been hiding since noon that day. Mia had left the shop unlocked for ten minutes while she’d run down the street to get a coffee. That had to have been when he got in. When he crept into her shop, climbed the stairs to her apartment, rolled under her bed, and waited there until she was nearly asleep before rising out from beneath the ruffles of her bedspread like a nightmare climbing out of a birthday cake.
Mia had screamed so loud in the second before Paul shoved the gun against her throat that she’d been certain someone had to have heard. She kept waiting to hear police sirens, but the minutes ticked by—long minutes, while Paul told her how much he’d missed her, how much he loved her, and kissed her on the cheek while she tried not to cry—and the night air had remained quiet.
Paul had made her get up and get dressed in a blue sundress he’d selected from her closet. He’d instructed her to fix her hair and do her makeup the way he liked it—with pink cheeks, glossy lips, and the brown mascara, never the black—and stood in the bathroom doorway watching, like he used to when they were together. After, Mia had dawdled picking out shoes as long as she dared, hoping Paul’s attention would waver and she would be able to get to the phone by her bed and send a 911 text to Sawyer, but Paul never took his eyes off of her.
And then, like the answer to a prayer, Sawyer had shown up on her porch, just as she and Paul were coming down the stairs from her apartment. Sawyer had known immediately that something was wrong, but he hadn’t given her away. He’d simply taken her cue and rolled with it, proving he got it, gother, in a way so few people ever had. And then he’d circled around to the back of the shop to try to help her, and Paul had shot at him.
Paul had shot at him, and now Sawyer could be dead.
Mia’s next breath emerged as a sob, but she bit her lip and held her breath, fighting to regain control. If she started crying now, she was never going to stop, and she had to stay calm if she was going to have any chance of getting away from Paul and calling for help.
“Are you going to cry for him?” Paul asked, his voice strangely disaffected, the way it had been since he rose from beneath the bed, scaring Mia out of her mind. “Were you sleeping with that man, Mia? After all those months of acting like I wasn’t good enough, did you jump into bed with the first dumb cowboy who crooked his finger?”
Mia shook her head, knowing better than to confirm Paul’s suspicions. It would only make him crazier, and he was plenty crazy already. “Where are we going?” she asked, slowing at the four-way stop at the southern edge of downtown.
“Keep going straight.”
Mia hesitated. “But this road—”
“Go straight,” Paul yelled.
Mia accelerated too fast, fear making her foot heavy on the pedal. Paul responded by shoving the gun into her side hard enough to make her gasp.
“Don’t try to wreck the truck, and don’t question me again,” he warned. “I know where I’m going, Mia. I have it all planned out. I’ve been planning how this was going to end for months.”
Mia’s breath shuddered out and tears pricked at her eyes. “Please, Paul. Don’t do this. This isn’t who you are. You’re not a killer.”