Flick looked down at her hands. “I have no idea what you are talking about. I thought that he was your friend?”
“He is my friend,” Sawyer retorted, his eyes hot. “Along with Jack and Axl, my best friend. He’s a loyal, intensely smart man who has my respect and admiration.”
Flick lifted her hands as if to ask,Then what’s the problem?
“Don’t shrug your shoulders,” Sawyer said. “You know what I’m talking about!”
Flick put her fists on her hips and tipped her head back to look up into Sawyer’s frustrated face.
“As fascinating as you are when you foam at the mouth, do you have a point?”
“You two will hook up, it will blow up, and I’ll be stuck in the middle,” Sawyer said bluntly.
Good grief. This was getting far too serious. “You do realize that I only met him five minutes ago? And that we hardly talked?” she pointed out.
Sawyer narrowed his eyes at her. “I saw the way you looked at him. The way he looked at you.” There had been a little heat, a lot of spark, some electricity . . . but only enough to power the entire East Coast for the rest of the year.
Telling Sawyer that would not help diffuse the situation. “He’s a great-looking guy! I’m not a nun; I like to look at hot guys. Hell, nuns like to look at hot guys!”
“He’s not interested in commitment. He spends most of the year away from home and if you hook up, he might end up hurting you and I’ll have to break him.” Sawyer looked agitated. “We work together. We’re partners. It could get really messy.”
Flick held up her hands. “Jeez, take a chill pill.” “This is going to end badly,” Sawyer muttered.
Flick rested her thumb against her bottom lip, surprised to see the normally laid-back Sawyer so worked up. She didn’t need Sawyer’s warning, as crazy and as out of character as it was. Flick knew that Kai Manning was way out of her league. She wasn’t an idiot; she’d read between the lines of what Sawyer didn’t say. She knew, instinctively, that Manning was, at best, complicated. Dangerous, mysterious, good-looking with an I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude. And that bad-boy vibe was deeply attractive. He knew it, she knew it, any woman with ovaries knew it.
He was trouble with a Capital T, flashing in bright neon. The type of man who women fell for and made utter idiots of themselves over.
She wasn’t always sure why her relationships tumbled off a cliff but they always, without fail, did. Maybe her choice of men had something to do with it—okay, a lot to do with it—but she was turning over a new leaf. Hell, she was turning over all the leaves in the Amazon jungle. She was keeping her distance from men, from all men, because, as Einstein said, the height of stupidity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
So she was stopping it all.
She was done with looking for love in all the wrong places. With looking for love, period. She wasn’t good at it and she was tired of handing over her time and affection and getting her heart stomped on. She’d finally decided, at the age of twenty-eight, that this was her time. She was back in Mercy and it was a time to start fresh, to try something different, to find out who she was and what she wanted from life. She was going to put her time and energy and money into finding out what made her happy and not into stupid men who just gave her grief.
Taking pity on Sawyer, who was looking all flustered and worried—so un-Sawyer like!—she patted his chest and smiled. “I’m not going to start anything with him. I’m taking a break from men, remember? Didn’t I tell you all that when I came home?”
“You’ve said that before.”
Yeah, but this time she meant it. Time would prove it to them. “Honey, I already have a crazy dog who drives me insane. Why would I want a man to complicate my life?”
Sawyer let out a long, relieved sigh. “Okay. Good.”
“Sex, though,” Flick mused, just to wind him up. “I could do with some great sex.”
Unlike her brother Jack, who would be birthing kittens at this point at the mere mention of her getting down and dirty, Sawyer just smiled lazily. “I can highly recommend it. I’ll even buy you a vibrator; what color do you prefer?”
Flick wrinkled her nose at him. She should know better than to mess with Sawyer because he always had a sharp answer.
“By the way, how is the First Lady of Mercy?”
Flick was grateful for the change of subject, though she didn’t want to think about why Sawyer jumped from the subject of sex toys to her aunt Gina. “She’s fine. At least, as fine as one can be after a crash as bad as that one was.”
“And I suppose she has everyone in the ward running around, desperate to do her bidding?”
Flick frowned at the tart note in Sawyer’s voice. “Why don’t you like her? I mean, I know that she can be managing and demanding, and that she’s incredibly bossy, but she has a really good heart. She does an enormous amount for our town and the community.”
Sawyer lifted one shoulder in a small shrug. “I don’t dislike her, Flick. Quite the opposite really. I admire the fact that she kept her shit together despite so many tragedies. You learned that from her.”
Flick supposed so. Gina had helped her learn to pick up her heart and move on after enduring two deaths in a year. Flick’d accepted her baby brother’s death—he’d been so sick for so long—but her mother’s passing still turned her stomach into a mess of emotions. Andy’s death was expected, her mother’s was not. Such a tragedy, the town had murmured. Nobody but her—and Pippa because Flick had told her about her suspicions—realized that when Andy passed on, so did their mom’s reason for living. The fact that she had a daughter who still needed her hadn’t been enough of a reason to keep living. It wasn’t suicide, Pippa argued, but Flick knew that her mom had willed herself to die, so she did. Same difference, really.