Page 6 of Sawyer (Sabre Security Daddies #6)

S awyer stared at the monitor, torn between laughing and storming across the street to rip those absurd platform shoes off her feet.

What the hell was she doing?

It was ten a.m. on a Sunday in the middle of July.

There were no costume parties. Halloween was too far away to shop for costumes.

He’d found zero evidence she read to kids at the library or moonlighted at the children’s hospital.

And yet, there she was, parading around like her getup was perfectly normal.

Sawyer leaned in, elbows on the desk, eyes fixed on her. The woman was a puzzle he had to solve. A sexy, infuriating, glitter-bomb of a puzzle. And God help him, he wanted to know what made her tick. Or better yet, what would make her unravel.

Then she’d turned on the most godawful racket, calling it music, and began to flail around the room. When she played 1970s disco music at the volume she’d set, he was surprised her ears didn’t bleed.

The godawful mix of disco beats that assaulted his ears was like a jackhammer wrapped in glitter. For a second, he thought she was having a seizure. Her arms flailed. Her hips jerked. And the way her ponytail whirled, it could have kept a hula hoop spinning.

It took two songs before it hit him. She was dancing. Or at least she was trying to.

And she was terrible. Epically bad. She was so out of sync with the music, he wasn’t sure why she bothered to have it playing.

But the glow on her face wasn’t only caused by sweat. She laughed and spun like a toddler on a sugar high. No, like a Little girl having the time of her life.

He couldn’t stop watching. She danced for over an hour without so much as a bottle of water, as if stopping would allow someone to steal her joy. Which begged the question, who was stealing her joy?

Better question, how the hell did she have all those curves with a workout like that? Not that he was complaining. He loved watching each and every bound and jiggle of her perfect figure.

After an hour, she collapsed on the couch, sweaty and breathless. He decided that, if she were his, he’d endure the disco, the chaos, all of it. Just to see her light up like that.

But she wasn’t his. She couldn’t be. He wasn’t the kind of man who betrayed a friend. So even though she might dance like an angel in freefall, she was still the woman who threw Jaxon under the bus to save herself.

It didn’t matter that it backfired. The General had swooped in like he always did, smearing the mess he’d made all over her so she could take the fall. Still, she’d gotten involved in the first place, hadn’t she? She’d earned the time she’d served. Every second. Jaxon hadn’t.

Once she’d recuperated, she peeled herself off the couch and changed into tiny cutoffs that looked painted on and a red tube top that clung like sin. He scowled. Where the hell was she going dressed like that?

She’d changed into practically nothing. But her hair and makeup were still on. It had to be for a man, right? His breathing sped up as if he’d been the one dancing nonstop for an hour. He’d told Reid she didn’t have a man in her life. Had he been wrong? How could he have been that wrong?.

The longer he watched her, the angrier he got. If she’d gotten all dolled up in her “fuck me, Daddy outfit, it had to be for some man. A man who wasn’t him. He shoved back from his desk, resisting the urge to punch his fist through the computer screen.

Without a thought to why he was so upset, he stomped out of the house he’d rented across the street from Lele. He stared at her home.

Her garage door lifted, and Lele backed out of the garage, pulling her lawnmower down the driveway behind her. He couldn’t believe she wore that to mow the grass.

He’d seen the lawnmower when he’d installed the camera in her garage. It was old, with a pull cord instead of an ignition button, no self-propulsion, and no large wheels. There was nothing to make using the mower an easy job. Her lawn was a steep incline, front and back.

And why had she waited until the middle of the day to mow her grass? It was over ninety degrees without a cloud in the sky. No way had she thought to put on any sunscreen. It would be a miracle if she avoided sun poisoning and heat stroke.

Had she always mowed her own grass? If she had, Hector wasn’t taking care of her worth a shit. She might not be able to afford to pay someone for lawncare, but her stepbrother sure as hell could.

He watched her, his jaw clenched tight. A smart man would have turned around a gone back to his computer. Or ducked behind one of the rusted-out cars lining the street. Or pretended to walk down the sidewalk away from her house.

But he didn’t do any of those things because he was a dumb fuck. When she had the mower where she wanted, she bent over to grab the pull cord. He’d seen her bend over a hundred times behind the bar at Videotopia. He’d have said the view didn’t get any better. He’d have been wrong.

That was made clear when she gave a view of that same movement from the back. When she bent over this time, her shorts pulled tight across her ass. Those Daisy Duke cutoff denim shorts she’d put on rode her ass so high her cheeks were on full display for anyone to see.

Oh, that wasn’t going to happen. Before he realized it, he was striding towards her. Years of covert ops had silenced his footsteps, but that didn’t occur to him at the moment. All he could think about was how this print of his hand would look on her ass.

You need to stop. This will fuck everything up.

It was true, it could, but right now, he didn’t give that first fuck.

In the week he’d been watching her, she hadn't been anything like he'd expected.

As he stalked toward her, she stepped to the side of the mower, one foot on the back wheel, both hands on the pull cord, yanking as hard as she could. Maybe she wouldn't have the strength to start the mower.

He fought a grin when she slammed her fist to her hips and kicked the mower. She was now hopping around her driveway foot in hand, obviously in pain.

Damn it. He knew she'd hurt herself.

He might not have a Daddy in him anymore. And she definitely wasn't his Little to take care of. But there was no way in hell he could stand there and watch her struggle in the July heat without doing something.

By the time he reached her, she had dropped her foot and was bent over the mower with the engine cover pulled back, touching all of the different parts. It didn't take a genius to figure out she had no idea what she was doing.

She didn’t seem to notice that he had arrived. At least, she didn’t acknowledge him. So, he tapped her on the shoulder and asked, "Do you need some help?"

Lele let out a horror movie scream and spun around to face him.

Before he could repeat his question, she brought her hands up in front of her.

Thinking she might take a swing at him, he tried to take a step back.

Before he could move, instead of punching him, she slapped at him with both hands, making some kind of squawking noise he’d never heard before.

"Wait! I didn't mean to startle you. I came over to help," he tried to explain.

If she heard him, he couldn’t tell. She kept swatting at him while he backed away.

After three steps, he'd had enough. Still, not wanting to hurt her, he reached out and placed his palm on the top of her head, using the heel of his hand to hold her in place. It made no difference. She kept trying to move forward like a wind-up toy that had run into a wall

Visions of tunneling his fingers through her curls and grasping her hair for an entirely different reason flooded his mind. Her curls were soft, and he had the oddest desire to pull her close and bury his face in them.

Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. He had to get control of this fiasco of a situation. With nothing better coming to mind, he growled, "You need to stop before you hurt yourself."

Great. Because that didn’t sound patronizing at all. He needed to calm her down, not rile her up even more. Had he learned nothing from watching his brothers deal with their Littles? Apparently not.

It took him a minute to realize that, although her feet were still moving, she’d stopped slapping at him. That minute cost him. She pulled out what looked like an inhaler from the pocket of her shorts.

She had asthma? How had that not come up in all his research on her? He hadn't seen anything about asthma. Why would she need an inhaler?

He realized his mistake too late. She stuck her “inhaler” in his face and pushed a button that activated a miniature airhorn. Releasing her hair, he backed up, covering his ears. In doing so, he lost his footing, landing flat on his ass on her lawn before sliding all the way down to the sidewalk.

That was the last straw. He tried and failed to hold back a string of curse words, strong enough to peel wallpaper.

Scrambling to his feet, he marched back up the hill.

He evidently wasn’t hiding his frustration very well because Lele took one look, turned on a heel, and ran back into her house, slamming the door behind her.

Holy fuck. What in the hell had just happened? He’d faced down enemy operatives, taken on the worst of the worst, and yet this five-foot-two, half pint of nothing had knocked him on his ass.

He had to make this right, and he needed to do it now. It would also be necessary to erase the footage of what had happened over the last few minutes because if his brothers at Saber saw it, he'd never live it down.

When he reached her front door, he found it slightly ajar. Knocking anyway, so he wouldn't scare her again, he stepped inside.

“Lele? Are you all right?” He called her name as loud as he dared, so she'd know who was in the house with her.

He'd been ordering drinks from her for over a week now. Surely when she calmed down, she would recognize his voice. She’d divided the room he entered into a kitchen area, a dining area, and a TV room. When she didn't answer, he went in search of her.