Page 31 of Sawyer (The Maddox BRAVO Team #1)

SAWYER

Three months after the last gavel fell, Saint Pierce tastes like salt and second chances.

Morning slides in through the studio skylight and finds me exactly where my best days start—wrapped around Cam on the paint-splattered rug, our coffee cooling on the windowsill, the city humming as if it’s throat-singing blessings down the block.

Her left hand is flung across my chest, the thin platinum band catching the light like the white line in her painting, a vow that never rubs off. She blinks awake, smiles the kind of smile you can roadtrip by, and lifts her chin for a kiss.

“Good morning, husband,” she murmurs, voice warm with sleep.

“Good morning, painter of my forever,” I say, because I’ve earned the right to be ridiculous and she lets me.

The radio on the workbench crackles—Dean’s line. I groan, and Cam laughs, shoving at my shoulder.

“Go save the world,” she says, “and bring back croissants.”

“Yes ma’am.” I kiss her nose, then her mouth, then stand and snag a T-shirt. She sits up, tucks her knees under her shirt, and watches me the way people watch sunrises they know won’t storm.

Dean doesn’t waste syllables. “I’ve got Riggs in my office pretending he can’t hear me. Come calm your favorite berserker.”

“On my way.”

Cam steals my baseball cap and sets it backward on my head. “Be nice to him,” she says. “And text me his grumpy face.”

brAVO’s office still smells like coffee and gun oil, like competence with a citrus top note. Rae is at her terminal, flipping a pen through her fingers, amused. Riggs is leaning in the doorway to Dean’s glass-walled office, arms crossed, beard more mutinous than usual.

Dean looks up when I enter, lifts his brows in that your turn way he’s perfected.

“What’s the emergency,” I ask, “besides Riggs scaring the potted plants?”

Riggs grunts. “New assignment.”

“Congratulations,” I say. “Why do you look like someone glued your boots to the ceiling?”

Dean steeples his fingers. “A high-visibility tour. Four cities, twelve days. Large checks, larger egos, lots of cameras. Our client asked for brAVO by name.”

“Your client,” Riggs says, “also asked specifically for me .” He glares like it’s a trap. “And I don’t do glitter tours.”

“Which client?” I ask, already suspecting.

Rae spins, grin feral. “Vanessa.”

The name hits like a thrown match in dry brush. I school my mouth. “Ah.”

Riggs scowls harder. “She’s chaos in heels.”

“You are a human lock,” I say. “Could be a match made in safe-cracking.”

Dean slides a file across the desk. “Someone’s been sending her organization’s inbox some creative threats.

Mostly noise, one or two notes that got the ADA’s attention—timing, insider details about her stops.

She’s moving a lot of money and attention; that attracts moths and wolves. She trusts us. She trusts you.”

“I can protect her,” Riggs says, “but I won’t babysit a publicity circus.”

“Protecting her is the job,” Dean says. “Paparazzi are weather. Work around it.”

Riggs stares at the carpet like he might chew it. “She talks. A lot.”

Rae snorts. “So do you. Usually in three-word sentences.”

I rest a hip on Dean’s desk. “What’s the real rub, brother?”

Riggs meets my eyes. For a second the grizzly flickers and I see the man who held the line with me in places where maps ran out. “She makes fun of me,” he admits. “And I… don’t hate it.”

“Translation,” Rae says, “he likes the sunshine but refuses to admit he needs SPF.”

Dean slaps the file once. “Flight tomorrow. Your advance pack is done. We already pinged local PDs and did venue sweeps. You’ll be primary. Rae’s your remote. Don’t make me regret splitting you two again.”

Riggs takes the folder like it weighs a hundred pounds and a feather. “If she calls me Beard-Mountain in public, I’m going to?—”

“—smile,” I say, “and move her three inches left to give the camera a better line of sight.”

“Go away,” he mutters.

I clap his shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

“Tell that to my blood pressure.” But when he turns, I catch the reluctant spark. The big man likes a challenge. He always has.

As if conjured by complaint, the office door bangs open and Vanessa breezes in trailing citrus perfume and a storm of scarves.

“There he is!” she says, pointing at Riggs as if selecting a prize on a game show. “My favorite monolith. Ready to live on planes and eat mini-pretzels while glaring at millionaires?”

“No,” Riggs says, deadpan.

She beams. “Perfect.”

Dean’s mouth twitches. Rae bites her knuckle. I press my lips together to keep from grinning.

Vanessa spots me, kisses my cheek, then plants a more decorous one on Dean’s airspace out of respect for rank. “Cam says you’re bringing dessert tonight to celebrate my imminent martyrdom.”

“Croissants,” I say. “And earplugs for Riggs.”

“I don’t need earplugs,” Riggs rumbles.

She pats his biceps. “You will.”

They square off for a heartbeat—her spark to his flint—and then, like a physics trick, both edges soften by a degree. Dean meets my eyes over their heads: see? I nod: Oh, I see.

When they leave to “discuss itineraries” (Vanessa’s phrasing; Riggs’s phrasing involves verbs like assess and secure ), Dean leans back and exhales.

“That one’s going to be interesting,” he says.

“Understatement of the year,” Rae mutters.

I text Cam Grumpy face unlocked with a stealth photo of Riggs scowling at a color-coded calendar Vanessa has already taken possession of. Cam replies with a heart and a paint emoji. Then: Dinner at seven? I have a surprise.

The surprise is an outdoor table under the wisteria, Edison bulbs strung low, Edgar’s pot roast making the whole block consider crashing. HarborShield nods when we pass; they feel like cousins now, not guards ghosting the edges.

Cam emerges from the kitchen carrying a small cake—pale blue icing, a thin white line piped across the top like a river. My throat gets tight in a way I don’t mind.

“Happy ‘first day we met without a ticking thing between us’ day,” she says. “It’s a bit arbitrary, but anniversaries should be about feel, not calendars.”

“It’s perfect,” I tell her, because it is.

We slice it, we eat too much, we laugh when frosting streaks her lip and I insist on removing it with my mouth.

Sometime between second helpings and leaning back to look at the stars, my phone buzzes with a text from Riggs: Plane wheels up 0900.

If Vanessa drowns me in scarves, bury me with my boots on.

I send him a thumbs-up and a prayer hands, and Cam grins, toasting the sky.

“To the monolith and the hurricane,” she says. “May they meet in the middle.”

After dinner we dance without music, just sway where we are, her cheek on my chest, my mouth in her hair. The city throws us a breeze; the wisteria throws us a blessing.

“I want kids,” she says into my shirt, quiet and certain. “Not tomorrow. Someday. Paint-under-their-nails kids. A dog that sheds on everything. A life that looks like the morning after a good party.”

No bomb in the world could make my heartbeat louder. “Copy,” I say, voice rough. “We’ll teach them knees and noise and how to find the way out of any room.”

“And to draw white lines,” she adds. “Always.”

We move through the house like people who finally believe it won’t disappear if they blink.

In the studio we stand before Never Cover and hold hands without talking.

In the stairwell we kiss like the first time and the last time and the thousand in between.

In our bedroom, where the window has learned our names, we fold into each other with the easy hunger of two people who remember what it cost to earn this ease.

Heat flares, deep and steady. I lay her back in the blue linen and worship with hands that learned restraint long before they learned joy.

She laughs into my mouth when I say something dumb and tender; she answers with a roll of hips that turns vows into fireworks.

We take our time because we can, because time finally belongs to us.

When we crest, it’s not a flood but a tide—inevitable, clean, the kind that leaves shells where rocks used to be.

We stay tangled, and afterward I fall asleep with her leg over mine and her hand on my heart like she’s the one guarding it now. She is.

Morning brings croissants and a photo from Riggs of Vanessa asleep in a first-class seat, mouth open, a scarf cocooned like a hurricane in nap form. I’m doomed, he captions. Then, after a beat: She snores cute. Do not tell anyone I said that.

I show Cam. She smirks and sends back: Proud of you, Beard-Mountain. He replies with a middle-finger emoji and a location pin from the tarmac.

Dean pings the group with Keep heads on a swivel. Orange Team is a call away. Rae adds Try the lemon bars at the Charleston stop. Worth a detour. The feed scrolls with logistics and jokes and the kind of shorthand you only get after bleeding together and making it out.

I step onto the veranda with coffee and watch the sky make up its mind. Cam slips under my arm, chin on my shoulder. Down on the street, a school bus sighs; up the block, a runner huffs past; inside, Edgar sings to himself as he polishes a bowl like it’s a trophy.

“We did it,” she says, not as a surprise but as a record for our own archive. “We made it through the part where stories try to make themselves out of us.”

“We wrote our own instead,” I say.

She nods, tips my face toward hers, and kisses me like a chapter end and a chapter start share a line. It’s simple. It’s everything.

Later we’ll go to the mural and touch up a corner the rain tried to eat.

Later I’ll teach a brAVO workshop to a bunch of rookies about what to do when the threat isn’t just a person but a narrative.

Later we’ll pick up a leash and meet a shepherd mix at the shelter who will absolutely own this house in two days.

For now we stand, and breathe, and let the world do what it does while we keep doing what we promised—hold the line, draw the way through, make it loud with love and quiet with trust.

Down the coast, a monolith and a hurricane are learning orbit. Here, under wisteria and a sky that finally trusts us, my wife slips her hand into mine and squeezes once—steady, coded, always—and my whole body answers back.

Always.

Thank you so much for reading Sawyer and Camille’s story.