Double hmmm.
“Take the ones marked ‘books’ into the office, if you don’t mind,” she told her movers. She had a low, sultry voice made for radio broadcasts. “Sorry they’re so heavy… and that there are so many of them…”
With my head averted to the left, I wasn’t looking where I was walking. Thus, I nearly fell down on my ass as I bumped straight into the solid wall that was Sawyer. The towering blond had stopped smack in the center of the walk, boots planted on the pavestones. His dreamy blue eyes were fixed on the woman next door, and he looked like?—
I didn’t know what he looked like.
Frankly, I didn’t know him all that well. Like most of the Gravewatch men, he rarely said more than three words at a time. But his expression was intense as it locked on the brunette next door, and it did not shift away. Not even for a second. His eyes were fixed on her like a tractor beam.
What was that all about?
Before I could ask, Sawyer spoke. He only said one word, but the voice he said it in was hoarse with disbelief.
“Skye?”
At the sound of her name, the girl turned. Her eyes swept across the group, moving quickly over Flo, Des, me, Cade, Agatha, and Sally… before she spotted Sawyer.
At which point, she blanched.
Completely.
All the blood drained out of her face in one heartbeat, leaving her pale as a ghost. Her hands went limp with shock. The box slipped out of her grip. It hit the pavestones, exploding on impact. Rolled reams of thick, weathered parchment flew out the top. They looked like charts of some kind.
“Sawyer?”
His frame went tight as she gasped out his name, sounding thready with panic. He took two steps closer to the fence that divided her property from Gwen’s and clipped, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Color hit her cheeks — nearly as red as the frames of her glasses. But she managed to swallow down her mortification as she narrowed her eyes at him.
“I live here,” she said stiffly. “What areyoudoing here?”
He just stared at her. He didn’t answer her question. Instead, he asked one of his own.
“There a reason why you never fucking called me back?”
Triple hmmm.
The woman’s cheeks got even redder.
Sawyer took two more steps, bringing his body straight up to the fence. His voice dropped lower, but I could still make out his words.
“There a reason you snuck out that morning without a fucking word?”
That morning?!
What morning?!
“It’s complicated,” the girl — Skye — said weakly.
Sawyer, for the record, did not look happy with this answer. But before he could say anything else, she bent down, snatched her fallen maps from where they’d rolled across the walk, and stuffed them back into the top of her PRIORITY box. Then, with a panicked sweep of her eyes across the lot of us, she turned and ran — yes,ran— into her new house and shut the door.
We all turned, as a unit, to look at Sawyer.
His jaw was clenched.
“How do you know Skye?” Desmond asked, blithely unaware of the tension.
Sawyer’s eyes went flinty as his head swung slowly toward the professor. “How doyouknow her?”