The Sweetest Thing (37 page)

“
Now
.”

“I ask you to marry me when we’re alone, and you assume I’m out of my mind and don’t respond. And now
you want me to ask you while we’re being stared at by…” He paused to look at all the people on the porch.

Everyone waved.

Shaking his head, Ford waved back. “I don’t even know some of those people but the ones I do know are probably going to mock
me for the rest of my life. And Jesus, is Chloe videotaping this?”

Chloe had her phone aimed at them. “For Facebook,” she called out.

Tara turned her back on them. “Just do it!”

He stared at her. “You really are the most stubborn woman on the planet.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m working on that.
Ask me
!”

“You sure do like to tell people what to do. You know that?”

“Yes, but to be fair, I’m good at it. Ford—”

“
And
impatient,” he mused. “Interrupting me when I’m trying to outline the reasons I love you.”

She blinked. “You’re… you mean you love my stubborn, bossy, interrupting self?”

“Well, I’d say you were more perversely inflexible and mule-headed, but yeah. I also love the way you drop your
g
s like a Southern belle, and the way you talk to yourself when you’re cooking. And how you think you’re so badass cool, calm,
and collected, when really, if you know what to look for, you show everything in your eyes, and usually you’re not cool, calm,
or collected at all.”

Her breath caught.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “I know all the secrets. I love them, too.” He pressed his mouth to her temple. “I love you, Tara.
Love me back. Marry me.”

She pressed her forehead to his and felt all the little pieces of her heart knit together. “Yes,” she said, and the crowd
on the porch erupted into cheers.

“I did that,” Mia told Maddie and Chloe proudly, pointing to Ford and Tara embracing. “I totally brought them together.”

Ford grinned at her, then looked down at Tara. “I even have a ring,” he said. “I’ve had it since right after you poured me
a glass of iced tea while you were serving the Garden Biddies.” He lifted a shoulder. “It was wishful thinking. It’s on my
boat,” he said and waggled a brow.

She laughed. “Are you trying to lure me back to your place?”

“Yes. Is it working?”

She thought about it for a beat. “It’ll be hard.”

He lowered his voice for her ears only. “I can promise you that.”

“I mean I’m no picnic, Ford.”

“No,” he agreed, closing his eyes when she slid her arms around his waist, brushing his lips along her jaw. “But you sure
taste good.”

With a sigh, Tara turned her face, pressing it against his chest. He wrapped her in his arms and held on, although to be fair,
she was doing most of the supporting. “How long do you figure until you fall down?” she asked.

“Maybe ten seconds.”

“Sawyer!” she yelled, without taking her eyes off of her new fiancé, who cupped her face and looked deep into his eyes.

“
Forever
this time,” he said as Sawyer strode toward them.

Tara sighed blissfully. “You know what this means, right?”

“I’m done guessing,” he said. “Tell me.”

“It means you’re mine,” she said. “And I’m yours. No more walking away. We are going to get it right this time.”

His smile was slow and easy, and just for her. “Well, finally.”

I
t wasn’t often that Chloe Traeger beat her sisters into the kitchen in the morning, but with Tara and Maddie currently sleeping
with the town’s two hottest hotties, it’d been only a matter of time.

Okay, in the name of fairness, Chloe hadn’t actually gotten to bed yet, but that was just a technicality.

With a big yawn, she started the coffee. Then gathering what she needed, she hopped up onto the counter to rest her tired—and
throbbing—legs. The quiet in the kitchen soothed her as she mixed her ingredients together, and she liked it. Given how loudly
she lived her life, the silence was a nice start to the day. Especially today, which promised to get crazy quickly. Later
in the afternoon, she’d be doing her esthetician thing. Natural skincare products were all the rage right now, and she had
nearly created an entire line that was a surprise hit. In the
past year, Chloe had made enough of a name for herself that she was in demand with select high-end spas across the country,
which booked her for their clients. Today she was going to a five-star hotel in Seattle, but first she had to work here in
Lucky Harbor at the B&B that she ran with her sisters.

That very grown-up thought had Chloe shaking her head and marveling. Only a year ago, she’d been free as a bird, roaming happily
from spa to spa at will, with no real ties. Then she and her sisters had inherited a dilapidated, falling-down-on-its-axis
beach inn, with absolutely no knowledge of what to do with it.

Hard to believe how far they’d come. They’d renovated, turned the place into a thriving B&B, and now Chloe, Tara, and Maddie
were real sisters instead of strangers. Friends, even.

Well, okay, so they were still working on the friends part, but they hadn’t fought all week. Progress, right? And that Chloe
had been gone for four of the past seven days working in Arizona didn’t count. She looked down at the organic lavender oil
she’d just “borrowed” from Tara for her homeopathic antibacterial cream and winced.

Probably Chloe could work harder on the friend thing…

Yawning again, she looked out the window. Waves pounded the rocky shore in the purple light of dawn as she stirred the softened
beeswax and lanolin together with the lavender oil. When Chloe was done, she carefully poured the cream into a sterile bottle.
Then, still sitting on the counter, she tugged the sweats up to her thighs and began to apply the natural antiseptic to the
two
long gashes on each of her calves. She was still hissing in a pained breath when the back door opened.

The man who entered practically had to duck to do so. Sheriff Sawyer Thompson was in uniform, gun at his hip, expression dialed
to Dirty Harry, and just looking at him had something pinging low in her belly.

He didn’t appear to have the same reaction to her, of course. Nothing rippled his implacable calm or got past that tough exterior.
And Chloe had to admit, the sheriff had a hell of an exterior. At six feet three inches, he was built like a linebacker. But
in a stunning defiance of physics, he had a way of moving all those mouth-watering muscles with an easy, male, fluid grace
that would make a fighter jealous.

Stupid muscles
, Chloe thought as something deep within her tightened again from just looking at him. In the year since she’d first come
to Lucky Harbor, she and the sheriff had developed a sort of uneasy truce. She did her thing; he didn’t approve. But then
she didn’t approve of him very much either, so that seemed fair enough. And, okay, so
one
time his disapproval had concluded with her in the back of his squad car but she’d managed to overlook that. The problem
now was that somehow lately whenever they’d been in close proximity, she’d reacted with a very inconvenient… lust.

Not that she’d be sharing
that
information with the good sheriff. No, that’d be like letting the big bad wolf in for some cookies and milk. Quickly yanking
down her sweatpants to hide her injuries, she shot him the most professional smile in her repertoire. “Sheriff,” she said
smoothly.

The guarded expression that he wore as purposefully as he did the gun at his hip slipped for a single beat. “Chloe.”

At his tone, her smile turned genuine. She couldn’t help it. She’d just achieved what few could, she’d knocked that blank
expression right off his face. She knew that was because he hadn’t been expecting her. It was usually Tara who made the coffee
every morning, coffee so amazing that Sawyer routinely stopped by on his way to the station.

“Tara’s not out of Ford’s bed yet,” she said.

This made him grimace. Apparently the vision of his best friend and Chloe’s sister in bed didn’t work for him. Or more likely,
it was Chloe’s bluntness that bothered him, which in turn pleased her quite a bit.

Recovering, he strode to the coffee maker, his gait oddly measured, as if he was as tired-to-the-bone as she.

The police and sheriff departments played weekly baseball games against the firefighters and paramedics, and they’d had one
last night. Maybe he’d played too hard. Maybe he’d had a hot date after. Given how women drivers tried to get pulled over
by him just to get face time, it was possible. After all, according to Lucky Harbor’s Facebook page, phone calls to the county
dispatch made by females between the ages of twenty-one and forty went up substantially whenever Sawyer was on duty.

His utility belt gleamed in the bright overhead light as he moved to the coffee pot. His uniform shirt was wrinkled in the
back and damp with sweat. She was wondering about that when he turned to her, gesturing to the pot with the question in his
eyes.

Heaven forbid the man waste a single word. “Help yourself,” she said. “I just made it.”

That made him pause. “You poison it?”

She smiled.

With a small head shake, Sawyer reached into the cupboard for the to-go mugs Tara kept there for him.

“You’re feeling brave then,” Chloe said.

He lifted a broad-as-a-mountain shoulder as he poured, then pointed to her own mug steaming on the counter at her side. “You’re
drinking it.” He leaned his big frame against the counter to study her. Quiet. Speculative.

Undoubtedly, people caved when he did this, rushing to fill the silence. But silence had never bothered Chloe. No, what bothered
her was the way she felt when he looked at her like that. For one thing, his eyes were mesmerizing. They were the color of
melting milk chocolate when he was amused, but when he was quiet, like now, the tiny gold flecks in them sparked like fire.
His hair was brown too, the sort that contained every hue under the sun and could never be replicated in a salon. At the moment,
it was on the wrong side of his last cut and in a state of dishevelment, falling over his forehead in front and nearly to
his collar in back. The lines in his face were drawn tight with exhaustion, and she realized that he probably hadn’t been
headed
in
for his shift as she’d assumed, but finishing one. Which meant that he’d been out all night too, fighting crime like a superhero.