Sinner-Saint Box Set (Sinner-Saint Series) Read online

  Even when she was not purposely thinking about it, she felt her reluctant cowboy on all levels. She recalled the sound of his voice, the feel of his body, and the taste of his lips in vivid detail, but it wasn’t real enough. It was almost torturous for her, as if he was just in the next room, but completely unattainable. She’d had no idea he even existed before that morning, but now that she knew he did he was part of her.

  As she relayed her story to her boss and a few of her coworkers, telling them she had been robbed at gunpoint but rescued by a handsome stranger, it sounded like a fairytale, like some sort of drummed-up Facebook trending story celebrities would use to stay at the top of the news ticker. It sounded even more absurd and imaginary when she explained that the gunman who had tried to rob her didn’t even get arrested.

  “Why didn’t they take him downtown?” one of her coworkers asked, a rather plump and nosy woman named Marlene, the office gossip, who always insisted on wearing too-small kitten heels that emphasized the girth of her pudgy ankles.

  “Well,” Cheri said, “the cop took a police report on the incident, but when they arrived the gunman was cuffed to the railing, and I was…okay. I told them about the gun, but like I said, the guy who saved me took it with him. There were no witnesses and no camera footage to back me up.”

  “Oh, right,” Marlene said, then cast a very noticeable eye-roll to a man named Jim before she took a big gulp of coffee from her oversized mug that was the same ugly green as her shoes.

  Cheri couldn’t blame them for feeling that way, because it sounded ridiculous. Although she had a good reputation at work, she wasn’t terribly social with everyone. Most of the people in the office thought she was way too mousy for a gorgeous guy to calm her with kiss, but her immediate reluctance to take the subway, opting for the bus instead, backed her up; no one with half a brain would add forty minutes to their commute each way just to make herself look good.

  In time, people began to accept that Cheri’s fantastic story was the truth and not just some fabrication for attention or some other motive. Even Marlene seemed to come around, though she did continue to interrogate her with the same questions time and time again, as if trying to catch her in a fib. Their acceptance of it, however, only confirmed for her that the rare chemistry she had shared with the man who kissed her to make her feel so much better was also very real, not just a figment of her fantasies.

  After a week of bus commutes, Cheri decided it was a far better option to bike to the office. While the weather was still quite muggy and hot, it was also clear and sunny, so she didn’t have to worry about rain ruining her hair or her mascara on the way.

  On the first day of her bicycling adventure, she left home extra early so she could stop at the coffee shop and still make it in on time.

  She wheeled her bike into the shop without objection from anyone. As she stood in line waiting for her hazelnut latte, she glanced through the newspaper and was shocked to read that someone else claimed to have been attacked at the same station where she was almost done for. As silly as she felt, and as hard as she tried to fight the feeling, she couldn’t help being a bit jealous, wondering if her cowboy had rescued the latest victim, too.

  “Your order’s up,” came a slightly-familiar, intoxicating baritone.

  She whipped around and looked straight into those green-brown eyes she’d been dreaming about. There was Cowboy Boots, gazing down on her, the features of his face, somewhat sad, upturned with a slight smile.

  “Whatever’s in there,” he said, nodding toward the paper in her hand, “it must be good. We were trying to get your attention, the barista and I, Sherry.”

  She was embarrassed to correct him, but she wanted him to know who she was. “It’s pronounced Cherry, like the fruit.” She grinned. “And… how do you say your name?”

  Again, he carefully avoided introducing himself and only offered her a slightly broader smile. He might as well have patted her on the head and sent her on her way.

  Not sure whether to be crushed or to take it as a challenge, Cheri stared at him for a moment, until a thought occurred to her: When they call his order, they’ll say his name. She took her latte to the side and leaned on her bike coolly, sipping it as she continued to spy and eavesdrop.

  “Here ya go,” the barista said, since the cowboy insisted on hovering near the counter.

  Frustrated, Cheri stopped him in his tracks and glanced at the cup in his hand. “Thomas, huh?”

  “Yeah. It’s pronounced Tom-us,” he teased with a wink.

  “Very funny,” she said. “It’s nice seeing you again, though. Cheri Holt,” she said quite formally, then offered him her hand for a shake.

  His grinned from ear to ear, giving Cheri her first view of his full smile. “Well done,” he said, “spying on my cup.”

  “Did your mama and daddy give you a last name?” she asked, with all the charm she could muster. “Or do I have to wait for another opportunity to find that one out?”

  “They did, and I see yours gave you quite the Southern drawl,” he answered.

  “Very smooth, Mr., uh…Thomas. Way to change the subject.”

  “Just getting to know you, that’s all,” he said.

  “Well, since you asked, I’m from Virginia.”

  “Nice place.”

  “Yep, and speaking of nice places, which one can I take you to for dinner, to pay you back for saving me the other day?” she pushed. She couldn’t believe she was asking—no, insisting.

  “Not necessary,” he said firmly, an unexpected edge in his tone.

  Hmm. Maybe I’m being too forward, Cheri worried. Maybe he’s just not available. Sure, he kissed me like he was half-starved after saving my life, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. She looked at him curiously and continued, “Your wife and kids are invited, too, of course,” she cleverly pried, even though there was no sign of a ring on his finger. As soon as she said the words, though, she knew she had gone too far.

  “No thank you,” he said coldly, his face turning to stone and a swarm of darkness seeping into his eyes.

  Stubborn as she was, Cheri didn’t want to take no for an answer. “Look, you can’t just… You saved my life, Thomas. Plus… Well, you can’t just kiss a woman like that and walk away.” She knew she was blushing, but she ignored it. “I also owe you an apology, if you thought I made fun of your shoes.”

  “If?” he said, arching his brow.

  “Is that really the issue? I didn’t mean it the way you took it,” she insisted. “Please.”

  “You already apologized for that back there. That’s not the issue.”

  “What’s the issue then?”

  “You act like I owe it to you,” he said softly, “when, in fact, I do not.”

  “No,” she said. “I owe you, just like I’ve been trying to say.”

  “The way I see it, sweet Cheri, neither of us owes anyone anything. It’s probably best we part ways.” His hazel eyes bore into her blue ones, and she was mesmerized by their beautiful colors.

  Cheri sighed, aware she had lost the battle. Before he took off, she took the opportunity to remember exact what he looked like. She knew he was cool on his feet and that he was the best kisser she’d ever met, but this was the first time she actually got a good look at how gorgeous he was. He was tall and perfectly proportioned. Despite the softness of his ribbed t-shirt, his body looked as hard as a rock, conjuring up pictures of a mountainside in Cheri’s head. Despite all that, though, she knew she had to back off.

  “Well, thanks again,” she said, finally. “Even if you say it isn’t necessary.”

  At the sugar and creamer station, she opened the cup to add sugar. In the process she knocked it over, and a puddle of hazelnut stickiness went everywhere: all over the marble slab, down the front of her, and splattering all over her shins. She was glad she was wearing her bike shorts and not her full-length spandex, or it would have made for some very uncomfortable, sticky riding for the rest of the way to work.


  Cheri did her best to stamp down her utter frustration. It wasn’t just the fact that she’d lost her latte, that gourmet, caffeinated bliss made to perfection—not to mention $3.95 a cup—but she was also angry that the man had flat-out rejected her. He didn’t even do her the courtesy of being subtle about it, and that embarrassed and angered her.

  Worst of all, Thomas’s nonchalant dismissal of her attempts to be hospitable brought to the forefront all the horrible truths about her lackluster love life. When was the last time I had a date anyway? I can’t even remember having sex. When will I have someone in my life, someone who means something, someone who thinks I mean something? She usually kept too busy to think about any of those things, but they were certainly on her mind now.

  Thomas quietly moved beside her. He calmly grabbed a pile of paper towels and mopped up the counter. He had ensconced her with his body, making her the middle of the sandwich between the counter and him. Heat emanated off him and warmed her, head to toe. She sensed him lowering, just like an elevator car, and then she felt him press the napkins around her bare legs. “Hold still,” he ordered.

  His voice was so rich, so deep, it sounded like tones more than words. He used that same delicious voice when he walked over to the counter to ask for hot water. The next thing she knew, Thomas was pressing lovely warm napkins on her skin, practically bathing the milky, sugared coffee off her. For a guy who wouldn’t even tell her his name himself and couldn’t accept thanks from her for an act of heroism, he was awfully bold and intimate at the drop of a hat. Cheri quickly decided that as soon as she got back to her office, she was going to make a note on her calendar: A guy touched my calf today.

  “There you go.” Thomas’ eyes bore into hers.

  “Here,” said the woman at the counter. “We made you another, on the house.”

  “Let them pour it in your container for you,” Thomas suggested, a slight smile tugging at his lips.

  Cheri couldn’t even look him in the eye anymore. He had managed to break her heart, and she didn’t even know the man. “Good idea,” she mumbled when she could finally bear to lift her eyes to look at him, still sulking.

  He arched his brow slightly, admonishing her. “It’ll be okay,” he promised.

  Cheri let the coffee shop fill her travelling mug with the latte she no longer wanted. She walked out, not even turning to thank Thomas or cast one more glance his way. She was done.

  She rode to work, hating with every turn of her pedal, wishing she’d never met that stupid cowboy who refused to allow her to apologize, the one whose kiss she couldn’t forget.

  Chapter 3

  It didn’t take long for the cycling commute to get old. Or just too wet on the rainy days, too cold on the cool days, too hot on the warm days, too sweaty on all days. Cheri decided to go back to taking the subway. This time armed with a can of Mace—just in case. She followed the story of the second metro attack, but there was little to report; authorities were still looking for the perpetrator. In her opinion, they didn’t seem to be looking too hard.

  She felt surprisingly calm as she waited for the train, until someone sat next to her and nudged her. Her body shook with the memory of the bad moment that had caused her to stop riding the metro in the first place. She looked down at her elbow and focused on a hand holding a piece of paper. She looked away quickly, focusing hard to ignore him.

  “Take it,” said the guy, maybe in his mid-twenties.

  “Um, no thanks,” she said, shying away again and refusing to look him in the eye.

  The man dropped the paper at her feet and shrugged. “Either way, you’ve been served,” he said triumphantly, then moved away from her.

  A process server? Seriously? He didn’t even ask my damn name! Cheri rolled her eyes and picked up the document.

  Her hands began to shake as she read it and discovered that she was being sued by the gunman, who insisted on capitalizing on the fact that the cops didn’t arrest him. The guy who had tried to take her purse, pulled a gun on her, was now unbelievably bringing a civil suit against her because he knew she couldn’t make her case against him.

  As soon as she got a cell phone signal, she called the cop who had taken her report but refused to arrest her mugger. Of course the call went straight to voicemail, but after the beep, she let him have it, ranting for a good full minute into her phone. The echoes of her message rolled down into the train tunnel, garnering distasteful looks from other commuters.

  She tossed the phone into her purse. Scared, frustrated, and wishing luck would finally come her way.

  To her horror, the cop she’d just called was in the metro station. Working his freakin’ beat, probably.

  She recognized him as he stalked toward her, his cell at his ear. In spite of her annoyance with him, he really was quite handsome. She might have felt some attraction if she wasn’t so ticked off by the fact that he blatantly refused to arrest her attacker.

  “There’s nothing I can do without a corroborating witness,” said the cop defensively.

  “Do the math,” she fired back.

  “I did! No gun, no corroborating witness, and a crowd of people who only saw the two of you, plus no sign of this mysterious cowboy you said you saw. It equals no grounds to haul anyone down to the station.”

  “He’s suing me now!” responded Cheri. “He’s suing me! You saw that guy. Tell me how the hell could I have managed to cuff him to that rail, when his arms are twice the size of my thighs? Besides, do you think I just walk around with handcuffs in my purse?”

  The cop gave her a salacious look that turned her stomach, then patiently reiterated, “It’s not…impossible. We have no video footage, and there are no witnesses, and… Look, do I need to keep repeating this? Personally, I’m inclined to believe you, but I’ve gotta go by the book or the case would be thrown out anyway.”

  “Meanwhile, he can bring a case against me based on his word against mine,” she said.

  “Out of my hands,” he said with a shrug. “That’s a civil issue, and I’m just on the executive, criminal end of the law.”

  “Damn straight you are,” she snapped, “because it’s criminal that you let the guy go after what he did to me!”

  “If you can track down this cowboy of yours, that would solve everything.”

  Cheri sighed, knowing he was right. She had no choice but to find Thomas and beg him to back her up. If she had to, she could hire a lawyer to subpoena him and make him talk; she was truly that desperate for his cooperation at this point. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure Perry Mason himself could find the man in the boots.

  Besides the chance encounter at the coffee shop, every so often she thought she spied his glorious head of hair above the crowd once or twice, but she had no idea where to locate him. Cheri had never even noticed Thomas before and had never seen him before that fateful day. Her only solace was that they seemed to live and travel on similar schedules, so she knew bumping into him again wasn’t a total impossibility.

  Based on what little she knew about him, she assumed he lived somewhere in her neighborhood or near it. The northeast part of Washington, D.C. was undergoing major renovations. The low-rent district had become the cool place to live and work, and housing was still affordable, though prices were on the rise. Cheri had gotten a great deal on an old house a couple of years prior, and she wondered if he’d found a cozy, affordable place to kick off his boots too.

  Companies were also taking advantage of the cheap real estate. Cheri’s employer was not all that far from her home. Technically, she could have walked to work, but she didn’t thoroughly trust the neighborhood, especially after the incident in the metro and the horrible things she was reading about in the paper. Thomas certainly wasn’t the suit-and-tie type and didn’t look like a corporation or white-collar employee or CEO, but he did catch the train to somewhere else before she got on and off in the emerging business district. His strong physique and rugged appearance led her to believe he might be a construct
ion worker; there were lots of those about, with all the remodels and contract sites about.

  She had to wonder, though, if he might have had something to do with law enforcement. After all, he did act like a cop that day, with all that cocky demanding, and he did own a pair of handcuffs. She didn’t understand why he was so keen on leaving the scene if that was the case, though, because he’d acted as if he was intimidated by the presence of other police officers. Maybe he was undercover and couldn’t risk blowing his cover, she thought, but he didn’t seem to have the wardrobe of some decently-paid detective. Both times she’d seen him beyond that incident, his clothes seemed awful worn. Wherever he collected his paychecks, she was a little jealous of the people who got to spend their days working with him.

  After the coffee encounter, Cheri had tried to push him from her thoughts. Thomas’s rejection of her simple thank-you dinner invitation hurt, but even more than that, it was a stark reminder of how lonely her life was. Every day, it was the same routine: get up, go to work, and go home alone. She had met the cowboy, and now she wanted her life to be more of a rodeo.

  She found a little humor in the fact that her life now included searching for Thomas. At least it’s something new to do, she thought as she pondered where he might be. She was just about to set out on her nightly quest when she saw the black sky looming beyond the big picture windows of her office. The weatherman had been calling for fierce thunderstorms, and while she usually dismissed them because they always seemed to give apocalyptic, shock-and-awe weather reports that seldom came true, this time, they appeared to be right.

  The gathering clouds looked potent, and they made her anxious. There was nothing like racing to the metro from the office, dodging open manhole covers, and trying to avoid sky-splitting flashes of lightning while deftly passing metal bike racks and railings of all sorts. Hoping to beat the downpour and the onslaught, she immediately gathered up her stuff to head out.