Page 66 of What Hurts Us

Layla’s knuckles turned white as she strangled the top of the steering wheel. “Are. You. Kidding. Me?” she hissed through gritted teeth. “The intersection wasempty,and it was a right turn!”

“Failure to come to a complete stop at a stop sign or red light carries a one hundred dollar fine in the state of North Carolina.”

She clenched her jaw. “This is payback for last night, isn’t it? You’re pissed that you had to ride to my rescue, so now you’re giving me a fucking ticket?”

I gripped the lip of the window and leaned in. “My feelings about last night and you have nothing to do with my job to uphold the law and keep this town safe.”

“You mean yourlackof feelings for me,” she shot back. The accusation hit me like a bullet.

A lack of feelings wasn’t the problem. An overabundance of feelings I didn’t know how to reconcile, on the other hand…

“Sit tight,” I clipped as I took her license and registration and walked back to my car. I could hear the whispers from the onlookers.

The entire town had come to a stop as I slid back into my cruiser. Tiffany stood on the patio of The Copper Mule, a tray full of food on her shoulder, watching me instead of doling out plates of biscuits and gravy. Christie Spellman, Louisa Mae, and Tammy Lynn stood on the stretch of sidewalk that connected the hair salon, the jewelry store, and the day spa, tittering amongst themselves. Shane and Elijah stood outside of the fire department, eyes on us, while they pretended to assess the rig.

Maybe it was a dick move, but no one was above the law. If the town saw me let her off with a warning, all hell would break loose.

They didn’t take a mile if I gave them an inch. They took a goddamn marathon.

We’d have a repeat performance of the time the Ladies Auxiliary decided that go-cart drag racing down Pate Chapel Road would be a good morale builder and money maker for their downtown revitalization projects. That wasn’t so much the problem as the fact that there was a three-drinkminimumto participate. They claimed it made things more entertaining. The law disagreed.

I walked back to Layla’s car, her ticket in hand. She had a spotless driving record, and it was an easy ticket to get dismissed. When I peeked in the window, she looked like she was on the verge of detonating.

Her cheeks were flushed. Her grip on the steering wheel was lethal, and her lip quivered like she was on the verge of tears.

My heart seized into a brick.

Without a word, she snatched the ticket from me and tossed it in the passenger’s seat.

“Drive safe, Miss Mousavi,” I said without a hint of remorse.

“Fuck you, Cal,” she rasped. Without another word, she rolled her window up and eased back onto the road, heading to work.

23

LAYLA

Iwas going to kill Callum Fletcher. I barely made it to the base without bursting into tears. The gossip grapevine had already informed AB of the reasons I was late. Rah-Rah, the bubbly blonde who had once auditioned on TV for a professional football team’s cheerleading squad at the age of forty-three, gave me a wide berth as we went through our daily base tasks. Even Loki avoided me, staying hidden in his crate instead of risking the wrath of the thundercloud that hung over my head.

That thundercloud was the thought of my soon-to-be celestially discharged fake fiancé.

My twenty-four hours on shift went by rather uneventfully. We had a daytime call to the mall in Raleigh where a woman had tumbled down an escalator, breaking nearly every rib. When EMS scraped her off the tile floor, her torso was a bag of skin filled with pulverized bones. Odin flew her first-class to the hospital while I delighted her with an in-flight cocktail of the narcotic variety. Sweet Beverly gave us a ten-out-of-ten rating as we transferred her higher up the continuum of care at the hospital. Tones had dropped again around midnight with a flight to Mt. Airy for a motor vehicle accident victim that we delivered to Novant Forsyth in Winston-Salem. Fire, police, and EMS had the scene secured and the patient ready for us on the ground. Rah-Rah charted while I tended to the patient. By the time we transferred care and got back in the chopper, we had made a faster delivery than every local pizza place in Falls Creek.

I lay in my bunk, silently willing tones to drop again and again, but they never did. I wanted some kind of emergency call to distract me from thoughts of last night. Of this morning.

I didn’t give a fuck that he’d given me a ticket. Okay, so maybe I did. But that was the least of my concerns.

It was the way he barely made eye contact with me after holding me all night like I was the most precious thing in the world to him. It was the chill in his voice.

He could touch me, kiss me, and make me want him more than I had ever wanted anyone, but he couldn’t be bothered to fucking look at me?

It was the fact that Ashley had emailed me a few photos she had tweaked and edited as a preview of our engagement photo gallery. We were standing on the footbridge when I had teetered backward. Ashley had captured the moment like lightning in a bottle—Cal reaching for me and pulling me in. His hand cupped my cheek as I stared up at him with utter adoration. His gaze was intense as he held me, pulling my body against his with one arm while he held my jaw, tipping my chin up to look at him. It all happened in a split second, but the intensity of the moment… It couldn’t have been fake.

Why had I fallen for him? Was this rock bottom? The crash that reminded me just how reckless I had been?

I thought abstaining from sex would help my heart mend after the last cop wrecked it. I should have learned it the first time: you don’t have to actually be with someone to fall for them.

And I had fallen like a skydiver without a parachute.

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