Sawyer shot him another glare that, even without the raised eyebrow this time, told Ciaran in no uncertain terms what he thought of that.
Fray and Otis both laughed, and with a deep sigh, Ciaran handed Sawyer his sweatpants. Fray shuffled himself and Otis out of the room while Sawyer pulled his sweats on under the covers. “We’ll let him get dressed,” Fray said. “Though I do love to see who wears the pants in the relationship, so to speak. And I especially love that it’s not Ciaran.”
Ciaran couldn’t even be mad. He sighed again, gave Sawyer a kiss on the side of the head as he got out of bed, and then they followed Fray and Otis out of the room.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
SAWYER
Sawyer sat at his desk,absentmindedly tapping his fingers on the keyboard, wondering just how to word his email to Hadeom.
He wanted to keep his job.
Not for prosperity’s sake, and not for the public safety of this town—this town didn’t need a cop at all—but in case they needed help of a different kind.
Help of a militarised kind. A coastguard kind of help.
The whole Australian Navy kind of help.
If this Lusca was coming—and from what Sawyer could ascertain from the way they spoke of it, it was only a matter of time—then she would meet a twenty-first-century kind of resistance.
The last time she’d surfaced had been in the mid-1700s. She’d encountered humans with no more firepower than wooden ships with cannonballs.
Not that Sawyer had any clue what kind of battle they were in for. He had the terrible realisation that it would be fought at the bottom of the fucking Tasman Fracture trench, in freezing-cold water some few thousand feet beneath the surface. Far deeper than Sawyer could go. Below where he could help.
“What are you thinking?” Ciaran asked. He was sitting on the cot in the jail cell, legs outstretched, leaning against the wall with his laptop, looking a dozen shades of cute and sexy.
They couldn’t very well do work in their own respective offices—they still couldn’t be apart too far or for too long, even two days later. Well, he thought it’d been two days.... Time differences were made even harder by the fact that they spent most of their time fucking and dozing.
“Sawyer?” Ciaran’s smile was laced with concern. “You went from worried to horny. What are you thinking?”
Sawyer straightened up in his chair and cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah. Sorry. Was just remembering....” He shook the memory of this morning’s shower sex out of his head. “Uh, the worry part, yes….” They were still acclimating to feeling every single thing the other was feeling. They couldn’t hide a thing and while it took some getting used to, he wasn’t convinced it was a bad thing. “Just thinking about the likelihood of me being able to man a small submarine with firepower. How deep can those things go?”
Ciaran laughed, closed his laptop, and came out to lean against Sawyer’s desk. He bent down and kissed him softly. “No submarines.”
“Well, not mine, no. Unfortunately. But the Australian Navy has some with a hellfire arsenal. I’m sure Hadeom could pull some strings?—”
Ciaran shook his head, still smiling, his voice gentle when he said, “No.”
“I know,” Sawyer said with a sigh. “Keeping the secret. It’s the number one rule. I get that. But he knows. I dunno what. But he knows something. And if there was ever a time....” Sawyer could barely bring himself to think it. “The fact that you and the guys could be in serious danger scares the shit out of me, and I’m completely useless. I hate not being able to help.”
“I know,” Ciaran murmured. He put his hand on Sawyer’s cheek, his eyes searching Sawyer’s. “We’ll be okay. We’ll send her back with her tail between her legs.” He moved his fingers in a running fashion.
“And the fissure she crawls out of?” Sawyer asked. “At the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean. Can you just close it now? Before she even gets here?”
He screwed his nose up. “Fissure. What a terrible word.”
Sawyer rolled his eyes. “Is crevice any better?”
“Marginally.” Ciaran chuckled. “It would be good if we could, but we don’t know where it will open.”
Sawyer thought about that for a second. “So, it’s not a fissure or crevice so much as it is a portal?” He thought about it some more. “A portal from wherever the fuck she’s been for the past two hundred and fifty years. Like in those superhero movies.”
Ciaran’s eyebrows flickered as if this was something he hadn’t considered. “Maybe.”
“So we don’t need the Navy,” Sawyer said, pushing his keyboard away. “We need The Avengers.”
