Windswept by Anna Lowe Page A

went white as chalk. Mia clenched her fists and looked at him in a way she’d never done before. Not that
Ryan, I really like you
look.
    Not that
Ryan, you’re really sweet
look.
    More like a
Ryan, you’re the scum of the earth
look.
    Two more guys piled out behind him, oblivious to what was going on.
    “Did you try it with her in the shower, Hayes?”
    “Yeah, did you lather her up? Or did she lather you down?”
    Someone elbowed the guy into shutting up, but it was too late. Mia’s face went from so pale she was practically translucent to raging red, and she stretched tall and bristling and thoroughly outraged.
    “So, which of you New York cops do I report sexual harassment to? You?” She stabbed a finger in Ken’s direction, then moved on. “You?”
    Murphy took a step back and stuck his hands up.
    “Or you?” Her eyes narrowed on him. Ryan Hayes, stupidest dumb-ass cop ever to hit the five boroughs, because he’d let one offhand comment snowball into
this
.
    Her finger shook slightly, but she stood her ground, because Mia was Mia, and once she started something, she never, ever quit.
    He looked at her now, staring at her toes in the moonlight, and waited for her hands to curl into fists and let him have exactly what he deserved.
    She didn’t and she hadn’t, though. She’d turned on her heel, strode to the corner of the pool set up for the course with a whiteboard, and glared. Glared and glared and glared as the other instructor got them into the pool for the first exercise of eight interminable hours of hell, which Mia spent in stone-faced silence, looking at the guys like they were a bunch of miscreants who didn’t deserve the time of day. Which they pretty much were.
    Even when they came back from a brief lunch break she didn’t say a word. And if she noticed the black eye he’d given Ken the second he had the chance, she didn’t comment.
    Ken had been easy to make up with, even if it took Murphy steering him over after a fifteen-minute cool-down time to force them to try again.
    “I’m sorry, man,” Ken said. “I didn’t think she was your…your… Well, I just didn’t think.”
    Which pretty much summed it up, didn’t it?
    “Are we good, man?” Ken held out a hand for a fist bump which Ryan halfheartedly returned. Yeah, he and Ken were good. He and Mia, on the other hand…
    She sat across from him now, the midnight breeze teasing her hair, casting uncertain shadows over her face. Mia, sitting eighteen inches and a world away from him right now. If only a fist bump were all it took to make them all better again.
    “I’m so sorry, Mia.”
    There it was again, that ridiculously inadequate word.
    He’d hung around the pool for an hour after the class ended, waiting for a chance to talk to her, only to be told by the other instructor that she’d left by through the back door.
    Classy Mia Whitman, reduced to slinking out the back door. Because of him. The nauseous feeling he’d been fighting all day grew.
    Every honk of city traffic, every voice on the street was an accusation as he made his way home at the end of that miserable day. The couple of days he’d given Mia to cool down turned into a week and then into two, and two weeks was too late, because she was gone. The woman who opened the door to the apartment Mia had been subletting only knew that the previous occupant was gone. Where Mia had gone, how he could get in touch, the woman had no clue.
    Gone. Mia was just gone. Gone from the pool where they’d done their morning laps. Gone from the apartment. Gone from his life.
    The spring that seemed so promising withered away, and winter came back with a vengeance, slushy and cold and gray, especially on weekends when he wondered why the end of a short-term relationship would prompt a thousand mournful questions every day.
    “Okay, she was pissed off,” Ken had said at around that time. “But didn’t she kind of overreact?”
    That’s what he thought, too. At least at first. But