Melissa Cutler - Cowboy Justice

“There you are,” Jenna said as soon as she saw Rachel. “Billy and April, this is our farm’s number one cowgirl, my sister Rachel.”

Oh, joy. Time for the cowgirl act. She tipped the brim of her hat at them and kept moving toward the house, hoping to avoid getting sucked in to a conversation.

“Wow,” said a boy who looked a year or so older than Tommy. “You’re a real cowgirl.”

No dice. She stopped walking and turned around, smiling like she meant it. Wasn’t the kid’s fault she was having a rough week. “Sure am. And you look like a cowboy with that bandana and those shiny red boots.”

He puffed out his chest. “I am.”

Jenna crowded close to her and whispered, “You should be resting.”

Rachel shrugged. “Yeah, so?”

Jenna rolled her eyes. “So, Amy had Kellan running all over the place in his truck looking for you.”

“He didn’t need to do that. It’s not like I’m in danger of getting lost on my own ranch.” Jenna got that mothering look in her eye, like she was winding up for a lecture. Time for a topic change. She gestured to catch the visiting kids’ attention. “Did Jenna here tell y’all about Tulip’s favorite treat?”

The two children vigorously shook their heads. “What’s her favorite treat?” asked the youngest, a little blond girl of maybe three or four.

Rachel knelt next to the girl. “What do you think it is?”

“Cookies? That’s my favorite.”

Rachel nodded. “Good guess. Tulip doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, but she loves carrots. Jenna, why don’t you help these cowpokes feed Tulip some carrots?”

Judging by the raise of Jenna’s eyebrows, she knew she was getting played. Rachel smiled sweetly and inched away from the scene.

Pushing through the kitchen door, she was greeted by the aroma of baking sweets.

Amy’s head shot up. She slammed her knife onto the cutting board. “Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been?”

Rachel surveyed the telltale mound of diced celery on the counter, Amy’s favorite form of stress relief. “Yep. Pretty good idea. Sorry about that.”

“Where have you been?”

She sat on the bench near the door and took off her boots. “I tried to leave flowers where Lincoln died.”

That stopped her “Oh. You tried? Does that mean you didn’t?”

Rachel buzzed by the table, where two trays of scones sat cooling, and snagged one. “Couldn’t. It’s a crime scene. The sheriff turned me away.”

“It’s just as well. You shouldn’t have been out riding in the first place.”

She bit into the scone. “I told you, I needed fresh air.”

Amy dumped the celery in a bowl with a bit more zeal than necessary. “We’ve got fresh air right outside this door. There’s no need for you to saddle a horse and go riding over the countryside to find it.”

Quarreling was her and Amy’s natural state of communication, but Rachel didn’t have it in her at the moment. She edged toward the door to the dining room. “I promised the sheriff I’d bring in some photos of the ranch, so I’d better get on that so I can get to the evening chores.”

“Rachel, you were shot. You need to rest. Let us handle the workload today. Kellan can take the photographs to Vaughn.”

Tempting. Then there’d be no chance of her running into him inadvertently, no inquisitive looks by Vaughn’s deputies or rumors to dance around. Problem was, she couldn’t take a chance of her sisters or Kellan discovering the content of the photographs. She hadn’t managed to keep the vandalism under wraps for four months only for them to find out by a careless slip-up on her part. “Nah, I’ll take care of it. I think he’s got more questions for me. Anyhow, I rested enough in the hospital. You know I don’t have the temperament to sit around twiddling my thumbs.”

Amy clucked in protest, but didn’t press the issue, thank goodness. “Stop by the kitchen on your way out. I’ll send scones with you for Vaughn. Cinnamon raisin is his favorite.”

Rachel stopped midstride with her hand pushing on the kitchen’s swinging door. “It is?”

“’Bout the closest thing to a fruit or vegetable he’ll eat, in fact. Makes him impossible to cook for.”

Rachel chewed the inside of her cheek as a pulse of ridiculous, misplaced jealousy rippled through her. This was her sister, not some romantic rival. Still, it hurt to think Amy knew something about Vaughn that she didn’t. Hard not to wonder what else she didn’t know—what she’d never know since she’d never let herself get that close to him again.

“Are you feeling okay, Rachel? You look pale. Maybe you should sit down.”

“I’m fine.” She flashed Amy a smile to prove it. “When have you ever cooked for the sheriff? At Kellan’s house?”

Amy leaned her butt against the sink, her brow creased with concern as she looked Rachel up and down. “Yes. Every Sunday he and Vaughn and the Bindermans get together to barbecue and watch sports on TV. I thought you knew that. And by the way, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind you calling him Vaughn. He’s practically family, as close as he and Kellan are.”

If Amy only knew. She kept the reassuring smile on her face and shrugged the shoulder of her good arm. “Guess his title stuck in my head from all those years he hauled Jenna home in his cruiser after she’d been out whooping it up. Hard to think of him as family.” Which was God’s honest truth, even if it was technically a lie of omission.

“Oh, that reminds me! With everything that’s happened, I didn’t tell you we’re moving the barbecue here this Sunday so I can try a new barbecue ribs recipe I’m experimenting with for the restaurant. Kellan and I debated about canceling it, with what happened to you, but we both agreed that in times like this, it’s even more important to surround ourselves with family and friends. To celebrate all the things we’re grateful for and show those trespassers that nothing slows the Sorentinos and Reeds down.”

Vaughn. In her house—for an entire afternoon. The room started spinning. Rachel braced her other hand on the doorframe, squeezing the wood so hard it made her wound throb with renewed fury. “The inn’s guests leave Friday morning, so I figured it was a good time to host. Matt Roenick, Jenna, and Tommy will be here too. It’ll be fun.”

She heard Amy’s footsteps approaching, but she couldn’t make her body work.

Amy slipped an arm around her waist. “You’re not okay. I’m taking you to the sofa.”

She twisted out of Amy’s grip and started toward the stairs. “I’m fine. Never better. I’ll stop by the kitchen for the scones before I leave.”

The stairs left her winded, her muscles achy. Closing the door to her room, she spied the double bed in the corner and exhaustion, sudden and swift, made her whole body feel heavy. Maybe a short rest was in order after all so she’d be at the top of her game when she delivered the flash drive to Vaughn’s office.

She dropped her jeans and shirt to the floor, pulled the band from her hair, and crawled into bed in her underwear. Her room’s window faced the afternoon sun. It speared through the cracks of the blinds, glowing yellow. She studied the pattern of light until the warm quiet dragged her into slumber.

Vaughn’s younger sister Gwen was a riot. A brazen loudmouth with a wisecracking sense of humor like the rest of their mother’s side of the family, the Italian side.

Of the three Cooper kids, Gwen had received the highest concentration of Finocchiaro blood, complete with olive skin, curly black hair, and a fiery temper. Vaughn and his youngest sister, Stephanie, shared the black hair, skin tone, and loud mouths, but they’d missed out on the temper, thank goodness.

The way he and Stephanie figured it, the temper trait must be a hit-or-miss phenomenon because Mom was as mild-mannered an Italian as ever existed, while Vaughn’s nonna was as much of a surly spitfire as one might expect from a four-foot-nothing grandma who, as a child, had immigrated from the Mediterranean climate of Sicily to the Texas desert. Then again, by some relatives’ account, her temper hadn’t truly triggered until her only daughter married Gregory Cooper, a local, poor-as-dirt Irishman.

Nevertheless, Gwen’s temper came with her out of the womb and hadn’t simmered down yet. When she got herself wound up real good, she even got to looking like Nonna—her face red and scrunched, her gestures wild, and her long, curly hair tossing around like a black-leaf tree in a hurricane. Once, when she was a teenager, he told her as much, which nearly made her head explode from the pressure of her indignation. She’d given Vaughn the silent treatment for weeks.

No one knew who Gwen inherited her kleptomania from. It was the one Finocchiaro-Cooper family anomaly. First time she was ever caught stealing in public, at least in Vaughn’s memory, she was four years old to Vaughn’s ten. After a morning spent in the family’s blacksmith shop on the campus of Tucumcari’s farrier college, Gwen had come home with a pocket of horseshoe nails. During a lengthy interrogation by Mom, Gwen led them to the room she shared with baby Stephanie. Under her mattress, she dug out dozens of stolen shoe nails.

Shoe nails evolved into trinkets lifted from their nonna’s house and odds and ends from her school. Their parents’ reaction was abject horror. Vaughn remembered eavesdropping on a lot of whispered, heated discussions about Gwen and her issuethrough the years. He’d sense the mood shift on the other side of his closed bedroom door and creep out to listen.

Stealing from friends and family became shoplifting when Gwen was a teenager. That’s when therapy started. What a waste of money those quacks had been, because no matter how many hours she spent on a counselor’s sofa, no matter what kind of antidepressants they pumped her with, her impulse to steal only grew more powerful.