“Good.” He swabbed his face with a sweat towel. “By the way, I’m reassigning you to be my second on this case.”

Long pause. “I thought Stratis . . .”

“Stratis is busy tracking down the source of the AR—15s.” An executive decision Vaughn had made about two seconds earlier. No way would Stratis get near Rachel again anytime soon if Vaughn had anything to say about it. Binderman was still pretty green, but he’d proved himself to be an eager apprentice at the job. This was an ideal opportunity to kick his training up a notch.

“Okay. Thanks on that.”

After the call ended, he folded the map of Sorentino Farm and set it by his car keys on the table in his entryway. En route to the bathroom, he stripped out of his workout shorts and started the water for the shower.

While the water heated—slow business in a house as old as his—he braced his hands on the lip of the sink and stared at his reflection in the mirror.

The scar on his jaw shone bright pink, usual for after a workout. He didn’t mind its presence, and in fact felt lucky to have escaped with such a minor injury from the junkie who’d pulled a rusty switchblade on him during a routine traffic stop in Devil’s Furnace the year before. He rubbed at it absentmindedly, then angled his head to study his hair. It needed a trim. He leaned in closer and scowled at the sprinkle of gray hairs at his temples. Job stress and genetics—two of life’s inescapable constants. Not that Vaughn had anything in his life worthy of complaint. At thirty-six, he had it pretty damn good—a great job, a house he owned, loyal friends, and a solid relationship with his folks.

He didn’t have Rachel, and he wished that didn’t bother him as much as it did.

There were other women, something he kept reminding himself of. In the year and a half since Rachel broke off their affair, he’d been on a few dates. Nothing that got past dinner and a kiss on the cheek. No one he ever wished he knew more about, or wished they wanted to know more about him. It kept coming back to Rachel.

More than once, he’d forced himself to consider the possibility that his preoccupation with her stemmed from the same source that made him love his job as a cop—there was something intoxicating about learning people’s secrets and solving the mysteries of their lives. No one on this planet was as big a puzzle to crack as Rachel Sorentino.

Then again, maybe he was fooling himself to boil his attraction down to such a simplistic reason. She was a mystery, all right, but a beautiful, passionate one. When the two of them crashed into each other, the result was euphoric. Nothing he’d ever done in his life felt as good, as extraordinary, as connecting with Rachel, bringing her pleasure and finding his pleasure with her.

A month had passed since the last time they’d succumbed to the unyielding pull of each other. The memory stirred his body to life, his cock rising to nudge the cold porcelain sink.

He stared at his reflection, thinking about Rachel and their last time together, until the mirror steamed over. Then he stepped into the shower, adjusted the heat, and, bracing a hand on the tile wall, ducked his head under the stream of hot water.

The meeting with Rachel hadn’t been planned. Never was, even though he put himself in her path as often as opportunity allowed, which was easy enough in a town as small as Catcher Creek. The diner, Parrish Feed & Grain, the vet’s office. They knew each other’s trucks, and knew what it meant when one approached the other. When Rachel wanted him, she let him know it loud and clear, and he took the reins from there.

The last time she wanted him, last month, she found him at Smithy’s Bar. She’d sat across the room and never once looked his way, but he paid the tab for her single beer on the sly, then followed her out and helped her into the passenger seat of her truck. He’d pulled her truck into his garage. No need to set tongues wagging with her truck parked out front.

He fisted his erection, remembering the way she’d undone his pants right there in the truck the minute the garage door closed. The wet heat of her mouth on him, the dragging friction of her tongue and lips.

Every tug of his hand on his flesh brought the memory into sharper focus. The silky soft feel of her hair in his hand when he’d brushed it away from her face. The way the back of her throat felt on the head of his cock, the hint of teeth. Her hands working his balls.

They’d spilled out of his truck, a tangle of clothes and skin. In his head, he heard the mewling cry she gave when he bound her wrists with his tie and looped it over the hook on the wall. They didn’t always play that game, but she seemed to need it rough that night.

He drizzled soap over his hand and worked his fingers over the ridges of his shaft in long, pumping strokes. His teeth gritted, he relived the taste of her wetness when he’d dropped to his knees and buried his head between her thighs. Her exquisite pussy, pink and swollen, opening for him. He’d rolled her flesh between his lips, then suckled her clit as he worked his fingers inside her wet, hot body. She’d whimpered his name.

Damn, he loved the sound of his name in her husky, desperate tone of arousal. Knowing it wasn’t just sex for her—it was him. It was all the things he could do to her that no other man could. He replayed the sound. The breathy whimper of his name on her lips that signaled her surrender to pleasure.

Build up came too swiftly at that particular memory. Panting, he backed off, sliding his hand to the base of his erection. He fluttered his fingers over his balls, taking a break to fast-forward the vision to the moment he’d wrapped her legs around his waist and entered her, pushing inside until her tits hit his chest and his balls smacked her ass. He slid his fist along the length of his shaft, squeezing hard, mimicking the feel of entering her body.

Bracing her back against the wall, he’d removed the tie from the hook so she could drop her bound hands around his neck. They’d kissed openmouthed, violently. She’d bit his lower lip hard enough to draw blood, then licked it away. His eyes shut tight, he rubbed the sensitive flesh behind the head of his cock, recalling the wicked look in her eyes as her tongue had darted over her lip to lap the blood. She’d used the tie binding her wrists to pull his face to hers for a second taste.

Fuck, he couldn’t hold back anymore. He pumped hard and fast, Rachel’s voice echoing through his head, whispering his name when she came. Release swept through him, buckling his knees, summoning a grunt from his throat, as it had that night. Only this time, instead of spilling himself into a condom buried deep inside Rachel, his seed fell to the shower floor.

Instead of collapsing into the warm, soft body of the sexiest woman he’d ever been with, all he had to lean into was the cold tile wall.

* * *

Parrish Feed & Grain sat smack in the middle of Main Street, straight across from First Methodist Church and two buildings down from Smithy’s Bar. A square, single-story building with a two story façade of wood shingles done in a Wild West, frontier style, the store had probably looked sharp and fresh thirty years ago, but now looked old and tired.

Rachel admired the family’s ability to keep their doors open despite years of a downward spiraling economy, family deaths and squabbles, and the opening of a new feed supply superstore in Tucumcari the previous year.

At nine-thirty, Rachel pulled into their parking lot, which sat empty save for the company’s old beater of a forklift and one other truck Rachel recognized as belonging to Kate Parrish. This time of day, most farmers and ranchers were still busy mucking stalls and tending to livestock. Thanks to the hiring of Ben Torrey, Rachel was at liberty to make this trip to town for supplies without worrying about falling behind on her work.

She came armed with a long list she and Ben had written out that morning, supplies to prep the fields for the first alfalfa crop, as well as a credit card she hoped carried a high enough limit to pay for it all. Ben had all kinds of good ideas on getting the farm up to snuff as a competitive alfalfa grower, and neither he nor Rachel could wait to dig in and get started.

Growing up, Rachel and Kate had been a few years apart in school, with Kate being Amy’s age, and so hadn’t really had a good reason to be friendly until Kate took over as the feed store manager five years earlier, leaving her dad more time to make deliveries to bigger farms and ranches. The two sometimes walked across the street to the Catcher Creek Café for lunch or a slice of pie if the store was slow, and Kate regaled her with stories from her time in Washington, D.C., where she’d gone to college and briefly tried to make a living in politics. Sometimes she talked about her sister, Chelsea, who was a rancher’s wife in Clovis, or her younger brother, Carson, a deployed marine.

Rachel wasn’t sure what had brought Kate home to Catcher Creek, and Kate never got specific. Maybe she’d grown tired of politics, or maybe something happened in the Parrish family that Rachel wasn’t aware of.

The front entrance of Parrish Feed & Grain chimed when Rachel entered. Kate smiled at her from behind the counter, on which a thick ledger book was open. A fancy calculator held one side of the book open. Her curly, reddish-blond hair had been wrangled into a braid that had fallen forward over the shoulder of her denim shirt.

She propped an elbow on the counter and smiled. “Well, hello, stranger. I heard tell you were shot, but you don’t look very shot.”

Rachel grinned. “How, exactly, does a shot person look, do you think?”