Melissa Cutler - Cowboy Justice

He glanced at Rachel. She’d opened her eyes and was staring out the window, unaware that no matter how justifiable her reasons for shooting the police chief’s son, if Vaughn didn’t do some fast thinking, her life as she knew it was over for good.

Intense, the way Vaughn looked at her. Like she might conjure a gun and shoot someone if he let his guard down. He’d stayed by Rachel’s side while nurses fussed over her and a doctor cleaned her wound, walked in step with the hospital bed as they rolled her to radiology for X-rays, and claimed the only chair in the room when they’d settled her into a private suite for her overnight observation stay.

The nurses called it a suite, but the room felt more like a prison cell to Rachel, with Vaughn as her jailer. He was too close, his stare too penetrating. Thank goodness for the drugs the nurses had given her, because otherwise she might have crumbled under his scrutiny.

He was dressed in his uniform, but had unbuttoned the collar and loosened his black tie. She was partial to the tie. Not too long ago, he’d done unspeakable things to her with that tie. Or maybe, he burned the ones he’d used on her and purchased replacements. She wouldn’t fault him for destroying the evidence of their time together. Every single day she prayed to forget him too.

The room’s fluorescent lights glinted off the sheriff badge on his chest. The reflection shimmered on her skin as she lifted her hand to touch his tie. The material was coarse, utilitarian, against the pad of her thumb. A zing of lust rippled through her belly.

Vaughn shot to his feet with a sharp inhale and prowled to the closed door to look out the narrow window. She fisted her hands in the blanket. Why had she done such a stupid thing as touch him?

When he returned to her bedside, he was careful to drag his chair out of reach, she noticed with an equal measure of gratitude and irritation. “Your sisters are waiting outside, and they’re worried.” His voice was strained, and he clutched the arms of the chair with a white-knuckled grip. “I know you want to see them, to show them you’re okay, so please try, Rachel. Try to concentrate on my last few questions so I can let your sisters in the room.”

She couldn’t remember any questions. “Ask me again.”

“After you called me from the canyon, what did you do next?”

“I reloaded my gun and climbed around the west side of the mesa.”

“What were the four men doing at that point?”

It had been over a year since she’d looked at Vaughn long enough to really see him. Their mistakes in the interim had taken place in the dark of night, and were over too soon for her to notice anything but the way he made her feel. His thick, dark hair was a smidge longer than she remembered, combed and held in place with a touch of gel. A new scar, an inch-long jagged line that still glowed pink, ran along his jaw near his right ear, and time had etched new laugh lines into the corners of his blue eyes.

Yet so much about him hadn’t changed. His face still disarmed her, with its high cheekbones, straight, squared nose and full lips that were the window to his emotions. Whatever he felt at any given time, she could always see it in his lips. His shoulders were as stiff as ever. That she remembered with perfect clarity. The way his shoulders began each morning relaxed, then crept ever closer to his ears as the day wore on.

“Rachel, please. What were the four men doing while you climbed the mesa?”

She rubbed her eyes and turned away from him. “Smoking dope, reloading their rifles, joking around.”

“They didn’t know you were coming to confront them?”

She huffed. “I wasn’t coming to confront them. I was coming to shoot them.”

“Jesus, Rachel, you can’t tell me stuff like that.” He flexed his hand and glanced at the closed door. His lips grew twitchy, and she knew he was deliberating some important choice. “Let’s stop talking about what happened today.”

She didn’t understand his worry, but felt too weak to question him about it. “Okay.”

“Has anything like this ever occurred on your ranch before? The graffiti or the people trespassing?”

She shrugged, then grunted when it sent a stab of pain through her injured arm. “A dozen or so times in the past four months. I kept photographic records on my camera and computer. I’ll hand the pictures over to you.”

He stared at her for a heartbeat, then vaulted from his seat and yanked the privacy curtain around her bed. “A dozen times? And this is the first I’m hearing about it?”

“It was no big deal.”

In a flash, he was leaning over her, his fists punching the pillow on either side of her head, his expression livid. She flinched. Not that she was one to cower, but it was unbearable, having him close enough for her to catch the scent of his aftershave and feel his breath on her face. She wanted to look at his eyes—his eyes alone broke her heart—but she held herself in check, and instead stared down her body, to the place where his tie brushed her chest.

“I have my reasons,” she whispered.

“Is it because of you and me?” His voice was even lower than hers, a note on the wind. With his hand on her jaw, he held her face until she met his eyes. “Is that it? You didn’t want me anywhere near you? Is that why you risked your life, because you were too proud to ask me for help?”

If only. But pride had nothing to do with it.

She held his gaze, wondering if he could see the truth in her eyes.

The hand that held her jaw relaxed. “You’re so damn proud.” He slid his fingers behind her ear into her hair. “But you’re going to have to trust me from here on out. What happened in Parillas Valley has put you in a situation. A real bad one. I’m going to do everything I can to get you out of this mess, but I’ve got to follow the letter of the law.”

She stared at him, confused and—for the first time since Vaughn’s patrol car barreled into Parillas Valley with its sirens blaring—afraid. “What?”

His eyes bore into hers, serious and sad. “Your and my every move is going to be scrutinized like nothing you’ve known before.” His hand cupped her head; his thumb curled over her ear. “I need to know. Have you ever told anyone about us?”

The question stung worse than a slap. If she’d had the strength, she would have shoved him away, shoved him out the door and out of her life for good. She screwed her mouth into a sneer as bitter acid crawled up her throat. How could she want someone so badly who took every opportunity to remind her that their relationship was nothing more than a filthy secret?

Rachel had never confessed her affair with Vaughn to anyone, including Jenna and Amy, because she was a coward, through and through. To this day, her sisters had no idea Rachel was to blame for their mom’s purposeful overdose on vodka and pills the year before. No idea that four weeks into her grief over losing their dad, she’d left their bipolar mom—who’d tipped over the mental deep end when her husband died—alone at night in the house so she could run off and get laid by the sheriff investigating Dad’s death. Jenna and Amy, along with the rest of the town, had assumed she’d been home that night, and neither she nor Vaughn had corrected their thinking.

Not only was she too cowardly to face their wrath, but confessing the truth would’ve landed Vaughn in trouble with his job. He should never have been sleeping with a person connected to a possible murder investigation. She supposed he had his own reasons for going ahead with the affair, as she had hers, and the car crash that killed her dad was eventually deemed a freak accident, but it didn’t change the facts. They had each done something horribly wrong, and Rachel’s mom had paid the price.

“Rachel, I need to know who you told.”

The fear in his voice dragged her to the present. Whatever he made her feel, the agony and the bliss, none of it mattered at the moment. She shook her head. “No one. You know that. But . . . I don’t understand. Why am I in so much trouble? I was defending myself today.”

She could see the outline of his tongue pushing around the inside of his lips. He stared past her, to the wall behind her bed, and took a deep, slow breath. Then he lowered his forehead to hers. The hand that had been holding her head dipped lower to clutch her upper back beneath the open hospital gown. The feel of his hand spanning her shoulder blades was the most marvelous and painful sensation she’d experienced since the last time he held her.

Of its own volition, her good arm hooked around his neck, clinging to him like he was the anchor she’d always needed him to be but he never had been.

His breath was ragged, his eyes closed. “Rachel, you shot a man in the back with an unregistered .38. You had every right to defend yourself on your property, but this man’s name is Wallace Meyer Jr. He’s the Tucumcari police chief’s only child.”

She swallowed, speechless. The revolver had been her father’s, locked in a safe with a handful of hunting rifles, and she’d never given using the gun a second thought.

Wallace Meyer had been cop numero uno in Quay County since Rachel was young. She remembered seeing him on the local news, giving official statements on various crimes and drug busts. Tucumcari, the county seat, was thirty miles east of Catcher Creek, but the two towns were inextricably linked. Actually, every small town in Quay County depended on Tucumcari like a lifeline. Within its city limits were the county’s only community college, library, and jail. Of the county’s twelve thousand residents, over half lived there.