Melissa Cutler - Cowboy Justice

Then Stratis’s eyelid twitched. “I’m going to head to the office to touch base with my source about stolen AR-15s.” He glanced at Rachel.

Vaughn did the same. She was still a solid five minutes out. “You do that. I’ll be along shortly.”

He followed Stratis from the mesa to the patrol cars parked in the valley. While Stratis fired up his engine and got organized, Vaughn reached through the open passenger window of his own car. He groped in the glove compartment for the pack of cigarettes he kept on hand.

Stowing a pack in the car was a mind-over-matter trick he’d started his first day of quitting. There was a certain power in having the substance he was addicted to within reach and making the conscious choice every time he got behind the wheel not to succumb to temptation. Problem was, every now and then the pull of addiction was too strong to resist.

Leaning against the hood, he held the sealed pack and watched Stratis’s car disappear in a cloud of dust, his mind locked on Rachel and cigarettes. His fingers grew slick with clammy sweat, sticking to the cellophane wrapper as he tried fruitlessly to remove it. A few puffs would provide so much relief. He’d snub it out after that, but then maybe he could face Rachel without ripping his throat out to stop the tickle.

She’d smell it on me. If I took a quick smoke, she’d smell it on my breath and in my hair and on my clothes. Then again, if she got that close, I’d have bigger problems to worry about.

A glance over the top of the car told him Rachel was close. He needed to intercept her before she crossed into the crime scene.

He shook the box, listened to the cigarettes moving inside. Halfway through a deep inhale of the faint tobacco scent, he froze. “What am I doing?”

Sniggering in self-disgust, he returned the pack to the glove compartment and walked away from the car. Any other day, he might have felt good, noble even, about rejecting the lure of nicotine. But it was impossible to feel strong with his other, more powerful addiction flying across the desert valley on horseback, headed straight at him like a force of nature.

He positioned himself at the edge of the crime scene, his legs apart, hands on hips, bracing for impact.

Rachel and her mount stopped several yards away from Vaughn. He didn’t recognize the horse, a lean, muscular palomino with a golden mane, but it looked as though it had enjoyed the run as much as its rider did.

Tendrils of long, brown hair had pulled loose from their binding to frame Rachel’s flushed cheeks and neck. Her position in the saddle accentuated the curve of her hips and small waist. A large white bandage peeked out from under the hem of her short-sleeve T—shirt, but otherwise, she looked as strong as ever, her body giving no indication that she’d been laid up with a gunshot wound until a few hours ago.

“You’re home from the hospital already.”

Way to state the obvious, jackass. He’d always prided himself on knowing exactly how to play any given situation, but not around Rachel. Her presence stripped him of even that basic skill.

She shrugged the shoulder of her good arm. “I don’t know about already. Felt like it took forever to get out of that place.”

During their affair, he’d lost count of how many nights he’d awoken alone in bed only to find her on his back porch, watching the stars. The house is too small, she always told him with a self-deprecating smile. “That’s because you hate being stuck indoors.”

“True enough.” Her horse huffed noisily, like it didn’t want to be left out of the conversation. She rubbed its neck and eyed Vaughn cautiously. “For some reason, I didn’t consider the idea that anyone would be out here today.”

It bothered him, her response. Got him thinking about premeditation and guilt. He’d already been wondering what she hoped to accomplish by revisiting the crime scene, but why had she hoped to find it unattended? What had she planned to do? “It’s a crime scene. My deputies and I are still processing evidence.”

“Guess I didn’t think it through too clearly when I set out.”

“Why did you come here?” He tried to keep the question from sounding like an accusation, but he had to know.

She watched him with a guarded expression and swung off the saddle. Vaughn felt the agility and power in her movement like a bare-knuckle punch to his heart. It was all he could do not to stagger back, clutching his chest.

She clipped a lead rope to the horse and guided it toward the irrigation spigot left over from the bygone days when alfalfa fields filled the valley.

Vaughn walked alongside them. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Unfinished business, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay. This is a crime scene. You can’t be here.”

The horse sniffed him curiously as it waited for water to fill the plastic tub below the spigot. He held his hand out for the horse’s inspection. After a few sniffs, he licked Vaughn between the fingers, then pushed his nose into Vaughn’s palm.

“This one’s a kisser,” he said, stroking his nose.

“His name’s Growly Bear.”

Vaughn scratched beneath his ear, which earned him a lick on the cheek. “Doesn’t seem growly to me.”

She shut off the water and tied the lead rope to the spigot. “He’s not his usual feisty self.”

“Something wrong?”

“He was Lincoln’s best buddy.”

Vaughn’s shoulders sagged. In all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, he’d forgotten that Rachel would be grieving over the loss of her horse. “I’m sorry about Lincoln.”

She avoided his gaze as she walked to her saddlebag. Tucked inside was a bundle of dried grass stalks and wildflowers tied around the middle with a blue ribbon. “I wasn’t trying to do anything illegal, coming here. I didn’t consider it from the crime scene angle. I came, we came”—she gestured to Growly Bear—“to put these out for Lincoln where he died.”

Vaughn longed to reach for her, to help her through her grief. But that was exactly how the mess of their affair started in the first place after her father’s death. “What happened with Lincoln, nobody should have to go through that. But I can’t let you down there.”

She nodded, her expression distant as she crushed at a dried flower between her fingertips. “Was his . . . body taken away?”

“Yesterday.”

She crushed another flower. The bits fell over the ground like grains of salt. “I need to say good-bye to him.”

And he wanted nothing more than to let her. He pressed a hand to his throat and stalked away, unable to look at the sorrow in her eyes for another second without touching her.

He heard her footsteps trailing him. “Vaughn, please . . .”

He stopped and let his gaze sweep over the valley—anywhere but at her. He felt her warmth standing behind him, heard her breath, and knew if he turned around, he was a goner. “We can’t have you adding things to the crime scene, even flowers. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to find another way to say good-bye until the investigation’s over.”

“No one’s here but us, unless one of your deputies is hiding behind the mesa or something. You could let me go down there. I won’t leave this, but I could use a moment of silence for him.”

“No one else is here, but I still can’t.” He’d compromised his professional ethics too profoundly with Rachel the first time around, and the guilt had eaten away at him ever since. He knew better than to make the same mistake again. But knowing better meant nothing with Rachel standing so close. “I’m trying to build a case against the men who hurt you and Lincoln,” he ground out.

“I know.”

The same hawk as before circled in the distance, coasting effortlessly, as if its will alone kept it aloft. “I can’t keep you safe if I have to remove myself from the case because of our relationship.”

“What we have isn’t a relationship. It’s a series of mistakes.”

He winced. Her words stung, even though he understood the dark place of anguish that brought them forth. As much as he’d never let go of the guilt for sleeping with a witness during a possible murder investigation, she’d never forgive herself that her mom attempted suicide while she was in Vaughn’s bed. “You and I were not the mistake, Rachel. The timing was. If we’d waited until the case closed. If we’d—”

“How many years have we known each other?”

Easy question, even if he couldn’t see where she was going with her line of thought. She’d been haunting his world since his first week as a sheriff deputy. “Twelve years.”

“Exactly. Took us more than ten years to do anything about the interest we had in each other, and when we did, we chose the worst possible circumstance, almost as though, on some level, we’d chosen the timing on purpose. Why did we do that?”

Hell if he had any idea. “I don’t know why we sabotaged it. I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

“I think it was because we knew, instinctively, it would never work between us. The night my mom overdosed, that’s when I opened my eyes and took a good look at myself. I despised what I saw.”

The bitter hurt in her words propelled him around to face her. She stood within arm’s reach, her jaw set resolutely, her eyes hard. She clutched the elbow of her injured arm.

“What did you see?” he asked, knowing he was going to hate the answer.

“I saw a woman who sacrificed her every core value for a screw.”

He swabbed a hand over his mouth, furious at her for disparaging what they’d had together. “We were more than that.”

“Then how come, every relapse we’ve had since, all we do is sleep together? We don’t talk, we don’t laugh.” She released her elbow and spread her arms wide, as though she were going to shout. But her voice only grew quieter, until she hissed the words. “We don’t have a single thing in common except compatibility in bed. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we can’t screw each other into happiness. Life doesn’t work that way.”

Frustration roiled through him with gathering intensity. Fisting his hands at his side, he fought to keep the wild gestures that came with his Irish-Italian blood under control. “You’re only remembering what’s convenient. We talked a lot, and laughed too. We sat in my truck or on your porch and talked all night long. Don’t you dare tell me our time together didn’t mean anything to you but a screw.”

Her lips twisted into a sardonic grin. “And yet, you regret it as much as I do. What does that tell you?”

With those words, Vaughn’s anger deflated. All he wanted to do was hold her, to ease the suffering he’d brought into her life from the moment he’d taken advantage of her grief so many months ago. To ease his own tortured heart. One step forward and he’d be near enough to trace the edge of her jaw with his fingertip, or slide his thumb across her lower lip. “Rachel . . .”

She took a step away. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t say my name like that, like you do when we . . .” She looked at the sky, like the words she was grappling with might be written there. “Vaughn, I can’t . . .”

She didn’t have to finish the thought—he knew exactly what she was trying to say. He wrapped a hand around her wrist and pulled her against him. His hand trembling with barely harnessed need, he removed her hat and tossed it behind her.

Threading his fingers through her hair, he held on for dear life. “I can’t, either,” he said softly. I can’t be with you, but I can’t stop thinking about you. Most of all, I can’t figure out a way to make us work.

She clutched a fistful of his shirt. “We shouldn’t be here alone.”

“No,” he said from behind clenched teeth. Because without the buffer of people around them, there was nothing stopping him from kissing her, or from taking her right there on the hard earth like he’d done more than once in the past. Desire, sudden and intense, knifed through his insides, so potent it made his bones ache.

“You’ve got to be stronger than me, Rachel. You’ve got to get out of here right now before anything happens.” He heard the strain in his voice, and knew she could too.

Instead of walking away, she slid her hand up around his jaw. Her lips brushed the edge of his mouth. “I hate who I become around you. Weak. I’m so weak.”

Weakness was something he knew all about. He worked a hand under her shirt, stroking the soft skin of her back. “I hate who I am around you too. You cloud my judgment, and I lose sight of everything I stand for. But I can’t help it. . . .”