Melissa Cutler - Cowboy Justice

“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.

Vaughn earned his police badge with the Albuquerque City Police Department when he was twenty-two. That year marked Gwen’s first arrest, after she shoplifted a necklace from a Tucumcari jeweler. Wallace Meyer himself did the honor. Didn’t matter to him that Gwen’s parents had tended his horses every week for years. He recommended the maximum sentence to the judge for a petty misdemeanor—ninety days in juvenile hall and a five-hundred-dollar fine.

Vaughn pulled his patrol car into the driveway of the house he grew up in, parking behind his dad’s four-by-four Chevy. He knew by the collection of beat-down, piece of crap cars lining the street that Dad was holding class in his workshop. He’d retired from service as a farrier and now taught at the college full-time. When the mood struck him, he held class at his personal blacksmith shop in the house’s original garage.

Vaughn stepped from the car and adjusted the brim of his hat. The aroma wafting out of the kitchen windows told him Mom was home too, and baking cookies. Good timing on his part.

When Vaughn and his sisters were growing up, Mom worked alongside Dad as a farrier. They’d met while his dad was going through farrier college in Texas, and his mom had taken to the profession like a termite to wood. Eager to establish their own business, they’d picked up and moved west, to Tucumcari. A year later, Vaughn was born.

Mom gave up her career when she decided her firstborn daughter needed more rigorous supervision. Vaughn sometimes wondered if she ever missed her job. He liked to believe she regularly stole away to the blacksmith shop when no one was paying attention to craft trinkets out of forged steel for her church’s craft sales the way some women knitted hats or painted. Working with metal had been her favorite part of the job. Her hands looked too soft and fragile to handle the hammers and heat anymore, but a guy could dream.

Rounding the corner of the walkway that cut between the house and the garage, he saw a half-dozen folks gathered around his dad. Most looked college age, with a couple middle-age guys thrown in.

Small-time ranchers, when they scaled back their businesses or passed the work on to their children, sometimes signed up for farrier school. Probably the first time in their working lives they had time to learn how to shoe a horse. For the most part, professional farriers were called upon for horseshoe maintenance around ranch country. It was a skill that took a lot of know-how to master, and it was easier and more cost-efficient for a rancher to hire a farrier than learn the trade himself.

Vaughn leaned against the wood siding of the house, watching. He never got tired of listening to his dad teach, like he’d taught Vaughn so many years ago.

Dad bent over an anvil, tongs in one hand and a rounding hammer in the other, giving a lesson on shaping a toe clip. “Make the first blow a hard one. That’ll seat the shoe against the anvil.”

He demonstrated with a whack of the hammer that made the two older men in the class flinch from the noise.

“Hey there,” his dad said when he noticed him. “My son, Vaughn,” he said to his class in that proud father way that made Vaughn feel eighteen again.

He gave a two-finger wave.

Dad held out the rounding hammer. “Want to show them how a sheriff does it?”

“Nah, I’m on the clock. Besides, I never was as good as you.”

Dad beamed at that, his bushy salt-and-pepper mustache curving up at the ends. “Are you staying for dinner?”

Vaughn shook his head. “Need to have a word with Gwen, then get back to work.”

Dad paused, midswing of the hammer. Guess he read Vaughn’s tone and phrasing correctly. Having a word with Gwen meant she was in trouble.

Straightening, Dad passed the tongs and hammer to the nearest student. “Go ahead and take a few practice swings.”

Walking to Vaughn, he doffed his gloves and wiped his hands on his leather apron. “Everything okay?”

His code for What did she do this time? Up close like this, he looked old, with more gray hairs than brown, and his skin grizzled from too many years working near high heat and smoke.

“Nothing new.”

Dad nodded and smoothed his mustache, his eyes radiating a weary sorrow. Damn, Vaughn hated to cause his parents more grief. They’d suffered enough because of Gwen’s illness. Not much he could do about it now though. Not with Meyer ready to punish Vaughn by lashing out at his sister.

“Class is almost over,” Dad said. “Stop by the workshop before you leave. I’m forging a new sole knife tonight and could use your input.”

What he really wanted was the scoop on Gwen, and Vaughn respected him enough to give it to him straight. “Will do.”

As Dad resumed his lesson, Vaughn opened the kitchen door, then took his hat in hand. Mom was at the sink washing dishes.

“Hey, Ma.” He bussed her cheek with a kiss as his eyes trolled for the cookies he’d smelled from the driveway. They weren’t cooling on a rack, and they weren’t on the kitchen table. He checked the cookie jar. Empty.

She shooed him away with her drying towel. “Get on with you, now. They’re still in the oven.”