When Stefan had offered him the job of Sheriff of Bliss, it seemed like the perfect place to start over. Of course, Stef hadn’t mentioned that he’d have to deal with Max or crazy-ass Mel, who insisted daily that the aliens were coming. No one had mentioned that he would be the law enforcement liaison to a nudist colony, or that once a year the new agers came in to soak up the vibrations or some shit that Bliss gave off. It was a weird town, and he was rapidly getting fed up with it.

 “Damn it, Max.” Callie walked into the sheriff’s office, pushing her cute little glasses up her nose. She was so adorable, Nate wanted to walk up to her and hug her. Of course, hugging would lead to rubbing, and he just knew if he laid a hand on her, he’d end up humping her leg like a dog. She was such a sweet armful. Even dressed in a denim skirt and blousy shirt, she was sexy as hell. Why hadn’t Stef bothered to mention that the woman of his dreams would be his secretary? Stef sure as hell hadn’t forgotten that he had a past with Callie. He just didn’t seem to care.

Callie completely ignored him. She blew past him, her hands on those curvy hips of hers, and plowed toward Max Harper. Callie never did anything without a great deal of energy. It was one of the hottest things about her. Callie was always moving, but Nate remembered a time when her energy had been spent, and all she could do was sigh. He’d give anything to get her underneath him again. But she was still off-limits.

Harper’s boots tapped against the floor. “Now, Callie, don’t you yell at me. Talk to that tight ass boss of yours. He’s pulling people off the street for no reason. He should be impeached. Rye would never have done something like that.”

Nate came off the desk, prepared to defend himself. He’d heard an awful lot about how the old sheriff handled things. Nate wondered if he would ever come out of the man’s shadow. Everywhere he went, he was compared to Rye Harper.

He couldn’t see her face, but he knew Callie was rolling her eyes. She just had that sarcastic stance. He’d learned an awful lot about reading Callie’s body language in the last two weeks. “Rye didn’t arrest anyone because he was as lazy as the day is long. I could barely get him to write a ticket. Sheriff Wright is an actual, honest-to-goodness cop, and not just some high school kid who didn’t want to work at Stella’s Diner.”

Logan’s head came out of the latest issue of X-Men. “Stella works too damn hard, if you ask me. This place is way calmer than the diner, what with all the tourists and having to deal with Nell and Henry’s protests. And seriously, have you seen what happens when you get that guy’s order wrong?”

Harper slapped at the bars of his cell. “I like my burger dead, man. Hal tries to cut corners by shoving a live cow in between two buns and calling it a burger. You want to arrest someone, Sheriff? Go arrest Stella’s short-order cook.”

Logan nodded as though happy to have confirmation of his life choices. “You see what I mean? Being a deputy is way less dangerous than working at Stella’s. And I graduated three years ago. Stop calling me a high school kid. At least move me up to college. Speaking of college…I’m thinking about taking one of those online courses. You think I could use the computer here?”

Nate narrowed his eyes, and Logan suddenly bolted out of his chair. “I’ll go catch some speeders. That’s a good idea.” Logan was smashing his hat on his head as he nearly ran out the door.

“Will you stop scaring the crap out of your deputy?” Callie frowned Nate’s way as the door literally hit Logan’s ass on his way out. The deputy yelped. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to get someone to agree to this job? This is a whole town full of antiestablishment hippies. They weren’t lining up to put on a uniform.”

Nate shrugged. Scaring the piss out of Logan was one of the highlights of his days here in Bliss. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Callie.” He attempted his most angelic look.

Now he could actually see the eye roll. It was an expression she used a lot on him. “Sure you don’t. I heard you recounting all of your so-called kills to him. Do you want to give that boy nightmares? And you…” She whirled back around to face the man in the cell. “What is your wife going to say?”

Max Harper grinned arrogantly. He wore jeans, a western shirt, and boots. He was all cowboy, all the time. “She’s going to say nothing because once I get my phone call, I’m calling Rye. He won’t tell Rach anything. I have too much on him. We’ve got a nice, mutually assured destruction balance going on.”

Nate sighed, a genuine sense of pleasure running through his system. This might even be better than giving Logan Green a bunch of baloney stories. This one was real. “Don’t worry about that phone call, Harper. I took care of it for you. Your wife said she’d be here as soon as she…what were her words? Oh, yeah, she’ll be here as soon as she sharpens a knife so she can cut your balls off.”

It took everything he had not to burst into laughter at how green Max Harper got. His hands fell to his sides, and he sat back on the little cot. “You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“You asshole. We had a friendly little game going and you have to play hard ball?” Harper looked like a little boy who had his toys taken away.

“Friendly little game? You call doing seventy-five miles an hour in a forty mile an hour zone a game? Then you didn’t stop when I put on the lights and the siren.”

“I was looking for a safe place to pull over.” Harper shrugged.

“For ten miles?” He’d followed that son of a bitch all the way down the damn mountain.

There it was, that arrogant smirk that made Nate want to clobber him. “Those roads are damn dangerous. I was giving you a signal that I would pull over as soon as I could.”

“You flipped me the bird, asshole.”

“See, now is that any way for a cop to talk? When my brother was the sheriff, he would never have used that sort of language.”

“He cursed your name on a regular basis,” a stern female voice added to the mix.

Harper shifted back as though the bars wouldn’t keep him safe from the terrifying newcomer. Rachel Harper was roughly five feet two and, if rumors were true, expecting a baby. Maxwell Harper was utterly terrified of his pretty little pregnant wife. She crossed to the middle of the room and stared a hole through him.

“Hi, baby.” It was obvious Max was going for sympathy. All of the arrogance on his face had fled in favor of a sad puppy look. “That man does not like me. He looks for any excuse to mess with me.”

Rachel ignored him. She turned to Callie. “Does he need to make bail?”

“No,” Callie said.

“Yes,” Nate interjected.

Now it was Callie staring at him, and Nate understood Max for a moment. Nate might not have impregnated Callie, but she had a hold on him all the same. “You are not leaving him in jail until the judge gets back from his hunting trip.”

“No, I need him to come home. I have a few words to say to you, husband number one,” Rachel said.

“I can stay.” Max nodded his head vigorously. “I don’t want any special treatment.”

“Max Harper, you will get out of that cell and get your sweet ass into the car, or there will be hell to pay.”

A long, slow smile tugged at Harper’s lips. He got up from the cot and stalked to the bars. “Hell to pay, huh? What kind of hell you going to put me through, Rach?”

Rachel cocked her head to the side as she stared at her husband. “I think you know what I’m talking about, Max. I’m going to need at least twelve hours.”

Max’s face flushed. He suddenly seemed very anxious. “I should get arrested more often.” He turned to Nate. “I am very, very sorry for the shameful way I taunted you, Sheriff Wright.” Harper snickered. “Sorry, it’s just the most clichéd name ever for a sheriff, but I utterly respect your authority.”

The asshole didn’t, but Callie was already getting the keys to the cell. He needed to hide the damn things. Every time he put someone in custody, his admin let them out.

The door to the station house slammed open, and Max’s twin brother, Rye Harper, ran in, his boots sliding across the slick floor. “Callie, I need to get Max out of here before…hey, baby.” Rye plastered a smile on his face. “I was just at the diner and found out Max had done it again. Damn it, Max, when are you going to grow up? Don’t you know we got a baby on the way?”

“Yes, you’re here to lecture Max.” Rachel Harper obviously wasn’t buying it. “BS, Rye, you’re here to bail him out and be his alibi, just like you always are.”

Max strode out of his cell and crowded his little wife, one hand sliding across the nape of her neck, the other rubbing her belly. “Don’t worry about it, bro. Me and Rach have a system worked out. If I screw up, then I have to be her sex slave for awhile. It’s a terrible punishment. It’s going to get me on the straight and narrow one of these days.”

Rye was immediately at her other side. “Well, I would like to point out that I was going to bail him out and then hide the evidence from you. That makes me every bit as guilty as him.”

Rachel’s laugh filled the station as she sent her husbands out to the car. The men ran to do her bidding, and she turned to Callie. “Sorry. Max is worried about the baby. You know how he gets when he’s anxious.”

Callie hugged the pregnant woman, her affection obvious. “He’s obnoxious all the time, Rachel. It’s part of his charm. Don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to that one about being a little more tolerant.”

Nate stood a little taller because he was pretty sure he was about to get lectured. Rachel left to follow her husbands. Husbands. Damn, as much as he hated Max Harper, Nate was also completely fascinated with the way the man lived his life. The Harper family consisted of the twins, and their shared wife, Rachel. No one in town even blinked. Nate had caught some of the tourists shaking their heads when she smooched on both, but the citizens of Bliss took it all in stride. One of these days, he was going to sit down with Rye, who seemed far more reasonable than his brother, and talk about how it really worked.

But for now, he had to deal with Callie. He went on the offensive.

“You have to stop doing that.” He made his tone firm. He wasn’t Max Harper, afraid of one small woman. After everything he’d been through, he knew all about fear, and it didn’t come in such a soft package. He’d just been wary of dealing with her. He’d spent the last two weeks mooning over what he couldn’t have, and now it was time to take the situation in hand. “You are my administrative assistant, Ms. Sheppard. If you want to be a deputy, you can take the test, and I’ll put your name on the waiting list.”

“If you don’t like my work, Sheriff, you should feel free to fire me.” She turned on her little kitten heels and stomped back toward the front desk. She sat down on her chair and immediately began to straighten a bunch of stuff that was already neat and organized.

She had him there. He was never going to fire her. He couldn’t even stand the possibility of her quitting. Hell, he didn’t like the days she took off, and more often than not found some damn silly excuse to see her. Feeling utterly impotent, Nate stalked into his office and slammed the door shut. He slumped down into his comfy chair and pondered his situation. Zane was getting worse, not better. He hadn’t been able to get him out of the cabin to come into town in the two weeks they had been living in Bliss. Zane still didn’t know Callie was here. Nate hadn’t told him for fear that Zane would take off on that bike of his, and Nate wouldn’t see him again until he had to identify his body.

It had seemed like a good place to start over after everything that happened. Nate couldn’t go back to the DEA, and there was no way Zane would go back even if they would let him. When he’d quit the DEA, Nate had been told that the director would hold his job, but he couldn’t even consider it while Zane was recovering. Zane’s body had healed, but his mind was still in a dark place. He’d needed a place where Zane could recover, but the bastard didn’t seem to want to recover. He wanted to brood. He wanted to rage. He wanted to beat the shit out of anything that came in his path. Nate kept hoping that would change, but now he wondered. Maybe they should have just gone back to Dallas.

It would be easier if she wasn’t here, but he needed her, damn it, and in more ways than one. Nate wasn’t used to small town politics, and he doubted anyone on the planet was used to Bliss politics.