Cowboy Justice (23 page)

“You run it every year?”

“Yup. Me and my deputies run as a team. It’s good fun, good press, that sort of thing. Last year was the first race since I’d quit smoking and, big surprise, it was my fastest time ever.” After a lingering inhale of the cigarette, he flicked it into a rusted coffee can, then handed her the rest of the pack. “Hide this from me, would you? Otherwise I’ll start right back up as soon as you leave.”

She tucked the pack in her lap. As soon as you leave.

There was her answer.

She hadn’t put it all together how desperately she’d wanted him to invite her to stay until he said that, but now the only thing she wanted more than to wake up with him in the morning, farm chores be damned, was for him to want her there.

Her heart aching something fierce, she brought her knees up and hugged them. “What happened to your family today? I heard talk at Smithy’s that your sister and parents were arrested, but all I heard were rumors.”

“That sounds about right for this town.” He shifted, twisting his fingers together as though, now that he was done smoking, he had no idea what to do with his hands. “My sister, Gwen, she has a disorder. Been cursed with it all her life. She steals things. From people’s houses, from her job or retail stores, all over the place. Used to be, the compulsion only seized her when she was nervous or scared. Last few years, though, she’s gotten worse.”

“That sounds like it would be tough on the whole family.”

“That’s the cold, hard truth. My folks, over the years they’ve been through way more than any parents should. I can’t tell you how frustrating it’s been for me to watch. I’ve done what I could to look out for Gwen. Wallace Meyer and I had an unspoken agreement that he’d look the other way with her shoplifting as long as I looked the other way with Junior’s, shall we say, hiccups with good citizenship.” He looked at her lap with hound dog eyes.

She set a hand on top of the cigarette pack. “Not on your life.”

He offered her a weak smile. “Fine. Be that way.”

“Was Gwen arrested for shoplifting today?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I mean, yes. But that’s not how the mess started. It started with Wallace Jr.’s trespassing and assault on your property.”

“You violated the unspoken agreement between yourself and Meyer when you arrested Junior, didn’t you?”

He scoffed. “Hell, no. Junior violated it the minute he brought rifles onto your land. That was no hiccup I could overlook. Even if I didn’t already have it out for Meyer, or if Junior had shot a stranger instead of the woman I—” He picked restlessly at his fingernails, scowling. “The details of who and what are immaterial. Junior’s guilty of assault with a deadly weapon, and no handshake agreement can save him from his crimes.”

“But Meyer didn’t see it that way.”

The statement roused a sardonic huff from Vaughn’s throat. “Meyer issued the order for his officers to search my parents’ house at the exact time I was transferring Junior from the hospital to the jail so I wouldn’t have the chance to interfere. The police found meth under my parents’ bed, weed in the cookie jar, and thousands of dollars of stolen goods in Gwen’s bedroom. I arrived at home in time to watch them cuff my mother and father and read them their rights.”

The despair Rachel felt that day came tumbling over her again. Vaughn’s foundation had been shaken as much as hers. More so, because unlike Rachel’s dad, his parents had been innocent victims. But she knew better than to show him sympathy for his experience. The kind of man she knew him to be, his only concern would be for his parents’ pain. “I’m so sorry they had to endure that.”

He scrubbed a hand over his nose and mouth. “The looks on their faces, of their hands cuffed behind their backs, will haunt me until the day I die. Nothing I ever do or say can make up for what I allowed to happen to them.”

She nearly argued that point, almost reminded him there was nothing he could’ve done. Then it hit her that she would’ve felt the exact same way. That she did, in fact, feel the same burden of guilt about what happened to her mother. Could it be that she was never actually capable of protecting her mother? Could that have been part of the illusion she’d bought into for too many years?

Her mother had spent many unsupervised hours in the house every day while Rachel worked on the farm. She was unsupervised all night long, as she and Rachel slept in different rooms on opposite sides of the house. Her mother could’ve overdosed without even leaving her room, if she’d had a mind to. How had Rachel managed to convince herself it had happened because she’d spent the night with Vaughn? Her guilt suddenly seemed ludicrous and self-indulgent.

Vaughn rubbed his throat. “Let me have that box, would you?”

Rousing from the trance of her epiphany, she fell forward, cigarette box in hand, and crawled behind him. She’d leave him as soon as she gathered the strength to do so, but for a few more minutes, she wanted to be near him. Resting on her side, she tucked the cigarettes behind her, hooked her arm around his shoulders, and dropped her forehead to the back of his neck. “Don’t do that to yourself. If you give in again, it’ll only give you something else to regret.”

With a soft snort, he grazed his lips over her forearm. “That’s the story of my life, Rachel.”

Was he implying that he regretted giving in to her tonight? Probably, but she certainly wasn’t going to apologize about asking for what she needed. “Were the drugs found in your parents’ house planted by the police, do you think?”

He shook his head. “Gwen confessed to hiding them when she heard the police coming through the front door. She figured they only had a warrant to search her bedroom, not the whole house.”

“After she confessed, were the charges against your parents dismissed?”

“The drug charges, yes. But Meyer’s still sticking it to them on harboring and abetting a known criminal. A judge released them on their own recognizance a few hours ago and I drove them home. Their house was trashed during the search, so I offered to put them up in a hotel while I cleaned or hired someone to, but they were too stubborn to let me.”

“Will those lesser charges stick?”

“They’d better not,” he said. “I’ve got to somehow convince Meyer to drop them, but I have no idea how I’m going to manage that within the purview of the law.”

“What about Gwen?”

“Gwen needs to pay her dues and get clean. Prison might be the best place for her right now. I hooked her up with a top-notch defense attorney and she’ll be sentenced early next week. My folks are sad about it, but seem to be taking it in stride.”

They settled into silence. He stroked her arm absentmindedly while she kept her cheek pressed to his back, concentrating on the rise and fall of his lungs beneath his ribs, the muscles of his back shifting, the unyielding tension in his shoulders. Beneath the residual smell of smoke, she caught a hint of soap and sweat on his skin.

“Something happened to you today too,” he said.

She unwound her arm from his neck and propped her back against his. “In the southwest field, Ben and I found an underground meth lab, of all the goddamn things.”

He craned his neck to look at her. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish.”

She could almost hear the wheels turning in his mind. “How was it ventilated?”

“Swamp coolers disguised in the irrigation flow vents.”

“How did you discover it?”

The prospect of answering that question for the hundredth time made her weary. “No offense, but I can tell you’re going into sheriff mode, and let me tell you, I spent the whole day answering questions like that for your deputies and Undersheriff Stratis. I could use the night off. I’m sure Stratis will fill you in tomorrow.”

“Stratis called me this morning, but I was too wrapped up in getting my parents out of custody to hear what he was saying. I designated him in charge of everything that came in and turned off my phone. I can’t believe the one day I was off the grid, you needed me and I had no idea.” With a groan, he shook his head, and Rachel swore she felt his shoulders hitch another notch toward his ears.

She did need him, but not in the way he was prepared to help her. More than anything, she needed him to ask her to stay. She needed strong arms around her that wouldn’t let go no matter what. But she wasn’t going to ask. She was done giving her heart over to men.

She cleared her throat. “There wasn’t anything you could’ve done differently from your deputies. When you didn’t come to investigate along with your men, and then you weren’t at the station house, I assumed it was because”—the truth hurt to think, much less say in a neutral tone of voice—“because you didn’t want to have contact with me.” She registered the strain in her words and, panicking, added, “Which was fine because you have a really great team of people working for you and they did an excellent job. Even Stratis was polite, which was a nice surprise.”

He cursed under his breath.

“I can’t tell you what it was like today, learning that my father destroyed my career, my future, and my ability to provide for our family. All these years, I thought our business went under because I wasn’t a good enough farmer. And he let me believe it.”

“You’re a great farmer.”

She scoffed. “Not yet, but I’m going to be someday.” Picking her fingernails, she added, “Did I ever tell you how I got into photography?”

He didn’t answer right away, like it took him a few seconds to make the mental U-turn. “No. I’ve always wondered.”

“I was seventeen. Riding along the northwest fence line with Cressley, the American Paint horse my dad got me for my tenth birthday. Going through an alfalfa field, I spotted a coyote crouched along the edge. Right there in the heat of the day. I figured he was sick or hurt, but before I could steer Cressley away, it sprang at us. Cressley reared and I fell.”

Vaughn eased away from her slow enough that she had time to shift her weight. He repositioned on the step so that his back was propped on the railing and he was looking at her. He patted the concrete next to him. “Sit here with me.”

She settled next to him, their shoulders touching. She fought the surge of affection the gesture evoked, but that proved impossible once he took her hand and cradled it in his.

“That’s better. Keep going. You fell . . .”

“I hit the ground hard and face planted in the dirt. I knew right away something in my body had broken, but couldn’t tell what.” The pain had radiated through her, tightening her throat, constricting her chest. It was the moment that marked the first time in her life she’d experienced real fear. The kind of bone-deep, suffocating fear that leaves the soul scarred. The soil had vibrated with the energy of hooves churning over the ground as Cressley fled. Then the world went silent but for the beating of her heart and the rustle of alfalfa in the breeze.

“What did you do?”

“I rolled to my back and held my right arm up for inspection. My hand dangled limp. The broken bone had cut through the skin near my wrist.” She spared him the gory details, but she saw them as plain in her mind as she had that day.

Vaughn sucked a breath in through his teeth and squeezed her hand. “Damn.”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about what the broken bone meant. I had responsibilities. I didn’t have the luxury to nurse a broken wrist. I was terrified for the future of the farm, and who was going to do the laundry or fix meals or get Amy and Jenna to school.”

“You were a child, but you were already running the show around there.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t have a choice. Somebody had to. I sure didn’t know how I was going to manage with my right arm out of commission. Not to mention the coyote was out there, and it wasn’t going to chase Cressley for long, not with a smaller, more helpless creature on the ground. I remember praying, Please don’t let me get bitten by a rabid coyote.”

“You would’ve died. Out there in the middle of nowhere, in the time before cell phones. Did anybody know where you were, at least?”

She rested the side of her head on his shoulder. He was so warm, so solid, it was hard not to crawl into his lap. “Not a soul, or so I thought. The longer I lay there, the more my fear subsided. Probably due to the shock I was in. I was at peace with the reality of the situation, you know? I settled into my fate. It was a typical June day, beautiful but hot. I remember looking up at the sky, framed as it was by alfalfa shoots. I remember breathing in their baked grass smell. Used to be my favorite smell in the world.”

He released her hand to wrap his arm around her, pulling her tight against his side. “Why’s that?”

Thinking about it made the smell tangible. She inhaled deeply through her nose. “That was the smell of survival for another crop season. It meant we were going to be okay.”

He drew lazy circles on her arm below her injury. “For me it’s the smell of metal heating in the forge fire of my father’s workshop. Best smell ever.”

“I don’t know that smell.”

“Guess I owe you an invitation to dinner at my parents’ house.”

Her throat constricted. What was she supposed to do with a loaded comment like that? “Does their house smell like a forge fire?”

He let out a soft laugh that vibrated against her ear. “Pretty much. My dad turned the original garage into a blacksmith workshop before I was born, so yeah, everything from the furniture to the carpet smells like a forge fire.”

“I’ll bet.” Before he could reiterate his offer or push the issue on dinner, she steered the conversation to neutral territory. “You want me to tell you what my long-winded story has to do with photography?”

“I was curious, but I didn’t want to rush you.”

“I was lying on the ground, looking at the sky. It was peaceful. I could make out the peak of Sidewinder Mesa in the distance. A smear of clouds pulled vertically behind it, like taffy, and I wished I’d had a camera.”

His hand stilled against her arm. “Seriously? Your arm bone was exposed and a possibly rabid coyote was lurking nearby, and you wished you’d brought a camera?”

She grinned. “Yeah, you’re right. It was an absurd thing to think about, but it’s the truth. Funny how the mind works when it’s in shock. Nevertheless, after that day, I was never without a camera again.” Knowing it would get a reaction out of him, she added, “End of story.”