Cowboy Justice (7 page)

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.

Chapter Five

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. . . .”

She pulled back and looked at him with eyes reflecting the same desperate longing that coursed through his veins. She trailed a finger along his temple. “I can’t let you go.”

There was nothing left to say. Dizzy with adrenaline, he wound her ponytail around his fist and dropped his lips onto hers, taking her mouth hard and deep like he knew she liked it. She surrendered to him, her hand gripping his shoulders, her breasts pushing against his chest.

The world apart from them disappeared, and all that was left in Vaughn’s universe was Rachel’s mouth, and her lean, lithe body pressing against him, and the way she made him feel.

He could have kissed her forever, but she tore her mouth from his and rested her forehead on his chest. Vaughn released her hair and wrapped his arms around her waist in an unmovable grip. He tipped his face toward the heavens, his eyes closed, praying for the strength not to beg her for more.

Of the two of them, Rachel was always the first to pull away, the first to remember the guilt and regret. The first to point out that their relationship would never amount to anything but a torrid affair. She was right, of course, but it damn near killed him every time she pushed away from his touch before he was ready to let her go.

She stroked the hair at the nape of his neck, which got him wondering how something as screwed-up as their relationship could feel so good. And, when she spoke, her voice was thick with agony. “Sometimes I think it would be easier if we were together. That maybe I could finally find peace. But you don’t bring me any peace.”

He pressed his lips to the top of her head. “There’s too much past between us, too much damage done for it to work. And now, it’s pointless to think about, because I don’t trust anyone to look out for your interests the way I can in this case. Wallace Meyer wants your head on a platter. I won’t let that happen, no matter what.”

“We can’t ever allow ourselves to be alone together again.”

“No.”

She pressed her palms against his chest until he released his hold on her. “I should go.”

“Yeah.” After adjusting his tie, he stuffed his hands in his pockets, trying to get his body and mind to work together again. “I’m going to need those photographs of the other graffiti incidents before too long, and we have a few more questions for you. I’ll send a deputy to your place tonight to pick you up and bring you to the station house.”

She scooped her hat from the ground and adjusted it on her head, then walked toward her horse. “No need for that. I’ll drop by your office this afternoon.”

Vaughn kept pace behind her. “I won’t be returning to the station house until at least five o’clock. Maybe it would be best if you came by before I got there.”

She unwound the lead rope. “Why?”

“You took a picture of me.”

That stopped her cold. “What?”

“On your camera. There was a picture of me.”

She wrenched her head down and away, her lips pulled tight.

Shit. He hated for her to feel awkward, but couldn’t see a way around it. “I’m only bringing it up because my deputies saw it. I’m afraid they’re going to start to wonder what they don’t know about you and me. I don’t want to give them any more clues.”

She blinked as though deep in thought, then gave a resolute nod. “I can’t explain why I took that shot. I’m sorry if it embarrassed you in front of your employees. From now on, you have to do your job by the book, whatever that means. Pretend I’m someone else if you have to. You’re facing reelection this year and you can’t risk your career because of this crazy, uncontrollable thing between us that won’t go away. It’s not worth it.”

He stood back as she lifted into the saddle. He didn’t have the heart to tell her there was no easy way to salvage his career in Quay County from the mess she and Wallace Jr. had created. All he could do was to keep Rachel safe from Meyer’s reach and bring a reckoning down on Wallace Meyer for his sins.

Before she could race away, he took hold of the reins. “Rachel, I need you to understand that despite everything, being with you was worth it for me. There’s a lot I regret about my past, but nothing more so than ruining my chance to prove that to you.”