Loving a Lawman Read online

  “You see any of it happen?”

  “No, but—”

  “But what?”

  Chase shrugged again. “Well . . . you know.”

  “Yeah,” Seth said. “I know.”

  Chase looked back over to his truck, the night breeze ruffling the ends of his blond hair where it stuck out from underneath his signature black hat. “How am I supposed to get to New Mexico?”

  “You could ride with Skeeter.”

  “He was riding with me.”

  “You could fly.”

  Chase shot him a “no way in hell” look.

  Despite the price of gas and the current pack of professional bull riders who hopped planes to get from one rodeo to the next, Chase found a thrill in driving. In drinking, dancing, and loving until the last possible minute before gunning his truck toward the desired state line.

  “Tell Jake what happened. You know he’ll let you take one of the trucks from the Diamond.”

  “You expect me to drive a Chevy?”

  Seth shot him a pointed look.

  “Fine,” Chase said, his disgust apparent. “I’ll use a ranch truck. Now what are you going to do with Jessie?”

  “I guess that depends on you.”

  “Throw her in jail,” he said flatly.

  “Chase—” Seth stopped, giving himself time to temper his words. “If there are no witnesses, it’s your word against hers.”

  “She admitted to it.”

  “A confession given while someone is yelling that they’re going to kill you can hardly be considered admissible.”

  “If you don’t believe me, go ask her yourself.”

  Seth clenched his jaw to keep from saying more. He was, after all, the sheriff, and he had a job to do. Remain impartial, uphold the law. If Chase wanted to press charges . . . and Jessie had no alibi . . . it didn’t matter how much Seth wanted her to be innocent. And it surely didn’t matter how much he wished things were different. “All right, then. I’ll take care of Miss McAllen. You just give Dusty your statement; then get out of here and go get some sleep before that bull kills you tomorrow.”

  His little brother flashed a “like that’s gonna happen” grin that didn’t make it past the corners of his mouth. Seth wasn’t sure if Chase was thinking about the possibility of death-by-bull or his non-sleep-related intentions with the flavor of the night. Maybe it was both.

  Chase paused as if he wanted to say something more, but changed his mind. He readjusted his hat, then spun away.

  “See, darlin’?” he said as he swung the blonde to his side and steered her toward the door of Manny’s Place. “I told you everything was gonna be all right. Now let’s get ourselves a couple more beers and see what we can do about wearin’ a hole in that dance floor.”

  With a sigh, Seth watched Chase head back into the bar. He loved his brother. But there were times . . .

  With a small shake of his head, he crunched his way across the broken safety glass toward the girl he’d known since she was in the second grade.

  Jessie sat at the end of the building farthest from the door. Her breathing had returned to normal and her head was down as she contemplated only heaven knew what. Her hands were braced on her knees, and her hat was pulled low over her eyes.

  Seth didn’t need to see them. He knew what color they were, had memorized it long ago—storm-cloud gray and just as dangerous, with dark rings around their irises that made them look twice as big as they really were and sooty lashes that should have belonged to a brunette.

  “Jessie?” he said softly. It was the voice he used when talking to frightened mares and skittish colts and red-haired angels who had fallen from grace.

  She didn’t look up, just raised her arms out in front of her, wrists lax, hands dangling, anger spent. “I’ll go peacefully. Just get it over with, Seth. Handcuff me and take me to jail.”

  Handcuff her.

  Now, there was an image Seth could’ve lived without.

  He swallowed hard.

  Despite his brother’s tomcat morals, and the fact that he didn’t deserve . . .

  Well, despite everything that Chase didn’t deserve, including the sassy redhead, Jessie was Chase’s girl. Always had been. Always would be.

  “I just want to talk to you about what happened tonight.”

  She dropped her hands back to her lap and shrugged. But he still couldn’t see her face, couldn’t read what was going on inside that pretty little head of hers.

  Uh-hum . . . did he say pretty? He’d meant . . . well, he’d meant something else, that was all.

  “What’s there to talk about? I confess. The end.”

  “Jessie.” The word was heavy with warning.

  Her head jerked up at a prideful tilt. The brim of her hat still shaded her eyes, but the slant of her jaw was unmistakable. “Why are you torturing me, Seth? Everyone knows I did it. Just arrest me and get it over with.”

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions first.”

  “Seth,” Dusty called.

  He turned as his deputy came ambling across the gravel, his uneven gait kicking up a few little pebbles and a whole lot of dust.

  Damn, they needed some rain. That was half the problem. It hadn’t rained in weeks. Daytime temps soared to over a hundred, and the nights weren’t much cooler. Heat like that made tempers flare, made normal people do crazy things.

  Like take a baseball bat to their boyfriend’s truck.

  Dusty stopped in front of him and flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Here’s what we know so far. Jessie was working at the bar tonight. Chase came in with another girl—the, uh . . . little blond thing.”

  “I saw her.”

  “Apparently Jessie took it for as long as she could, then told Manny she wanted a smoke break—just for the record, she doesn’t smoke. From there, it appears she took the baseball bat he keeps behind the counter to make sure everyone stays in line, and the rest is the stuff legends are made of.”

  “Anybody see her take the bat?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody actually see her vandalize the truck?”

  Dusty shook his head. “But you know . . .”

  “Yeah,” Seth said with a nod. “I know.”

  It was Homecoming ’08 all over again.

  Seth had been in California at the time, but he’d heard plenty of news from home. How Jessie, in a fit of rage over Chase—what else?—had wrecked the car Sissy Callahan was going to ride in during the parade. Wrecked meaning she had taken an ax handle and beat the ever-lovin’ shit out of it until the thing was damn-near totaled.

  Allegedly.

  Not the totaling part, but the part about Jessie actually committing the deed. No one had seen her do it, so no charges had been filed. And Jessie’s mama had just passed a couple of weeks before, so no one had the heart to go digging around for evidence. The insurance had paid for the car, and Sissy had ridden on the FFA float with the blue-ribbon goat instead of on the back of a convertible ’Vette.

  “The insurance adjuster should be here in a little while.” Seth handed his deputy the bat. “Dust this for prints, and we’ll file the report in the morning.”

  Dusty started to walk away, then looked at the bat, stopped, and turned back to Seth. “But this isn’t—”

  “Dust it for prints, and we’ll file the report in the morning,” Seth repeated.

  Dusty glanced back at Jessie, then leaned close to Seth so only he could hear. “But this ain’t Manny’s bat, Seth. Manny’s bat’s got blue tape around the neck and—”

  “I know. Now dust it for prints.”

  “All right,” Dusty said with a small shake of his head.

  “And get Chase’s statement, will ya? He has to come up for air sometime.”

  Dusty nodded again as Seth turned back to Jess
ie. “Get in the truck,” he said without preamble.

  “Aren’t you going to arrest me?” It was the first protest she’d made all night.

  “Consider yourself arrested. Now get in the truck, and we’ll talk about this down at the station.”

  All right, so the “station” was little more than a three-story building in the heart of downtown Cattle Creek that also served as the courthouse and the jail for all of Page County. But after eight years with the San Diego PD, Seth hadn’t broken the habit of calling it by its proper name.

  “Fine,” she said with a heavy sigh.

  Seth reached out a hand to help her up.

  Without hesitation, she slid her palm into his, then closed her fingers around the back of his hand. Seth braced himself against what was to come.

  One innocent touch of skin against skin had him thinking about . . . things he shouldn’t think about. Had him feeling . . . things he shouldn’t feel. He felt like using his hold on her to pull her flush against him, shoulder to shin. He felt like kissing her lips, tipping off her cowboy hat, and burying his hands in the curly strands of her strawberry blond hair. He felt like . . . like . . .

  He felt like a bastard.

  Damn it. She was his brother’s girl.

  He would go on telling himself that a few more times, and one day he would actually start to listen. Even believe it. Then he could stop wondering how different it would have been if he’d just seen Jessie first.

  But no one was allowed those second chances. And he’d been sixteen the first time he ever saw her. She had been seven with dirty knees and scraggly hair that looked as if it had never seen the business side of a brush. No, it wasn’t the first time that was the problem. Or the countless times after. No, the problem came when he’d come home from California for Donna McAllen’s funeral and found that the scraggly-haired, dirty-kneed seven-year-old had grown up to be a very desirable young woman.

  And she was off-limits. As off-limits as they came.

  Chase’s girl. They had been on-again, off-again—mostly on-again—for as long as most people in Cattle Creek cared to remember. Seth loved his brother, but he didn’t know what Jessie saw in Chase. It wasn’t as if he brought a woman back home often, but he seemed to lack compassion and empathy, and that set Seth’s teeth on edge. It was his brother’s lack of maturity, he was sure. He cared for himself first and everyone else after. Everyone including Jessie.

  If she was Seth’s girl . . . well, she wasn’t. And that was all that mattered.

  Ah, the irony. He could have any woman in Cattle Creek . . . hell, the whole county. Except Jessie. She was his brother’s girl. Always had been, always would be. And that left him with a pretty bad case of “what you can’t have is the one thing you want the most.”

  But he’d get over it. Just like the time Jake started going out with Miranda Coleman, and she was forever marked his brother’s territory. Seth had gotten over that one then; he’d get over this one too. Eventually.

  Seth let go of Jessie’s hand slowly as not to let her know her touch burned into his soul and reluctantly because—bastard that he was—he wanted to go on touching her as long as he could.

  True to her word, she went peacefully, plodding along in front of him as he followed behind.

  Without a word she opened the back door on the passenger’s side of his service vehicle and scrambled in.

  “Jessie, get out of there.”

  “Isn’t this where all the common criminals ride?”

  She might have been a bit dejected, a little down in the mouth, but he had to hand it to the girl, she was as plucky as ever.

  “Cute,” he muttered, but knew from the smoldering gray coals of her eyes she wouldn’t be moving any time soon, not unless it was what she wanted. Damn her stubborn hide.

  He knew which battles to fight and which ones to leave alone.

  “Suit yourself.” He slid inside the Explorer and started the engine. Seat belt buckled, he waited for her to fasten her own before backing the SUV out of the parking lot and onto the old highway. He pointed the headlights toward town, glancing in the rearview mirror at his prisoner. “Why’d you do it, Jessie James?”

  “Don’t call me that.” Her words were quiet and solemn, just a knee-jerk reaction to the nickname he’d pegged her with so many years ago.

  Despite the dim light and the cage that separated them, he could see the defiant edge of her jaw. Her arms were crossed over her slim, compact body, her cowboy hat casting shadows across the upper part of her face. If he looked really close, he could just make out the curly stubs of her pigtails sticking out from underneath her knockoff Stetson.

  “You gonna answer?”

  Jessie blew out a derisive breath. “Did you see that girl? Ugh.”

  “Yeah, she was something, all right,” he said, very aware she hadn’t answered his question, not by a long shot.

  “Why does he do it, Seth?”

  Her voice was subdued and tinged with sadness, and he didn’t have to ask what she was talking about.

  “He’s just sowing his wild oats, Jess.”

  But the real truth . . . Chase was a wild oat farmer, not into merely sowing, but planting and harvesting and rotating crops regularly.

  “You like girls like that?”

  He didn’t, but there was no use in telling her that. Bleached blond and man-made curves couldn’t compare to a fiery redhead with a dusting of freckles across her nose and a sweet little body that was just the way the good Lord had intended it to be.

  She was quiet, maybe even thoughtful for a long moment, then said, “Tell me about your ideal girl, Seth.”

  “Brunette, built, and breathing.” He’d been hiding his feelings for so long the words slipped out before he even had a chance to think about answering her question any differently. “Not necessarily in that order.”

  She didn’t even laugh.

  “That was a stupid stunt you pulled back there.”

  She made a noise, could have been in agreement. Maybe not. He couldn’t tell. Maybe it was just a noise.

  “You know you’ll have to pay for the repairs.”

  Another noise. This one just as unintelligible.

  “Gonna be three . . . maybe even four thousand dollars.” He shrugged, then chanced a look in the mirror to gauge her reaction. She was staring out the window, watching the town slide by. She looked thoughtful, almost peaceful, but he could tell by the taut line of her shoulders under the faded cotton of her shirt she was anything but. Jessie McAllen, the poorest kid in town, didn’t have that kind of money.

  But she had more than her fair share of pride. How could she not? It had to take a lot to keep her chin up after everything the McAllen women had endured. None of them had had an easy life, but it seemed Jessie had suffered the brunt of the town’s gossip mill. She was a little too spirited, a little too easy to pin things on. He supposed that was what had gotten her into this mess. That and her love for Chase.

  Seth couldn’t say it was unrequited. As much as his brother liked to play around, Seth supposed that in his own way, Chase loved Jessie. Just not enough to give up the other women. Not yet anyway. But one day, Chase was going to smarten up and realize what he had at home. And that would be the end of that.

  In the meantime, Seth had three reports to write and a pretty little perp in the back of his patrol car.

  Had he said pretty? He meant . . . Ah, hell, he’d meant pretty.

  * * *

  Where are we going?” Jessie asked a few minutes later as Seth turned the Explorer onto Larkspur Lane. He didn’t know why she asked; she knew where they were headed. Maybe she just wanted to hear him say it.

  “Your house.”

  “You’re not taking me to jail?” Her question was hopeful and incredulous all at the same time.

  “Oh, I’m taking you to jail, all ri
ght. But I think you need to let your grandmother know what happened so she won’t worry about you.”

  Jessie didn’t answer as he pulled into the buckled concrete driveway.

  In the dark, he supposed, the house didn’t look so bad. The shadows of the night hid the faded, peeling paint that had once been the color of freshly churned butter. And it wasn’t so obvious that the bottom half of the screen door didn’t have screen in it anymore. In the dark, you couldn’t see the whitewashed tractor tire planter that hadn’t had flowers in it since Jessie’s mama died or the missing windowpane that had been replaced with a piece of cardboard that used to be a 409 box from the Safeway.

  All right, he could see all that. But in the dark, it wasn’t quite as noticeable as it was in the golden glare of the Texas sun.

  “You know,” Jessie started in a falsely bright tone. “She’s probably already in bed asleep. And the doctors don’t want her disturbed if at all possible. So we can just postpone this until tomorrow.”

  Nice try, sister. “There’s a light on.”

  “Oh, she always leaves that one burning.”

  “Everyone in town knows she’s an insomniac.” Seth turned in his seat to stare through the cage at her.

  Her jaw was set at that stubborn angle she seemed to prefer, but her posture was slumped, as if she’d had more than she could handle for one night.

  Welcome to the club.

  Except all of this would be over in a heartbeat when he pulled her in front of her grandmother and made her admit what really happened. It wasn’t an honorable plan, but it was the best one he had. Jessie might have been raised poor, but she’d been raised right. She wouldn’t lie to her only kin.

  He got out of the truck and opened the back so Jessie could do the same. She hesitated ever so slightly; then without a word she slid from the backseat. She took a deep breath, pulled at her jeans, then started toward the house.

  She didn’t say a word to him as she made her way up the creaky porch steps. Nor when he held the screen door open as she fumbled for her key. A sliver of light greeted them as she finally got the door unlocked and pushed it open so they could enter.

  The combined smells of liniment and nicotine assaulted Seth as he stepped over the threshold behind Jessie. Old people and stale tobacco smoke. It was the kind of odor that seeped into every crevice and refused to leave. Of course, it didn’t help that Naomi, Jessie’s grandmamma, had arthritis and smoked like a freight engine. Honestly he didn’t know how Jessie escaped the house every day without smelling the exact same way. But she didn’t. She smelled like sunshine and strawberries and a field full of daisies after a rain shower.