Denying the Devil

by Calle J. Brookes

  “Yes, she’s safe now. With Agent Lake.”

  “She loves him. Could tell. Did you get the men?” Blue eyes closed and her small hand twitched on the blanket. Her small, cut, bruised, and broken hand. Clay brushed her fingers lightly, just above the plaster cast. He just needed to touch for a moment.

  “Don’t worry about that now.” Oh, he’d get them. Even if it took the rest of his life, he’d get the men who’d hurt Bailey. Including her own father. “You just rest.”

  “Don’t have to stay. Know you don’t want to.” Her eyes remained closed, her breathing deepened. Clay let out the breath he’d been holding. “Know you don’t like me very much.”

  “Of course I like you, Bailey.” But she was already out. He stood, staring down at her for a long moment. Bailey was two weeks shy of her twenty-fifth birthday, but she barely looked old enough to vote. He’d known of her since she was nine and he was twice that. Her hair was completely straight and pale blonde. It was long, almost to her waist, he thought. Someone had washed her hair and braided it into two braids. When she’d been brought in, she’d been soaking wet and covered with mud and sludge of some sort. And blood.

  Clay would never forget Bailey’s blood.

  Bailey made such a small lump under the thin blanket. Small and vulnerable and having barely survived hell.

  Not like her? Hell, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

  Bailey Moore had fast become the center of his world—and she would never know that. Bailey kept him centered, grounded. Reminded him of sunshine and hope. Without her, he’d simply sink into oblivion in his personal life and drown in his duty as the sheriff.

  He wasn’t stupid; he knew how he felt about her bordered on obsession. He’d wanted nothing more than for some young rancher to come and carry her off. Carry her somewhere where she couldn’t haunt him with just a simple smile.

  Someone had carried her off, and it had been her own bravery that led to her rescue. Hers and another woman Clay had always loved.

  He had almost lost them both. Clay wouldn’t forget that.

  1.

  BAILEY MOORE WAS back.

  Clay Addy, Sheriff of Value, Texas, population seven hundred eighty-three, knew it from the first moment he walked into his office that ridiculously sunny Monday morning. Bailey was back.

  He could almost smell the shampoo the woman used.

  He dreamed of that damned shampoo sometimes. Dreamed of her shampoo, dreamed of her impossibly blue eyes, dreamed of her slightly crooked smile. The smattering of freckles over her smooth cheeks. The tiny dimple that flashed every once in a while when she was truly happy about something.

  Dreamed of finding her almost dead every damned night.

  Those were the dreams he could never get past. He had failed her. Through his stupidity, he had failed her.

  He never should have left it at one guard all those months ago. He should have known they were dealing with far too many unknowns. She had paid the price for his stupidity.

  First with a bullet, and then with hours of captivity at the hands of the one man who never should have let someone hurt her.

  Bailey's father and his friends were still out there somewhere.

  But Bailey...Bailey was back.

  And he had no idea how he was supposed to deal with her.

  Clay fell back on his go-to position. He looked out of his office, toward the four desks that stood silently in the middle of the small bullpen. They had a total population of near eight hundred, but that was mostly in the five mile region surrounding the town. He still covered the entire Value County population, of near four thousand. He had two deputies on duty now at all times.

  He'd forgotten Jeremy had taken over the scheduling for him two months ago. Forgotten until this moment.

  Forgotten that Jeremy had made a point to remind him that Bailey was coming back today.

  It was one hell of a thirty-sixth birthday present for himself, and he knew it.

  Bailey Moore had no business ever setting foot in a Texas State Police building. Especially his. Maybe doing forensics, or something off the radar like that. Maybe he could nudge her toward a transfer to nearby Finley Creek County. It was far bigger. Had a much better forensics unit than he did. His entire unit consisted of one deputy who'd had a few months' training. Bailey.

  Movement caught his eye.

  Blonde hair in a high ponytail.

  Bailey.

  He stood where he was and just watched her for far too long, feeling like a damned asshole. He should go out there and talk to her. Welcome her back, as her boss, at least. But he didn't.

  Because he didn't want her there, and they both knew it.

  She had known how he felt about her from the very beginning. He'd made no secret about it. And that had driven a wedge between him and his youngest—and only female—deputy. A chasm he regretted, after what had happened to her.

  If she had trusted him more, she could have come to him that morning. He would have done his best to help her deal with what had been bothering her.

  Instead, she'd felt there was only one person she could turn to. And had gone to that woman.

  They both had nearly died because Clay hadn't had enough well-trained guards to keep them safe.

  If they had found Bailey an hour later than they had she would have been gone. Possibly minutes.

  The doctors had lost her at least once that he knew of on the operating table.

  It had been four months and two weeks since that hell had happened.

  And now...Bailey Moore was back.

  And Clay didn't know what to do about her once again.

  BAILEY RAN HER FINGERS over the battered wood of the desk stationed far away from almost everything else. It was the desk she'd been assigned on her first day with the Value TSP. Sheriff Addy hadn't wanted her there. She'd at first thought it was because he was a sexist pig. But he just hadn't wanted her specifically.

  He was perfectly fine with other female TSP deputies that filtered through the area ever so often. It was just with her that he had a problem. Bailey had never figured out why.

  She had spent most of the last four months to figure Clayton Addy out.

  Bailey was no closer to having the answers to him now than she was when she'd first opened her eyes to see him sitting by her hospital bed—scowling at her.

  She wouldn't lie to herself; it had been one of the hardest things she had ever done, coming back here. Since the attack and abduction had happened, she'd done her best to avoid Value as much as she possibly could. Her physicians had been at the Finley Creek General Hospital. The therapy sessions she'd attended at Women for Hope after Violence had been right across the street. She'd considered leaving Value and everything about it behind her forever.

  But where would she go? What would she do?

  Value was all she had ever known. And leaving would make it feel so...unfinished. She was tired of feeling unfinished. Of everything just stopping abruptly and being abandoned.

  She'd felt that way since she was four years old and her father had been arrested for police corruption.

  That hadn't changed much in the twenty-one years since.

  Her desk wobbled dangerously when she dropped her bag on top of it. She looked down. She'd been using a thin fifty-year-old romance novel to prop it up. But someone had removed it and shifted her desk four feet to the left.

  Farther away from the other three.

  Separated again.

  She somehow doubted it was Jeremy, her closest friend on the small eight-person force, who had done it. It was probably the Sheriff. He wanted no traces of her left anywhere in the post. She'd learned that early on when she'd made the mistake of bringing a small plant into the bullpen.

  He'd made it disappear within a week.

  She shot a glare toward his office. Bailey had no doubt he was in there. Probably watching her through the blinds on his door. She had no illusions where Clayton Barratt Addy was concerned. The man despised her.<
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  Thought she was weak and helpless and useless and not worth his precious time. Half the time she thought he resented the very air she breathed.

  What in the heck was she doing here again?

  She should have taken the offer to work at the Finley Creek TSP post when it had been offered to her last week.

  Elliot Marshall, chief of that post, had offered her the job personally. She'd gotten to know his wife very well—they shared the same therapist at W4HAV. He'd remembered her from the few occasions their paths had crossed.

  He wasn't the least bit sexist or misogynistic, like another TSP man she knew.

  Far from it.

  She should just march in there and tell Clay exactly that. That she was gone as soon as he was able to find her replacement. Then she should just let it out and tell him exactly what kind of an asshole he really was.

  But that wasn't who she was. Bailey wasn't like that.

  Until everything that had happened four months ago, anyway.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe she needed to do this so that she could heal from that. From the pain, the fear, the trauma...the betrayal.

  Her own father had nearly killed her and one of the few friends she had. Bailey relived that almost every single night.

  He hadn't been the one to pull the trigger; his crime was more one of complicity. And he had let her go, eventually. When it was almost too late to help her—or her friend Kyra.

  They had both been inches away from death when they'd arrived at Finley Creek General. Thankfully, the physicians there had put her and Kyra back together again. Mostly.

  Sometimes it felt like they'd used mismatched parts on her. Bailey didn't feel whole any longer. She probably wouldn't for a very long time.

  She wasn't about to let Clay Addy shatter the pieces of her that remained.

  Bailey put her personal belongings away and made an executive decision he was just going to have to deal with.

  Her desk belonged right there, next to Jeremy and Bobby’s. If Sheriff Clay Addy didn't like it, he could shove it up his nose. One wooden inch at a time.

  Bailey leaned down and scooted the heavy desk back to where it belonged.

  Hard hands covered hers before she could move it more than two inches. "What in the hell are you trying to do? Hurt yourself already?"

  She turned toward the man next to her. And for the first time in four months and one week looked into the eyes of the sheriff of Barratt County.