She swallowed, her eyes locked on a spot near his feet. Then she rubbed her wrist and he had to wonder if the binding had hurt her, after all. “I’ve always wanted to ride with you too.”
He let out a hard laugh. “We are so screwed up, you and me. My God, we are a mess.”
She swayed, like all the energy had drained from her in one mighty whoosh. He reached for her, but she caught herself on a post, sagging against it. He smoothed a hand over her back. “You all right?”
“No, I’m not.” She turned her eyes up to his, resolve as hard as steel glinted in them. “Recuse yourself from the investigation. For me. For us.”
Chapter Twelve
The stuffy heat of the stable pressed down on him. The buzz of flies he’d previously been oblivious to filled his ears. He ran a finger between his collar and his neck to combat the heat and the excruciating tickle in his throat.
Why the hell had he ever thought it was a good plan to quit smoking at the same time he tried to quit Rachel? He would hand over the deed to his house if a cigarette would materialize in his hand. Stupid thought to flit across his mind, but he couldn’t have possibly heard Rachel right. Because that would mean she felt something for him besides blinding lust, besides infuriating resentment for that lust—which, he’d decided a while back, were pretty much the only two feelings she harbored for him.
“What?” he croaked.
She straightened. “Remove yourself from my case. I want to try for something real. With you.”
Oh, God, no. Why now? Why couldn’t she have been ready a month ago, before the shooting? Feeling as if he’d been struck with a cane, he sunk into the arm he’d braced against the post, closing his eyes. “Don’t you think I’ve considered that already? I haven’t thought of one other thing since Monday except how I can possibly make everything work. There’s no easy answer.”
She shoved away from the post to pace the length of the stable, her hand on her forehead. “You were expecting the answer to be easy? Because I can tell you from experience, nothing in life worth having is easy. Look around you on my farm, Vaughn. Every valley used to be covered in alfalfa. My crop. It’s all gone. I’ve been fighting for my place in the world since the day I was born. You think anything’s supposed to be easy?”
“Damn it, Rachel. Listen to me. I didn’t mean easy like you think. Look, the Meyers have been acting above the law since the day I met them. My whole goal in becoming a cop was to one day put myself in a position to hold them accountable for their crimes. That’s what I’ve been working toward for the last twenty years. Since I was sixteen, that was all I wanted.”
He flicked the brim of his hat higher, no longer wanting to hide himself from her. “Then, after twenty years of waiting for the right moment and the right case to come along, Wallace Jr. and his friends trespassed onto your property with drugs and automatic rifles. They shot you. They shot your horse. It was the perfect opportunity for me to bring justice down on the Meyer family. It was the case I’d been waiting for.”
She sucked her cheeks in and looked so lost he thought she might start crying. “Forget I asked. I can’t compete with revenge.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you—everything’s changed for me, but I’m trapped. If I recuse myself now, the first thing that’ll happen is Meyer and his men will start digging around to find out why. And they won’t have to dig far. People in town are already spreading rumors about you and me.”
“You’d lose your job.”
“Maybe, but I don’t even care about that anymore. What I have to care about is that the people of this county entrusted me with enforcing their laws. If the truth came out about our involvement, all the interviews and evidence I’ve collected against Meyer Jr. and Jimmy de Luca could be labeled as tainted in the eyes of the court. If a judge threw it all out, a conviction would be nearly impossible.
“Elias Baltierra will have other charges to contend with when my men catch up with him, but if Meyer Jr. and Jimmy de Luca were released due to lack of admissible evidence, and they went off and committed another violent crime, I would’ve failed the people I vowed to protect. I can’t live with that. I’ve been wracking my brain since the afternoon of the shooting, but I can’t see how it’s possible to do my job the way it needs to be done and still have what I want.”
Rachel dragged her eyes away from the horses to fully regard him. “What is it that you want?”
Oh, baby. “Do you really have to ask?”
“Yeah, Vaughn, I’d really like to know because I can’t figure it out.”
How could she not know? Maybe she needed to hear it from him, was all. Wouldn’t change a damn thing, but if she needed it said out loud, then he could cowboy up and lay bare his heart, the same as she had. He strode to her and settled his hands on her shoulders. Her proud, stubborn chin raised a notch. Her brown eyes were glassy with moisture, but just as stubbornly set.
“I want you. I’ve always wanted you.”
Saying it didn’t feel freeing, as he’d thought it would. All these months he’d wanted to tell her how he felt. He thought if he ever got the chance to, it would ease his burden. But it felt like shit.
Her glassy-eyed gaze shifted to the space over his shoulder. He tried to pull her against him to embrace her, but she remained rigidly upright.
He tucked an errant hair behind her ear. She flinched, but let him do it. “The afternoon you were shot, all I wanted was to make the men who hurt you pay. When I found out a Meyer was involved, it was like the only two things in my life I’d ever wanted were slamming into each other while going a hundred miles an hour. I had about a split second to figure out how to react. I never thought it was possible—”
His throat closed, snuffing his words, as the truth hit him hard.
She wanted him to recuse himself because she had feelings for him. She wanted to give a real relationship a try.
And, oh, it hurt worse than saying the words to her had. It felt like sinking headfirst into quicksand. He sucked air in through his nose, long and slow, struggling against the ache in his lungs and heart.
Lightheaded, he tried again to explain. “If I had thought for one minute that you felt something real for me, I would’ve given the case to Stratis from the get-go, and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. But in the last sixteen months, you’d made it clear to me, over and over, that you didn’t want anything except a roll in the hay when the mood struck you.” Shaking her head in protest, her face crumpled. He pressed on. “I thought you and I had no chance in hell of ever working out. So I vowed to take care of you the only way you’d let me—with my badge. I thought, if I make the Meyer family pay, then at least I will have gotten one thing I wanted. The only thing I was at liberty to have.”
Hugging herself, she stared as hard as she could at the space over his shoulder.
“Talk to me, Rachel. Please.”
She drew a tremulous breath. “When my mom’s doctors told us that the overdose had left her with so much brain damage she’d never be the same again, I was hurting so bad. It was like what I’d been through with my dad all over again, except that my mom’s life was over because of the choice I made to be with you.”
He put his arms around her and she resisted, but he was done with her pushing him away. He locked his arms around her and tugged hard until she acquiesced and stumbled into his chest. The rigidity of her spine surrendered and she melted into his embrace.
“I stood at Mom’s bedside that night before you got to the hospital and it was like I was watching my family crumble to dust in my hands. I was afraid that the next time I took my focus off my family, another disaster would happen. And we couldn’t take any more hits, as fragile as my sisters and I were. I ended things between us that night believing I was cutting off an infected limb so the rest of me could survive. I didn’t expect—” Her words cut off as her whole body was overcome with a violent shudder.
He held her head in his hand, his other arm like a vice arou
nd her back. If he could’ve gotten closer to her, he would’ve. He wanted to crawl into her skin and pump her heart for her, breathe for her, anything to take away the lonely, defeated pain in her voice.
She turned her face into the hollow of his throat. “I didn’t expect that a year and a half later, I still wouldn’t be over you. I was managing my feelings okay until this week.”
That about said it all, right there.
He could see it plainly now, how they’d gotten to this state of total and utter fuck-up. Didn’t make it any easier a pill to swallow, though.
He smoothed a finger across her cheek. “Nothing like a crime to bring the two of us together, huh?”
She raised her head and offered him a melancholy smile.
“Like you said, we are one hell of a mess.”
He returned her sad smile. “It bore repeating.”
“How long until the case against Wallace Meyer Jr. and the others closes?” she asked.
Vaughn sucked his cheeks in and bit down on them until he’d gotten a solid grip on the wild hope that she’d be willing to wait for him. “Until their cases are settled in court? A year. Probably more like two.”
She thunked her forehead on his chest. “Okay. Two more years.”
He bit his cheeks harder. Until he tasted blood.
“You ought to get on with your job, then. If we’re going to deny ourselves what we both want, let’s at least make sure something positive comes of it.”
She was so strong, so resilient. No wonder he’d fallen hard for her. She was incomparable.
She wiggled, trying to break loose of his grip, but he cupped her chin in his hand and turned her face up toward his. “I’m going to kiss you first.”
She met him halfway, pressing her lips into his. They fit so perfectly together. She yielded her mouth to his tongue. He slid it along hers, tasting her, merging with her, body and soul. Unlike the other good-byes they’d said to each other over the last year and a half, this one felt official. Permanent.
At least for a year or two.
Damn.
He suckled her lower lip before letting her go.
When he turned away from her, his heart felt as empty as his arms.
* * *
They saddled Disco and Growly Bear in heavy silence, their eyes averted, together but alone. A thousand different feelings whipped through Rachel, images of her life, of her family. That day in John Justin’s that she was liberated. The day she broke her arm when she was seventeen. The first glimpse of her father’s body when she identified him at the morgue. Her mother lying in a field next to an empty bottle of vodka. Tommy’s birth. Vaughn standing on her porch in the darkness, his eyes smoldering with desire. Field after field gone to weeds and dust. Thirty-two years and this is what it came down to.
One man. And the hardest choice she’d ever had to make, but also the clearest. She would not jeopardize public safety by compromising the case against the men who shot her, at least, any more than she already had. It was a line in the sand she should’ve recognized from the get-go, as he should have. But at least they were crystal clear about it now.
At least, finally, they were being honest about their feelings for each other. It was a hard-earned peace that was settling over her, but at least it was peace, even if it was nestled within grim reality.
She lifted the lead ropes for both horses. “Let’s get this over with. You’ve got evidence to collect and we’re wasting daylight.”
He untied the knot he’d locked the stable doors with and opened them, rubbing his throat. He’d done that a lot this week, and she wondered when he’d picked up the nervous habit. While she led the horses to the heat and blazing sun at the edge of the stable yard, he swung by his squad car to exchange the farrier kit for his evidence kit.
Once they were on the horses and clear of the yard, Rachel relaxed a bit. Without turning her head, she darted a look at Vaughn. Disco was used to new riders, and men in particular. He was the horse Mr. Dixon and Kellan rode, and sometimes the most skilled horsemen of their guests. This was the first time Rachel had seen Vaughn handle a horse, and she didn’t work all that hard to mask her admiration of his exceptional skills.
Having already unbuttoned his collar, he was rolling up his shirtsleeves. His tie was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s your tie?”
“In my pocket. I figured my choices were to either let some air flow in or dissolve in a puddle of sweat.”
Rachel tried a smile on for size, hoping he’d relax into one of his own. “You chose wisely. It’s a hot day.”
He adjusted the brim of his hat to shade his eyes, his lips not even close to smiling. The same awkward silence in which they’d prepped the horses descended over them. After about a mile and a half, Rachel decided the horses were warmed up enough to get moving. Maybe she and Vaughn could outrun the day’s heat along with their mutual heartbreak.
“Well, Sheriff, you wanted to ride with me, so how about we kick it into gear? You up for some speed?”
He stared at her, his lips twitching the way they always did when he was deliberating between choices.
She broadened her smile. “I can’t see anything wrong with having some harmless fun at this point.”
He swallowed, then seemed to rouse himself from his melancholy. “Disco and I are ready for anything. Aren’t we, Disco?” He scratched the horse’s side.
“Come on, then. See if you can keep up.” She spurred Growly faster. Disco followed close behind.
Gradually picking up speed until the horses ran at a full gallop, they thundered across the valley. In no time flat, Vaughn proved himself her equal in horsemanship.
She stole as many glances his way as she could manage. Drinking in this fantasy come to life. Her cowboylawman, with horse handling skills as long as his legs, dressed in that devastatingly handsome sheriff uniform that turned her to putty, complete with a holstered sidearm, worn boots, and a hat.
Then he smiled at her. Flying across a long stretch of desert, their horses neck and neck, he’d turned her way and smiled. Boyishly, without reservation or the anguish that came with their broken relationship. Love bloomed in her heart.
For the first time that she could remember, she didn’t feel guilty around him. Guilty that she was doing something wrong, shirking her responsibilities, that disaster was waiting to strike because she’d let her guard down to laugh and relax. She didn’t feel lost, either. She supposed that’s what their hard-earned peace had given her. The ability to breathe and smile in his presence.
She could live with that trade-off—for a year or two, anyway.
Once, coming around a rocky bend, he and Disco found a shortcut between two scrub trees and snuck into the lead. His whoop of laughter floated to her on the wind. “Disco takes the lead,” he called.
“This isn’t a race!” she hollered, laughing right along with him.
He pointed to a lone scrub tree a couple acres away.
“It is now,” he shouted over his shoulder to her as he put pressure on Disco’s flanks. “To the tree!”
Their horses churned over the dust and dirt. Rachel lifted out of the saddle, bending low over Growly’s neck to whisper encouragement in his ear. She clutched his mane, and kept up the string of sweet nothings to Growly until he was nose-even with Disco. Her method worked, and soon, she and Growly pulled into the lead.
“You don’t play fair, cowgirl,” Vaughn shouted. “Get that ass in the saddle so I can concentrate.”
Smiling so hard her facial muscles ached, she stayed standing until Growly passed the tree. Then she circled to slow down, shaking her hands in the air in a show of victory, and giggling the whole time. “You didn’t think you could actually beat me in a race, did you?”
Vaughn laughed and shook his head. “You caught me. I’m all bluster.”
She brought Growly to a stop. “That was fun. Let’s get these guys a drink of water before we go on.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“How much farther to the derricks?” he asked.
“They’re right behind that ridge.” She gestured west, to a small rise.
“I haven’t seen the road Binderman would’ve taken.”
“The road follows the fence line around to the west. This way takes longer, but it’s more fun. I figured since you wanted to ride, and this is probably the only time we’ll get to, we might as well make the most of it.”
“I’m glad you reasoned it out like that.”
She wanted to kiss him in a bad way, but for once, she overcame his temptation without too much effort. “Me too.”
While the horses drank, Vaughn looked south, surveying their surroundings and getting his directional bearings. Rachel snuck her camera from the saddlebag. He’d hear the click, so if she wanted a candid image of him, the first shot would have to be perfect.
She inched around the front of the horses, framing Vaughn with Sidewinder Mesa to the left and a prickly pear cactus ten yards out to the right. His arms weren’t visible, crossed over his chest as they were, which didn’t make for the best image. She held the camera to her face, her finger on the button, waiting.
Disco snorted, spraying water on her legs. She held the camera steady, even as Disco moved to block Vaughn from view. She had a hunch that would be worth waiting for if it happened. Sure enough, Disco headed straight for Vaughn. He gave Vaughn a nibbling kiss on the nape of his neck.
Vaughn jumped in surprise, then threaded his fingers into Disco’s mane and smiled at him.
Click.
As she knew he would, he shifted his gaze over his shoulder to look at her. His smile dropped to a flat line. His eyes turned serious, searching.
Click.
She lowered the lens. No sense apologizing or explaining it away. She was a photographer, and catching Vaughn looking at her like that—standing with a horse, her land in the backdrop—opened her heart so wide she could barely breathe.
Cowboy Justice Page 19
