Men In Uniform Anthology

by Delilah Devlin

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 105, PMB 159

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  rights@entangledpublishing.com

  www.entangledpublishing.com

  Edited by Alethea Spiridon

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition March 2019

  CALL ME CRAZY

  REBECCA ROYCE

  Chapter One

  Wyatt Emmanuel watched as the barber shaved his hair, making him practically bald again except for the brief stubble the act left behind. The buzzing pounded against his ears, a sound he was familiar with yet that never ceased to annoy him all the same. Once every two weeks he came into this shop and paid his fifteen dollars to have all the hair shaved off his head. His dark, almost black, hair grew back so fast it took a regular shave every two weeks to keep it that short, but the necessity of making what was his otherwise floppy, uncontrollable hair manageable wasn’t the only reason he showed up on the dot every fourteen days for the shave.

  Sitting in the barber’s chair listening to the town talk around him told him more about the goings-on of his friends and neighbors than anything else ever would. When he’d taken the job of sheriff of Rose, Texas, the previous occupant of the badge he now wore had given him one piece of advice that he planned on never forgetting: don’t discount the gossip you hear. Nine times out of ten what the residents of Rose said was going on, was actually going on.

  He’d found that to be the case when he’d grown up here a million years ago, too. Oh, maybe it wasn’t a million years ago. Maybe it was two decades earlier, but it felt like a millennium had passed, that was for sure. Only back then the gossip he’d heard had mostly been about his mother, her illegitimate son—namely him—whose father she refused to name but everyone and their sister had an opinion on who it must be, and the scores of men she had coming and going from her trailer at night. Or at least that had been one of the main topics.

  He hated listening back then, and yet here he was, sitting in the chair, keeping his ears sharp.

  “Is it true, Wyatt?” Macy Klein was one of the few old birds in the town who still used his first name and hadn’t changed to “Sheriff” when he’d been elected unanimously the year before by the council. In a district as small as Rose, no one could take a piss in a government seat without the council’s say-so. He’d been persona non grata two decades earlier, but now he was local boy made good. They’d been happy to unanimously grant him the job. Macy had been one of those who voted. Yet she’d never called him Sheriff. Not once. Was it a deliberate gibe to remind him that she still remembered his place or just habit from always having called him Wyatt?

  The buzz of the razor stopped. Diego Monroe had been his classmate and taken over the barber shop when his father, the aptly named Buzz, retired and moved to the Gulf Coast of Florida two years before.

  “Is what true, Ms. Klein?” He could call her Macy, he supposed. Names mattered in these parts. He was never going to be accused of disrespect. If he had to arrest her for something, that was a different matter, but unless she suddenly started driving down Main Street with a blood alcohol level above the legal limit, he thought best to leave well enough alone.

  She leaned down on the counter next to the mirror where Wyatt could watch his hair being buzzed. It amazed him how many women hung around the barber shop in Rose when it was pretty much a place for men’s haircuts. Yet they were always there. Traditions remained traditions in small towns, whether they made sense or not. “That Faith Carmen has been regularly calling you out to her ranch to investigate little green men? Has she finally cracked?”

  His stomach clenched at the glee he heard in the woman’s voice. Before he could answer, another woman, referred to by everyone as Auntie even though she had no family ever as far as he knew, who didn’t seem to be doing anything but sitting there, spoke up. “Sheriff isn’t going to talk to us about an ongoing investigation.”

  That was true, except it also wasn’t. “There’s no investigation to speak of, so I have nothing to answer at all.”

  He got out of the chair. Today he’d learned nothing of interest. Still, he’d come back in two weeks and try again. Standing at six foot four inches, he towered over everyone else in the place. That was the case for most places he went. He nodded at everyone and exited the shop. Once they brought up Faith and her alien issue, he knew he was going to have to get out of there fast. There wasn’t an investigation going on—if there had been he wouldn’t have been able even to deny it or acknowledge it at all until the information was released publicly—but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a Faith Carmen problem.

  She really did think she was seeing little green men in her backyard every night for the last week. She’d only called him about it two days ago and had been reaching out for the last two nights. He’d drive the twenty minutes out to her ranch, investigate, find no evidence of anything, and leave. Actually, the truth was he hightailed it out of there as fast as he could. Faith did bad things to his imagination. He couldn’t afford to be daydreaming about turning her over the side of his car and fucking her as hard and long as they both wanted while he was on the job.

  He put on his cowboy hat and made his way to his truck. The sun was starting to move downward in the sky, giving the early evening the settled feeling he only ever got in Texas. The sky was just bigger here. Wyatt had lived all over the world—well, maybe “lived” wasn’t the right word—he’d lived in New York when he’d been in the NYPD for the last ten years; he’d been stationed before that in Afghanistan and Iraq when he’d served his country. None of those places had felt the least bit like home.

  His phone beeped and he looked down at it. The secretary, Mary, was texting him. She preferred that to calling if it was a non-emergency, and even though it went against protocol, he hadn’t felt the need to correct her. Young people just didn’t call anymore. Even at work. When had thirty-eight felt so completely old?

  It’s that woman again. Calling about the aliens.

  He sighed. Third night in a row. He could almost have predicted the report at this point. Faith was really not letting this go.

  On it.

  If he didn’t want Mary to text he should probably stop responding to her that way. He’d determined to keep things in Rose as peaceful as he could, and that meant not arguing when things didn’t need to be made a fuss about. Wyatt jumped in his F-150 and started the engine. She purred, but she always did. He grinned at the thought. He might just love his truck a little bit more than he’d ever cared for any vehicle before, but he’d dreamed of owning one when he watched the cars on the highway speed past his trailer as a child. Someday, he’d promised himself, he was going to have one of those Ford trucks, and he’d managed it, which was why he drove his own vehicle and not the one issued to him by Rose.

  Yeah, maybe he shouldn’t give Mary a hard time about her texting.

  The ride out to Faith’s ranch took twenty minutes, taking him almost to the edge of town. The problem was what it also did, which was to take him straight through the memories that he’d known would plague him when he came back, but hadn’t really been prepared for nonetheless.

  Rose, like so many small towns in the Hill Country of Texas, had been small and sleepy when he was young. The economy had been based mostly on agriculture. But with the booming of bigger cities like Austin and San Antonio forcing sprawl great distances beyond their borders, Rose had to change with the times. It still wasn’t bustling, but where Main Street had been basically a pharmacy, the barbershop, and a grocery when he’d been a kid, it now consisted of several restaurants, a bigger pharmacy, and the barbershop, and folks had to travel out of town to the city next door to go the huge discount grocery store that had run the small mom-and-pop one right out of town.

  Still, most people knew everyone, and the out-of-towners who had made the area their weekend home—coming in from the bigger cities for fresh air and quiet�
��hadn’t yet priced the locals totally out of their homes. Wyatt sighed. As if on cue, the trailer park he’d grown up in came into view. Every town had its issues, and almost all of the ones in Rose came from there. Trailer parks could be lovely, homey places, and nice to grow up in. Wyatt had seen those locations. That wasn’t this one.

  Hey, kid, is your mom home? Tell her I’m coming by at 8. And don’t be hanging around when I get there.

  Wyatt, your mama is one hot piece of ass.

  Hey, Wyatt, my mom says your mom is a whore. What’s a whore?

  How much does your mom charge for blow jobs? Does she give a birthday special?

  The voices of the past hit him hard. They always did. One of his knuckles was slightly bigger than the others on his right hand. That was thanks to the massive numbers of fights he’d gotten into defending his ma from the things people said about her. Even though he’d known them to be true, it was still his mother, end of story.

  He’d learned how to throw a punch better, eventually. But the remnants of those early, anger-fueled attacks remained on his right hand and always would. He didn’t mind the marks. They taught him control and to never forget where he came from and how bad things could be if you didn’t guard yourself.

  So why had he come back to Rose? He gripped the steering wheel tighter. That was always the question as he sped past the four miles of land operated by the trailer park. He missed the quiet here, the peace, the way it felt like the troubles of the world were elsewhere. And a large part of it was a never-quenched desire to just come back a winner.

  He should be feeling great, but a never-ending sense of dissatisfaction he’d had since childhood still hit him hard. Maybe someday he’d be rid of it.

  Nostalgia, or obsession—whatever it was—passed. He focused instead on the matter at hand. Faith Carmen was a single mother, a teacher, and a would-be rancher on a failing ranch. She had twin daughters who were twelve years old. He’d done his research. Up until the first time she called, she had no history whatsoever with the police. She didn’t even have unpaid parking tickets.

  Yet all of a sudden she was seeing aliens and calling frantically for help. Had she had some kind of mental break? He hated to think it. Wyatt had known Faith in high school. They’d been in the same graduating year. They hadn’t had much to do with each other, but at least she hadn’t been a problem. Wyatt hadn’t been on the guest list on her parents’ ranch parties, but Faith had never, ever been cruel. Not once.

  Now Wyatt was regularly being called out there. There’d been a process to dealing with this at NYPD. Evaluations to be made, if needed. He’d cared about people there, but he hadn’t gone to school with them.

  No, Wyatt knew this woman’s story really well. He’d hated her ex when Robbie had been the captain of the football team. Unlike Faith, Robbie had not been so kind. And he was fairly certain Robbie had partaken of a birthday blow job from Wyatt’s mother, which was just…gross.

  He pushed down the sour stomach threatening to make him pull over to the side of the road to puke. “It’s okay, your mom put food on the table.” He reminded himself of this almost every time he had to drive out this way.

  He arrived at Faith’s family’s ranch, which she was now trying to keep above water, and stopped to look at the scene. The house needed a good painting. Or maybe more. It was possible she was going to have to sand the house down and start over. There might be rot.

  Like so many small family ranches, hers had seen better days. There used to be a sign outside that said CARMEN FAMILY RANCH. It was long gone. As were the cattle they used to raise here. Now it was basically a house. A falling-down house that Faith tried to keep up on her teacher’s salary, alone with her twin daughters.

  Who the fuck knew where Robbie was?

  Like Wyatt, at some point, she’d come back home.

  Maybe everyone came home again eventually.

  He shook his head as he got out of the truck. Maybe sometime when he wasn’t spending his weekends filling out paperwork he’d come out here and offer to help her.

  Seated on the swing to the left of the porch were Faith’s daughters, Kelly-Jo and Kaci. They didn’t look like their mother, but seemed both of them took after Robbie with his platinum-blond hair and blue eyes. Faith was a dark beauty, in high school and still. She was tall, thin, and had long dark locks that fell past her ass. If it was the style for women to chop their hair as they got older she hadn’t gotten that message, and the world was better for it. Wyatt shook his head. He had to pull it together.

  Daydreaming about Faith did no one any good. He wasn’t going to date her. That wasn’t how life worked out for him, and every relationship he’d ever been in ended in disaster. He couldn’t burn bridges just months back in town, especially when there were kids involved. Kids who’d already suffered enough from having Robbie for a father.

  “Ms. Carmen,” Wyatt called out to her. One of the things she’d told him during his first time out here was that she’d gone back to her maiden name. He’d officially not called her Ms. Johnson ever again.

  From where she stood on the edge of the porch, she waved her hand in the air. “That’s just weird, Sheriff. We went to school together from the time we were five. Let’s stick to the names. I realize this whole thing is odd to begin with, but I’m Faith and you’re Wyatt. Drop the formalities.”

  “Faith.” Desire stirred inside him, making his pants suddenly tight. He really preferred to keep the titles just because it did a good job of reminding him that his sexual desires for this woman were not going to happen. The sheriff of Rose didn’t sleep with the residents. But Wyatt might very well want to fuck the hell out of Faith.

  In his fantasy, he stripped her down, slowly, and stroked her nipples until they pebbled in his fingers. She’d cry out his name just from that stroke alone.

  Fuck. He really had to pull his shit together.

  He finally spoke again. “You’re seeing them again.”

  “Well, I didn’t call you out here for my health. I think we both know this is getting out of hand.”

  She took the stairs off her porch two at a time. Freckles covered her face, neck, and arms. Wyatt had always thought the look was beautiful. Just the lightest dusting everywhere. For being dark-haired, she had the palest skin, no indication that she ever spent any time outside. He knew she had as a young woman, helping her dad around the ranch when it had been a working ranch. Now she taught second grade in town.

  Faith put her hands on her hips. “Well?”

  She was waiting for him to do something, of course. It was called his job. “Okay. I’m going to go have a look around like I’ve done the last two nights. If I see something, we’ll proceed from there. If I don’t, I’m going to come in the house and we’ll have a little chat.” He looked past her shoulders at the girls. This had to be handled gently. “Hello, Kelly-Jo. Hello, Kaci.”

  They both muttered some version of hello but neither looked up from their iPads. She looked over her shoulder before she turned and rolled her eyes at him. “I saved up for a year to buy them those. Now I sometimes wonder if what I was really doing was eliminating my children’s manners and ability to communicate.”

  He laughed. “Okay. So same deal as before? You saw the aliens out by the tree line and in the woods? And no video?”

  Faith nodded. “Yes, that’s right. Wyatt, listen, I’m not crazy. I’m not. The girls didn’t see it. I keep trying to capture it on my phone, but by the time I grab the phone to run out there and record it, it’s gone.” There hadn’t been any recording the last time, too. These aliens seemed to be going out of their way to not be spotted by anyone but Faith herself.

  Fastest-moving aliens ever.

  “I don’t even watch science fiction. Something’s happening.”

  “Well, I’ll check that out.” He touched the brim of his hat and made his way toward the woods. His first night out here he’d brought deputies with him. Since that had proven to be a big bunch of nothing, tonight and
the night before he’d come by himself. If he was somehow accosted and taken prisoner by an alien ship he was going to feel like a true jackass.

  …

  Faith Carmen watched Wyatt walk away toward her wooded area with dread settling in her stomach. What if he didn’t find anything? Again. The first night he and the deputies had turned up to look after she called, she’d been hopeful. Surely they’d have an answer to what she saw. I’m not crazy…right?

  There were little green men swarming her property. They were there. She’d seen them.

  She rubbed the back of her neck. Okay, he was looking. That was a good thing. Wyatt Emmanuel wasn’t like the good old boys in this town. He didn’t automatically hate her because she’d quote-unquote driven Robbie from his home and deprived everyone of her lousy ex’s company for the remainder of their days.

  Wyatt had never liked Robbie to begin with. Like her, he’d been a bit of an oddball here. Like her, he’d come back because…well, she couldn’t rightly explain why that was except that it was home. When she’d had nowhere to go, nothing to hold on to, returning home had seemed the only answer.

  She turned to her daughters. “Time for bed, lovebugs.”

  Kaci rolled her eyes fast. She was always the most dramatic of the two of them. Had been that way since birth. “It’s not time for bed. You just want to talk to the handsome sheriff about the aliens.”

  Faith tried to ignore the way her words made her cheeks feel hot. “Kaci…”

  Her phone rang, and she stared down at it. Her neighbor way down the long block was calling. The woman’s daughter was the same age as the girls, and Faith answered knowing that she’d be calling to see if the girls could sleep over. This was the case almost every week now. Sometimes she found it intrusive that she wanted them over so much to be with her own daughter, but tonight it felt like kismet.

  One way or another, she and Wyatt were going to need to have a difficult conversation. Her girls didn’t have to be home for this. Since Aimee was on her way home from the grocery store she was willing pick up Kelly-Jo and Kaci to see her daughter, Jana. All of that was easy enough, which meant Faith got to send the girls upstairs to pack. They were more excited about that than the idea of going to bed and hustled upstairs to get ready. They were downstairs in two minutes and in Aimee’s car before Faith could say boo. She waved at them down the driveway.