by Lisa Jackson
“A wife and an ex-wife,” Matt clarified.
The old man’s thin lips pursed, but he didn’t argue. “What I want from you—from all my children—is grandchildren. You know that. It’s an old man’s dream, I know, but it’s only natural. I’d like to go to my grave in peace with the knowledge that you’ll find yourself a good woman and settle down, have a family, and that the McCafferty name will go on for a few more generations.”
“There’s lots of time—”
“Not for me, there ain’t!” John Randall snapped.
Feeling as if he was being manipulated for the umpteenth time by his father, Matt tried to hand the buckle back. “If this is some kind of bribe or deal or—”
“No bribe.” The old man spit in disgust. “I want you to have that buckle because it means something to me, and since you rode rodeo a few years back, I thought you might appreciate it.” He wagged a finger at the buckle. “Turn it over.”
Matt flipped the smooth piece of metal and read the engraving on the backside. “To my cowboy. Love forever, Larissa.” His throat closed for a minute when he thought of his mother with her shiny black hair and laughing brown eyes, which had saddened over the years of her marriage. From a free spirit, she’d become imprisoned on this ranch and had sought her own kind of solace and peace that she’d never found in the bottles she’d hidden in the old house she’d grown to despise.
Matt’s gut twisted. He missed her. Bad. And the old man had wronged her. There were just no two ways about it.
“Larissa had it engraved after I won it. Hell, she was a fool for me back then.” The wrinkles around John Randall’s mouth and eyes deepened with sadness, and there was a tiny shadow of guilt that chased across his eyes. “So, now I want you to have it, Matthew.”
Matt’s fingers tightened over the sharp edges of the buckle, but he didn’t say a word. Couldn’t.
“And I want me some grandbabies. That’s not too much for an old man to ask.”
“I’m not married.”
“Then get yourself hitched.” His father gave him a head-to-toe once-over. “Fine, strappin’ man like you shouldn’t have too much trouble.”
“Maybe I don’t believe in marriage.”
“Then maybe you’re a fool.”
Matt traced the silhouette of the bucking bronco with one finger. “It could be I learned from the best.”
“So unlearn it,” John Randall ordered, just as he always did. His way or the highway. Matt had chosen the latter.
“I’ve got me a horse to break,” he said. “And my own place to run.”
“I was hopin’ you’d be stayin’ on.” There was a hint of desperation in his father’s voice, but Matt stood firm. There was just too much water under the damned bridge—muddy, treacherous water fed by a swift current of lies and deceit, the kind of water a man could slowly drown in. Matt had come to the ranch to mend some emotional fences with the old man and to help the foreman, Larry Todd, for a week or so, but his own spread, a few hundred acres close to the Idaho border, needed his attention.
“I can’t, Dad,” he said finally as he followed the path of a wasp as it flew toward the back porch. “Maybe it’s time to get you inside.”
“For God’s sake, don’t try to mollycoddle me, son. It’s not like I’m gonna catch my death out here today.” John Randall folded his hands in his lap and looked between the old slats of the fence to the hard pan of the paddock where the Appaloosa, still wearing an empty saddle, pawed the ground, kicking up dust. “I’ll watch while you try to break him. It’ll be interesting to see who’ll win. You or Diablo.”
Matt lifted a disbelieving eyebrow. “You sure?”
“Ye-up.”
“Fine.” Matt squared his hat on his head and climbed over the fence. “But it’s not gonna be much of a contest,” he said, more to the horse than the man who had sired him. He strode forward with renewed determination, his eyes fixed on the Appaloosa’s sleek muscles that quivered as he approached. Few things in life beat Matt McCafferty.
A high-strung colt wasn’t one of them.
Nor was his father.
Nope. His weakness, if he had one, was women. Fiery-tempered, bullheaded women in particular.
The kind he avoided like the plague.
And now his father wanted him to find a woman, tie the knot and start raising a passel of babies.
He nearly laughed as he reached for the reins, and Diablo had the nerve to snort defiantly.
No way in hell was Matt McCafferty getting married. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. That’s just the way it was.
Chapter 1
The following November
She’d met him before.
Too many times to count.
That didn’t mean she had to like him.
No, sir.
As far as Detective Kelly Dillinger was concerned, Matt McCafferty was just plain bad news. Pure and simple, cut from the same biased, sanctimonious, self-serving cloth as his brothers and his bastard of a father before him.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t look good. If you liked the rough-and-tumble, tough-as-rawhide cowboy type, Matt McCafferty was the man for you. His rugged appeal was legendary in Grand Hope. He and his older and younger brothers had been considered the best catches in the entire county for years. But Kelly prided herself on being different from most of the women who wanted to swoon whenever they heard the McCafferty name.
So they were handsome.
So they were sexy.
So they had money.
So what?
These days their reputations had tarnished a bit, notoriety had taken its toll, and the oldest of the lot, Thorne, was rumored to be losing his status as an eligible bachelor and marrying a local woman doctor.
Not so the second brother, Matt. The one, it seemed, she was going to have to deal with right now.
He was muscling open the door to the Grand Hope office of the sheriff’s department with one broad shoulder and bringing with him a rush of frigid winter air and snowflakes that melted instantly the minute they encountered the sixty-eight degrees maintained by a wheezing furnace hidden somewhere in the basement of this ancient brick building.
Matt McCafferty. Great. Just…damned great. She already had a headache and was up to her eyeballs in paperwork, a ream of which could be applied to the McCafferty case—no, make that cases, plural—alone. But she couldn’t ignore him, either. She stared through the glass of her enclosed office and saw him stride across the yellowing linoleum floor, barely stopping at the gate that separated the reception area from the office, then sweep past the receptionist on a cloud of self-righteous fury. Kelly disliked the man on sight, but then she had her own personal ax to grind when it came to the McCaffertys.
There was fire in McCafferty’s brown eyes and anger in his tight, blade-thin lips and the stubborn set of his damnably square jaw. Yep, cut from the same cloth as the others, she thought as she climbed to her feet and opened the door to the office at the same time as he was about to pound on the scarred oak panels.
“Mr. McCafferty.” She feigned a smile. “A pleasure to see you again.”
“Cut the bull,” he said without preamble.
“Okay.” He was blunt if nothing else. “Why don’t you come in…” But he’d already crossed the threshold and was inside the small glassed-in room, pacing the short distance from one wall to the other.
Stella Gamble, the plump, nervous receptionist, had abandoned her post and was fidgeting at the door, her bright red fingernails catching light from the humming fluorescent tubing overhead. “I tried to stop him, really I did,” she said, shaking her head as her tight blond curls bounced around her flushed cheeks. “He wouldn’t listen.”
“A family trait.”
“I’m sorry—”
“It’s all right, Stella. Relax. I needed to talk to one of the McCafferty brothers, anyway,” Kelly assured her, though that was stretching the truth quite a bit. A conversation with Thorne, Slade or especially Matt wasn’t on her agenda right this minute, not when Nathaniel Biggs was calling every two hours, certain that someone had stolen his prize bull last night, Perry Carmichael had reported an odd aura suspended over the copse of oak trees behind his machine shed out on Old Dupont Road and Dora Haines was missing again, probably wandering around the foothills in nineteen-degree weather with a storm threatening to blast in from the Bitterroots by nightfall. Not that the McCafferty case wasn’t important—it just wasn’t the only one she was working on. “Don’t worry about it,” she said to Stella. “I’ll talk to Mr. McCafferty.”
“No one should get by me,” the receptionist said, blinking rapidly.
“You’re right, they shouldn’t,” Kelly agreed, and glared at the uninvited guest. “But, as I said, I need to talk to him, anyway, and I don’t think he’s dangerous.”
“Don’t count on it,” McCafferty countered. Standing near the file cabinet, he looked as if he could spit nails.
The phone rang loudly at Stella’s desk.
“I’ll deal with this,” Kelly said as the receptionist hurried back to her desk and immediately donned her headset.
Kelly closed the door behind her and snapped the blinds shut for privacy, as she didn’t want any of the deputies witnessing the dressing-down that was simmering in the air of her postage-stamp-size office.
“Have a seat,” she offered, sweeping off the files that were stacked in the single chair on the visitor’s side of her metal desk.
He didn’t move, but those eyes followed her as she plopped into her ancient desk chair. “I’m tired of getting the runaround,” he announced through lips that barely moved.
“The runaround?”
“Yep.” He planted his hands between her in-basket and the computer monitor glowing from one corner of the desk and leaned across the reports that were strewn in front of her. “I want answers, dammit. My sister’s been in a coma for over a month because of an accident that I believe is the result of someone running her Jeep off the road, and you people, you people, are doing nothing to find out what happened to her. For all we know someone tried to kill her that day and they won’t stop until they finish the job!”
“That’s just speculation,” Kelly reminded him, the short fuse on her temper igniting. There was a chance that Randi McCafferty’s rig had been forced off the road up in Glacier Park. With no witnesses it was hard to say. But the sheriff’s department was checking into every possibility. “We’re trying to locate another vehicle if one is involved. So far, we haven’t found one.”
“It’s been over a month, for crying out loud,” he said as she sat on the corner of her desk, watching a battery of emotions cross his face. Anger. Determination. Frustration. And more—a fleck of fear darkened his brown eyes. Fear wasn’t an emotion she considered when thinking of any of the roguish, tough-as-rawhide McCafferty men. The three brothers, like their father, had always appeared an intrepid, fearless lot. “And over two weeks have passed since Thorne’s plane went down. You think that was an accident, too?”
“It’s possible. We’re looking into it.”
“Well, you’d better look harder,” he suggested, his nostrils flaring.
The guy was getting to her. Again. He had a way of nettling her—getting under her skin and irritating her. Kind of like a burr caught beneath a horse’s saddle. McCafferty straightened, swept his hat from his head and raked stiff fingers through his near-black, wavy hair. “Before someone actually dies.”
“The feds are involved in the plane crash.”
“That doesn’t seem to be helping a whole helluva lot.”
“We’re doing everything in our power to—”
“It’s not enough,” he cut in. Again fire flared in his eyes. “Are you in charge of this investigation, Detective?” he asked, casting a glance at the badge she wore so proudly. He was crushing the brim of his Stetson in fingers that blanched white at the knuckles.
She held on to her patience, but just barely. “I think we’ve been over this before. Detective Espinoza has been assigned the case. I’m assisting him, as I was the first on the scene of your sister’s wreck.”
“Then I’m wasting my time with you.”
That stung. Kelly gritted her teeth and stood.
“Tell Espinoza I want to talk to him.”
“He’s not in right now.”
“I’ll wait.”
“It might be a while.”
Matt McCafferty looked as if he might explode. He dropped his hat on a nearby folding chair and leaned over her desk again, shoving some file folders out of the way as he pushed his face closer, so that the tip of his nose nearly touched hers. The air seemed to crackle. The smell of wet suede, horses and a faint hint of pine reached her nostrils. Snow had melted on the shoulders of his sheepskin jacket, and there were a few damp spots on his face. His fists opened and closed in frustration on the desktop. “You have to understand, Detective, this is my family we’re talking about,” he said in a low whisper that had more impact than if he’d raged. “My family. Now, the way I see it, my sister was nearly killed, and not only that but she was nine months pregnant at the time.”
“I know—”
“Do you? Can you imagine what she went through? She went into labor when her Jeep careered over that embankment and crashed. She was just lucky someone came along and called 911. Between the paramedics and the doctors over at St. James Hospital and a lot of help from the man upstairs, she pulled through.”
“And the baby survived,” she pointed out, remembering all too clearly the condition of mother and son.
Matt wasn’t about to be deterred. Like a runaway freight train gathering steam, he kept right on. “After a bout of meningitis.”
Her fingers coiled over a pen on the desk. “I understand all this—”
“Fortunately little J.R. is a McCafferty. He’s tough. He pulled through.”
“So he’s fine,” she reminded him, trying to keep emotions out of the conversation, which, of course, was impossible.
“Fine?” He snorted. “I guess you might say so, except that he needs his mom, who is still comatose and lying in a hospital room.” For a brief second Matt McCafferty actually seemed as if he cared about his nephew, and his brown eyes darkened in concern. That got to Kelly, though she refused to show it. Of course he was worried about the kid—McCaffertys always looked after their own. To the exclusion of all others. “And that’s not all, Detective,” he added.
“I’m sure not,” she drawled, and he scowled at her patronizing tone.
“It’s a miracle that Thorne survived the plane crash and ended up with only a few cuts and bruises and a broken leg.”
Amen to that. Thorne was the eldest McCafferty brother, a millionaire oilman who hailed from Denver. He’d been flying the company jet back to Grand Hope, hit bad weather and gone down.
“The way I see it, either the McCaffertys are having one helluva string of bad luck, or someone’s out to get us.”
“Randi was driving and hit an icy patch. Your brother was flying alone in the middle of a snowstorm. Bad luck? Or bad judgment?”
“Or, as I said, a potential murderer on the loose.”
“Who?” she asked, meeting his glare, not backing down an inch though she was beginning to sweat, and the office, filled by his presence, seemed even smaller than usual.
“That’s what I was hopin’ you’d tell me.”
God, he was close to her. Too close. The desk between them seemed a small barrier.
“Believe me, Mr. McCafferty—”
“Matt. Call me Matt. There’re too damned many McCaffertys to call us by o
ur last name.”
She wouldn’t argue that point.
“And somehow I have the feelin’ that you and I, we’ll be workin’ real close together on this one. I intend to stick to you like glue until you find out who the hell is behind this, so we may as well cut the formalities.”
The thought of working closely with anyone named McCafferty stuck in Kelly’s craw, and this one, this damnably sexy, cocksure cowboy, was the most irritating of the lot, but she didn’t have much choice in the matter. “All right, Matt. As I was saying, we’re trying our best here to find out the truth behind both accidents. Everyone in the department is busting their hump to figure this mess out.”
“Not fast enough,” he growled.
“And none of us, me especially—” she hooked a thumb at her chest “—needs anyone looking over her shoulder.” She stuffed the pen in the mug on her desk. “Didn’t you hire your own private detective?”
His thin lips tightened a fraction.
“A man by the name of Kurt Striker?” She folded her arms across her chest.
He nodded. “We thought we needed more help.”
“So what has he got to say?”
“That he thinks there’s foul play,” McCafferty said, his eyes narrowing on Kelly as if he couldn’t quite figure her out. Tough. She was used to men distrusting her as a detective because she was a woman, and that’s what Matt McCafferty was saying; she could read it in his eyes. Well, that was just too damned bad. She wasn’t about to be bullied or intimidated. Not by anyone. Not even one of the high-and-mighty McCaffertys. Matt’s father, John Randall, had once been a rich, powerful and influential man in the county, and his descendants thought they could still throw their collective weights around. Well, not here.
“Has Striker got any proof that someone’s behind the accidents?” she asked.
Hesitation.
“I didn’t think so.” She slipped from the desk. “That’s it. Now, listen, I have work to do, and I don’t need you barging in here and making demands and—”
“Striker says there’s some paint on Randi’s rig. Maroon. Maybe from the other car when she was forced off the road.”