Nate gave serious consideration to killing his one and only prisoner. Two weeks into his new life, and he was thinking about going out of it with a bang.
The station was quiet, with only Nate, his deputy, Logan, and the prisoner currently occupying the neatly kept rooms. Nate leaned on the reception desk and considered the man in the small cell. Bliss County Jail was a tiny operation with two simple cells. If he could catch a serious offender and shove him in there with Max Harper, he might be able to solve a major problem. If said prisoner shivved the mouthy horse trainer, then Nate wouldn’t have to put up with the son of a bitch. Nate stared over at his deputy, Logan Green. The lanky, too-young-for-a-uniform boy had his nose in a comic book.
All in all, it was a long way from the Drug Enforcement Agency.
When Stefan had offered him the job of sheriff of Bliss, it seemed like the perfect place to start over. Of course, Stef hadn’t mentioned that he’d have to deal with Max or crazy-ass Mel, who insisted daily that the aliens were coming. No one had bothered to warn him that he would be the law enforcement liaison to a nudist colony, or that once a year the new agers came in to soak up the vibrations or some shit that Bliss gave off.
It was a weird town, and he was rapidly getting fed up with it.
“Damn it, Max.” Callie walked into the sheriff’s office, pushing her glasses up her nose. Yeah, there was one thing he wasn’t fed up with and that was looking at her. She was so adorable, Nate wanted to walk up to her and hug her. Of course, hugging would lead to rubbing, and he knew if he laid a hand on her, he’d end up humping her leg like a dog. She was such a sweet armful. Even dressed in a denim skirt and blousy shirt, she was sexy as hell. Why hadn’t Stef bothered to mention that the woman of his dreams would be his secretary? Stef sure as hell hadn’t forgotten that he had a past with Callie. Not that he seemed to care.
Two weeks in and he was starting to think he would go crazy if he didn’t get his hands on her. Not that he was close to doing it. She barely spoke to him except to lecture him on all the things he was doing wrong. Then he would get sarcastic and broody and she would go back to not talking to him.
Callie completely ignored him. She blew past him, her hands on those curvy hips of hers, and plowed toward Max Harper. She never did anything without a great deal of energy. It was one of the hottest things about her. She was always moving, but Nate remembered a time when her energy had been spent and all she could do was sigh. He’d give anything to get her underneath him again.
But she was still off limits.
Harper’s boots tapped against the floor. “Now, Callie, don’t you yell at me. Talk to that tight-ass boss of yours. He’s pulling people off the street for no reason. Can sheriffs get impeached? Because he should be impeached. Rye would never have done something like that.”
Nate came off the desk, prepared to defend himself. He’d heard an awful lot about how the old sheriff handled things. Nate wondered if he would ever come out of the man’s shadow. Everywhere he went, he was compared to Rye Harper.
He couldn’t see her face, but he knew Callie was rolling her eyes. She had that sarcastic stance. He’d learned an awful lot about reading Callie’s body language since he’d started the job. Mostly that was because he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“Rye didn’t arrest anyone because he was as lazy as the day is long,” Callie declared. “I could barely get him to write a ticket. Sheriff Wright is an actual, honest-to-goodness cop, and not some high school kid who didn’t want to work at Stella’s Diner.”
Logan’s head came out of the latest issue of X-Men. “Stella works too damn hard, if you ask me. This place is way calmer than the diner, what with all the tourists and having to deal with Nell and Henry’s protests. And seriously, have you seen what happens when you get that guy’s order wrong?”
Harper slapped at the bars of his cell. “I like my burger dead, man. Hal tries to cut corners by shoving a live cow in between two buns and calling it a burger. You want to arrest someone, Sheriff? Go arrest Stella’s short-order cook.”
Logan nodded as though happy to have confirmation of his life choices. “You see what I mean? Being a deputy is way less dangerous than working at Stella’s. And I graduated three years ago. Stop calling me a high school kid. At least move me up to college. Speaking of college…I’m thinking about taking one of those online courses. Any way I could use the computer here?”
Nate narrowed his eyes, and Logan suddenly bolted out of his chair.
“I’ll go catch some speeders. That’s a good idea.” Logan was smashing his hat on his head as he nearly ran out the door.
“Will you stop scaring the crap out of your deputy?” Callie frowned Nate’s way as the door literally hit Logan’s ass on his way out. The deputy yelped. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to get someone to agree to this job? This is a whole town full of antiestablishment hippies. They weren’t lining up to put on a uniform.”
Nate shrugged. Scaring the piss out of Logan was one of the highlights of his days here in Bliss. He attempted his most angelic look. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Now he could actually see the eye roll. It was an expression she used a lot on him. “Sure you don’t. I heard you recounting all of your so-called kills to him. Do you want to give that boy nightmares? And you…” She whirled back around to face the man in the cell. “What is your wife going to say?”
Max Harper grinned arrogantly. He wore jeans, a western shirt, and boots. The man was all cowboy, all the time. “She’s going to say nothing because once I get my phone call, I’m calling Rye. He won’t tell Rach anything. I have too much on him. We’ve got a nice, mutually assured destruction balance going on.”
Nate sighed, a genuine sense of pleasure running through his system. This might be even better than giving Logan Green a bunch of baloney stories. This one was real. “Don’t worry about that phone call, Harper. I took care of it for you. Your wife said she’d be here as soon as she…what were her words? Oh, yeah. She’ll be here as soon as she sharpens a knife so she can cut your balls off.”
It took everything he had not to burst into laughter at how green Max Harper got. The cowboy’s hands fell to his sides, and he sat back on the cot. “You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“You asshole. We had a friendly game going and you have to play hardball?” Harper looked like a little boy who had his toys taken away.
Was the man insane? “Friendly game? You call doing seventy-five miles an hour in a forty mile an hour zone a game? Then you didn’t stop when I put on the lights and the siren.”
“I was looking for a safe place to pull over.” Harper shrugged.
“For ten miles?” He’d followed that son of a bitch all the way down the damn mountain.
There it was, that arrogant smirk that made Nate want to clobber him. “Those roads are damn dangerous. I was giving you a signal that I would pull over as soon as I could.”
“You flipped me the bird, asshole.”
Harper pointed his way. “See, now is that any way for a cop to talk? When my brother was the sheriff, he would never have used that sort of language.”
“He cursed your name on a regular basis.” A stern female voice was added to the mix.
Harper shifted back as though the bars wouldn’t keep him safe from the terrifying newcomer. Rachel Harper was roughly five feet two and, if rumors were true, expecting a baby. Maxwell Harper was utterly terrified of his pretty, pregnant wife. She crossed to the middle of the room and stared a hole through him.
“Hi, baby.” It was obvious Max was going for sympathy. All of the arrogance on his face had fled in favor of a sad-puppy look. “That man does not like me. He looks for any excuse to mess with me.”
Rachel ignored him. She turned to Callie. “Does he need to make bail?”
“No,” Callie said.
“Yes,” Nate interjected.
Now it was Callie staring at him, and Nate understood Max for a mome
nt. Nate might not have impregnated Callie, but she had a hold on him all the same. “You are not leaving him in jail until the judge gets back from his hunting trip.”
“No, I need him to come home. I have a few words to say to you, husband number one,” Rachel said.
“I can stay.” Max nodded his head vigorously. “I don’t want any special treatment.”
Rachel stood in front of the cell. “Max Harper, you will get out of that cell and get your sweet ass into the car or there will be hell to pay.”
A long, slow smile tugged at Harper’s lips. He got up from the cot and stalked to the bars. “Hell to pay, huh? What kind of hell you going to put me through, Rach?”
Rachel cocked her head to the side as she stared at her husband. “I think you know what I’m talking about, Max. I’m going to need at least twelve hours.”
Max’s face flushed. He suddenly seemed anxious. “I should get arrested more often.” He turned to Nate. “I am very, very sorry for the shameful way I taunted you, Sheriff Wright.” He snickered, his mouth curling up in a smirk. “Sorry, it’s just the most clichéd name ever for a sheriff, but I utterly respect your authority.”
The asshole didn’t, but Callie was already getting the keys to the cell. He needed to hide the damn things. Every time he put someone in custody, his admin let them out.
The door to the station house slammed open, and Max’s twin brother, Rye Harper, ran in, his boots sliding across the slick floor.
“Callie, I need to get Max out of here before…hey, baby.” Rye plastered a smile on his face. “I was at the diner and found out Max had done it again. Damn it, Max, when are you going to grow up? Don’t you know we got a baby on the way?”
“Yes, you’re here to lecture Max.” Rachel obviously wasn’t buying it. “BS, Rye. You’re here to bail him out and be his alibi, like you always are.”
Max strode out of his cell and crowded his wife, one hand sliding across the nape of her neck, the other rubbing her belly. “Don’t worry about it, bro. Me and Rach have a system worked out. If I screw up, then I have to be her sex slave for a while. It’s a terrible punishment. It’s going to get me on the straight and narrow one of these days.”
Rye was immediately at her other side. “Well, I would like to point out that I was going to bail him out and then hide the evidence from you. That makes me every bit as guilty as him.”
Rachel’s laugh filled the station as she sent her husbands out to the car. The men ran to do her bidding, and she turned to Callie. “Sorry. Max is worried about the baby. You know how he gets when he’s anxious. He tends to take it out on the world around him.”
Callie hugged the pregnant woman, her affection obvious. “He’s obnoxious all the time. It’s part of his charm. Don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to that one about being more tolerant.”
Nate stood a bit taller because he was pretty sure he was about to get lectured. Rachel left to follow her husbands. Husbands. Damn, as much as he hated Max Harper, Nate was also completely fascinated with the way the man lived his life. The Harper family consisted of the twins and their shared wife, Rachel. No one in town even blinked. Nate had caught some of the tourists shaking their heads when she smooched on both, but the citizens of Bliss took it all in stride. One of these days, he was going to sit down with Rye, who seemed far more reasonable than his brother, and talk about how it really worked.
But for now, he had to deal with Callie. He went on the offensive.
“You have to stop doing that.” He made his tone firm. He wasn’t Max Harper, afraid of one small woman. After everything he’d been through, he knew all about fear, and it didn’t come in such a soft package. He’d been wary of dealing with her. He’d spent the last two weeks mooning over what he couldn’t have, and now it was time to take the situation in hand. “You are my administrative assistant, Ms. Sheppard. If you want to be a deputy, you can take the test, and I’ll put your name on the waiting list.”
“If you don’t like my work, Sheriff, you should feel free to fire me.” She turned on her kitten heels and stomped back toward the front desk. She sat down on her chair and immediately began to straighten a bunch of stuff that was already neat and organized.
She had him there. He was never going to fire her. He couldn’t even stand the possibility of her quitting. Hell, he didn’t like the days she took off, and more often than not found some damn silly excuse to see her. Feeling utterly impotent, Nate stalked into his office and slammed the door shut. He slumped down into his comfy chair and pondered his situation. Zane was getting worse, not better. He hadn’t been able to get him out of the cabin to come into town in the two weeks they had been living in Bliss. Zane still didn’t know Callie was here. Nate hadn’t told him for fear that Zane would take off on that bike of his, and Nate wouldn’t see him again until he had to identify his body.
It had seemed like a good place to start over after everything that happened. He couldn’t go back to the DEA, and there was no way Zane would go back even if they would let him. When he’d quit the DEA, Nate had been told that the director would hold his job, but he couldn’t even consider it while Zane was recuperating. Zane’s body had healed, but his mind was still in a dark place. He’d needed a place where Zane could get better, but the bastard didn’t seem to want to recover. He wanted to brood. He wanted to rage. He wanted to beat the shit out of anything that came in his path. Nate kept hoping that would change, but now he wondered. Maybe they should have gone back to Dallas.
It would be easier if Callie wasn’t here, but he needed her, damn it, and in more ways than one. Nate wasn’t used to small-town politics, and he doubted anyone on the planet was used to Bliss politics.
He was fumbling, and he didn’t know how to stop.
There was a brief knock on the door, and Callie popped her head in. If things were different, this would be the point where Nate would haul his hot secretary into his arms, shove her skirt up, and have his way with her. His eyes glazed over as he thought about freeing his cock and settling her in his lap. He’d lower that tight pussy onto him and fuck her hard. It would be a nice break. They got three a day. That might start to satisfy him.
“Are you still here or have you checked out?” Callie stared at him like he was from another planet.
Nate sat up carefully. His cock was painfully hard, but then it had been in that state for the last two weeks. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Mel. The aliens have landed, and he has proof.” Callie wrinkled her nose. “You need to get out there and talk to him. I have the Detector 4000 out on the desk.”
Every muscle in his body was suddenly weary. The Detector 4000 was one of the reasons he should have stayed in Dallas. It was a video game controller Stefan had “enhanced” with various bells and whistles to placate the town crazy—well, one of them, anyway. It made a lot of sounds and had lights that went off and told the user that no alien technology was in evidence.
It was complete bullshit.
Maybe it was time he took his job seriously. Nate stood up and placed the Stetson on his head. Yes, that was exactly what he needed to do. Why should he fit in? He was the sheriff. He was the authority figure for the town. Maybe the town needed to fit in with him. Yes, it was time to take this town in hand.
Callie watched him as he walked past her. “I don’t like that look.”
He waved her off. “Get used to it.”
Nate walked past the front desk, pointedly ignoring the Detector 4000. Mel would have to learn to deal with reality.
There was a new sheriff in town, and Bliss would have to face the music.
* * * *
Boy, he was about to screw up big time. Callie just knew it. She grabbed the Detector 4000 and raced after her boss, turning the sign on the door from Come on in to Don’t commit any crimes. We’re fishing.
He was already in the Bronco, starting the engine. Callie had quickly realized that Nate Wright was a man who took his time making a decision, but once he’d settled on
his course, he was quick to follow it. She had to be fast or he’d be in trouble.
Before he had a chance to back out, she swung open the door and slammed into the passenger seat.
“Damn it, Callie, who is minding the store?” His lips thinned, and he looked pointedly at the station house. He was not amused by the sign she’d made when Rye had been sheriff. He’d been famous for his fishing afternoons.
She didn’t argue. It wouldn’t help to point out that no one would think a thing about the station not being manned. If there was trouble, they would call her on the radio or her cell. Nate hadn’t left his big-city mentality behind. She leaned across him and grabbed the radio. “Logan, this is Callie. I need you to get back to the station house.”
There was a slight pause. “Is he still there?”
She felt Nate stiffen beside her. Well, if he wanted his staff to like him, he should be less rude. Hell, she didn’t like him most of the time and she’d slept with him. Not that anyone knew that except Stefan. “No. It’s safe. He’s going out on a call, and I’m going to make sure he doesn’t cause trouble.”
She could hear Logan’s voice lighten. “Awesome. Then I’ll be right there.”
She would make sure to put a call into the station before they came back. More than once, she’d found Logan taking a nice nap on one of the cell cots. She didn’t think Nate would find it amusing. She replaced the radio as Nate backed out.
“I swear I should fire you all. I’ve never been in such a shoddily run operation before.” He kept his eyes on the road in front of him.
“Or you should feel free to head right back to the big city where everything is sunshine and roses.” She kind of wished he would leave. It would be infinitely easier on her. Logan could be sheriff, and as long as absolutely nothing ever happened, everything would be all right. Of course, if anything went wrong, they were screwed. Still, she might be willing to take the risk. The tension was starting to wear on her.
“At least in Dallas we don’t mollycoddle crazy people.”
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