The Trouble With Cowboys

by Melissa Cutler

  Vaughn’s expression turned grave, alert. Pure cop. He drew his firearm and positioned himself at the door. With the barrel aimed at the ground, he peered through the peephole and waited. A minute later, he cursed under his breath and holstered the gun.

  “Who is it?” Kellan whispered.

  Throwing him a grim look, Vaughn opened the door.

  Rachel Sorentino stumbled in, her fist raised like she’d been about to knock, her other hand gripping Kellan’s briefcase. The one Amy had winged into the pond. His heart stopped.

  Rachel’s disheveled hair flopped over her face. She swiped it away and took in the room, her eyes flitting to Vaughn before honing in on Kellan. Her whole body quivered, but Kellan didn’t think it was from the cold, despite that she wore only a long-sleeved T-shirt and the night air hovered near freezing. The expression on her face was murderous.

  She wound back and hurled the briefcase across the room. It smacked into the kitchen island and landed on the floor with a clatter, flopping open. Empty. She and her sisters had kept the papers that had been inside. Kellan would have too.

  Panic twisted his gut into a knot. Amy knew about the lawsuit.

  Vaughn inched toward her. “Rachel, what are you doing driving around in the middle of the night? It’s pitch black and freezing out there. Too dangerous.”

  She speared a finger in his direction. “I’ll deal with you next.” She whirled to face Kellan. He held his ground. “You son of a bitch. Taking advantage of my sister’s good will. Taking advantage of all of us.”

  “I can explain.”

  Her expression flared in challenge. She stretched her arms out. “Go ahead, then.” She wasn’t yelling. If anything, she’d lowered her voice. Fury, harnessed but potent, poured from her every word. “Explain to me how you looked me in the eye and promised not to hurt Amy, when all the while you and Amarex were planning to crush our livelihood.”

  “I know what it looks like from your perspective, but I didn’t know anything about Amarex’s legal claims against your family until after I asked Amy out at church last Sunday.”

  “Didn’t stop you from seducing her, did it? Or from squeezing us for all our family secrets.”

  He glanced at Vaughn, who stood statue-still with a somber expression, his eyes locked on Rachel, his hands clenched at his sides. No help there. “You’re right, Rachel. In the end, it didn’t stop me. But I didn’t start out thinking along those lines. I kept the date with Amy because I wanted to explain the situation. You have no reason to trust me on this, but I had the best of intentions. The night got away from me. Amy’s so . . .” Intoxicating, amazing, everything I didn’t know I needed. “She’s better than I deserve and I guess I lost my mind a little bit.”

  She laughed, a thick, angry laugh. “You lost your mind? You mean, like my mom lost her mind? Because I don’t think you know what that’s like. Pick a different excuse.”

  Oh, man. How could he make her see? “Yesterday, when you and Amy rode up on your horses, after Jenna got the call from the hospital, I was there to talk to you all about the Amarex situation.” He gestured to the ground. “That’s why I had my briefcase and all that paperwork. I swear to you.”

  She nodded, but her eyes glinted with sarcasm. “Uh-huh. Have you filled Morton in on our family secrets yet? The weaknesses in our case against Amarex?”

  “The opposite, actually. If you looked in the briefcase, you probably saw the business card of my friend, Matt Roenick. He’s an—”

  “Save it, Kellan. Because you know what? This is a blessing in disguise, you helping Amarex destroy us. It certainly opened Amy’s eyes to the truth about you and your intentions.”

  She glanced sideways at Vaughn. He shifted his weight, but his expression remained unflinching. His only tell was in the subtle ripple of his cheek as he clenched his jaw.

  “It’s opened my eyes too,” she continued, swinging her gaze back to Kellan. “I’m done breaking my back to hold on to the farm. Every day, my entire life, working myself to the bone. The whole time, worrying about money and my family’s future. You better believe I’ve got the ulcers to prove it. So this lawsuit I got served today got me thinking—what’s stopping me from taking my sisters and my nephew and starting over somewhere else? Far away from this loose-lipped, judgmental hole of a town. There’s nothing here worth fighting for anymore.”

  “Rachel . . .” It was Vaughn. He took a step toward her, his hand outstretched like he was aiming for her shoulders.

  She pivoted to face him. “Don’t Rachel me. You allowed this to happen. You let my sister get taken advantage of by your best friend, knowing his family’s company wants to ruin us.” She took a deep breath. “Or is that what you want? Amarex takes my land and forces me to leave. Then you don’t have to deal with me anymore. Do you hate me that much?”

  “Rachel, no . . .” He tried to reach for her again.

  “Not another step closer, Vaughn.”

  He stopped, his hands out like a buffer between them. “I don’t hate you. Not even close.”

  Kellan wasn’t in a position to see the expression on Rachel’s face, but her shoulders slumped. “I wish you did,” she whispered.

  Vaughn’s lips screwed up. “Sometimes I wish that too.”

  She nodded and lurched away. “Kellan, go ahead and tell your uncle I’m not going to put up a fight. All that matters to me is my family, and Amarex can’t take them away. No matter what power they think they have over us.”

  Without looking at Vaughn, she opened the door and walked out, into the night. Vaughn followed. Knowing him, he wanted to make sure she made it to her truck safely. As if evil strangers were waiting in the shadows to ambush her.

  Kellan stood next to Vaughn and watched her leave in silence. The minute her taillights disappeared, Vaughn put the full force of his strength into a kick that launched a potted plant off the porch. It sailed into the driveway and smashed to bits. Max must’ve been sleeping under a porch chair because he army-crawled down the steps and slunk out of view.

  Cursing loudly, Vaughn stomped to his truck and flipped open the glove compartment.

  He emerged with a pack of cigarettes in his hand and hung one from his lips.

  “Vaughn, don’t.”

  “Shut up, Kellan. You have no idea how bad I want to punch you right now.” Cupping his hands over his mouth to block the wind, he lit up and took a long drag, holding the smoke in his lungs for a few beats before releasing it in a slow stream. “Damn, that’s good.”

  Leaning against the truck, he looked up at the stars as he took another slow drag.

  Kellan was as rattled by Vaughn’s reaction as he was by his exchange with Rachel. Mechanically, he walked to the barbecue deck for lighter fluid and matches. Back out front, he snatched the cigarette pack from the roof of Vaughn’s truck and a metal bucket from the side of the house. He couldn’t stand the idea of Vaughn having to quit his addiction a second time. Once had been hard enough on them all. The pack went into the bucket, followed by the fluid, then a match. The bucket exploded in flames.

  “They sell more at the Quick Stand, you know,” Vaughn said evenly.

  “Don’t do this to yourself again. I know something happened between you and Rachel, but don’t use cigarettes to cope. Damn near killed you to quit last time.”

  He took another drag. “It wasn’t the quitting smoking that nearly killed me.”

  “I was there. You suffered like a dog for weeks of nicotine withdrawal.”

  “I’m telling you, it wasn’t the cigarettes.”

  “Then what?”

  For the first time since Rachel drove away, Vaughn looked Kellan in the eye. “What I did to Rachel, the shame I have to live with every day. It’s worse than nicotine withdrawal. Worse than anything I’ve ever experienced.”

  Vaughn Cooper was one of the best men Kellan had ever known, with a sense of honor set in stone. He would never purposefully hurt anyone, especially a woman. “What, exactly, did you do to Rachel?�
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  Chapter 14

  Vaughn kicked off the truck and walked toward the house, crunching right over the shards of the terra-cotta pot he’d destroyed and the corpse of the plant. At the base of the porch stairs, he flicked the cigarette into the dirt and ground it out with his boot. It was a nostalgic move, one that took Kellan back. He’d seen Vaughn snuff out a cigarette butt the same exact way a million times over the years they’d been friends.

  A sneaking disquiet oozed into the spaces of Kellan’s mind. He thought he knew Vaughn so well—better than anyone else on earth. He had his mannerisms down, knew all his jokes. They’d tackled their twenties and early thirties together, fended off mothers eager to marry their daughters to one of them, squeaked out of more than one hairy situation, and over time became as close as brothers. Closer, he amended, thinking of how he’d dragged his feet over calling Jake. Yet, clearly, something big had happened between him and Rachel, and he’d chosen to leave Kellan in the dark.

  Vaughn settled into a chair with a tired sigh and scrubbed his face with his hands.

  Kellan joined him, his curiosity and concern mounting. He folded his arms against the puffs of cold breeze coming off the hills. “Were you and Rachel romantically involved?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why did you two keep it a secret?”

  Vaughn brought out the disposable lighter from his shirt pocket and flicked a little flame into life with a satisfying sound of friction. “Because I screwed up. Bad.”

  Click. His thumb lifted from the lighter and the flame vanished.

  “Can’t be as bad as you think. Nothing’s unfixable.” He pulled his face back, surprised by his own words. He didn’t believe that . . . did he?

  The rasp of friction and a flame appeared again. Vaughn gave an incredulous snort. “Never took you for an optimist, K. For the record, this thing with Rachel is not fixable.”

  Desperation, that strange, heavy yearning, dropped like a lead weight in his stomach. He felt like begging, the need to connect with his closest friend was so powerful. Don’t shut me out. After everything else that’s gone on with Amy and my brother, I can’t lose you too. “Why don’t you start at the beginning? Tell me what happened.”

  With a flick of his thumb, the flame disappeared. He tapped the lighter against his knee and seemed to draw into himself as he spoke, staring at the floor beyond his feet. “I knew who Rachel was because when I was a deputy, I had to return Jenna to her family more than once after I found her partying in bars with a fake ID, drunk, and up to no good. I’d haul her home in my patrol car, ring the doorbell, and her older sister would be the one to answer. Rachel. She was pretty, but I kept telling myself she wasn’t my type, you know?”

  Kellan agreed—he couldn’t think of a less likely couple, with Vaughn thriving in the public spotlight and Rachel as classic an introvert as he’d ever met. But he kept his mouth shut, offering a noncommittal nod instead.

  “Once Jenna got pregnant and settled down, the only place I’d see Rachel was at the Catcher Creek Café for lunch every now and then. We’d wave and I’d ask after Jenna and her boy. It went on like that until Gerald Sorentino died last New Year’s Eve.”

  “He ran his jeep off of Hoja Pass, the sisters told me.”

  “That’s exactly what he did. He grew up on that land and probably traversed that stretch of road a thousand times in his life. Tox report was clean, inconclusive evidence of possible tampering. No seat belt on, but that was about it. Forensics ruled it an accident. The steering mechanism failed. I could never prove otherwise, but it’s always nagged at me that maybe I missed something.” He shrugged. “Anyhow, the accident put me at Sorentino Farm a lot. Rachel was as pretty as ever, and strong. If she was grieving, she didn’t show it. She took care of the people around her and ran the farm, her spine straight, her chin high. Pure steel running through that woman’s veins.

  “I got to thinking about peeling that armor away, finding the softness underneath. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, about her. Wondering what it would be like to be the man she let down her guard around.” With a huff, he looked at Kellan. “Stupid reason, right? But there it is.”

  “Doesn’t sound stupid to me.” He’d been way worse gone with Amy. All she had to do for Kellan to throw his integrity out the window was take a bite of filet mignon.

  “So one night, about a few days after Gerald’s death, I went out to her place. I had questions about the investigation, and she was alone. She’d been drinking, not too much, but enough that I could see it in her eyes.”

  Vaughn dug through his jeans pocket and produced a business card. Holding it by one corner, he set it on fire. Kellan watched it burn, afraid to speak or move lest Vaughn think better of sharing the rest of his story. When the flames licked too close to his fingertips, he dropped the burning card to the ground and stomped it with the toe of his boot.

  He shot Kellan a pointed look. “I took advantage of her vulnerability.” His voice was raw, pained. “I seduced a grieving witness in an open investigation I was the lead on.”

  Kellan had formulated a general idea of the direction Vaughn’s story was headed, but still, he couldn’t wrap his mind around the possibility that his best friend, the greatest sheriff Quay County ever elected, would’ve made such a terrible, unethical choice. “When you had a clear head the next day, did you end things with her?”

  Vaughn smeared the charred paper across the floor, leaving a black gash in its wake. “The next day, I didn’t have a clear head. I was even more fucked up. Because all I could think about was how soon I could get back with her. The minute I got off work that night, I drove to her house. And every night after that it was either my place or hers.”

  Kellan winced. “When did you end it?”

  “That’s the thing. I didn’t have the willpower to drag myself out of the situation. Talk about addiction, man—I was crazy. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate. For four weeks, my world spun around Rachel. The worst days of my life, but also the best. When we were together, we burned the fucking walls down around us.”

  Kellan thought about last January. He hadn’t seen Vaughn much that month, but he’d written it off as a surge of crime and crazies following the holidays, as sometimes happened. The more he thought about the risk Vaughn had taken by being with Rachel, the more he couldn’t believe in its possibility. “You could’ve destroyed your career.”

  “I didn’t care.”

  “You must’ve cared a little because you kept it a secret from all of us.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. But I didn’t care enough to stop.”

  A frightening new possibility came to Kellan. “Rachel could throw you under the bus if she got it in her head to. She could get you tossed off the force. She was pretty angry tonight.”

  “If she did, I wouldn’t blame her one bit. But she won’t. She’s too private a person to expose herself to the kind of scrutiny that would come along with filing such a claim.” He wrung his hands and looked at his truck. “Wish you hadn’t incinerated my stash. I could use another smoke right now.”

  “Then I’m doubly glad I torched them.”

  Vaughn scowled and leapt to his feet. He prowled to the end of the porch.

  “You said the affair lasted four weeks. How did it end?” Kellan asked.

  “I would’ve kept going back to her until it destroyed us both. But the night of her mom’s suicide attempt, Rachel was with me. It’s why she didn’t know her mom left the house. That brought her to her senses, all right. After I finished the preliminary investigation, I drove to the hospital, worried about how she was dealing with everything.

  “We were standing next to my car in the parking lot because we didn’t want her sisters to know I was there. She told me she couldn’t take it anymore—the sleepless nights, the sneaking around like criminals, the guilt over what happened with her mom. Her family needed her too much for her to be selfish, she said. She was in charge of the fa
rm, all by herself, and she had to concentrate on that. She didn’t have time for an affair that would never amount to anything real.”

  “Ouch. No wonder she thought you hated her.”

  He paused midstride. “I don’t. I can’t believe she thought that.” He resumed his agitated pacing. “Anyhow, her words were like a slap to my face. Woke me up from the fog I was in. I took a good look at her, really looked. She had dark circles under her eyes, and she’d lost too much weight. Our affair was destroying her as much as it was me. That’s when it hit me—nothing as wrong as what we did, what I did to her, can lead to anything but pain and regret. I sacrificed my professional and personal integrity for nothing, because it didn’t matter how perfect we were together, we were doomed from the start.”

  Kellan did the math in his head. Bethany Sorentino’s suicide attempt was four weeks after New Year’s Eve. The end of January. “That’s around the time you quit smoking.”

  He shuffled dirt off the edge of the porch with his foot. “I needed to suffer. I needed the physical pain to distract me from the shame. I didn’t quit smoking for my health, but for survival.”

  Kellan joined him at the porch rail. “You’re not over her.”

  Vaughn’s face turned heavenward and he chewed the inside of his cheek. “How do you get over someone like that? Who makes you feel more alive than you’ve ever felt in your life? I can’t stop the what ifs. If I’d only waited, kept my wits about me and my pants zipped, I could’ve asked her out properly once her family issues settled down, treated her like she deserved, instead of some shameful secret. I would’ve been proud to have her on my arm. What we had could’ve been beautiful, and I poisoned it.”

  “You can’t think like that, man. You could still fix it with her.”

  “Gimme a break. This is why I’m telling you. Because you can’t let the same thing happen with you and Amy. If you care anything about her, and I’m guessing you do, you have to leave her alone. Bide your time. Don’t do something that goes against your personal and professional ethics. It’ll poison everything you touch.”