Susan set out slices of cake on paper plates that she fetched from the cupboard . As they settled in and she poured the coffee she’d just brewed, Barbara pulled out her notepad.
“Now, what’s the first thing you’re going to do as sheriff?” she asked, pencil poised above the pad.
As if in answer, they heard angry shouting coming from the street outside.
“Arrest someone?” Chelsea sighed, setting down her coffee cup. Note to self, she thought; learn how handcuffs work.
She hurried outdoors, with Barbara, Susan and Lorena racing after her. To her shock, the commotion was coming from Erika, who was beating up Mayor Winkleman on the front steps of the town hall.
She ran over and grabbed Erika by the arm and hauled her off him.
“Erika! What the heck? Do you actually want to be the first person I arrest?” she demanded indignantly. “I thought we were practicing the whole ladylike thing! Beating up elected officials is not ladylike!”
“Tell her!” Erika yelled at the mayor. “Or I swear I’ll kick your ass from here to Billings!”
The mayor hung his head, glanced up at Chelsea and then stared down at the ground. “Well, there is one little thing that we may have forgotten to mention when we offered you the sheriff’s job.”
Oh, crud. Here it comes.
“What?” she demanded.
The mayor shuffled his feet.
The local merchants and their customers had run up and were gathered around, eagerly watching. Barbara was scribbling madly on her notepad.
The mayor opened his briefcase, pulled out a sheet of paper and held it up. It was a wanted poster of a shockingly handsome man with a sexy scowl.
It took her a moment to realize who the man was. It was Roman, the man she’d whacked with her purse the day before.
“He’s the Alpha of a gypsy pack which is camping out on our territory. There’s a warrant for his arrest that’s been sent to us from a shifter territory in Colorado, for grand theft auto. You’ve got to serve the warrant, bring him in and personally take him to Colorado,” the mayor said to her shoes, since he couldn’t meet her eyes.
So that hadn’t been a band poster the teenager had defaced. It had been a wanted poster. Awesome.
“Aren’t they trespassing, if they’re on your territory?” she asked, looking at the poster with dismay. “Couldn’t you have them all forcibly evicted?”
He sighed. “Technically, no. Gypsy packs can occupy land on any shifter territory for up to six months.”
“What happened to the last Silver Peak sheriff?” she demanded ominously.
A long, drawn-out pause and much foot-shuffling and fidgeting indicated that she really wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Mayor Winkleman. While I’m still young, please.”
“He tried to arrest Roman, and Roman broke his nose.”
“What happened to the Silver Peak Alpha?” she continued, although she really didn’t want to know.
“Roman knocked him unconscious, put a dunce cap on his head and left him on the town hall steps.”
“And the beta?”
“It had been raining a lot. Roman literally dragged him through the mud and ruined his clothing and sent him running back to town.”
“Why did the last mayor quit?”
“Roman came into town to go shopping and the mayor tried to tell him he couldn’t until he took care of the warrant and Roman gave him an atomic wedgie and hung him from a flagpole.”
“And, you think I can arrest him.” She stared at him stonily.
“I saw how you handled him with that kid!” he said. “And you’re female. I’ve never heard of him striking a woman. So you can probably arrest him without getting beaten up or killed. Maybe. Almost certainly.”
Erika shot him a look of disgust.
“Do not hit him again,” Chelsea said to Erika, who was balling her fists. “Can you go check on Pepper, please?”
“Fine,” Erika sighed, and headed off to Chelsea’s office.
“Has he killed anyone?” Chelsea asked the mayor.
“Well, a few Death Matches here and there, plus someone who came in guns blazing to try to arrest him and shot and injured one of his pack members. But that idiot didn’t use a silver bullet, so of course he didn’t stand a chance against them. We can give you silver bullets. I was going to give you ’til tomorrow to get settled in and then stop by with an assortment of weapons for you to use.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve called in the Council for Shifter Affairs on this?”
The mayor grimaced in distaste. “Good God, no.”
Not surprising. No shifter called in the council unless it was a last resort.
In an instance of serious shifter versus human crime, or vice versa, the council would be called in, but when it came to shifters having problems with other shifters, that was left entirely to the respective tribes and packs and prides. A shifter had to obey the laws of whatever pack he or she belonged to, and if they visited another pack, they had to obey those laws.
“The council’s already been out here enough recently,” he added, wincing in disgust.
“So they know about Roman’s pack?” Chelsea asked.
Mayor Winkleman shook his head. “No, no, it’s just that sheep have been disappearing from the Rodgers Ranch for the last few months, fences torn down, and there were wolf paw prints in the area. Our pack lands border the ranch. Mitch Rodgers, the ranch owner, has been lobbying to have a couple hundred acres of our property annexed, because he says that our pack members are the ones killing his sheep. He claims he needs the land as a buffer between his property and ours.”
At her look of surprise, he added, “It’s odd. He’s never had problems with us before. I mean, we don’t associate with the human town a lot, of course, but we do know all the major players over there. We do some business with them from time to time. Once a year we have a human-shifter social, and we visit each other’s towns to check out the Christmas decorations. In all the years I’ve known him, Mitch has never seemed prejudiced against shifters. Our people buy livestock and feed from his ranch. And yet all of a sudden, he’s insisting that we’re coming on to his land and stealing his sheep.
“Is the land valuable for any reason, the land that he’s asking for?”
“No, it’s just more forest land. He already owns a huge spread. Nobody’s clamoring for our property—we’re out in the middle of nowhere, not near any major roads or towns. However, we’re not going to shrink our territory and hand over a big tract of land just because he says so.”
“Well,” Chelsea mused, “I hate it say it, but times have been tight economically. And it sounds as if it’s out of character for him to just randomly accuse shifters of something without cause. Is it at all possible that he’s right, that it’s somebody from here stealing his sheep?”
“Not from here,” the mayor said, then flinched. “Don’t tell Roman I said that.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well,” the mayor said slowly, “the attacks started right after Roman’s pack showed up. But the council actually sent a shifter investigator out here twice because Mitch complained, and both times the investigator scented real wolves at the site where the sheep had disappeared. Not shifters. So the council declared the case closed.” He looked at her hopefully. “Maybe that problem will go away once you arrest Roman. Not that I’m saying Roman had anything to do with it,” he added hastily.
Of course you’re not saying that, Chelsea thought. Because it would take a set of testicles to say that, and clearly you’re lacking those.
Chapter Six
It was pitch dark out, the woods illuminated only by the silver crescent of the moon. Chelsea was sprayed head to toe with Wolf’s-naught, provided by Lorena, who had an herbal section in her store. The concoction would prevent her from being scented by the pack so she could sneak up on them.
She’d left Pepper at Erika’s house, and Erika had promised to take
care of her until Chelsea got back. She’d also offered to go with Chelsea, but Chelsea had refused. This was Chelsea’s mess, she’d gotten into it herself, and she wasn’t going to risk anyone’s life doing it. Also, if she died during her attempt to bring Roman to justice, she needed someone to take care of Pepper.
She was wearing jeans, a button-down denim shirt and hiking boots. She’d pinned the sheriff’s star on her shirt. She’d been told that the sheriffs here wore civilian clothes, but she figured that her frilly, lacy outfits would be pushing it.
She was hauling along the non-lethal weapons she’d selected from the arsenal dropped on her desk the previous afternoon, courtesy of the mayor. She had refused the silver bullets; she wasn’t killing anybody.
She stood in the clearing and surveyed the camp.
There was a group of tents clustered together, and others scattered throughout the surrounding woods. There was a big ring of stones circling a fire pit. There were picnic tables with benches. The tents were all big and sturdy, canvas draped over criss-cross log tent poles, and elevated with wooden platforms. Everything looked well-constructed and solid.
She moved closer to the tent on the hillside that she knew was Roman’s. Erika had introduced her to some of the outlaw groupies, shifter girls who liked to visit the camp and have a good time with the bad-boy outlaws. For those girls who didn’t want anything serious, the fact that the guys would be moving on in a few months was part of their appeal. One of the girls, who was mad at Roman because he’d turned her down, had described the layout of the camp to Chelsea.
Fortunately, his tent was set a little distance from the rest of the tents. If she was lucky, she’d be able to disable him and get him into town without any of his packmates noticing.
She could hear sounds coming from his tent…sounds of sex. Roman was having very loud, enthusiastic sex.
She felt an odd sensation of anger and frustration curling up inside her, and she paused for a moment to get it under control. She envisioned her dark feelings as a spinning ball of matter, and she wrapped it in a white gauzy substance and then shrank it, smaller and smaller, until it was nothing but a point of light.
Then she began striding towards the tent.
When she reached it, she yanked the tent flap back and tossed in a small pepper spray bomb that the mayor had given her.
Within seconds she heard shrieks of rage, and a big, naked man and a woman came staggering out of the tent. Even better, they were tangled up in sheets, which made it easier for her to run over and slap copper handcuffs on the man.
The moon swam out from behind a cloud, and the sheet fell off of the man.
Chelsea looked at him.
The woman looked at him at the same time.
The man was tall and lean and muscular, and had close-clipped black hair and a hawkish nose.
“You’re not Roman!” Chelsea and the woman both exclaimed at the same moment.
Then the woman shrugged. “Whatever. It wash pretty good,” she slurred drunkenly. “I think.”
“Hello, sweetheart. And there I thought you weren’t interested.” Roman came strolling up, wearing nothing but boxer shorts and looking highly amused.
* * * * *
Well, well, well, this was a fun turn of events. The hot redhead from town had come back.
Roman had to admit, she’d been drifting through his mind surprisingly often since he’d first laid eyes on her. It wasn’t just the fact that she hadn’t rolled right over for him like most women did. It wasn’t her lush, full figure, with its sexy rounded tummy and broad hips that he wanted to grab hold of and pull up against him. There was something more, some mysterious quality that sent his pulse racing every time he remembered her fiery amber eyes glowering at him in that alleyway.
“Good evening.” He grinned at her. “You’re on my territory now, which means we play by my rules. I see you brought handcuffs. Ready to play?”
Then he caught sight of the five-pointed star on her shirt. She was wearing jeans and a button-down denim shirt which did things to her curves that made him slightly dizzy…and a sheriff’s star.
“Oh, come on. You’re the new sheriff?” he said as her face fell. He couldn’t help it. She was the sheriff of Silver Peak? This was the best they could come up with? God, that town was so screwed.
He burst out laughing. He laughed harder and harder as her expression grew more and more unhappy, and then suddenly she burst into loud, noisy tears, burying her face in her hands.
Oh, hell. She was crying so hard her shoulders were shaking.
He heaved a huge sigh, walked over and patted her on the shoulder. “Sweetheart, I don’t mean to be an asshole—well, yes I do, because I am. Which is why you shouldn’t be here. Bigger, stronger, meaner people have tried to arrest me, and they’ve all failed.”
In the blink of an eye, she’d slapped handcuffs on his wrists and looked up at him with an enormous grin. Copper handcuffs, so he couldn’t shift. Her eyes were completely dry; she’d faked the whole thing.
“What about sneakier?” she said sweetly. “Were any of them sneakier than me?”
Then he felt two sharp pricks, one in his collar bone and one at his waist, and he heard a crackling sound. At the same time his whole body cramped and he fell to the ground, muscles burning, body twitching. She’d tazed him. And then she tazed Leon. And now she was the one laughing her ass off.
Chapter Seven
The cool, crisp breeze rustled the leaves on the ground and ruffled Roman’s hair. This really was his favorite time of year, with the chilly nights giving way to mild, warm days. He let out a huge yawn and arched his back, stretching luxuriously.
“Stop that, you bastard!” Chelsea hissed at him. He responded with laughter.
“You doin’ all right there, darling? You’re starting to sound kinda winded,” he said, which earned him a sharp kick in the ribs.
“I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to abuse your prisoners, Miss Officer of the Law,” Roman drawled. “Or is that Mrs.? I didn’t see any wedding ring. Anyway, if you look in your Sheriffing 101 handbook, there’s a whole section about not kicking your prisoners when they’re restrained.”
“For you, I’ll make a special exception,” she growled. She tugged harder.
Sheriff Chelsea Wintergreen clearly hadn’t thought this through. Sure, she was a larger girl, but he had her beat. He weighed two-fifty, all muscle, and he was six foot five. As soon as she’d incapacitated him, she’d grabbed him by the arm and started trying to drag him through the woods. He hadn’t resisted; he was just lying there, enjoying the show. She was puffing and gasping, frantically trying to pull him.
Roman was hugely entertained and unreasonably turned on. He could feel the thick swell of his erection rubbing against his boxer shorts.
“You need some help there?” a voice called, and Chelsea jerked and looked up. They were now surrounded by his entire pack, who were standing there watching him with expressions of amusement on their faces.
“Who are you offering to help? Her, or me?” Roman called.
Avery laughed. “Her, you jackass. Why would I help you? You’re not a hot chick with a great rack.”
Roman felt a surprising flash of anger crackle through him like lightning, but he quickly swallowed it. So Avery was flirting with Chelsea. Big deal. Roman wasn’t dating Chelsea. He never dated anyone. Dating wasn’t his thing.
Roman moved quickly and tossed the handcuffs aside, then leapt to his feet. Chelsea stared at him.
“How in the hell did you do that?” she demanded, looking thoroughly miffed. Her hair was disheveled, her forehead was damp from sweat and she was breathing hard. God, she was hot.
He grinned at her. It was his own little trick and he wasn’t ever going to reveal his secrets. It involved breaking his thumb and all, but shifters heal quickly and have a high pain tolerance.
Leland sat up, still handcuffed. “Yeah, how?” he asked Roman. “And could someone for God’s sake un-ha
ndcuff me?”
Chelsea scowled, knelt down and undid his handcuffs. Leland grabbed the handcuff key and started to walk off with the cuffs and the key.
“Hey! Those are mine!” she yelled after him.
Leland tossed her an amused glance. “We’re outlaws.” He smirked. “You probably shoulda thought of that before you tried to arrest our Alpha.”
“Hi, I’m Avery and you’re gorgeous,” Avery said quickly, bustling forward and thrusting out his hand, which Chelsea refused to shake. Avery grinned, shrugged and didn’t move. He was obviously enjoying being close to Chelsea. Roman felt that murderous rage again but he swallowed it down.
Marcus was standing slightly apart from all the others, watching, with a mixture of annoyance and faint amusement on his face.
“You didn’t really put a lot of planning into this, did you?” he asked Chelsea, with a ghost of a smile.
Man. She almost had Marcus smiling? What the hell was up with that?
“I put plenty of planning into it,” she said indignantly.
“And it didn’t occur to you to bring some means of transporting him through the woods? He weighs a good two-fifty. Can you hoist that amount of weight normally? You should have brought an ATV with you. Or a posse.”
“Hey!” Roman said irritably. “Can you not help out the crazy sheriff lady who’s trying to arrest me?”
Marcus let out a rumbling growl. “Why, you scared?”
Roman gave an answering growl and glared at him. Marcus had taken it a step too far. Nobody spoke to the Alpha that way.
As if sensing it, Marcus threw up his hands and muttered, “You’re not scared of anything. Boss. Just came to see if I could help, is all. Since I’m not needed, I’m going back to bed.” He headed into the woods.
Roman turned to face Chelsea again. “Now, there’s the little matter of you trespassing on my property.”
“Your property!” she said indignantly.
“Shifter law, sweetheart—you really oughta study up on it. Gypsy packs are allowed to take up temporary residence on any unused portion of shifter territory, and everything within a one-mile radius of our camp falls under my domain.”
Mate Marked: Shifters of Silver Peak Page 4