Wind River Lawman

by Lindsay McKenna

  Praise for Lindsay McKenna

  “The believable and real romance between Tara and Harper is enhanced by the addition of highly dimensional supporting characters, and a minor mystery subplot increases the tension by a notch. This is a fine addition to a strong series.”—Publishers Weekly on Lone Rider

  “Captivating sensuality.”—Publishers Weekly on Wind River Wrangler, a Publishers Marketplace Buzz Books 2016 Selection

  “Moving and real . . . impossible to put down.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review on Wind River Rancher

  “Cowboy who is also a former Special Forces operator? Check. Woman on the run from her past? Check. This contemporary Western wraps together suspense and romance in a rugged Wyoming package.”—Amazon.com’s Omnivoracious, “9 Romances I Can’t Wait to Read,” on Wind River Wrangler

  “Set against the stunning beauty of Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, Wind River Wrangler is Lindsay McKenna at her finest! A tour de force of heart-stopping drama, gut-wrenching emotion, and the searing joy of two wounded souls learning to love again.”—International bestselling author Merline Lovelace

  “McKenna does a beautiful job of illustrating difficult topics through the development of well-formed, sympathetic characters.”—Publishers Weekly on Wolf Haven (starred review)

  Books by New York Times bestselling author

  Lindsay McKenna

  WIND RIVER WRANGLER

  WIND RIVER RANCHER

  WIND RIVER COWBOY

  WRANGLER’S CHALLENGE

  KASSIE’S COWBOY (novella included in CHRISTMAS WITH MY COWBOY)

  LONE RIDER

  WIND RIVER LAWMAN

  And coming in January 2019

  HOME TO WIND RIVER

  WIND RIVER LAWMAN

  LINDSAY McKENNA

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Lindsay McKenna

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Teaser chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Also by

  ZEBRA BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Nauman Living Trust

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Zebra and the Z logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-1-4201-4536-6

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4201-4539-7

  eISBN-10: 1-4201-4539-8

  To my 2 favorite dentists!

  Dr. Steve Vergara, Arizona Smile Designs,

  Cottonwood, Arizona,

  and

  Dr. Danny Ripplinger, Las Vegas, Nevada,

  who saved a very important tooth,

  working 2.5 hours to do just that.

  Two great guys, very kind, humorous,

  and sensitive to a patient’s needs.

  You can’t ask for more of a dentist.

  Now? I don’t fear going to one.

  Chapter One

  June 1

  Sheriff Sarah Carter didn’t know what the hell to do. She stared down at the help wanted ad she was going to place in the Jackson Hole, Wyoming, newspaper. Her finger hovered over the Send button. Had she gotten this right? Had she revealed enough about the person she was looking to hire? Conflicted, feeling as if the devil on her right shoulder was shouting at her to cut out some of the work qualifications she’d put in and the angel on her left, saying it was fine as is, she sat back, frustrated.

  Her office was glass-enclosed on three sides, with a red-brick wall behind her squeaky desk chair. Outside, the deputies for Lincoln County were getting ready for a shift change at four p.m. It was the weekend, always a brutal time for drunks on the roadways. Every Saturday during the summer months, she’d assign a small task force to pull over suspected drinkers to give them Breathalyzer tests. The Wind River Valley stretched a hundred miles long, hugging the western border of the state with Idaho and Utah. It was a fifty-mile-wide valley, bracketed by the Wilson Range on the west and the Salt River Mountain on the eastern border.

  What to do? What to do? Her red eyebrows bunched as she studied the computer screen.

  WANTED: Wrangler with medical background. Further duty to be an assistant to an older woman. Send résumé.

  Was that enough of a description? Wrangler and assistant? Actually, she had little hope that any man who applied for the position would meet both criteria. Sarah desperately needed a male wrangler to fill in and help her spry, seventy-five-year-old grandmother, Gertie Carter. She was her father, David’s, mother. And the word spry was less than what she would use: rocket was more like it. Type A, unbound. A go-getter. Or, as Gertie would say, no moss ever grew under her feet. No siree Bob!

  Her lips twitched. She dearly loved both her grandmothers, Gertie and Nell. Both were intelligent, accomplished businesswomen, but in completely different ways. On her ranch, Nell sold grass leases to cattlemen from other western states every spring and summer, so they could fatten their cattle on some of the greenest, richest fodder in the US.

  Gertie Carter’s husband, Isaac, had died a year ago. They’d been married at eighteen, started the Loosey Goosey Ranch and the rest was history. Together, they’d built an organic egg empire with free-range fowl. Today, it was the largest company in the country, providing organic eggs and fryers to all the major grocery chains. Gertie’s egg empire was worth three hundred million dollars.

  Now, Gertie needed some male help. Isaac had always taken care of the chicken and egg business while she tended the accounting books, the contacts with the grocery stores, orders and such. Without Isaac, and having arthritis in both her wrists, Gertie couldn’t possibly fill Isaac’s shoes. No, she needed a wrangler. But she also needed a man who had a medical background because Gertie would get sudden, unexpected dizzy spells and lose her balance. She’d fallen many times. And each time, she called Sarah on the cell phone, asking for help instead of dialing 911.

  The problem was, Sarah was often involved in law-enforcement situations as the sheriff of the county, and she couldn’t just pick up and drive back to the ranch to help her grandmother. Gertie needed help. Desperately. Right now, Sarah’s father was filling in, but he couldn’t do it forever. No, they had to hire someone much younger.

  But who? Who would want to be known as the chicken wrangler of Wind River Valley? Maybe she sho
uld tell the prospective applicants they’d be an egg wrangler. Clearly, there was no pride in telling folks you were a chicken wrangler? With a sigh, Sarah put down her private phone number, hit the Send key and prayed for the best, not really expecting anyone to answer the ad.

  * * *

  Dawson Callahan was sitting at a café in Jackson Hole, having just driven to the cow town an hour earlier. He’d come from his parents’ Amarillo, Texas, ranch. They’d tried to dissuade him, but he’d always wanted to find out what it would be like to live in Wyoming. No, it didn’t have the Alamo. No, it didn’t have the history of being the largest state in the union. All those attributes his father, Henry, always talked about, fell on deaf ears.

  He’d managed to survive as a Navy combat corpsman assigned to a US Marine Corps company from age eighteen through twenty-nine. When his enlistment was up, he went home to Texas, back to being a wrangler on his father’s small ranch, where they raised cattle. But it didn’t fulfill him. He was restless. He wanted to strike out on his own. How many times had he dreamed of coming to Wyoming? Too many. Well, this was his chance. And as he read the help wanted ads, one caught his eye: for a wrangler with a medical background. That was him. And because his Grandma Lorena had helped raise him while both his parents worked, Dawson had a soft spot for older men and women, seeing his own grams in all of them.

  Okay, he’d answer the ad as soon as he got a big breakfast. He’d find a local motel, use their business computer, fill out his résumé and see if he couldn’t get hired.

  June 2

  Sarah’s eyes widened. There on her personal computer the next morning was a résumé for the ad she’d placed! She quickly scanned the email.

  My name is Dawson Callahan. Enclosed is my résumé for your job.

  She sat at her desk in her own small home, a block from the courthouse where the sheriff’s department was located. It was seven a.m. and she was due to go to work at eight. The only thing good about being the sheriff was that she wasn’t on a shift schedule, which she hated but had done for many years earlier in her career. Trying to quell her excitement, she opened up the file that said “Résumé” on it.

  Leaning down, looking at her Apple Macintosh laptop screen, she watched the file open. As she rapidly scanned the résumé, her heart beat a little harder in her chest. This man was a Texas-born wrangler, thirty years old, single and had been in the US Navy as a combat corpsman for over ten years before his enlistment was up.

  What were the chances? Sarah let a soft sigh escape from between her lips, staring at the résumé, reading it again. Making sure she didn’t miss anything. This sounded too good to be true. Was it? In her business as sheriff, she saw the worst of society. Not the best. Without thinking, she touched the screen with her fingertips. Dawson Callahan sounded perfect for the job, but she cautioned herself to be wary.

  First, when she got to work she’d run a thorough search on him via law-enforcement channels. There was no way she wanted a felon or someone with a bad background working with her beloved grandmother. No way.

  Next, after ruthlessly researching his background for law-breaking issues, Sarah would contact a friend she had at the Pentagon. He would get her the man’s DD Form 214, which would fill in any blanks about his entire military service: what kind of discharge he got and if he’d had any issues within that time frame. People lied all the time. Or they told half truths or half lies, thinking that was all right. It wasn’t. She wanted to know everything about this Texan—if, indeed, he really had been born in Amarillo—before setting up a meeting with him to pursue the possibility of hiring him as Gertie’s assistant.

  She wished she had a photo of him. She ran a Google search and came up with nothing. That was strange. Most people nowadays had a social media account, but he had no Facebook page, no Twitter account . . . no . . . nothing. That raised a red flag to a point. He’d been a US Navy medic, a combat-trained one, assigned to a Marine Corps company. She was intimately familiar with the Corps because she’d joined at age eighteen and left at twenty-two, but not before serving in Afghanistan in Helmand Province, one of the most dangerous places to have a deployment. Every squad in a company had a Navy combat corpsman assigned to them. So that part fit and was likely accurate.

  Sitting back, she wiped her face with her hands, feeling the weight and stress on her shoulders. Funny how she could let the stress in her sheriff’s role slide off and found it much less troublesome than family stress. Family was as personal as it got, and Sarah understood why it was taking a toll on her. She loved Gertie. And she wanted to protect her and find someone who was damn near an angel in quality and mentality, and very compassionate to aid her. And she knew just how long the odds were of finding a man like that.

  Her mind canted to the past, to the Navy corpsman in her squad. He was kind, quiet and listened a lot but didn’t say much. Most of the others she’d met in those years in the Corps were like that. They were people you’d want at your side if you were bleeding out, knowing you were going to die. There was a streak of compassion in them, a humanity that Sarah rarely found in fields other than medical first responders—whether EMT, paramedic or combat corpsman. There was no question that those in the medical service field had a certain personality type. She hoped with all her heart Callahan possessed that same kind of personality, but she’d only find out if he passed the first series of rigorous searches. What did he look like? She was dying to find out because she had a knack for reading faces.

  June 3

  Dawson looked at his cell phone when he got up at six a.m. The motel where he’d stayed was the cheapest he could find, on the outskirts of the wealthy corporate community. Jackson Hole, he’d found out real quick, wasn’t for the poor, the disenfranchised or even the struggling middle class. When he looked at house sales, he realized Palm Springs, a very rich community, had been transplanted here. No one without a lot of money could afford to stay in this town. Himself included.

  Rising to his six-foot, two-inch frame, feet bare on the oak floor, he stretched fitfully. The bed was lumpy and not supportive, leaving him with a backache that would probably sort itself out by noon. He ambled over to the desk, where there was a coffeemaker, and made a cup. Turning, he walked to the window, seeing the sky was a pale blue, the sun tipping the horizon, the town just beginning to wake up. He’d left the phone number of his hotel when he sent the résumé. Wanting to hear, he opened his cell phone email. The note was cryptic: I’ve received your résumé, Mr. Callahan. I’ll contact you in two days. Thank you. SC.

  Well, he wasn’t black ops for nothing. He’d been ordered to Recon Marines, their stealth branch, and served in that capacity for ten years. More than likely? This SC, whoever that was, was checking and vetting him about now. He grinned a little and sipped his coffee, heading to the bathroom to take a hot shower. It didn’t bother him that SC was giving him a thorough background check; he had a grandmother, too, and he’d want to protect her from any man who wasn’t on the up-and-up. Nowadays, people lied too easily. And fake news was believed, unfortunately. In the world he came from, you didn’t lie at all. If you did, you were tossed out with a bad reputation and no one wanted you around them, became a pariah.

  His curiosity rose as he wondered if SC was the individual who’d placed the ad. Man or woman? He didn’t know. Finishing off his coffee, he pulled open the shower-stall door.

  June 5

  Deciding to take in the scope of Wind River Valley, Dawson had spent the last couple of days nosing around about potential work in the Jackson Hole area. Now, it was time to explore this valley south of the famous town.

  The small burg of Wind River had 965 inhabitants, or so the sign read. It was built up on both sides of Route 89 and looked more turn-of-the-century—the twentieth one—to Dawson. He’d gone to the Tucson Wild West show and the OK Corral depiction of that historical shoot-out. This town’s footprint building-wise reminded him of that time. The only impressive place was a three-story red-brick building midway dow
n on the right, the courthouse. He saw a number of deputy cruisers on the left side of the large, 1910-style building. The jail was part of the sprawling complex. It had Victorian touches, with white wooden decorations, black, freshly painted wrought-iron fencing around the entire area, plus lots of nicely trimmed bushes and colorful foliage with a rich green lawn in the front.

  It was clear to Dawson that this was a ranching town. Coming into the city limits, he’d seen at least four different three-quarter-ton pickup trucks with different ranch names painted on the side doors. There was Charlie Becker’s Hay and Feed store, and he swung in and parked because the lot was full and busy with ranchers. He saw a number of men who seemed to be employed either by the ranchers or by the store, hefting hundred-pound sacks of grain or using hay hooks to load alfalfa or timothy hay into the backs of the waiting trucks in line at the two busy docks. This would be a good place to find out if there were any jobs for wranglers in this lush, verdant valley. Climbing out, he saw a sheriff’s black Tahoe SUV parked with the other trucks, with gold on the sides: Lincoln County Sheriff.