Hunter had traded in his living-on-the-edge mentality and wandering ways, and now he was here, about to run for his third term as sheriff of Rebel County. People had been skeptical at first and he’d barely won the first race, but thanks to his Mimi and the fact that he’d been running against a low-life Tucker, folks had seen him as the lesser of two evils and given him a chance. Number two had been a landslide, and three was sure to be the same, especially since his opponent was none other than Cade Tucker. While Cade was one of the few Tuckers to rise up and amass a small fortune for himself, most of the local businesses had Sawyer roots. The Sawyers were the money behind Rebel. They always had been, and to hear his Mimi tell it, they always would be.
Even against Cade, Hunter would most certainly win.
If he could shut down the moonshine ring that was still operating in his county. That would easily top Cade’s one and only claim to fame—blowing the whistle on two local nail salons that had been fronting football pots.
This was much bigger and sure to trump Naughty Nails and their little side business. That’s why Hunter was out here risking his neck. No way did he like the sliver of apprehension that whispered up his spine, or the rush of adrenaline that pumped through his veins and coiled his muscles tight.
This was just part of the job.
One that he would soon hand over to the suits out of Austin. The FBI had been breathing down his neck about this case, thirsty for details, hungry for a major collar. Which he would gladly give them. Once he had more information. Hard-core evidence.
It was all about being thorough.
No way was he out here after hours because this was the most interesting case to come across his desk since he’d discovered Buddy Roy selling marijuana brownies out of the trunk of his Kia. Sure, Hunter dealt with the occasional moonshiners, but most were local and harmless. They posed more of a threat to themselves than they did to the good citizens of Rebel.
But these guys … They were different. They might well be local, but they were smart, too. Cunning. And judging from the covert setup, they were most certainly moving more than a few jars of moonshine down at the VFW Hall. These shiners were going to great lengths to cover their tracks and protect their investment, which told him it was a hefty investment, indeed. That, and he just had a feeling.
That tingle that told him there was something big going on. Something dangerous. Exciting.
The thought struck and he pushed it away. He wasn’t looking for excitement. This was all about keeping the peace in his town. Being reliable. Dependable.
He wouldn’t disappoint.
Those days were long gone, buried six feet under with his little brother who’d always gone above and beyond the call of duty.
Yep, he would gather as much information as possible and then he would hand it over to the Feds. Then he would get himself over to the courthouse and file the paperwork to run for another term.
But first …
He eyed the small red dot blinking on a nearby tree. His gaze focused, taking in the edges and curves of the game camera attached to the sturdy wood. Another quick glance at the rest of the area and he noted another camera. And another.
Yep, these shiners were smart, all right.
So smart that he wouldn’t doubt that the cameras not only took pictures, but also sent live feed to someone on the other end. Watching for trespassers. Waiting.
He moved ever so slightly and the light on the nearest tree blinked. The faintest hint of flash lit up the area and sent Hunter ducking behind the tree.
Too smart and so it was time to back off.
For now.
Hunter locked in the location on the GPS on his phone and turned. He made it several steps, picking his way slowly past the trees, moving this way and that, backtracking the way he had come. He’d almost made it, too, but then he heard the voices in the distance.
“He was right here, I tell ya. Right here.”
Leaves crunched, branches rustled, and just like that, he had two shiners hot on his tail.
He reached for the walkie-talkie in his back pocket. “This is Sheriff DeMassi. I need backup.” He breathed a quick location before cutting his dispatcher off in midresponse and hitting the Silence button.
Stuffing the walkie-talkie back into his pocket, he picked up his steps and hauled ass.
CHAPTER 3
Jenna hauled the box down off the back porch and headed for the burn pile set up several yards away. The sun had already set and the only light came from the orange flames now licking at the star-dusted sky.
She settled the container near the pile and reached for the first of a mountain of old Reader’s Digests.
Her grandfather had never been one to part with anything, be it a nearly empty tube of Bengay or six large boxes full of faded magazines.
She tossed the first few issues into the fire. A spray of red embers spit back at her and she inched a few inches backward before tossing in another handful. The flames gobbled up the faded pages, sending a burst of smoke spiraling into the air.
A smile touched her lips as her gaze snagged on a cover that featured Ronald Reagan. James Harlin Tucker had never had a ready supply when it came to words of wisdom for his three granddaughters. He’d been an alcoholic barely able to take care of himself, much less the three young girls left behind when his son and daughter-in-law had died in a car accident. It had been Callie who’d been both mother and father to Brandy and Jenna when their parents had passed on. She’d doled out all the good advice in the family. The only words James Harlin had ever passed on were the occasional “If you want to make a really good moonshine, you have to add just a hint more honey,” or “George Jones might be a pretty good SOB, but he ain’t got nothin’ on Hank,” or “If we want to get this country back on track, we need another one like Ronald Reagan.”
Yep, he’d been as much a Reagan fan as he’d been into Hank Williams and hard cider shine. She curled the small magazine and shoved it into her back pocket before feeding another stack into the flames.
Not because she was a fan herself, or the least bit sentimental when it came to her grandfather. He’d been a selfish man for the most part, too intent on making his moonshine to spare any time for his granddaughters. But there had been those rare moments when he’d recited some joke from his beloved Reader’s Digest and actually coaxed a smile out of Jenna.
Brandy and Callie, not so much. They’d been older and had never found anything remotely funny about James Harlin. But Jenna had been younger, and so it had been easier for her to look past his faults and focus on the one redeeming quality about her grandfather—he could always make her laugh.
“Only because you have the same warped sense of humor,” Callie had told her too many times to count.
The same sense of humor.
The same green eyes.
The same I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude.
Yep, she was definitely a chip off the old Tucker block.
Which was her main problem in a nutshell.
She forced her fingers to move, fished the magazine out of her back pocket, and tossed it onto the fire. The flames breathed a fiery sigh across the cover, the edges blackened and curled. Just like that, Ronald Reagan turned to a thick gray wisp of nothing. The smoke burned her nostrils and her chest tightened. She stiffened and forced a deep breath.
The next two hours were spent hauling out the last few boxes from James Harlin’s old room, namely more Reader’s Digests, some old clothes that the church had turned down when they’d stopped to pick up donations, and a mountain of old receipts for all of James’s sugar and corn purchases that had been hiding in the back of his closet. He could barely remember his last name at times, but he’d kept pristine track of his shine.
“We’re going to make it big again,” he’d always told the girls while he’d searched for the original Texas Thunder recipe. “Bigger than back in the day. You mark my words.”
But the only thing he’d made had been a gross miscalculati
on that had caused an explosion that had destroyed his handmade still and everything within a twenty-yard radius. James Harlin included.
Jenna herself had been sleeping at the time. The boom had brought her fast awake, but when she and her sisters had made it out to the edge of the woods, the fire had been too widespread. They’d called 911 and watched helplessly as James and his still had gone up into a cloud of smoke along with the surrounding oak and cedar trees.
Her gaze went to what had once been a thick tree line. The spot had been leveled, the ground now bare until it reached the new tree line farther away. The branches quivered despite the lack of a breeze. Awareness whispered over her skin and she had the sudden feeling that she wasn’t alone.
Her ears perked and she listened, but only the buzz of crickets filled the night air.
Crazy.
Now that her sisters had moved out, the solitude was getting to her.
She focused on retrieving the last of the boxes Callie had packed up last year. While her sister had finally found the guts to put away their grandfather’s stuff, she hadn’t managed to do any more than stack the boxes. They had sat in the room, waiting for someone else to find the courage to finish what Callie had started. Brandy had stepped up to the plate next, moving everything out onto the porch and calling the church.
Only the First Presbyterian Church of Rebel hadn’t been too excited over a useless pile of outdated Reader’s Digests and so the magazines had been left behind and tossed back into the room, waiting for someone else—namely Jenna—to step up and finish the job. And since there was no trash pick-up so far out of the city limits, she was left feeding a burn pile.
She blinked against the sudden burning behind her eyes and reached for the last box. She hauled it through the house and pulled open the back door. She was just about to shove it onto the porch when a large, dark shadow filled her line of vision and a deep, familiar voice echoed in her ears.
“Get back in the house. Now.”
“Sheriff DeMassi?” she started, but before she could ask him what he was doing here, he gripped her arm, steered her around, and pushed her back inside.
“Wait a sec—” she started as he followed her in and slammed the door. The lock clicked as the one and only dead bolt on the decrepit door slid into place.
“If you want to find yourself staring down the barrel of a Beretta, keep talking.” He flipped off the lights near the back, plunging the kitchen into darkness and turned to peer past the edge of the curtains. “If not, then get the rest of those lights.” He motioned to the bulb gleaming in the hallway.
Jenna opened her mouth, but something about the stiff set to his broad shoulders stalled the words in her throat. She stiffened, turned on her heel, and flipped a nearby switch. Darkness descended, filling the hallway. The only other light that still burned was a lamp on James Harlin’s old nightstand. A few seconds later, she’d killed the switch on it and stopped off to make sure the front door was locked before finding her way back to the kitchen. The burn pile still blazed outside, edging the kitchen curtains in a pale orange glow.
“What’s going on?” she whispered after a few silent minutes of staring at his shadowy form standing sentry at the back window. Her heart echoed in her ears and her breaths came quick and shallow. “Sheriff?” she whispered again when he didn’t say anything.
Rather he simply stood there, waiting, listening.
Her ears perked and that’s when she heard it. The faint thud of footsteps. The crunch of grass. The cock of a trigger …
Just as the thought registered, the sheriff grabbed her hand, hauled her down to the floor and shielded her body with his. A shot echoed, wood cracked, and the first bullet bit through the door and whizzed overhead.
CHAPTER 4
No fucking way.
The words registered a split second before Jenna realized they weren’t just in her head. Instead, the sheriff’s voice echoed in her ear, his body pressing her down flat on the floor, hard muscle shielding every dip and curve and …
Wait a second.
No way should she be thinking about his muscles and her curves and … Seriously, someone had just shot at them.
“He’s in there,” came the frantic voice from outside. “He has to be in there. There’s no place else to run…” The words faded into the blare of a siren in the distance. “Shit. Someone called the cops.”
“That was the cops, I’m telling you. It was the sheriff. I saw him plain as day.”
“That don’t make a lick of sense. You can’t see a blasted thing plain as day when it’s full-blown night.”
“I’ve got good vision.”
“All’s you saw was the back of his head.”
“Yeah, well it looked like the back of the sheriff’s head and that there siren’s proof that it was. He ran back to his squad car and now he’s coming for us.”
“Or maybe somebody just called the police because they heard the first round of gunshots a ways back. I told you not to fire.”
“Think what you want. Either way, we need to get while the gettin’s good.”
“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all night. We still got work to do.” Footsteps clomped across the back porch and then grew fainter as the two men hit the ground running.
“Wait,” the sheriff murmured in her ear when she started to get up.
“But they’re gone.”
“Maybe, and maybe not. Just give it a second. Just to be sure.”
But it took more than a few seconds for Hunter DeMassi to climb off of her. It was exactly sixty-eight seconds during which Jenna did her damnedest to focus on the echo of her own heartbeat rather than the steady drum of his as he pressed her down.
The rich, intoxicating aroma of clean soap and strong male filled her head and skimmed her senses and she trembled.
“It’s okay,” he murmured, his grip on her tightening as if he mistook the response for fear.
Ah, but it was fear. Of the carnal variety because this was the closest Jenna had been to a member of the opposite sex since she’d sworn off men over three months ago.
Not that three months was a long time. Not for the average female, but Jenna liked men. She enjoyed them. Or she had before she’d sworn off bad boys and given the not-so-bad boys a chance. The sex hadn’t been nearly as satisfying and so, technically, her dry spell had been going on a lot longer than three months.
Try two years.
Twenty-four long, lonely months since she’d had really good sex. Long enough to make any woman a little desperate.
And stupid.
His warm breath brushed the back of her neck and her nipples pebbled in response. A shiver worked its way up her spine. Her thighs clenched.
Even though Hunter DeMassi with his do-right attitude and his conservative looks was far from the thigh-clenching type.
She reminded herself of that all-important fact when he finally pulled her to her feet. A sliver of orange slid past the edge of the drapes that covered a nearby window and sliced across his face, illuminating his features. She found herself staring up into eyes as intoxicating as a shot of her granddad’s favorite blueberry moonshine, and even more potent.
Her stomach hollowed out and her throat tightened.
Hello? It’s Sheriff Hunter DeMassi aka Dudley Do-Right. He walks the straight and narrow. Hell, he is the straight and narrow.
Which meant she shouldn’t be reacting to him at all.
She knew that. At the same time, she couldn’t help but notice the five o’clock shadow covering his jaw and the all-important fact that he wasn’t wearing his uniform. Instead of the blah-blah beige, a soft white cotton T-shirt clung to broad shoulders and heavily muscled arms. A small rip a few inches below his collar gave her a glimpse of dark, silky hair. Faded jeans cupped his crotch and outlined his long legs. Scuffed cowboy boots completed the look and for a split second she forgot this was the same man who sat in the second row at church every Sunday and directed traffic at the senio
r ladies’ bake sale every other Tuesday.
He looked almost … dangerous.
Heat whispered up her spine and she stiffened.
Dark brows drew together as he eyed her. “You okay?”
“I…” She swallowed against the sudden lump in her throat and forced herself to take a deep breath. “What just happened?”
“I was tracking some suspects and got a little too close. They spotted me and, well, you know the rest.”
“What kind of suspects?”
He eyed her as if deciding just how much to say. “Some bad-ass mothers judging by the look of your door.” He turned then, his long, tanned fingers going to the bullet hole surrounded by splintered wood. “Looks like a three fifty-seven. Maybe a Glock or a Smith and Wesson.” He turned back to her then, a strange light in his eyes. “I didn’t mean to put you at risk by barging in here, but I needed some cover.”
“Better the door than you.”
He grinned then, a slash of white that split the shadows of the room and her breath caught.
Stupid, she reminded herself. Really, really stupid.
“I’d better get some of these lights turned on.” She gave herself a mental shake and turned as he reached for the walkie-talkie stuffed into his back pocket. Static echoed through the room a split second before Hunter started talking in a low monotone that kept her from making out more than a few words.
“A squad car picked up both suspects,” he told her. “Again, I’m really sorry about the door. I’ll get my deputy out here to fix it first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Don’t bother. That door was worn down near the hinges anyway. I’m sure it’ll be the first thing to go when the renovation starts. In the meantime, I’ll just stick some duct tape over the hole and she’s good to go.”
He arched an eyebrow. “You fixing the place up?”
“I’m changing the place up.” She glanced around at the dingy avocado wallpaper and old-fashioned copper Jell-O molds that hung above the faded white cabinets. “A complete one-eighty. By the time I’m finished with it, you won’t recognize it.” Or so she hoped.
Tempting Texas Page 2