by Lora Leigh
Zeke wouldn’t have, and he still didn’t believe it. He’d heard about the pictures more than he wanted to. He refused to look at them.
“Miss Goody Two Shoes got caught having her fun,” Mina said smoothly. “I can’t believe she thought she could get away with playing like that here. She should have known better.”
Zeke’s lips thinned as he sat at the bottom of the bed and pulled his boots on. Dammit, he didn’t need to hear this again. He could feel that edge of burning anger in his gut, the one that warned him he was letting a woman get too close.
Caitlyn Rogue Walker was nothing to him, he told himself. He couldn’t let her become something to him, either. She was too damned innocent, no matter what those photos might show. Not to mention too damned young.
“Too bad the cameraperson didn’t take a few more.” Mina yawned then. “Miss Walker wasn’t even fully undressed, but she was definitely getting ready to have a good time.”
His jaw bunched. The innocent Miss Walker had pissed off the wrong people, and Zeke felt responsible for that. Hell, this was just what he needed. He had steered clear of her for the express purpose of making certain she was never targeted for any reason because of him, and she had ended up as a target because of his son instead.
She had caught the attention of two of the town’s worst inhabitants. A brother and sister who delighted in destroying anyone they could. She had caught their attention by defending his son at school.
He felt responsible. It was his son, and despite his knowledge that she had been set up, he still hadn’t managed to find a way to punish those who had hurt her or to tamp down his growing interest in a woman he had no business touching.
He could feel the curling knot of anger, a hint of territorial possessiveness where the teacher was concerned and squelched it immediately. Miss Walker was too young, too innocent. She wasn’t a woman that would accept a sex-only relationship, nor was she a woman Zeke would be able to hide the darker core of his sexuality with, as he did other women. Women such as Mina. Women who touched only his body, never his heart. Miss Walker had the potential to touch the inner man, and he refused to give her the chance.
He’d failed to protect one woman in his life already; he wouldn’t make that mistake again.
“She’s Calvin Walker’s daughter, you know,” Mina continued. “Hell, I thought he was dead. What’s he doing with a daughter? Damned Walkers have never been worth crap, so it shouldn’t be surprising.”
Zeke rose to his feet and turned back to her. “I’m heading out, Mina. Take care.”
This relationship was over. He could barely manage civility now. Mina had always seemed like a kindhearted woman. She had a ready smile, compassionate hazel eyes, a gentle face. And a mean streak a mile wide. He’d learned that over the past few months. When it came to other women, younger women, anyone she considered a threat to what she might want at the time, she turned viperous.
“And you’re not coming back.” Her expression lost its amusement now. “Did you think I didn’t know your attention was waning, Zeke?”
“We had an understanding, Mina.” He’d made certain of it before the relationship began.
She sat up in the bed, unashamedly naked, her short brown hair mussed attractively around her face.
“Your attention hasn’t been worth shit since you met that girl,” she accused him snidely. “You go through the motions, but I don’t doubt you’re thinking of her when you’re fucking me.”
His brow lifted. “Jealousy doesn’t become you, Mina, and it’s not a part of what we had. In this case, you’re wrong. There’s nothing between me and Miss Walker.”
And there never could be. She was too young, too tender. Zeke didn’t mess with women whose innocence lit their eyes like stars in the sky. Caitlyn Walker was the forever kind, and Zeke simply didn’t have that to give her. Forever required the truth, it required parts of himself being revealed, and he’d learned at a young age that the truth wasn’t always acceptable.
“There’s nothing between the two of you because you’re a closemouthed bastard intent on making certain you never give so much as an ounce of yourself,” she snapped. “What’s wrong, Zeke, can’t anyone match the memory of that paragon you were married to? Or did you simply spend too much time in Los Angeles partying with all the gay boys?”
Zeke stared back at her silently. Prejudice in the mountains was still alive and thriving; he’d known that before he came home.
“Good-bye, Mina.”
He turned and left the room. He’d be damned if he’d let himself be drawn into an argument with her, especially one she could use against him at any time in the future.
Zeke had a lot friends that still lived in L.A., and yeah, a few of them were gay. He and his past wife, Elaina, hadn’t felt that sense of prejudice that thrived here. He didn’t give a damn what a man or woman’s sexual preference was. He hadn’t cared then, and he didn’t care now.
As he left Mina’s little house outside town, he reminded himself that he was here to do a job, not to make friends or to find another wife. He’d been born and bred in these mountains; he knew every cliff and hollow, every breath of breeze and sigh of the wind. And he’d missed it like hell when he’d been forced to leave. Not that he’d had a choice at the time. It was leave with his mother or face the further destruction of his soul.
At fourteen, his life had changed forever. One moment in time had cursed him and had caused his parents’ divorce. Moving to L.A. with his mother and meeting Elaina, the woman he’d married, had changed it further. At seventeen he’d become a father himself, and through the years he had learned the hard way that he couldn’t run from his past. It had found him, and his wife had died because of it.
He was back in Kentucky because of it. Because he was tired of running, tired of fighting to forget what couldn’t be forgotten.
Damn, he loved these mountains though, he thought as he started his truck and pulled out of Mina’s back drive. The sun was rising over the peaks of pine, oak, and elm that filled the rolling hills. There was a mist in the air that drifted off the nearby lake, and the scent of summer filled his senses.
The vision of Rogue—he just couldn’t see her as Caitlyn—filled his head, no matter how hard he tried to push it back. He was thirty-two years old, a grown man next to her tender twenty-one. She was so damned tiny she made a man second think his own strength and so damned innocent that all a man could think about was being the one to teach her how to sin.
Someone else would have to teach her, he thought, if someone hadn’t already. He was staying just as far away from that land mine as possible. She would be the one woman that would tempt him. If he dared to touch her, if he even considered taking her, he’d never be able to give her only a part of himself. And because of that, he could never have her. There wasn’t enough left of him to give, sometimes he felt as though he had never completely found himself and never would until the demons of his past were destroyed.
Securing that end wouldn’t be easy, he had known that from the beginning. Navigating the waters of deceit could come with a very high price. It was hard enough protecting his young son from it; he couldn’t deal with protecting a woman as well.
Vanquishing those enemies meant doing the job alone. And until one little schoolteacher with violet eyes, he hadn’t minded paying the price.
ONE
Present day
Sheriff Zeke Mayes stepped into the squalid mobile home and grimaced at the scent of blood and death that filled it. The rusted metal of the mobile home outside gave only a hint of the depressing interior. No more than twelve by forty, the tiny home was littered with refuse, old dishes, old food, stale whisky and tobacco, and congealing blood and brain matter scattered across the walls and threadbare, dingy carpets.
Old beer, food, and vomit stains spotted the floors where used newspapers, dishes, and dirty clothes hadn’t been thrown. It was a damned mess. And right in the middle of it was the bigger mess.
; “Hell.” He stepped farther in, careful to steer well clear of the body laid out on the floor. “Get forensics in here, Gene, and call the coroner.”
Deputy Gene Maynard looked around the room with a confused frown. From the gun still clenched in one of the dead men’s hands to the brain matter splattered around the floor.
“Forensics? Hell, Zeke, this ain’t no homicide. These boys done done themselves in,” he spat in disgust. “You pull forensics out here and Alex Jansen is gonna piss down his leg for you tying up his boys that way.”
Zeke turned and stared at the deputy. Some days, Gene liked to think he knew Zeke’s job better than Zeke did. Zeke stared back at him silently, daring him not to do as he was told. It would be a simple matter at this point to suspend him. Hell, it might speed things up, even if it would garner more suspicion than Zeke needed.
Gene sighed, gave a quick nod of his dark-haired head, then left the trailer and loped back to the cruiser he’d arrived in to make the call. Zeke turned back and stared at the mess once again. Yeah, it looked like just what it could have been. One brother killing the other, then killing himself, but maybe that was the problem, it looked too much like it. And the Walker boys might have been trouble more often than not, but this just didn’t sit right in his gut. It resembled too closely several other unsolved crimes over the past ten years and pinched his gut with warning.
Hell, he hadn’t expected this when he’d answered the call earlier from the sister of these two men, asking if the sheriff would check up on them. Lisa Walker was stuck in Louisville looking after their grandmother in the hospital and needed some things from the old woman’s house. She was trying to get hold of Joe or Jaime to bring them to her and the phone here had stayed busy through the weekend.
Zeke stared around the room, found the phone by the recliner, and narrowed his eyes at the old-fashioned base. The receiver was off the hook, barely showing beneath the newspaper laying over it.
Joe and Jaime Walker weren’t exactly scions of the community. They were irritants sometimes, normally harmless, fun-loving country boys. Joe worked at a lube and oil in town and Jaime worked whenever the mood hit him, wherever he could get a job at the time. And for the past few years they’d been supplying Zeke with information pertinent to a group of homeland terrorists that had been disbanded the year before.
This wasn’t a murder-suicide, and Zeke knew it; he could feel it.
Jaime was sprawled in a dilapidated easy chair in front of the silent television set, a neat little hole in the center of his head. Dark hair feathered over his brow and framed his handsome face. Once bright, laughing blue eyes were blank and cold in death, but his expression seemed surprised.
His muscular arms rested on the chair, blood stained his white T-shirt. He was still dressed in jeans and boots; he hadn’t settled in for the night, perhaps preparing to leave later.
The television was turned off. Zeke stared at it, then at the television remote laying on the floor by the recliner. There was a half-empty bottle of beer there, too.
Joe Walker was crumbled to the floor, the back of his head blown to bits. His face was in profile, and horror seemed to crease it.
He, too, was dressed in well-pressed jeans and a white shirt, boots on his feet. The boys had meant to go out, Zeke thought. They were dressed for a Saturday night on the town.
They hadn’t made it out last night though. For some reason, it appeared one brother had killed the other, then himself. Gray matter and blood stained the floor and walls and the reek of death was stifling.
Son of a bitch.
“They finally offed each other.” Gene stepped back into the doorway and stared at the wasted corpses. “They were fighting at the Walker bar just outside of town Thursday night over some woman. Rogue had a few of the bouncers toss them out and send them on their way.”
Zeke turned to stare at the deputy coolly. “Does offing each other fit either man’s personality, Gene?”
It looked as though Joe had stepped inside, closed the door, and shot his brother, then himself. A murder-suicide. Simple and not really unusual. It happened, too damned often. But that wasn’t what had happened here.
“Looks to me like ole Joe finally had enough of Jaime stealing his women.” Gene sighed and shook his head. “Those boys never did amount to much despite Calvin Walker tryin’ to send them through school. They graduated but never did do much else, did they?”
Zeke held his tongue there. He didn’t know what Calvin Walker had done for his distant cousins any more than he knew why the hell he left his daughter, Rogue, to suffer in that damned bar outside of town. It wasn’t any of his business, either, Zeke told himself, other than asking the necessary questions to close this case.
He stared around again and shook his head. Hell, Joe and Jaime had been tight. Fraternal twins rather than identical, but still, damned close in looks and with each other. The girls loved them. Young, old, or married, it didn’t make a difference. The Walker twins were laid-back, easygoing, laughing, and as thick as thieves. Poke at one brother and you might as well poke at the other. And yes, they were known to fight over their women, but never in a serious way.
This just didn’t make sense.
“Forensics is pulling up, coroner is behind him. Looks like the new chief of police is here to oversee how you’re usin’ his boys,” Gene announced mockingly as Zeke stepped toward the open door and moved to the rickety front porch before heading toward the driveway.
Alex Jansen pulled in behind the forensic team and the coroner. The new chief of police was ex-military and damned sharp.
Zeke held up his hand, stopping the forensic team as Alex strode toward him. There was still the slightest limp in Alex’s stride from a wound received during a mission in the Special Forces before he took over the job of chief of police, but the limp was growing less noticeable.
Dressed in a short-sleeved dark blue shirt, jeans, and boots, Alex looked like exactly what he was. An animal prowling in a man’s body.
“Zeke.” Alex extended his hand, his gray eyes concerned. “We got problems out here?”
“Seems I might have.” Zeke pushed his hat back on his head as he stared around the sunlit meadow the Walker mobile home sat within. “Walk in here with me. I need another set of eyes. We go as far as the door and that should be enough to keep from messing up your boys’ area.”
Alex nodded and followed behind him as Zeke led the way back to the trailer and then stood aside as Alex stepped into the doorway. Zeke didn’t talk. Instead, he stood by the doorway, staring at the scene again.
“Immaculate,” Alex murmured, and Zeke knew Alex wasn’t talking about the state of the habitation but rather the scene of the death itself. “No apparent hesitation on the shooter’s part. Walked in, aimed, and shot. Jaime didn’t fight, and neither did Joe.” He turned to Zeke. “Any sign of drugs?”
Zeke shrugged. “I’m leaving that call up to your boys and the coroner. I’m ordering an autopsy just to be sure. The rest.” He just shook his head. “Doesn’t feel right, Alex.”
Alex stared around again, his arms crossing over his chest, eyes narrowed. “No,” he finally said slowly, carefully. “It doesn’t feel right, but sometimes, it doesn’t.”
And there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it, either, Zeke finished silently. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had died in this county and the answers weren’t there, and it wouldn’t be the last. But this one was closer, it was more personal, despite the distance he tried to keep between himself and Rogue Walker, cousin to the two dead twins.
He moved back as Alex stepped outside and stared around the overgrown clearing. The Walkers’ home sat in a small valley surrounded by oak, pine, elm, and dogwood. It was the end of April and spring was making itself known with a vengeance. It was already seventy, the sun beating down with blazing strength and heating the land around them.
“Let’s get out of the way then.” Alex sighed as they moved from the porch. “Forensics will
do their job, see if they can get any answers for you.”
Zeke almost breathed a sigh of relief. Alex’s predecessor would cry and moan for weeks when he had to loan out the forensics team to the county.
“Thanks for the loan, Alex,” he stated, watching his own words, his own responses. Alex knew the same thing Zeke did. This was a murder, straight and simple, committed by a particular man, in a very particular manner.
“Need any help with this?” Alex asked as they moved back to the parked vehicles.
Zeke shook his head, aware of Gene trailing them now.
“Not yet. I’ll keep you up-to-date on it though. Gene said there was rumor the boys were fighting at the bar the other night. I’ll head out there later and talk to Rogue.”
Alex paused and stared back at Zeke, amusement suddenly gleaming in his eyes. “She’s helping Janey at the restaurant,” he informed Zeke then. “Haven’t you been picking her up lately?”
Zeke lifted his hand and rubbed at the back of his neck. Rogue was a sore spot with him; it was one of the reasons he hated finding Joe and Jaime as he had. Those boys were favorites of hers, and damned if someone wasn’t going to start wondering if Zeke was spending precious county money because of the rumors that were drifting through town that the sheriff and the bar owner were sniffing around each other.
“Not lately,” he finally admitted. “The warmer nights, she’s been riding her Harley in.” That didn’t mean he didn’t check up on the leather-wearing, motorcycle-riding hellion as often as he found time to do so.
Hell, he hated admitting that he missed those late night calls, just as he came off duty, requesting a ride from the restaurant where she was helping Alex’s lover back to the bar she owned. The woman was a managerial whiz kid, yet she had come here as a high school mathematics teacher five years before.
She was an enigma to him. She messed his head up every damned chance she had, and he wasn’t a man that liked having to question parts of himself that he had never questioned before. He’d made a decision before he returned to Kentucky, and now he had no choice but to stick with it. Until this was finished, there was no time for the emotions Rogue Walker inspired in him. There was no time for love.