Lassoing the Deputy

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue

He almost hadn’t seen it.

The letter had arrived in his mailbox early this afternoon, tucked in between meaningless advertisements, flyers and catalogs offering him everything from overpriced steaks, uniquely packed and shipped overnight to his Beverly Hills apartment, to useless toys and gadgets only “the discerning professional could appreciate”—or hope to pay for, for that matter.

He’d tossed the lot of them into the garbage, but his aim was off and several pieces of mail fell to the kitchen floor instead of into the silver garbage pail.

He stooped to pick up the fallen pieces in order to throw them away, and that was when he found his grandfather’s letter stuck in between the catalogs.

Even so, he almost hadn’t opened the envelope.

He loved the man dearly. Harry Taylor was his only living relative and the best person—man or woman—that he knew, but the ever-widening dark vortex where he had resided these past four months was growing too large for him to crawl out of anymore.

He wanted his pain, his guilt to finally be over.

Others might have forgiven him for what had happened, but he couldn’t forgive himself, and lately, the burden had gotten to be too much for him to handle.

But the letter continued to call to him.

His grandfather, who staunchly refused to have anything to do with “modern nonsense” like computers or the internet, preferred to communicate the old-fashioned way and had written the letter using pen and paper.

Holding the envelope in his hand, Cash Taylor smiled for the first time in weeks, thinking fondly of the man who had written this.

His grandfather had always been there for him, taking him and his mother in when his father was killed in a freak accident on an offshore oil rig. And the man became his sole guardian when his mother died less than a year later, losing her battle with cancer.

A simple, hardworking, decent man, his grandfather knew nothing about what had happened, what was going on presently in his life.

His days on the ranch and living in Forever represented the best years of his life, Cash recalled, not for the first time.

Very slowly, he opened the letter. It wasn’t a long missive, as his grandfather had never been enamored with his own words. Consequently, the letter was incredibly short.

I’m getting hitched again, boy. To Miss Joan! Can you believe it? I finally wore her down. Wedding’s on a Saturday in three weeks. I know you’re real busy, but it would really make me proud to have you there, standing up for me. I miss you, boy.

Grandpa

That was all.

Folding the letter again, Cash tucked it back into the envelope. There was an ache in his soul, a yearning for what had once been.

“I miss you, too, Grandpa,” he whispered. “More than you could possibly know.”

In all the years that he had lived with the man, his grandfather had never come right out and asked him for a favor. But this invitation was clearly a request for a favor—his presence at the ceremony.

Cash looked at the gun he’d purchased just this week. The gun he’d bought to put him out of his misery.

The same gun, it now occurred to him, that would put his grandfather into misery.

He couldn’t pay the old man back for everything he’d done, for all his kindness, love and patience by killing himself. It wouldn’t be right or fair.

Cash picked up the weapon and crossed to his lavish bedroom with its vaulted ceiling and marble-tiled fireplace. He slipped the gun into the back of the bottom drawer of his bureau.

Disappointing his grandfather was not an option.

He was going to the wedding. There was time enough when he got back to do what he felt he had to do.

It wasn’t until later that he realized the invitation was a lifeline he’d grabbed on to and held with both hands.

His grandfather had saved him for a second time.

Chapter One

Sheriff Rick Santiago paused on his way back from the coffee machine, a filled mug in his hand. He looked thoughtfully at one-third of his team, his only female deputy, Alma Rodriguez. There was an odd expression on her face and she appeared to be at least a million miles away.

She’d been like that since yesterday and it just wasn’t her usual, cheerful behavior. He was accustomed to the raven-haired woman smiling and humming to herself.

He wasn’t used to seeing sadness in her brown eyes. “You doing okay, Alma?” he asked, his voice low and confidential.

Surprised at being addressed, Alma dragged her mind back to the sheriff’s office and tried her best to focus on her boss’s voice. It wasn’t easy when her mind was going off in three different directions at once. “Sure. I’m fine. Why?”

“I don’t know, you look a little…off,” he finally said for lack of a better word to describe what he’d been witnessing these past two days.

“No, I’m fine,” she answered with perhaps a tad too much enthusiasm. “But thanks for asking,” she added, hoping that would send Rick back to his broom closet of an office and thus bring an end to further questions.

Ordinarily, she would have loved nothing better than to lean back and talk with the sheriff, a man she not only admired, but liked. Forever being the semi-sleepy little Texas town that it was, there wasn’t all that much to do when the town’s two alcohol devotees weren’t staggering down the street because they’d imbibed just a wee bit too much, or Mrs. Allen’s cat didn’t once more need coaxing out of the tall front-yard tree.

And as for Miss Elizabeth, she hadn’t wandered down Main Street in her nightgown in nearly a year.

Crime, such as it was in Forever, was definitely down, allowing her to have too much time on her hands. And consequently, too much time to think about things she didn’t want to think about.

Like Cash Tyler’s return, however brief.

She wasn’t ready for it.

Harry Monroe had dropped his bombshell on her yesterday, gleefully telling her his grandson, Cash, was coming for the wedding.

Her stomach had been pinched in half ever since.

“Reason I’m asking,” Rick went on, leaning his hip against the side of her desk for a moment, “is because, besides that look of preoccupation on your face, the coffee you made this morning is just this side of lethal.” He paused to take a sip of the hot, inky brew, as if to show her that he had managed to survive the drink. “Now, I don’t mind it that way, and most likely Joe won’t, either,” he said, referring to his deputy brother-in-law, Joe Lone Wolf. “We like our coffee almost solid. But Larry, well, Larry just might threaten to sue you.” Humor curved his mouth as he referred to his third deputy, Larry Conroy, who was not the most mild-mannered man under any circumstances. “After he gets up off the floor and stops sputtering and choking, of course.”

It wasn’t that Larry was delicate exactly, but the man was downright picky about everything. While nothing ever pleased the man, this would definitely set him off on a marathon complaining session, he thought.

“My thinking is that maybe you put in twice as much coffee this time around,” he pointed out kindly, as if her error was the most natural one in the world. “Knowing how meticulous you normally are, I’m thinking that maybe you’ve got something on your mind.”

Rick leveled his dark eyes at her, giving her a look that had been known to make ten-year-old candy thieves confess to their crimes in an instant. It’d worked pretty well on the few suspects he had had to interrogate. Then he got down to what he really wanted to say to his deputy. “Something you’d like to get off your chest, but don’t really feel comfortable talking about at home?”