RaeAnne Thayne - Taming Jesse James

When he’d finally decided to ignore her blatant back-off signals and asked her to dance, she’d stared at him as if he had just dumped a glass of champagne all over her, then topped it off by stomping on her fingers.

She hadn’t said anything for several painfully long moments, then she had jumped to her feet and stammered some excuse about how she needed to check on something. Next thing he’d known, he’d seen her driving out of the church parking lot as if she was trying to outgun a tornado.

He pushed the memory away. So the pretty, enigmatic Ms. McKenzie didn’t want to dance with him. So what? He was a big boy now and could handle a little rejection once in a while. His little sister, Cassidy, probably would have said it was good for him.

Not that any of that had a thing to do with the reason she was sitting in front of him trying not to wring her hands together nervously.

“Is there something I can help you with, Ms. McKenzie?” he asked again, in his best casual, friendly-policeman voice.

She drew in a breath, then let it out in a rush. “I want you to arrest someone.”

It was the last thing he expected her to say. “You do?”

Her soft, pretty mouth tightened. “Well, I’d prefer if you could drag him behind a horse for a few hundred miles. But since I don’t think that’s very likely to happen, given civil rights and all, I suppose I’ll have to settle for seeing the miserable excuse for a man locked away for the rest of his natural life.”

“Does this miserable excuse for a man have a name?”

She hesitated for just a few beats, just long enough to nudge his curiosity up to fever pitch. “Yes,” she finally said coolly. “Yes, he does have a name. Seth Garrett.”

His jaw dropped. “The mayor? You want me to arrest the mayor?”

“I don’t care if he’s the president of the United States. He belongs in jail.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Care to tell me why, before I rush over there with my handcuffs? I’m not saying I won’t do it—I’d just like to be able to give the man a reason.”

She stood up, her hands clenched tightly into fists and a glare on those delicate, fine-boned features. “This is not a laughing matter, Chief Harte. If you refuse to take me seriously, I’ll…I’ll find someone who will. The FBI, maybe, or the Wyoming State Police.”

She was serious! She wanted him to march into the mayor’s office and haul him off to jail. What could she possibly have against Seth Garrett, one of the most well liked and respected men in town? He doubted the man even jaywalked.

Still, he knew she wouldn’t have come here without a reason, and it was his job to listen to it. “I’m sorry, ma’am. You just took me by surprise, that’s all. I didn’t mean to make light of this. Sit down. What do you think he’s done?”

Sarah slid into the chair again and knotted her hands together tightly. She wasn’t sure what was more to blame for their trembling—this seething fury writhing around inside her or the sick lump in her stomach at having to face the man in front of her.

She did know she shouldn’t have come here. Jesse Harte made her so blasted nervous she couldn’t think straight, and she had known before she even walked into his office that she would make a mess of this.

In the past eighteen months she had worked hard to overcome the lingering fragments of nightmare that haunted her. She wanted to think she had become almost functional again, hiding the worst of her panic attacks behind a veneer of control.

But for some reason Jesse Harte always seemed to punch a hole in the paper-thin wall of that facade, leaving her nervous and upset.

It wasn’t him, exactly. Or, at least, she didn’t think so. He seemed gentle enough with the girls. It was kind of sweet, actually, to see such a hard-edged cop teasing giggles out of two ten-year-old girls.

For a month she hadn’t been able to shake the image of him in his dark Western-cut suit at his brother’s wedding, dancing with each of the girls in turn and looking big and solid and completely masculine.

That was most of what made her nervous. He was just so big. So completely, wholly male—intimidating just by his very size and by the aura of danger that surrounded him.

With the combination of that dark-as-sin hair, those startling blue eyes and that wicked smile, Jesse Harte drew the lustful eye of every woman in town. If it weren’t for the badge on his tan denim shirt, it would be difficult to remember he was on the right side of the law. All he needed was a bushy mustache and a low-slung gun belt hanging on his hips to look like the outlaw she heard he was named for.

He sent her nerves skittering just by looking at her out of those blue eyes and she hated it, but she had no one else to turn to. She had a child to protect, and if that meant facing her own personal bogeyman, she would force herself to do it, no matter the cost.

Besides her unease around the police chief, it didn’t help her nerves to know she could be risking her job. When she had taken her concerns to the principal, Chuck Hendricks had ordered her to leave well enough alone. She was imagining things, he said, making problems for herself where she didn’t need to.

It was a grim reminder of what had happened in Chicago. She had been warned then about stepping in where she had no business. But then, just as now, she hadn’t had a choice.

“Can I get you a glass of water or something?”

She blinked and realized the police chief was waiting for some kind of an explanation for her presence here. “No. No, thank you. I’m fine.”

“You ready to talk now?”

She took a deep breath, then met his gaze directly for the first time since she’d entered his office. “Mr. Garrett’s stepson is in my class.”

“Corey Sylvester?”

“I take it you know him.”

Despite her worries over Corey, that blasted smile of his sent her stomach fluttering. “This is a small town, Ms. McKenzie. Not much slips by the eagle eye of the Salt River P.D. What’s Corey done now?”

“Oh, no. He hasn’t done anything.”

He chuckled wryly. “That’s a first.”

“What do you mean?”

“Only that the boy’s had his share of run-ins with local authorities.”

Another person might have asked what possible crimes a child of ten could have committed to bring him to the attention of the local police chief. Not Sarah. She had seen much, much worse than Corey Sylvester could even contemplate. In Chicago, children as young as eight dealt drugs and sold their bodies on street corners and murdered each other for sport.

She thought of a pretty girl with glossy braids and old, tired eyes, then pushed the memory aside.

This was rural Wyoming, where children still played kick-the-can on a warm spring night and the most excitement to be found was at the high school baseball diamond.

That’s why she had come here, to find peace. To immerse herself in the slow, serene pace of small-town life.

To heal.

“Corey has done nothing,” she assured the police chief. “He’s a troubled young boy and I…I believe I know why.”

“I’m assuming this has something to do with his stepfather, otherwise you wouldn’t be here looking for the mayor’s head on a platter, right?”

Her jaw clenched as she remembered what she’d seen at school that day. “Corey has all the characteristics of an abused child. I believe his stepfather is the one abusing him.”

Chief Harte leaned forward, suddenly alert as an alpha wolf scenting danger. She started to shrink back in her chair, but quickly checked the movement. She wouldn’t cower. Not if she could help it.

“That’s a very serious allegation, Ms. McKenzie. You have any evidence to back that up?”