Joanna Wayne - Cowboy Conspiracy

“You’re afraid of me, Wyatt Ledger …

“Afraid you might fall hard for me and that I might interfere with your burning desire to settle a score for your mother no matter who it hurts.”

“You’re reading this all wrong, Kelly. I’m just following the lawman’s code. A cop never gets personally involved with a woman he’s protecting. It makes him lose his edge. Fear has nothing to do with this.”

“Prove it.”

She stepped right in front of him, so close he could feel her breath on his bare chest. “Kiss me right now and prove you’re not afraid.” She took his hand and pressed it to her breast.

He lost it then and he kissed her hard, ravaging her lips, exploding in a rush of desire he couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to.

JOANNA WAYNEwas born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, and received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from LSU-Shreveport. She moved to New Orleans in 1984, and it was there that she attended her first writing class and joined her first professional writing organization. Her debut novel, Deep in the Bayou, was published in 1994.

Now, dozens of published books later, Joanna has made a name for herself as being on the cutting edge of romantic suspense in both series and single-title novels. She has been on the Waldenbooks bestseller list for romance and has won many industry awards. She is also a popular speaker at writing organizations and local community functions and has taught creative writing at the University of New Orleans Metropolitan College.

Joanna currently resides in a small community forty miles north of Houston, Texas, with her husband. Though she still has many family and emotional ties to Louisiana, she loves living in the Lone Star State. You may write Joanna at PO Box 852, Montgomery, Texas 77356, USA.

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It was a country club neighborhood. Sprawling brick houses. Manicured lawns. A guard at the gate. The kind of community where people should be resting safely in their beds at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday.

But in the Whiting home, one resident would never wake up to the smell of morning coffee—the latest Atlanta homicide to drop onto Wyatt Ledger’s overflowing plate.

Home murders were the worst, he lamented as he pulled up and stopped behind the two squad cars already parked in the driveway of a columned, two-story brick structure. A lone, bare tree stretched its creaking limbs toward the covered entry. Welcome to paradise gone brutal.

Not that murder was any more horrid or final here than in the backstreets and alleyways where so many of the city’s gang and drug-related killings went down. But a home was a person’s refuge, the haven from the outside world. Blood seemed so repulsively out of place splattered over pristine surfaces where violence had never struck before.

And home murders hit way too close to the nightmarish memories Wyatt could never lay to rest.

He turned at the squeal of brakes as a blue sedan joined the scene. A second later his partner rushed up the walk behind him, catching up just as he reached the door.

“Be nice if murders occurred during waking hours,” Alyssa said as she twisted her skirt until it hung straight over her narrow hips. Even slightly disheveled, she looked good. In any other setting, no one would guess she was as tough and smart as any homicide detective in the city.

“Didn’t you have a hot date tonight?” Wyatt asked, but his focus had already moved from Alyssa to the house’s surroundings. Lots of trees and shrubs to offer cover for a perp. An alarm-system warning was planted in the front garden. He’d have to check and see if it had gone off.

“Kyle and I went out with friends and didn’t get home until after midnight,” Alyssa said. “I was sorely tempted to ignore the phone.”

“You’d be yelling if you weren’t invited to the party.”

“Wrong. I hate crime scenes. I love arresting murdering bastards, so I forego sleep.”

“I figure we may lose a lot of sleep over this one.”

“Why?” Alyssa asked. “What do you know about the crime?”

“Probably the same as you know. Cops were summoned by a 911 call. Found a woman fatally shot. House belongs to Derrick and Kathleen Whiting.”

Wyatt opened the unlocked door and stepped inside a high-ceilinged foyer. A multifaceted crystal chandelier dripped light over a marble floor and an antique cherry credenza. Cold air blasted from the air-conditioning unit, though it was already October and in the high sixties outside.

Low voices drifted down the hallway. Wyatt’s gut tightened as he strode toward the conversation. He’d been in Homicide six years. This part of the routine never got easier.

He saw the blood first, streams of it flowing away from a body partially hidden by two uniformed officers. Wyatt knew both of the policemen—Carter and Bower. They’d worked night shifts for as long as he’d been with the Atlanta P.D.

“It’s ugly,” Carter said, stepping back for Wyatt and Alyssa to move in for a closer look. He added a few expletives to make his point.

The victim was lying facedown on the living room floor, wearing a pair of black pajamas. Her feet were bare. She’d been shot in the back of the head at close range. Two bullet entry points were clearly visible.

The wounds were enough to make most men puke. It worried Wyatt a little that he’d become so desensitized to the gore that he didn’t pitch his dinner onto the sea of off-white carpet.

“The back door had been jimmied open,” Carter said. “The TV is unplugged and pulled out from the wall. Looks as if the victim may have come downstairs and interrupted a burglary in progress.”

“Or someone meant it to look that way,” Wyatt said. “Did you check the rest of the house for other victims?”

“Yep. All clear. No one else is home. There are men’s clothes in the closet in the master bedroom, but only one side of the bed appears to have been slept in. There’s another bedroom. Looks as if it belongs to a teenage boy. Slew of baseball trophies on some cluttered shelves and a poster of the Atlanta Falcon cheerleaders on the wall. Dirty clothes piled on the floor. Bed hasn’t been slept in.”

A boy who’d come home soon to find his mother had been brutally murdered.

A surge of unwanted memories bombarded Wyatt. Events replayed in his mind in slow motion. Staring at his mother’s brutally slain body, the pain inside him so intense he’d had to fight to breathe. The panic. The fear. The smell of burning peas. To this day he couldn’t stomach the sight or smell of peas.

“Who called the police?” Alyssa asked.

“A neighbor. He said he heard what sounded like gunshots from the Whiting home, but that the alarm system hadn’t gone off. When we got here we found the back door wide open, so we came in that way and then unlocked the front door for you guys.”