Christmas Rescue at Mustang Ridge. Delores Fossen
Even though she’d been dead and buried for over two and a half years now, since Sunny was just a baby.
“Are we just going to keep calling her she and her?” Royce asked. He huffed, but Jake didn’t know if he was just riled about the situation or the pronoun use. “Because she’s got a name, you know?”
“Yeah, and it’s a name not welcome here,” Chet insisted.
His father wasn’t the forgive-and-forget sort.
Neither was Jake in this situation.
But Sunny needed her. And that meant Jake needed her, too.
“Maggie Gallagher,” Jake said aloud. It was the first time that name had crossed his lips in two years, eight months and five days.
Maggie, his former sister-in-law. Or would that be his late wife’s sister? Or how about the woman who’d gotten Anna killed? Yeah, that was the label that fit her best.
Maybe Chet had the right idea about not saying her name.
Chet stopped pacing and snapped toward Jake. “How you gonna convince those marshals to give us her location?”
The million-dollar question. Jake had a fifty-cent answer.
Jake shook his head. “I can’t convince them. Royce and I have already tried.”
“We have,” Royce agreed. He glanced at Chet. “The Justice Department can’t tell us where she is because during her relocation processing, Maggie specifically said she didn’t want contact with any of us.”
Chet cursed again.
If Jake had been feeling charitable—he wasn’t—he would have pointed out that Chet had warned Maggie that if she ever came back to Mustang Ridge, he’d kill her and the horse she rode in on. Hardly a welcome-mat greeting. And it was that threat that had no doubt caused Maggie to include the no-contact order.
Chet lifted his hands, palms up. “So, that’s it? You’re just gonna give up?”
It took Jake a moment to rein in his voice. “I’ll never give up.”
Chet shook his head, riffled his hand through his hair. “Then never giving up better come with some kind of plan attached.”
“I have a plan,” Jake managed to say. It wasn’t a good one, though, and it would hurt.
Oh, yeah. It’d hurt bad.
“Best if I don’t give you any details of what I have to do.” Jake unpinned his badge and dropped it on the table.
It hardly made it sound when it hit the soft pinewood.
Funny, he figured it would. Because the sound sure went through him. That badge was fourteen years of his life and had been pinned to his pockets since he was twenty-one.
“For safekeeping,” Jake explained, knowing as explanations went, that it wasn’t a very good one.
Or an honest one.
Chet glared at the badge, then at Jake. “We’re family. We got a right to know what you’re doing.”
Jake pulled in a weary breath, shook his head and started for the door.
Chet called out for him to stop, but Jake just kept going. There was no way he could tell his family that come tomorrow, all hell was going to break loose.
And that he, Sheriff Jake McCall, was about to become an outlaw.
Chapter Two
There had been a time in her life when Maggie Gallagher would have knocked a man senseless for pinching her butt.
Now wasn’t that time.
Maggie ignored the gesture that Herman Settler probably thought was good ol’ boy friendly fun, and she deposited the plate in front of him.
Flop two, over hard. Smeared raft on the side.
Or in nondiner lingo: fried eggs and buttered toast.
The lingo was all mixed up in her head now. Mixed up with things like Herman’s butt pinch and the squirrel-brown uniform she wore five days a week. Sometimes six. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t good. But Maggie didn’t fight it.
She hadn’t fought it or anything else in a long time.
“Top off my coffee, darlin’,” Herman drawled, and added a wink. Flirting with her.
Didn’t the man realize he was old enough to be her father? Her boss, Gene Dayton, sure did. Gene was busy frying more eggs and sausages on the grill, but even through the haze of griddle smoke and grease splattering, Gene still managed to give Herman a look that could have frozen the hottest part of Hades.
Later, Gene would lecture her about letting men like Herman run roughshod over her.
And he’d actually use the word roughshod.
She’d nod, pretend to agree. Pretend that it mattered. Because it was easier than explaining why she wasn’t looking for a fight. Not with Herman. Not with Gene.
Especially not with herself.
She reached across the tiled counter for the coffeepot. The tile was a dingy yellow now with even dingier hairline cracks running through it. Still, it was clean. Maggie should know since she’d been the one to clean it. It was the part of her job she liked best.
The only part, she amended.
The bell jingled over the door as she was topping off Herman’s coffee. Maggie looked at the wall clock, not the glass door. Ten twenty-three. The bell ringer would be Ted Halvert, owner of the town’s newspaper, the Coopersville Crier.
Ted was a few minutes early, but he was the only customer Maggie was expecting this time of day. For most people, it was already too late for breakfast, too early for lunch, and the Tip Top didn’t have enough ambience for people to drop by for just coffee or conversation.
“Got your table ready, Ted.” Maggie leaned back over the counter to set down the coffeepot, turned to give Ted the smile he would expect.
The smile froze on her face.
And the pot slammed on the dingy tile that she’d just cleaned.
The sound of the breaking glass registered in Maggie’s mind, but something else took over. Another set of lingo. A different set of rules.
She reached for a gun that she no longer wore.
Her riffling hand slid right across the shoulder holster that wasn’t there, either.
“Megan?” Gene called out. “You okay?”
It was her name now. Megan Greer. Her “relocation” name that had become second nature like cleaning and fake smiles, but Maggie couldn’t process it or Gene’s question.
Her breath stalled in her lungs. The blood rushed to her head. And everything she’d put behind her, everything she’d tried to choke down in a deep dark place, all of it came crashing back.
Because of Sheriff Jake McCall.
It was him all right. All six feet, three inches of him. Standing there in the tinsel-decorated doorway of the Tip Top, glaring at her from the brim of a black Stetson. Beneath his buckskin shearling coat, Maggie saw the shoulder holster.
A real one.
And Jake’s hand was on the butt of that real Colt .45.
“Are you here to finish things?” Maggie whispered. Not much sound in her voice, and everything inside her began to fall apart.
Unlike Jake.
He stood there, unmoving and unruffled, those Winchester-blue eyes drilling holes in her. Now, here was a man who could ride roughshod over her.
And she would