CHAPTER ONE

      After the wedding...

      MOST OF HIS duties as his buddy Tripp’s best man complete, Spencer “Spence” Hogan ducked out of the reception, held in the library’s community room, as soon as the bride and groom left the scene, both of them beaming with just-married joy and understandably eager to get the honeymoon underway.

      It was a five-minute drive to the police station. Once there, Spence strode through the small lobby without sparing more than a nod of greeting for Junie McFarlane, the second-shift dispatcher, or either of the two duty officers chatting her up.

      Inside his modest office, he wasted no time swapping out the rented tux and shiny lace-up shoes for the well-worn jeans, blue cotton shirt and everyday boots he’d stashed there earlier in the day. He took his hat from the hook next to the door, put it on and then, feeling like his normal self instead of somebody’s pet monkey, Spence allowed himself a sigh of pure relief.

      Out front again, he surveyed the goings-on.

      The deputies, Nick Estes and Moe Radner, were back at their desks, focusing intently on pretty much nothing in particular and fairly radiating the Protestant work ethic. Both were rookies, their hair buzz-cut, their uniforms so starched that the fold lines still showed, their badges buffed to a high shine.

      Junie caught Spence’s gaze and smiled slightly. She was just this side of forty and beautiful, in a country-music diva way. Mercifully, though, she went easy on the makeup, at least when she was on the job, saving the big hair, false eyelashes, sprayed-on jeans and rhinestones for her nights off. “How’d the wedding go, Chief?” she asked, with a twinkle in her green eyes. “Did Hadleigh Stevens manage to get herself married for real this time around, or did some yahoo show up and derail the whole shindig?”

      Like Spence, Junie had attended the other ceremony, by now a local legend, right up there with the bank robbery back in 1894 and the time Elvis and his entourage breezed through town in a convoy of limos, somewhere in the mid-1950s, reportedly on their way to Yellowstone.

      Spence chuckled. “Yep,” he confirmed, recalling the almost-wedding, just over a decade before. Tripp Galloway had been the yahoo-of-record, and Hadleigh had been the bride, eighteen, storybook-beautiful, naive as hell and in dire need of rescue, although she’d raised some spirited objections that sunny September afternoon. The ousted groom, well, he’d been the personification of Mr. Wrong. Otherwise known as Oakley Smyth.

      Tripp, a man on a mission, had blown into that little redbrick church like a dust devil working itself up into a full-scale tornado, moments before the I dos would’ve been exchanged, calmly announced that he could give the proverbial just cause why these two could not be joined in holy matrimony and proceeded to do so.

      Understandably, Hadleigh hadn’t taken Tripp’s interference at all well; in fact, she’d pitched a memorable fit and whacked him hard with her bridal bouquet, not once, but repeatedly, scattering flower petals every time she made contact.

      There was no reasoning with her.

      Finally, Tripp had lifted Hadleigh off her feet, slung her over one shoulder like a feed sack and carried her out of the sanctuary.

      At that point, Hadleigh’s protests had escalated considerably, of course, and she’d kicked and squirmed and yelled all the way back down the aisle, through the main doors and outside, into a world of much wider possibilities. Most likely, she hadn’t been aware of that last part, being in a royal tizzy and everything.

      For all Hadleigh’s outrage, no one had interceded—not the preacher, not Alice Stevens, Hadleigh’s grandmother and last living relative, not the stunned guests jamming the pews. Nobody moved a muscle, and nobody spoke up, either.

      And that was a peculiar thing in itself, given the nature of small towns in general and Mustang Creek in particular. There, folks didn’t hesitate to get involved when there was a ruckus, the way they might in a big city. No, sir. These were country people; the men were cowboys and farmers, carpenters and electricians, truck drivers and garage mechanics, sure to wade in and fight if the need arose—and the women, when sufficiently riled, could be fierce, with or without their men to back them up, alone or running in a pack.

      This time, though, they’d all stood by and watched, the whole bunch of them, male and female, while Hadleigh was being, as she’d put it, “abducted, damn it!”

      After all, the collective reasoning went, it wasn’t as if Tripp was some stranger with dubious intentions. Like the indignant bride slung over his shoulder, he was one of their own, a hard worker, decent to the core—even if he had been a little wild in his youth and not much of a churchgoer.

      He’d served his country, honorably and in a time of war, too, when the stakes were high. In places like Mustang Creek, things like that mattered.

      Oakley, on the other hand, hometown boy though he was and from a prominent family into the bargain, barely registered a blip on the public-opinion meter, one way or the other. Still more kid than man, he’d never exhibited signs of even modest ambition, partied all through college and, most damning of all, forged himself a reputation for always taking the easy route.

      He wasn’t hated, but he wasn’t liked, either.

      When the locals thought about Oakley at all, it was usually to wonder what in creation the Stevens girl, an otherwise intelligent and exceptionally pretty one at that, saw in the guy. She was nice, in addition to her other favorable qualities and, in the town’s opinion, could’ve had just about any eligible man she took a liking to.

      At that point in his mental wanderings, Junie snapped Spence back to the here and now with a soft, wistful “Isn’t it romantic? How Tripp and Hadleigh finally ended up together, even after everything that happened way back when?”

      Spence adjusted his hat, frowning. “Romantic?” Just hearing the word, let alone saying it aloud, made him a little nervous, although he wouldn’t have admitted as much. Sure, okay, he was glad for the newlyweds—Tripp and Hadleigh wanted to spend the rest of their lives together, and they were obviously meant for each other. They’d traveled separate trails, long and lonely ones mostly, before their paths finally crossed again and, after some fuss and fury, decided to buckle down and forge the kind of relationship that can ride out practically anything.

      And if anybody, anywhere, deserved happily-ever-after, it was those two.

      Still, as far as Spence was concerned, Tripp