Through the Sheriff's Eyes

Through the Sheriff's Eyes
Janice Kay Johnson

Love comes before duty… Faith refuses to be with a man who feels a sense of obligation towards her. She’s been through some traumatic events that have left her a little shaky. That doesn’t mean she needs Sheriff Ben hovering. She’ll be fine…on her own.Despite her protests, however, Ben won’t budge. He insists they share a romantic connection. She’ll admit she finds him attractive, but how can she be close to a man who might view her as a duty? It’s not until she catches a glimpse of herself through his eyes that she discovers what he feels for her is very real.

“Do you know what I’d like to do right now?”

Faith shook her head in response to Ben’s question. Her teeth closed on her lower lip, betraying nerves.

“I want to take you home with me and tuck you into my bed for a nap. I want to lie there next to you.” Ben wouldn’t even have to be touching her. He’d be satisfied to watch her sleep.

Color touched her cheeks and he thought he saw yearning in her eyes before they shied from his. “That’s just weird.”

He smiled at her. “Maybe. Of course, that’s not all I want, but it would be a start. Just … knowing you were sleeping soundly, right there next to me.”

“I don’t understand you,” Faith whispered.

His own voice low and husky, Ben said, “I’m willing to give you a chance to, any time you’re ready.”

Dear Reader,

The relationship between twins is a fascinating one often explored in fiction. The extremely close bond that sometimes exists, especially between identical twins, is hard for those of us not born a twin to understand. I, of course, like to focus on relationships that have gone bad. It intrigued me to imagine twin sisters with completely different needs. One craves the closeness born in the womb. The other is, almost from birth, horrified to see this other person who is a reflection of her. How can they help but hurt each other, no matter how much they also love each other?

And what’s going to happen to these two women, whose ability to love each other has been damaged, when later they fall in love with the heroes? Wonderful questions I loved exploring.

Because Charlotte’s and Faith’s lives are so entangled, their stories had to be as well. I’m just glad the two books are coming out in back-to-back months! The first THE RUSSELL TWINS story, Charlotte’s Homecoming, was released in July 2011 and now you have Faith’s story.

Enjoy!

Janice Kay Johnson

About the Author

The author of more than sixty books, JANICE KAY JOHNSON writes novels about love and family—about the way generations connect and the power our earliest experiences have on us throughout life. Her 2007 novel Snowbound won a RITA

Award from Romance Writers of America for Best Contemporary Series Romance. A former librarian, Janice raised two daughters in a small rural town north of Seattle, Washington. She loves to read and is an active volunteer and board member for Purrfect Pals, a no-kill cat shelter.

Through the

Sheriff’s Eyes

Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE

BEN WHEELER HATED TO fail at anything.

He hadn’t made a habit of it in his seventeen-year career in law enforcement. Oh, there’d been screwups, sure. Like the one that had landed him in the ICU for a week with a bullet hole in his gut. But that time, he’d taken down the guy who shot him and a second one who’d been about to shoot him, so he couldn’t exactly call it a failure. He’d lived, they’d died. And naturally, there were cases—particularly in Homicide—that had gone cold, which he hated.

But failing to find an ordinary guy … Not a professional hit man or anything like that, not someone who knew how to disappear as a career skill. Nope, just a sleaze who’d abused his wife and, now that she’d left him, wanted to teach her a vicious lesson. Ben couldn’t think of an excuse in the world for his failure to locate Rory Hardesty and put the son of a bitch behind bars.

His fingers flexed on the steering wheel despite the brief glower he gave them. He wished like hell there was a different, logical route to take into West Fork—one that wouldn’t add fifteen minutes or more to the drive.

One that wouldn’t take him past the Russell Family Farm, coming up on the right once the highway rounded a curve that followed the river.

Every time he saw the damn farm, he was slapped in the face with the reminder that he’d failed. Was still failing.

He should have been able to keep Faith and Charlotte Russell from being terrorized and hurt.

He’d spent this afternoon in Everett helping train volunteers for a program that kept first-time juvenile offenders out of the court system. He was giving his time generously because he believed in preventative law enforcement. Nip crime in the bud, so to speak. Make teenage offenders who’d surrendered to an impulse to shoplift or threaten someone face sober citizens from their own community who could assign real-life punishment while also offering the kind of attention and caring the court system couldn’t. The kids who took the opportunity seriously wouldn’t have the crime on their records. Ben liked the concept.

He’d keep his gaze straight ahead as he passed the farm, he told himself. Allow no more than a brief glance, to be sure there wasn’t an ambulance or police car with flashing lights there to signal trouble. Not that there would be at this time of day—Hardesty liked the midnight hour.

Less than half a mile past the Russell farm, the highway led into the small town of West Fork in the foothills of Washington’s Cascade Mountains.

Ben’s town now, although he didn’t know yet whether it would be permanent. He’d taken the job as police chief a year ago and still hadn’t decided whether the decision had been good or lousy. Life was undeniably more peaceful here than it had been in Los Angeles. Peaceful, however, could be considered a euphemism for boring. He hadn’t made up his mind which it was.

For a man who had worked his way up from a street officer in the LAPD to a lieutenant in Homicide via long stretches undercover in Vice, spending his days worrying about a chain saw stolen from a rental outfit or graffiti on the high-school gym wall felt unreal. Most of his officers were young and inexperienced, not toughened by ten years or more of urban crime like the homicide detectives who’d worked under him in Los Angeles had been. These days, the most dangerous place he stepped into was the city council chamber. He and the conservative, unimaginative idiots who made up the council did not see eye to eye on most issues. Unfortunately, he was dependent on them for his paycheck and continued employment.

Although Ben had been feeling satisfied with his afternoon’s accomplishments, he’d been growing increasingly tense from the minute he’d left the courthouse in Everett. All because he’d have to pass the Russells’ place, which made him think about Rory Hardesty, about Charlotte, and most of all about Charlotte’s identical twin sister, Faith, who was Hardesty’s ex. The two were twenty-nine, he knew; Faith had lived in West Fork her entire life except for the four years of college, while Charlotte had come home only recently to help Faith and their dad.

His squad car came abreast of the cornfield within which Faith had designed a maze that was a huge hit with area teenagers. Then he passed the handpainted signs strung along the highway, promising Antiques! Fresh Organic Produce! Plant Nursery! Local Arts & Crafts! Corn Maze! It was about the same time he’d moved to West Fork that the Russell Family Farm had been converted from real agriculture to primarily retail. Whether the farm/store/nursery amalgamation was doing well enough to keep the property from being sold off as neighboring ones had been, he had no idea.

Ben was startled to see that his turn signal was on and he was slowing. What in hell? He’d been avoiding the farm and Faith Russell in particular for weeks now. He had no new information to offer her.

But, damn it, here he was turning in anyway, pulling into the hard-packed dirt parking lot in front of the nearly one-hundred-year-old barn that housed the retail business.

Faith’s Blazer was parked beside her father’s battered pickup truck up by the two-story yellow farmhouse. It was late enough in the afternoon that she was home from the elementary school, where she taught kindergarten. He knew she came straight home every day, changed clothes, then went straight to work at the barn, taking over from the part-time employee who filled in days when Charlotte wasn’t able to. Don Russell, the twins’ father, had been injured in early August when the tractor had rolled on him. Now, in October, he was becoming more mobile, but was still on crutches and couldn’t be of much help to his daughters in keeping the farm going. Ben had seen the strain on his face; Russell felt guilty as hell that his land, his farm, was still in the family only because Faith was willing—no, determined—to work herself to the bone to save it.

Russell wasn’t the only one feeling guilty. If only Ben could find and arrest Faith’s ex-husband, that would take a hell of a lot of pressure off her.

A van and a car were parked in front of the barn, which meant Faith had some business. He parked beside the car and, after a moment, got out.

Spiky purple asters bloomed in the narrow bed in front of the barn, as did a clump of sunflowers at the corner. A scarecrow sat atop a bale of straw right outside the barn doors. Sheaves of dried cornstalks and a couple of pumpkins added to the Halloween appeal. Between the corn maze, the pumpkin fields and the wagon rides, Halloween was big for the Russells.

Damn it, what was he doing here?

He knew the sight of him upset Faith. She probably wasn’t any happier to see him than she would have been to see her ex-husband stroll in.

Her divorce had been final over a year ago. The marriage had lasted three years, and resulted in only one police report, after Hardesty had beaten Faith so viciously she’d have died if a neighbor hadn’t called 911. He’d gone—too briefly—to jail, and she had left him. What little Ben knew of the marriage had come from Charlotte, who’d told him that the final beating had been the worst, but not the first. Hardesty had hurt his wife over and over again. Until that last time, she’d lied when she got medical treatment for broken bones and concussion. Forgiven him again and again. Intellectually, Ben knew how the dynamic of an abusive relationship worked and why the women often came to think they were at fault and deserved the punishment. Textbook info aside, he still didn’t really get it.

Sometime this past summer, Hardesty had apparently gotten over any sense of shame and decided Faith should be ready to forgive him again and come back to him. When it became clear that wasn’t happening, he’d gotten mad.

First, in August, came a middle-of-the-night arson fire that did some damage to the barn. That was when Ben had met the Russell sisters. A week or so later, a cherry bomb was lobbed through the dining room window when both women were sitting at the table. Ben had arrived to find Faith white with shock, her silken skin bristling with shards of glass from the shattered window. She’d been virtually deaf for nearly a day after the explosion and was damn lucky her eardrums hadn’t been permanently damaged.

Hardesty hadn’t gone back to his apartment, hadn’t shown up to work the next day. He’d vanished—until the night he broke into the farmhouse and attacked Charlotte, thinking she was Faith. Concussed and with an eight-inch-long gash from a knife, Charlotte had gone to the hospital.

“Rory wouldn’t have hurt Charlotte on purpose,” Faith had insisted. “Only me.”