The Mccaffertys: Matt

Matt’s fingers tightened over the sharp edges of the buckle, but he didn’t say a word. Couldn’t.

“And I want me some grandbabies. That’s not too much for an old man to ask.”

“I’m not married.”

“Then get yourself hitched.” His father gave him a head-to-toe once-over. “Fine, strappin’ man like you shouldn’t have too much trouble.”

“Maybe I don’t believe in marriage.”

“Then maybe you’re a fool.”

Matt traced the silhouette of the bucking bronco with one finger. “It could be I learned from the best.”

“So unlearn it,” John Randall ordered, just as he always did. His way or the highway. Matt had chosen the latter.

“I’ve got me a horse to break,” he said. “And my own place to run.”

“I was hopin’ you’d be stayin’ on.” There was a hint of desperation in his father’s voice, but Matt stood firm. There was just too much water under the damned bridge—muddy, treacherous water fed by a swift current of lies and deceit, the kind of water a man could slowly drown in. Matt had come to the ranch to mend some emotional fences with the old man and to help the foreman, Larry Todd, for a week or so, but his own spread, a few hundred acres close to the Idaho border, needed his attention.

“I can’t, Dad,” he said finally as he followed the path of a wasp as it flew toward the back porch. “Maybe it’s time to get you inside.”

“For God’s sake, don’t try to mollycoddle me, son. It’s not like I’m gonna catch my death out here today.” John Randall folded his hands in his lap and looked between the old slats of the fence to the hard pan of the paddock where the Appaloosa, still wearing an empty saddle, pawed the ground, kicking up dust. “I’ll watch while you try to break him. It’ll be interesting to see who’ll win. You or Diablo.”

Matt lifted a disbelieving eyebrow. “You sure?”

“Ye-up.”

“Fine.” Matt squared his hat on his head and climbed over the fence. “But it’s not gonna be much of a contest,” he said, more to the horse than the man who had sired him. He strode forward with renewed determination, his eyes fixed on the Appaloosa’s sleek muscles that quivered as he approached. Few things in life beat Matt McCafferty.

A high-strung colt wasn’t one of them.

Nor was his father.

Nope. His weakness, if he had one, was women. Fiery-tempered, bullheaded women in particular. The kind he avoided like the plague.

And now his father wanted him to find a woman, tie the knot and start raising a passel of babies.

He nearly laughed as he reached for the reins, and Diablo had the nerve to snort defiantly.

No way in hell was Matt McCafferty getting married. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. That’s just the way it was.

CHAPTER ONE

The following November

She’d met him before.

Too many times to count.

That didn’t mean she had to like him.

No, sir.

As far as Detective Kelly Dillinger was concerned, Matt McCafferty was just plain bad news. Pure and simple, cut from the same biased, sanctimonious, self-serving cloth as his brothers and his bastard of a father before him.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t look good. If you liked the rough-and-tumble, tough-as-rawhide cowboy type, Matt McCafferty was the man for you. His rugged appeal was legendary in Grand Hope. He and his older and younger brothers had been considered the best catches in the entire county for years. But Kelly prided herself on being different from most of the women who wanted to swoon whenever they heard the McCafferty name.

So they were handsome.

So they were sexy.

So they had money.

So what?

These days their reputations had tarnished a bit, notoriety had taken its toll, and the oldest of the lot, Thorne, was rumored to be losing his status as an eligible bachelor and marrying a local woman doctor.

Not so the second brother, Matt. The one, it seemed, she was going to have to deal with right now.

He was muscling open the door to the Grand Hope office of the sheriff’s department with one broad shoulder and bringing with him a rush of frigid winter air and snowflakes that melted instantly the minute they encountered the sixty-eight degrees maintained by a wheezing furnace hidden somewhere in the basement of this ancient brick building.

Matt McCafferty. Great. Just…damned great. She already had a headache and was up to her eyeballs in paperwork, a ream of which could be applied to the McCafferty case—no, make that cases, plural—alone. But she couldn’t ignore him, either. She stared through the glass of her enclosed office and saw him stride across the yellowing linoleum floor, barely stopping at the gate that separated the reception area from the office, then sweep past the receptionist on a cloud of self-righteous fury. Kelly disliked the man on sight, but then she had her own personal ax to grind when it came to the McCaffertys.

There was fire in McCafferty’s brown eyes and anger in his tight, blade-thin lips and the stubborn set of his damnably square jaw. Yep, cut from the same cloth as the others, she thought as she climbed to her feet and opened the door to the office at the same time as he was about to pound on the scarred oak panels.

“Mr. McCafferty.” She feigned a smile. “A pleasure to see you again.”

“Cut the bull,” he said without preamble.

“Okay.” He was blunt if nothing else. “Why don’t you come in…” But he’d already crossed the threshold and was inside the small glassed-in room, pacing the short distance from one wall to the other.

Stella Gamble, the plump, nervous receptionist, had abandoned her post and was fidgeting at the door, her bright red fingernails catching light from the humming fluorescent tubing overhead. “I tried to stop him, really I did,” she said, shaking her head as her tight blond curls bounced around her flushed cheeks. “He wouldn’t listen.”

“A family trait.”

“I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right, Stella. Relax. I needed to talk to one of the McCafferty brothers, anyway,” Kelly assured her, though that was stretching the truth quite a bit. A conversation with Thorne, Slade or especially Matt wasn’t on her agenda right this minute, not when Nathaniel Biggs was calling every two hours, certain that someone had stolen his prize bull last night, Perry Carmichael had reported an odd aura suspended over the copse of oak trees behind his machine shed out on Old Dupont Road and Dora Haines was missing again, probably wandering around the foothills in nineteen-degree weather with a storm threatening to blast in from the Bitterroots by nightfall. Not that the McCafferty case wasn’t important—it just wasn’t the only one she was working on. “Don’t worry about it,” she said to Stella. “I’ll talk to Mr. McCafferty.”

“No one should get by me,” the receptionist said, blinking rapidly.

“You’re right, they shouldn’t,” Kelly agreed, and glared at the uninvited guest. “But, as I said, I need to talk to him, anyway, and I don’t think he’s dangerous.”

“Don’t count on it,” McCafferty countered. Standing near the file cabinet, he looked as if he could spit nails.

The phone rang loudly at Stella’s desk.

“I’ll deal with this,” Kelly said as the receptionist hurried back to her desk and immediately donned her headset.