Taming Jesse James

“Yeah?”

His dispatcher, receptionist and all-around pain in the neck shoved open the door and stood in the doorway, all four feet ten inches of her.

“Chief, you got company,” Lou Montgomery barked.

“Yeah?”

“Says it’s important.”

“Send him in, then.”

“Her,” a new voice interjected. Compared to Lou’s rotgut-rough voice, this one was as soft and smooth as water rippling over rocks. He knew that voice. He opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, the girls beat him to it.

“Ms. McKenzie!” they shrieked in unison, and rushed to greet his visitor, their fourth-grade teacher. She gave them a strained smile but accepted their hugs graciously.

“What are you doing here?” Dylan asked.

The pretty teacher looked uncomfortable. “I…I just had some business to discuss with Chief Harte.”

Something she obviously didn’t want to share with two nosy little girls. Before the terrible twosome could interrogate her about it, Jesse stepped in. “Ladies, I’ll have to take a raincheck on the poker lessons. Aren’t you supposed to be cleaning out the stalls at the clinic, anyway?”

They both groaned, but picked up their backpacks. “Bye, Ms. McKenzie,” they chimed in unison.

“Thanks for the Snickers bars.” Dylan smirked at Jesse on her way out the door.

As soon as they left, Ms. McKenzie raised a delicate eyebrow at him. “Poker lessons?”

Despite that sexy voice of hers, the schoolmarm tone still made him feel as if he’d just been caught throwing spitballs. He cleared his throat. “Uh, guilty. What can I say? I’m a bad influence. Sit down. How can I help you?”

After a brief hesitation, she walked across the office with that slight, barely perceptible limp that had been driving him crazy with curiosity since she’d moved to town at the beginning of the school year.

She slipped into the chair across the desk from him and folded her hands carefully on her lap, her green eyes focused on some point just to the left of his face.

He fought the urge to look over his shoulder to see what she found so fascinating back there. Judging by their few brief encounters since her arrival in Salt River eight months ago, he had the uncomfortable feeling she wasn’t looking at anything in particular, just away from him.

For some reason, he seemed to make Sarah McKenzie nervous, although for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what he’d done to her.

The last time he’d seen her had been nearly a month ago at his brother Matt’s wedding to Dylan’s mother, Ellie. At the reception the schoolteacher hadn’t moved from the corner for most of the evening. In a pale peach dress and with all that sun-streaked blond hair piled on top of her head, she’d looked cool and remote and scrumptious enough to gobble up in one bite.

When he’d finally decided to ignore her blatant back-off signals and asked her to dance, she’d stared at him as if he had just dumped a glass of champagne all over her, then topped it off by stomping on her fingers.

She hadn’t said anything for several painfully long moments, then she had jumped to her feet and stammered some excuse about how she needed to check on something. Next thing he’d known, he’d seen her driving out of the church parking lot as if she was trying to outgun a tornado.

He pushed the memory away. So the pretty, enigmatic Ms. McKenzie didn’t want to dance with him. So what? He was a big boy now and could handle a little rejection once in a while. His little sister, Cassidy, probably would have said it was good for him.

Not that any of that had a thing to do with the reason she was sitting in front of him trying not to wring her hands together nervously.

“Is there something I can help you with, Ms. McKenzie?” he asked again, in his best casual, friendly-policeman voice.

She drew in a breath, then let it out in a rush. “I want you to arrest someone.”

It was the last thing he expected her to say. “You do?”

Her soft, pretty mouth tightened. “Well, I’d prefer if you could drag him behind a horse for a few hundred miles. But since I don’t think that’s very likely to happen, given civil rights and all, I suppose I’ll have to settle for seeing the miserable excuse for a man locked away for the rest of his natural life.”

“Does this miserable excuse for a man have a name?”

She hesitated for just a few beats, just long enough to nudge his curiosity up to fever pitch. “Yes,” she finally said coolly. “Yes, he does have a name. Seth Garrett.”

His jaw dropped. “The mayor? You want me to arrest the mayor?”

“I don’t care if he’s the president of the United States. He belongs in jail.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Care to tell me why, before I rush over there with my handcuffs? I’m not saying I won’t do it—I’d just like to be able to give the man a reason.”

She stood up, her hands clenched tightly into fists and a glare on those delicate, fine-boned features. “This is not a laughing matter, Chief Harte. If you refuse to take me seriously, I’ll…I’ll find someone who will. The FBI, maybe, or the Wyoming State Police.”

She was serious! She wanted him to march into the mayor’s office and haul him off to jail. What could she possibly have against Seth Garrett, one of the most well liked and respected men in town? He doubted the man even jaywalked.

Still, he knew she wouldn’t have come here without a reason, and it was his job to listen to it. “I’m sorry, ma’am. You just took me by surprise, that’s all. I didn’t mean to make light of this. Sit down. What do you think he’s done?”

Sarah slid into the chair again and knotted her hands together tightly. She wasn’t sure what was more to blame for their trembling—this seething fury writhing around inside her or the sick lump in her stomach at having to face the man in front of her.

She did know she shouldn’t have come here. Jesse Harte made her so blasted nervous she couldn’t think straight, and she had known before she even walked into his office that she would make a mess of this.

In the past eighteen months she had worked hard to overcome the lingering fragments of nightmare that haunted her. She wanted to think she had become almost functional again, hiding the worst of her panic attacks behind a veneer of control.

But for some reason Jesse Harte always seemed to punch a hole in the paper-thin wall of that facade, leaving her nervous and upset.

It wasn’t him, exactly. Or, at least, she didn’t think so. He seemed gentle enough with the girls. It was kind of sweet, actually, to see such a hard-edged cop teasing giggles out of two ten-year-old girls.

For a month she hadn’t been able to shake the image of him in his dark Western-cut suit at his brother’s wedding, dancing with each of the girls in turn and looking big and solid and completely masculine.

That was most of what made her nervous. He was just so big. So completely, wholly male—intimidating just by his very size and by the aura of danger that surrounded him.

With the combination of that dark-as-sin hair, those startling blue eyes and that wicked smile, Jesse Harte drew the lustful eye of every woman in town. If it weren’t for the badge on his tan denim shirt, it would be difficult to remember he was on the right side of the law. All he needed was a bushy mustache and a low-slung gun belt hanging on his hips to look like the outlaw she heard he was named for.

He sent her nerves skittering just by looking at her out of those blue eyes and she hated it, but she had no one else to turn to. She had a child to protect, and if that meant facing her own personal bogeyman, she would force herself to do it, no matter the cost.

Besides her unease around the police chief, it didn’t help her nerves to know she could be risking her job. When she had taken her concerns to the principal, Chuck Hendricks had ordered her to leave well enough alone. She was imagining things, he said, making problems for herself where she didn’t need to.

It was a grim reminder of what had happened in Chicago. She had been warned then about stepping in where she had no business. But then, just as now, she hadn’t had a choice.

“Can I get you a glass of water or something?”

She blinked and realized the police chief was waiting for some kind of an explanation for her presence here. “No. No, thank you. I’m fine.”

“You ready to talk now?”