Cooper Vengeance. Пола Грейвс

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СКАЧАТЬ was going to make her lose her cool, he was right about one thing—he didn’t know her at all.

      Hamilton extended his hand toward her. “Can’t we call a truce? At least for today, so we can both mourn your sister the way she deserves?”

      She stared at his outstretched hand, loathing him so much she could barely contain the howl of rage burning like acid in her chest. “I’m done here,” she said. “Carrie knows how I feel.”

      She walked away from him, forcing herself not to run, though every instinct she possessed was screaming at her to get away as fast as she could. She made it safely to her Lexus and slid behind the wheel, locking the doors. She leaned back against the sun-baked leather seat, shaking with a chaos of emotions.

      “You’re going to explode if you don’t deal.” Diana Sprayberry’s gentle words drifted into her mental maelstrom. As if the therapist were physically there, methodically picking apart the tangle of Natalie’s emotions and moving them to their proper places, Natalie felt the tension seep away, leaving her enervated. Only the blistering heat of the car’s interior drove her to insert the key in the ignition and start it up so the air conditioner could dissipate the hellish swelter inside the Lexus.

      She was off duty today, but the sheriff himself had called her at home early that morning and asked her to come in for a 2:00 p.m. meeting. Natalie knew Sheriff Tatum had asked Dr. Sprayberry to give him an evaluation of her mental state, but she’d been seeing the counselor for just under a week now. Surely that wasn’t long enough to assess her state of mind.

      As it turned out, apparently Dr. Sprayberry thought it was plenty long enough. The therapist herself was waiting in Sheriff Roy Tatum’s office when Natalie arrived. Dressed in a steel blue variation of her usual prim business suit, Dr. Sprayberry was perched on one of the two armchairs in front of the sheriff’s wide mahogany desk when Natalie entered. She met Natalie’s wary gaze with a mixture of regret and steely certainty.

      “Administrative leave?” Natalie asked in disbelief when the sheriff got straight to the point. “You’re taking me off the force completely? I don’t even get desk duty?”

      Tatum’s expression revealed the same mixture of regret and certainty Natalie had seen in the counselor’s eyes. “Dr. Sprayberry believes your inability to move past your anger at your sister’s death poses a threat to the people of the county as well as your fellow deputies.”

      “And to yourself,” Dr. Sprayberry added gently.

      Natalie whipped her head around to look at the doctor. “So this is about taking away my weapon, not my badge. You think I’m either going to go on a shooting spree down at Gray Industries or I’m going to eat my gun?”

      “Natalie,” Tatum warned.

      She looked at the sheriff. “I have another gun. I have a license to carry it. And as far as I know, we still have a Second Amendment in this country. You solve nothing by doing this.”

      The fire in Tatum’s eyes told her she’d pushed the sheriff too far. “If you plan to ever step foot back in this department again, you will give me your weapon and your shield and keep the lip to yourself, Deputy.”

      She tamped down a retort and handed her duty weapon and her badge to the sheriff, slanting a look at Dr. Sprayberry. The therapist met her gaze, unflinching. Natalie headed for the door.

      “And stay the hell away from Hamilton Gray,” the sheriff added as a parting shot.

      Natalie closed the door behind her and paused there for a moment, acutely aware of the curious gazes of her fellow deputies. She doubted any of them gave a damn whether or not she was suspended. Well, maybe Travis Rayburn, the rookie cop who seemed to have a little crush on her. And Lieutenant Barrow was always pretty nice to her.

      But the attitudes of the rest of her fellow deputies matched those of her parents: what on God’s green earth was Natalie Becker of the Bayside Oil Beckers doing working as a deputy sheriff?

      She didn’t care. She hadn’t taken this job to make friends with her fellow deputies.

      She kept her head high as she walked out, ignoring the stares following her out. She trudged to her Lexus and found, to her dismay, that she’d been in the sheriff’s office just long enough for the brutal sun to heat the car’s interior to a toasty 140 degrees. She lowered the windows to let out the hot, stale air and cranked the air conditioner up to high.

      As she drove south, heading toward her house on the bay, the neon-studded facade of Millie’s Pub visible in the distance drew her into a quick detour east. Millie’s was a small place, little more than a hole in the wall, but the local law enforcement loved the place. For Natalie, the bar was more a curiosity than a home away from home, but she’d become accustomed to going there after work with the other deputies—her attempt, she supposed, to fit in with the others.

      Why she was stopping here now, of all days—when she could call herself a deputy only on the technicality that Roy Tatum had suspended her, not fired her—she wasn’t sure. God knew, it was too early in the day to drink.

      But compelled by an emotion she couldn’t define, she parked her car in a spot near the end of the building, stepped back into the fiery afternoon heat and went inside the bar.

      J. D. COOPER SAW THE redhead from the cemetery enter the pub and stride straight to the bar, her long legs eating up real estate like a pissed-off thoroughbred. She bellied up to the bar and ordered a shot of Tennessee whiskey, downing it in one gulp. J.D. watched in fascination, wondering if she’d tell the bartender to hit her again, like a cowboy in one of those old Westerns his son, Mike, liked to watch on the classic movies channel.

      She ruined the effect by taking a napkin from the metal holder and delicately blotting leftover drops of whiskey from her pink lips. She ordered a ginger ale chaser and settled onto a bar stool, drinking the soda from a straw and scanning the bar’s murky interior with the eyes of a woman who knew she was completely out of place, which she was.

      A woman like Natalie Becker didn’t walk into a place like Millie’s every day.

      She was a deputy sheriff. Sister of the deceased. Daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the South. That much information had been easy to glean, even for a stranger in town.

      Although technically, he wasn’t a stranger. His connection to Brenda had opened a few mouths; all he’d had to do was mention his wife’s name to some of Millie’s customers to find out what he’d needed to know. Of course, he’d also had to suffer through the looks of pain and pity at the mention of her name. Brenda had been as well loved here, in her hometown of Terrebonne, as she’d been back home in Gossamer Ridge.

      Stopping at Millie’s had been a pure guess. At the cemetery, he’d seen the bulge of a weapon hidden beneath the lightweight jacket of the redhead’s summer suit. Yes, this was Alabama, and a lot of women in the state carried concealed weapon licenses, but damned few of them wore lightweight summer suits in this unholy heat. That left law enforcement. Cops got used to wearing uniforms of one sort or another, regardless of the weather.

      J.D. had considered going straight to the Ridley County Sheriff’s Department and asking if they employed any redheads, but that was a little too direct for his purposes. So he’d done the next best thing—he’d found the only bar in town that looked like a place where cops would hang out.

      “Another Sprite? Or would you like something stronger now?” The ponytailed waitress stopped at J.D.’s СКАЧАТЬ