Dalton's Undoing
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RaeAnne Thayne
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16
CHAPTER ONE
Some little punk was stealing his car.
Seth Dalton stood on the sidewalk in front of his mother’s house, the puppy leashes in his hand forgotten, and watched three years of sweat, passion and hard work take off down the road with a flash of tail lights and the squeal of rubber.
Son of a bitch.
He stood looking after it for maybe fifteen seconds, trying to comprehend how anybody in Podunk Pine Gulch would have the stones to steal his 1969 Matador red GTO convertible.
Who in town could possibly be stupid enough to dream he could get more than a block or two without somebody sitting up and taking notice that Seth wasn’t the one behind the wheel and raising the alarm?
Just how far did the bastard think he would get? Not very, if Seth had anything to say about it. He’d worked too hard on his baby to let some sleazebag drive her away.
“Come on, kids. Fun’s over.” He jerked the leashes, grateful the dogs weren’t in midpee, and dragged the two brindle Australian herder pups up the sidewalk and back into the house.
Inside, the members of his family were crowded around his mother’s dining-room table playing one of their cutthroat games of Risk.
Looked like Jake and Maggie were kicking butt. No surprise there, with his middle brother’s conniving brain and his wife’s military experience. The Dalton clan was in its usual teams, Jake and Maggie against his mother and stepfather, with his oldest brother, Wade, and wife, Caroline, making up the third team.
That was the very reason he’d volunteered to take the puppies out for their business in the first place. It was a little lonely being the solitary player on his side of the table. Usually he teamed up with Natalie—but it was a little disheartening to find his nine-year-old niece made a more cutthroat general than he. She was in the family room watching a video with her brothers, anyway.
The only one who looked up from strategizing was his mother.
“Back so soon? That was fast!” Marjorie crooned the words, not to him but to the puppies—or her half of the dynamic duo anyway. She picked up the birthday gift he’d given her and nuzzled the little male pup.
“You’re so good. Aren’t you so good? Yes, you are. Come give Mommy a birthday kiss.”
“Don’t have time, sorry,” Seth said drily.
He ignored the face she made at him and reached for the keys to Wade’s pickup from the breakfast bar.
“I’m taking your truck,” he called on his way out the door.
Wade looked up, a frown of concentration on his tough features. “You’re what?”
He paused at the door. “Don’t have time to explain, but I need your truck. I’ll be back. Mom, keep an eye on Lucy for me.”
“I just washed that truck,” his brother growled. “Don’t bring it back all muddy and skanky.”
He wasn’t even going to dignify that with a response, he decided, as he headed down the stairs. He didn’t have the time, even if he could have come up with a sharp response.
Wade’s truck rumbled to life, smooth and well-tuned like everything in Seth’s oldest brother’s life. He threw it in gear and roared off in the direction the punk had taken his car.
If he were stealing a car, which road would he take? Pine Gulch didn’t offer a lot of escape routes. Turning south would lead him through the houses and small business district of Pine Gulch. To the east was the rugged western slope of the Teton Mountains, which left him north and west.
He took a chance and opted to head north, where the quiet road stretched past ranches and farms with little traffic to notice someone in a red muscle car.
He ought to just call the police and report the theft. Chasing after a car thief on his own like this was probably crazy, but he wasn’t in the mood to be sensible, not with thirty thousand dollars’ worth of sheer horsepower disappearing before his eyes.
He pushed Wade’s truck to sixty-five, keeping his eye out in the gathering twilight for any sign of another vehicle.
His efforts were rewarded just a moment later when he followed the curve of the road past Sam Purdy’s pond and saw a flash of red up ahead.
His brother’s one-ton pickup rumbled as he poured on the juice and accelerated to catch the little bugger.
With its 400-cubic-inch V8 and the three hundred and fifty horses straining under the hood, the GTO could go a hundred and thirty without breaking a sweat. Oddly enough, whoever had boosted it wasn’t pushing her harder than maybe forty.
His baby puttered along fifteen miles below the speed limit and Seth had no problem catching up with her, wondering as he did if there was some kind of roving gang of senior-citizen car thieves on the loose he hadn’t heard about.
He kept a respectable two-car length between them as the road twisted again. He knew this road and knew that just ahead was a straightaway that ran a couple of miles past farmland with no houses.
He couldn’t see any oncoming traffic so he pulled into the other lane as if to pass and drew up alongside his baby, intent on getting a look at the thief.
He was a punk, nothing more. The kid behind the wheel was skinny, dark-haired, maybe fifteen, sixteen. He looked over at the big rumbling pickup beside him and he looked scared to death, eyes huge and wild in a narrow face.
Good. He should be, the little dickhead. Seth rolled the window down, wishing he could reach across, pluck the kid out of the car and wring his scrawny little neck.
“Pull over,” he shouted through the window, even though he knew the kid wouldn’t be able to hear him.
He must have looked like the Grim Reaper, Freddy Kruger and the guy from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre all rolled up into one, he realized later, and he should have predicted what happened next. If he’d been thinking straight, he would have handled the whole thing differently and saved himself a hell of a lot of trouble.
Even if the car thief couldn’t hear Seth’s words, obviously the message got through loud and clear. The kid sent him another wild, scared look and yanked the wheel to the right.
Seth growled out a raw epithet at the hideous sound of metal grinding against metal as the GTO scraped a mile marker post on the right. In reaction, the kid panicked and swerved too hard to the left and Seth groaned as his baby nosedived across the road and landed in an irrigation ditch.
At least it was blessedly empty this time of year.
The sun was just a sliver above the horizon and the November air was cold as Seth hurriedly parked the pickup and rushed to his car to make sure the kid was okay.
He jerked open the door and was petty enough for just a moment to enjoy the way the kid cringed against the seat like he thought Seth was ready to break his neck with his bare hands.
He felt like it, he had to admit. He had no doubt the GTO’s paint was scraped all to hell from the run-in with the mile marker post and the left fender looked to be crumpled where she’d hit a concrete gate structure in the ditch.
He held on to his anger while he checked the thief for any sign of injury.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. I…think so.” The boy’s voice shook a little but he warily took Seth’s hand and climbed out of the car.
Seth revised downward his estimate of the boy’s age, figuring him to be no older than thirteen or fourteen. Just old enough to start shaving more than once a month, by the look of it.
He had choppy dark hair worn longer than Hank Dalton would ever have let his sons get away with and he was dressed in jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt about four sizes too big with some logo of a wild-looking music group Seth didn’t recognize.
The kid seemed familiar but Seth couldn’t immediately place him—odd, since he knew just about every kid in the small community. Maybe he was the son of one of the dozen or so Hollywood types buying up good grazing land for their faux ranches. They tended to stay away from the general population, maybe afraid the down-home friendliness and family-centered values would rub off.
“My mom is gonna kill me,” the kid moaned, burying his head in his hands.
“She can stand in line,” Seth growled. “You have any idea how much work I’ve put into this car?”
The kid dropped his hands. Though he still looked terrified, he managed to cover it with a thin veneer of bravado. “You’ll be sorry if you mess with me. My grandpa’s a lawyer and he’ll fry your ass if you try to lay a single hand on me.”
Seth couldn’t help a short, appreciative laugh even as the pieces clicked into place and he registered who the kid must be and why he had looked familiar.
With a grandfather who was a lawyer, he had to be the son of the new elementary school principal. Boylan. Boyer. Something like that.
He didn’t exactly hang around with the elementary-school crowd but Natalie had pointed out her new principal and the woman’s two kids one night shortly after school started when he’d taken his niece and nephews out to Stoney’s, the pizza place in town.
His grandfather would be Jason Chambers, an attorney who had retired to Pine Gulch for the fishing five or six years back. His daughter had moved out to join him with her kids—no husband that Seth had heard about—when the principal position opened up at the elementary school.
“That lawyer in the family will probably come in handy, kid,” he said now.
The punk groaned and his head sagged into his hands once more. “I am so dead.”
He wasn’t quite sure why but Seth was surprised to feel a few little pangs of sympathy for the kid. He remembered all too well the purgatory of this age. Hormones firing, emotions jerking around wildly. Too much juice and nothing to do with it.
“Am I going to jail?”
“You boosted a car. That’s a pretty serious crime. And you’re a lousy driver, which is worse, in my book.”
“I wasn’t going to take her far. You’ve got to believe me. Just to the reservoir and back, I swear. That’s all. When I saw the keys inside, I couldn’t resist.”
Damn. Had he really left the keys in the ignition? He looked inside and, sure enough, there they were, dangling from the steering column.
How had that happened? He remembered pulling up to his mother’s house for her birthday dinner, then rushing out to take care of business when Lucy started to squat on the floor mats. Maybe in all the confusion, he had been in such a hurry to find a patch of grass before his puppy busted her bladder that he’d forgotten his keys.
What kind of idiot left his keys in a ride like this, just begging for the first testosterone-crazed teenager to lift her?
Him. He mentally groaned, grateful at least that the boy hadn’t been hurt by their combined stupidity.
“What’s your name, kid?”
The boy clamped his teeth together and Seth sighed. “You might as well tell me. I know your last name is Boyer and Jason Chambers is your grandpa. I’ll figure out the rest.”
“Cole,” he muttered after a long pause.
“Come on, Cole. I’ll give you a lift to your grandpa’s house, then I’ll come back and pull her out with one of my brothers.”
“I can walk.” He hunched his shoulders and shoved his hands in the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.
“You think I’m going to leave you and your sticky fingers running free out here? What if you happen to find another idiot who’s left his keys in his ride? Get in.”
Though Cole still looked belligerent, he climbed into the passenger side of the pickup.
Seth had just started to walk around the truck to get in the driver’s side when he saw flashing lights behind him.
Instead of driving past, the sheriff’s deputy slowed and pulled up behind the GTO. Seth glanced at the boy and saw he’d turned deathly white and his breathing was coming fast enough Seth worried about him hyperventilating.
“Relax, kid,” he muttered.
“I am relaxed.” He lifted his chin and tried for a cool look that came out looking more like a constipated rabbit.
Seth sighed and closed his door again as he watched the deputy climb out of the vehicle. Before he even saw her face, he knew by the curvy shape that the officer had to be Polly Jardine, the only female deputy in the small sheriff’s department.
She dimpled at him, looking not much different than she had in high school—cute and perky and worlds away from his idea of an officer of the law. Though she still looked like she should be shaking her pom-poms at a Friday night football game, he knew she was a tough and dedicated cop.
He imagined she inspired more than a few naughty fantasies around town involving those handcuffs dangling from her belt. But since her husband was linebacker-huge and also on the sheriff’s department—and they were crazy about each other—those fantasies would only ever be that.
“Hey Seth. I thought that was your car. Man! What happened? You take the turn a little too fast?”
His gaze shifted quickly to the boy inside the truck then quickly back to Polly, hoping she hadn’t noticed. He found himself strangely reluctant to throw Cole Boyer into the system.
“Something like that,” he murmured.
She followed his gaze to the boy and speculation suddenly narrowed her eyes. “You sure that’s the whole story?”
He leaned a hip against the truck, tilted his head and gave her a slow smile. “Would I lie to an officer of the law, darlin’?”
“Six ways from Sunday, darlin’.” Though her words were tart, she smiled in a way that told him she remembered with fondness the few times they’d fooled around under the bleachers before Mitch Jardine moved into town and she had eyes for no one else. “But it’s your car. If that’s the way you want to play this, I won’t argue with you.”
“Thanks, Pol. I owe you.”
“That’s the new principal’s kid, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“We’ve had a few run-ins with him in the few months they’ve been in town,” she said. “Nothing big, breaking curfew, that kind of thing. You sure letting him off is the right thing to do for him? Today a joyride, tomorrow a bank robbery.”
He didn’t know anything except he couldn’t bring himself to turn him in.
“For now.”
“Let me know if you change your mind. I’m supposed to file an accident report but I’ll just pretend I didn’t see anything.”
He nodded and waved goodbye then climbed into the truck. Cole Boyer watched him, his green eyes wary. “Am I going to jail?”
“No. Not today, anyway.”
“Friggin’ A!”
“Don’t be so quick with the celebration there,” he warned. “A week or two in juvie is probably going to look pretty damn good by the time your mother and grandfather get through with you. And that doesn’t even take into account what you’ll have to do to even the score with me.”
* * *
She was late. As usual.
In one motion, Jenny Boyer shoved on slingbacks and shrugged into her favorite brocade jacket.
“Listen to Grandpa while I’m gone, okay?” she said, head tilted while she thrust a pair of conservative gold hoops into her ears.
“I always do.” Morgan, her nine-year-old, going on fifty, sniffed just like a society matron finding something undesirable in her tea. “Cole is the one who doesn’t like authority figures.”
Didn’t she just know it? Jenny sighed. “Well, make sure he listens to Grandpa, too.”
Morgan folded her arms and raised an eyebrow. “I’ll try, but I don’t think he’ll pay attention to either me or Grandpa.”
Probably not, she conceded. Nobody seemed to be able to get through to Cole. She’d thought moving to Idaho to live with her father would help stabilize her son, at least get him away from the undesirable elements in Seattle who were leading him into all kinds of trouble.
She had hoped his grandfather would give the boy the male role model he had lost with his own father’s desertion. So much for that. Though Jason tried, Cole was so angry and bitter at the world—more furious with her now for uprooting him from his friends and moving him to this backwater than he was with his father for moving to another continent.
She glanced at her watch and groaned. The school board meeting started in ten minutes and she was scheduled to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining her efforts to raise the elementary school’s performance on standardized testing. This was her first big meeting with the school board and she couldn’t afford to blow it.
The therapist she’d gone to after the divorce suggested Jenny’s chronic tardiness indicated some form of passive aggression, her way of governing a life that often felt beyond her control.
Jenny just figured she was too busy chasing after her hundreds of constantly spinning plates.
“I’ve got to run, baby. I’ll be home before you go to sleep, I promise.” She kissed her on the forehead, wondering as she headed out of her room if she had time to hurry down to the basement to say goodbye to Cole. No, she decided. Besides her time crunch, any conversation between them these days ended in a fight and she wasn’t sure she was up for another one tonight.
“Bye, Dad,” she called down the hall as she grabbed her laptop case and her purse. “Thanks for watching them!”
“Don’t worry about a thing.” Jason Chambers appeared in the doorway, wearing his favorite Ducks Unlimited sweater and jeans that made him look far younger than his sixty-five years. “Give ’em hell.”
She mustered a distracted smile, grateful all over again that they’d been able to move past their complicated, stiff relationship of the past and find some measure of peace when she moved to Pine Gulch.
Juggling her bags and her keys, she yanked open the door and rushed out, then gave a shriek when she collided with a solid, warm male.
With a little gasp, Jenny righted herself, registering the muscles in that hard frame that seemed as immovable as the Tetons. “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you.”
She knew who he was, of course. What woman in Pine Gulch didn’t? With that slow, sexy smile and those brilliant blue eyes that seemed to see right into a woman’s psyche to all her deepest desires, Seth Dalton was a difficult man to overlook.
Not that she didn’t try her best. The youngest Dalton was exactly the kind of man she tried to avoid at all cost. She’d had more than enough, thank you very much, of smooth charmers who swept a woman off her feet with flowers and champagne only to leave her dangling there, hanging by her fingernails when they decide young French pastries are more to their taste.
What earthly reason would Dalton have for showing up at her doorstep? He had no children at her school, he was years past his own education and somehow she couldn’t picture him as the type to bake cookies for the PTA fundraiser.
She couldn’t think of anything else that would bring him to her door and the clock was ticking.
“May I help you, Mr. Dalton?”
Surprise flickered in those eyes for just a moment, as if he hadn’t expected her to know his name. “Just making a delivery.”
She frowned, impatient and confused, as he reached around the door out of her view, tugging something forward. No something, someone—someone with a sullen scowl, a baggy sweatshirt and a chip the size of Idaho on his narrow shoulders.
“Cole!”
Beneath her son’s customary sulky defiance, she thought she saw something else beneath the attitude, something nervous and on edge.
“What’s going on? You’re supposed to be down in your room working on geometry!” she exclaimed.
“Geometry blows. I went out.”
“You went out,” she repeated, frustration and bewilderment and a terrible sense of failure rising in her chest. How could she possibly reach the students at her school when she couldn’t manage to find even the tiniest connection to her own son? “Out where? I didn’t hear you leave.”
“Ever hear of a window?” he sneered. Nothing new there. He had been derisive and mean to her before they ever came to Pine Gulch. He blamed her for everything wrong in his life, from his short stature to Richard’s affair and subsequent abandonment.
She was mortified that a stranger had to witness it. She was even more mortified when Seth Dalton raised one of those sexy dark eyebrows and placed a firm hand on Cole’s shoulder. “Now, do you really think that’s the proper way to address your mother?”
Jenny gave the man a polite smile, wishing him to Hades. “Thank you, Mr. Dalton, for bringing him home, but I believe I can handle things from here.”
For some reason, either her words or her tone seemed to amuse him. His mouth quirked up and a masculine dimple appeared in his cheek briefly. “Can you, now? I’m afraid we still have a few matters of business to discuss. May I come in?”
“This isn’t a good time. I’m late for a meeting.”
“Sorry about that,” he drawled, “but I’m afraid you’ll have to make time for this.”
He didn’t wait for permission, just walked through her father’s entry into the living room. She had no choice but to follow, noting as she went that Jason and Morgan were nowhere to be seen.
“Cole, you want to tell her what you’ve been up to?”
Her son crossed his arms, his expression even more belligerent, but again she caught a faint whiff of fear beneath it. Her stomach suddenly twisted with foreboding.
“What’s going on? Cole, what is this about?”
He clamped his mouth shut, freezing her out again, but once more Seth Dalton placed a firm hand on his shoulder.
Cole suddenly seemed to find the carpet endlessly fascinating.
“Istolehisride,” he mumbled in one breath and Jenny’s heart stopped, hoping she’d heard wrong.
“You what?”
Cole finally lifted his gaze to hers. “I took his car, okay? What did he expect? He left the frigging keys in it. I was only going to take it for a mile or two. I figured I’d have it back before he even knew it was gone. But then I crashed…”
“You what! Are you hurt? Did you hurt anyone else?”
Cole shook his head. At least he had enough guilty conscience to look slightly ashamed.
“He scraped a mile marker post and front-ended into an irrigation ditch. The only thing damaged was my car.”
She sagged into the nearest chair as her career suddenly flashed in front of her eyes. She could almost hear the echo of gossip across shopping carts at DeLoy’s, under the hair dryers at the Hairport and over beer at the Bandito.
Did you hear about that new principal’s wild boy? She can’t control him a lick. That little delinquent stole a car. Crashed it right into a ditch! Seems to me a woman who can’t control her own son sure don’t belong in that nice office down at the elementary school.
She screwed her eyes shut, wishing this was all some terrible dream, but when she opened them, Seth Dalton was still standing in front of her, as dangerous and sexy as ever.
“I am so sorry, Mr. Dalton. I…don’t know what to say. Are you pressing charges?”
She thought she heard Cole make a small sound, but when she glanced at him, he looked as prickly and angry as ever.
“It’s going to take me considerable work to fix it.”
“We will, of course, cover any damages.”
He suddenly sat down on the sofa across from her, crossing his boots at the ankle. “I had something else in mind.”
She stiffened. “I’m an elementary school principal, Mr. Dalton. If you’re looking for some kind of huge financial settlement, I’m afraid you’re off the mark.”
“I’m not looking for money.” He glanced at Seth. “But I will need another set of hands while I’m doing the repair work. I figured the kid could work off the damages by helping me out with the repair work and around my ranch with my horses until the bodywork is done.”
Cole straightened. “I’m no stupid-ass cowboy.”
Seth Dalton gave him a measuring look. “No, from here you look like a stupid-ass punk who thinks he’s living out some kind of video game. This isn’t Grand Theft Auto, kid, where you can always hit the restart button. You broke it, now you’re going to help me fix it. Unless you’d rather serve the time, of course.”
Cole subsided back into his customary slouch as Jenny considered his proposal. Her gut wanted her to tell him to forget it. She didn’t want her son to have anything to do with Pine Gulch’s busiest bachelor.
Cole had had enough lousy male role models in his life—he didn’t need a player like Seth teaching him all the wrong things about how to treat a woman.
On the other hand, her son stole the man’s car—not only stole it, but wrecked the blasted thing. That he wasn’t in police custody right now seemed nothing short of a miracle.
What choice did she have, really? Seth could easily have called the police. Perhaps he should have. Maybe a hard gut check with reality might be just what Cole needed to wake him up, as much as she hated the idea of her son in juvenile detention.
Seth Dalton was being surprisingly decent about this. From what little she knew about him—and she had to admit, most of her biased information came from overheard conversations and breathless comments in the teacher’s lounge about his many flirtations—she would have expected him to be hot-tempered and petulant.
Instead, she found him rational, calm, accommodating.
And extremely attractive.
She let out a slow, nervous breath. Was that the reason for her instinctive opposition to the man’s reasonable proposal? Because he was sinfully gorgeous, with that thick, dark hair, eyes a stunning, heartbreaking blue and chiseled, tanned features that made him look as though he should be starring in Western movies?
He made her edgy and ill at ease and that alone gave her enough reason to wish for a way to avoid any further acquaintance between them. She was here in Pine Gulch to help her little family find some peace and healing—not to engage in useless, potentially harmful fantasies about a charming, feckless cowboy with impossibly blue eyes and a smile that oozed sex.
“I’ll know better after I tow the car out to the ranch and take a look at her but from my initial look, I’d estimate there was about five or six hundred dollars’ damage,” he was saying. “The way I figure it, if he worked for me a couple afternoons a week after school and Saturday mornings, we should be clear in a few months. Is that okay with you?”
She looked at Dalton and then at Cole, his arms still crossed belligerently across his chest, as if everyone else in the room was responsible for his troubles but himself.
He disdained everything about Idaho and would probably consider being forced to work on a ranch every bit as much punishment as going to juvenile detention, she thought.
“Yes. That’s more than fair. Wouldn’t you agree, Cole?”
Her son glared at both of them—and while Jenny felt her own temper kindle in automatic response, Seth met his look with cool challenge and Cole quickly dropped his gaze.
“Whatever,” he muttered.
“Thank you,” Jenny said again, walking with him to the door. “As tomorrow is Saturday, I’ll drive him out to the Cold Creek in the morning. What time?”
“How does eight work for you?”
“We’ll be there. I’m very sorry again about this. I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”
His smile was slow and wide and made her insides feel as if she’d just done somersaults down a steep, grassy hill.
“He’s a teenage boy, so I’d guess he probably wasn’t thinking at all. See you in the morning.”
Jenny nodded, wondering why that prospect filled her with an odd mix of trepidation and anticipation.
