Snowbound with the Sheriff
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Laurel Greer
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18
Harlequin😌 Second Chances
HarlequinChapter One
Stella Reid hadn’t cried since she was eighteen. And even though a lump the size of her rental car filled her throat, she didn’t plan on starting now. She squinted through the snow that flecked the windshield, gripping the steering wheel tight enough to make her fingers cramp. Side benefit to her late flight into Bozeman: it was too dark to see if a streak of bright red paint still marked the second pole past the turnoff to Moosehorn Lake.
There weren’t any other cars on the road to keep her company, either. A snowstorm on a Thursday night meant the locals went to bed at nine, she supposed. Turning up the volume on the stereo, she glanced at the odometer, then the clock on the dashboard. Why did the small ski town where she’d grown up have to be so far away from civilization? She’d left the place in her dust to go to college, and could count on two fingers the number of times she’d returned since.
Her plans had eclipsed Montana far before the biggest mistake of her life. Being eighteen and sitting on the side of the road, handcuffs biting into her wrists and rain pelting her face, had only solidified her drive to get out and put her mark on the world.
She’d climbed the rungs of a Manhattan hedge-fund firm, but it was a ladder that was currently collapsing, one workplace rumor at a time. At least she’d avoided handcuffs this go-round.
But she was still going to land on her ass in Sutter Creek and watch her life crumble around her.
Her head swirled faster than the flakes falling outside the vehicle. In the face of her firm’s fraud scandal, which would go public any day, her high-school shenanigans—wrecking Ryan Rafferty’s uncle’s car and getting threatened with the loss of her scholarship—sounded like a picnic. And she didn’t even know how to begin removing the wedge she’d put between her and her family since she’d blown the whistle on her CIO six months ago.
Six months of distance? Try your whole life.
Sighing, she forced herself to focus on the dimly lit, snowy road. Emotional reunions weren’t her thing, and she doubted her half siblings were in the mood to hear her out. But she had to start somewhere, right? Making herself useful with repairs to the family’s veterinary clinic expansion seemed to be her best bet. She’d keep busy while she waited to see if her career imploded after this morning’s information leak at the firm. God, when was the last time small-town USA had more options for forward movement than New York?
She swore to herself. Shaking her head, she tapped the built-in Bluetooth controls. She told her phone to call her half brother, Lachlan. When she’d contacted him this morning to tell him she was finally hopping on a flight for a visit, he’d mentioned something about a work bee two days from now, on Saturday. Maybe she could get a few more details out of him while she had nothing better to do than drive. Provided he was willing to talk. He hadn’t done a very good job lately of hiding how pissed off he was over how little she’d been in contact.
But facing his temper was preferable to letting her mind drift to that telephone pole a mile back, and all the memories she didn’t want to revisit during her trip.
Getting knocked up. Getting arrested. Loving—and losing—Ryan Rafferty.
Her brother answered after three rings.
“Stella? You here? I don’t see your car outside.” He yawned audibly.
“Not yet. I just passed RG Ranch. Or whatever it’s called now.”
He chuckled. “Still the same.”
“Like everything else in town.”
“No, I’d say you’ve missed out on a hell of a lot of new things.” His lighthearted tone vanished. “Starting with your niece. She rolled over the other day. And you haven’t even gotten to hold her yet.”
Stella’s heart squeezed. “I know. Like I said, I would have come sooner but—”
“Work got in the way,” Lachlan snapped.
She exhaled. There was the anger she’d been expecting. The anger she deserved. The problem with being in the middle of a massive securities-fraud investigation was not being able to tell anyone about it. Including her family. Not when her niece had been born, or when, back in November, a fire had ripped through an old barn that Lachlan was in the process of converting into a search-and-rescue dog school. Stella had been stuck in a boardroom in Manhattan with a wire taped under her blouse when she got the news their sister, Maggie, had been admitted to the burn unit. She had so much she had to make up for.
“If I’m going to keep paying the seed money for your business, I need to keep my job,” she said. “And there was no way to leave my ongoing work project partway through.” She’d only managed to get leave from the investigators yesterday. They’d decided that the rumors swirling around the firm necessitated Stella being somewhere else, so they’d approved her request to go to Sutter Creek, provided she surrender her passport and agree to return when required.
“Maggie and I needed you to be here, not just to play the wallet. But you’ve never been one for home, Stell. I don’t know why I thought Laura’s birth or the fire would be different.”
His “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” tone was worse than his earlier curtness. She was never going to be part of her half siblings’ close-knit duo, not with them being full siblings and Stella having a different mom. Maggie and Lachlan had grown up in Chicago and both had moved to Sutter Creek after they’d graduated from the elite prep school Stella would have sold her soul to attend. She’d wanted nothing more than to be in a big city, so had only spent the summers with them during their childhood. And her mom had never gotten over Stella’s dad’s infidelity. Encouraging a bond between Stella and her “cheating husband’s brats” had been crazy low on the family priority list.
Fear struck Stella. Would two weeks of helping with the rebuild even put a dent in all that? Picking up a paintbrush on Saturday seemed too small an effort. But where else could she start? “Count me in for slapping some paint on a wall this weekend.”
“We’re starting with framing and drywalling,” he corrected.
“A hammer, then.” Getting to participate in the barn rebuild would be a small beam of hope amid the dimness surrounding her career. “I really do want to help out. Even if I have a few things to catch up on.”
“Almost twenty years’ worth of things, Stella,” he growled. “You’ve actively put more distance between you and us.”
No, between her and Sutter Creek. She hadn’t intentionally widened the sibling divide.
Or had she?
“Well, you’ve got me for two weeks. All of me.”
“And we’re not going to turn down an extra set of hands.” He sighed. “You should know that Ryan—”
“I don’t want to talk about him.” She refused to waste any valuable brain energy on Ryan Rafferty. When she’d needed him most, he’d cut off all contact. Half a lifetime had passed. It was no longer relevant, no matter how much she’d lost in the aftermath of their breakup.
Deal with the things you can fix.
“I’m really looking forward to getting to know Laura and Marisol.” She yawned. Oh, man. Her hasty escape from New York was catching up to her. She did not have the energy to meet new people tonight. If she rolled in half-asleep and midargument with Lachlan, she’d make a terrible first impression. “I know you offered that I could stay at your place, but I think it’s better that I grab a room at one of the hotels.” Predicting she’d need a place to recharge, she’d booked in at the Sutter Mountain Hotel mid-flight. This conversation was only confirming she’d made the right decision.
A long pause filled the SUV. Had she lost the connection? “Lachlan?”
“You’re not even going to stay with us?” He sounded like he couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or hurt.
Ouch.
“You have enough going on without having to play host. I’ll come have coffee in the morning before you head off to work.”
He swore under his breath. The quiet bite in the word reverberated through Stella.
“We could invite Gramps, too,” she suggested. Their grandfather had moved home from his winter residence in Arizona to help out Maggie at the veterinary clinic after the fire. Maggie’s burns limited what she could do with her animal patients, and their grandfather had stepped back in as the main veterinarian.
“Did you even bother to tell him you were arriving?” Lachlan said, his voice a hairbreadth from a shout.
“Of course. I texted him before I left New York.” They’d have plenty of time to catch up in more detail.
“And the bathroom I spent cleaning today? And Marisol forgoing napping when Laura napped so that she could wash the sheets and get the spare room ready for you? You didn’t think to text us, too?”
All right, that was a full-on shout. She lowered her voice, hoping that if she was calm, he’d follow suit. “I left so quickly, I lost sight of the details. I didn’t mean to put you out. How about I come for a drink tonight, then? Meet Marisol, at least. I assume Laura’s asleep.”
“So’s Marisol—she passed out on the couch a half hour ago, waiting for you to get here. So if you don’t want to stay here, there’s no point in coming by tonight. What’s one more day, when it’s been, what, over a year since I last saw you?”
Guilt stabbed her clean through and acid burned her throat. “This was really my first opportunity to take holidays. The past few months... Like I’ve said a hundred times, I’ve been tied up. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe one of these days, I’ll actually believe you. See you tomorrow.”
He hung up.
Her stomach lurched, and she clutched the wheel. Okay. She was going to need her quiet night in the hotel to strategize on how to begin to make amends with Lachlan.
If only I could be honest.
She winced. Taking holidays... Bit of a stretch. More accurately, she’d been forced to take a leave of absence. The authorities investigating her firm’s CIO had told her to stay away from the office until the investigation was complete and charges were laid. Focusing on anything other than work had been impossible since the moment when, newly promoted and with access to more information than she’d ever had as an analyst, she realized some of the practices of the senior members of the firm were shifty as hell. She’d been a key part of the case, right up until her role as whistleblower was leaked internally a couple of days ago. All problems she wasn’t able to explain to her siblings because of the non-disclosure agreement she’d signed.
Her marching orders for the next two weeks were clear—visit her family, but no breaking her silence. Either the investigators would finish gathering evidence and charge her colleagues, exonerating Stella, or the whole mess would go public, make the national news and people would naturally assume she had snitched to cover her own ass. Either way, losing her anonymity meant her name was mud at the firm.
Be a whistleblower, the district attorney said. It’ll be kept confidential, the SEC authorities said. They can’t fire you—we promise. Or her favorite: your coworkers will thank you.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Well, right. Ethically, she’d made the right choice.
And she couldn’t control whether, or how fast, charges were laid against the fraudsters, or if her attempt to be the good guy would mean losing everything. But she could use these two weeks to rebuild some damage she had caused. Her half siblings deserved better than the arm’s length she’d held them to over the years.
Stella contemplated calling Maggie to check in, but her reserves were drained to zero. She narrowed her gaze on the two dark ruts of asphalt, ribbons of black running through the world of white. Slowing for one of the few stoplights along the two-lane highway, she waited for a pickup to turn, but a gust of wind shook the car, bringing a sheet of snow across her windshield. Her pulse jumped, and she took her foot off the accelerator for a moment.
God, she hated this road. Had it always been this far a drive from Bozeman? Then again, in high school, any time she’d made the trek into town, she’d usually been preoccupied by a certain handsome cowboy in the driver’s seat.
As a teen, she’d scrambled for every scholarship dollar, desperate to get to college without hurting her mom by asking her dad for help. And then Ryan had come along, wearing a Stetson and a broody smile, oozing teenage testosterone. She’d lost her head. And almost lost her shot at an upward trajectory.
He might have covered for her when they’d been stupid kids, giving her the chance to earn her place in the upper echelon of New York’s financial world. Might have pulled Maggie from the fire, too. But just because he’d saved both Stella’s ass and her half sister’s life didn’t mean she was required to look back on him fondly.
He’d earned her gratitude, but he’d never earn back her loyalty.
She pressed the accelerator just a hint more. The weather was crap, but the SUV had all-wheel drive and winter tires, and the faster she got to the hotel, the better. She needed to sleep. Lick her wounds a little. And show up at Lachlan’s in the morning, ready to make amends.
The dark stretch of road made it feel like she was the only person in the universe, except for whoever was in the car stopped at an upcoming intersection. Headlight beams lit the interior of her vehicle as she passed. White, to red and blue—
She startled, and her car swerved a little. The tires pulled in the shallow snow ruts, and her heart rate kicked up again. She steadied the vehicle, taking a deep breath to calm her pulse. Oh, crap. A cop. What the hell? She was going maybe two miles over the speed limit. Maybe she wasn’t the guilty one.
The siren blipped.
Ugh, definitely for her. She eased over to the side of the road, tires jittering as they caught the snow. Great. She was going to be even later checking in, if she had to spend any length of time explaining to the officer why they were completely in the wrong for pulling her over. She turned the key in the ignition, cutting off Chris Cornell mid-chorus.
By the time she had the window rolled down and was being blinded by a flashlight, her chest burned with irritation.
Snow swirled in through the open window, stinging her face. She squinted into the bright beam—with no streetlights, all she could see was a silhouetted cowboy hat pulled low over the officer’s face and broad, male shoulders.
“Do you want my license and registration?” Stella asked, holding the documents out for the still, silent man. “It’s a rental. And I wasn’t speeding.” And I just want to go to bed, and this highway is the worst because the last time I was on it, I got arrested—
“Holy God,” the officer said, gripping the open window ledge with a black-gloved hand. He lowered his flashlight. A gold star on his chest glinted in the beam. “Stella.”
“Ryan?” Fragments of her past sliced at her. Soulful, guarded eyes. Strong hands. A dry wit that made her laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe.
And ending up utterly, painfully alone. Having to deal with losing their baby without him even having known she was pregnant.
She blurted out the first thought that made it to her mouth. “You have a criminal record. How the hell are you the sheriff?”
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