Desire & Ice: A MacKenzie Family Novella (The MacKenzie Family) (2 page)

Truth was he
had
wanted to go to the local college, but the necessary scholarships had failed to materialize. Coop's brother Riley taught archeology there, and so when the sheriff first offered to buy him a beer, he found himself wondering if the guy might have a line on some night classes or something. But no, the only MacKenzie brother to go into local law enforcement had been working a different agenda that night.

"You love Surrender too much to leave it, but you also love giving people the third degree," Cooper had said. "Sounds like
I'm
the one you should be working for, Patterson."

The next day he’d started saving.

A few days later, he'd signed up for three different online courses in law enforcement.

In another week, he was driving two hours to Myrna Springs to put in hours on their local shooting range, and on the drives back and forth he'd pull over to pick up any boulder pieces he could haul in the back of his truck so he could add them to his backyard gym.

So what if he'd never attended anything close to a police academy or parachuted into Afghanistan under the cover of darkness? By his first day with the Surrender Sheriff's Department, he had the body of a Greek god and the firearms qualifications of a secret service agent.

None of that would matter now if he incurred Coop's wrath, however.

"I just want to check on her, Sheriff. That's all. I just want to make sure she's got everything she needs to stay safe up there."

The answer was silence, studded with some light crackles that suggested interference from the storm's approach.

The ominous, piled-high clouds seemed far behind him. But they only seemed that way.

Contained in his rearview mirror, they looked deceptively small, even though they were swollen with snow and crawling over the peaks like something out of a science-fiction movie.

The cold front driving them was the real monster, however.

It was the middle of April, but that didn't mean it wouldn't be a helluva storm.

Everyone in Surrender knew full well the Arctic was perfectly willing to take their state into its icy clutches pretty much any time of year. Yesterday the temperatures had been in the seventies, but the forecast had been for a fifty-degree drop in less than twenty-four hours. They were already twenty degrees of the way there. The worst part, as always, would be the winds, the powerful arctic winds that could whip an inch of snow into a twenty-foot high drift in no time flat.

When he thought of Eliza Brightwell alone on that old ranch in the middle of that icy nightmare… Well, that just wouldn't do. That just wouldn't do at all.

But Coop was right. She had to know what was coming. Everyone in town did.

All day farmers had been rushing to pen what livestock they could. Rawley Beamis had been prowling the aisles of his store that afternoon, shouting out warnings that he'd be closing down in a few minutes, even as Eliza had searched desperately for a shovel.

Just one really good shovel
, she'd told the clerk breathlessly.

But you needed a lot more than one good shovel to make it through a blizzard, and he wasn't exaggerating when he'd said she'd been gone a while. Four years, to be exact.

But her time away wasn't the only thing that worried him. It was how distracted she'd seemed.

Not just distracted
, Danny told himself now.
Not just rushed
.
She was something else. She was
terrified.

Still, the sight of him all grown up, sporting the body he'd worked so hard on, had startled her out of her frenzy. And yes, he'd seen a flare of lust in her expression when they'd first locked eyes. That lust had quickened his already galloping pulse as he'd approached her.

She'd certainly never looked at him that way when he was her student, that was for sure. And yeah, sure, okay,
maybe
his memory of that look was part of what now had him driving farther away from the center of town. Or maybe it was the strange, fragmented conversation that had followed.

"Just checking on some things up at the old place," she'd said when he'd asked what brought her back to town.

"Your husband's place?"

"Ex-husband," she'd quickly corrected him, then clearly regretted it since it made her answer sound even stranger.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he'd said.

"Don't be. I'm not."

"But you're still friends apparently, since you're checking on his place."

"Something like that, yeah," she'd muttered.

Lance Laughlin, the man Eliza had married. Handsome as sin and determined to get out of Surrender as soon as he'd landed Eliza's hand in marriage. His parents had been ranchers, but from a young age Lance had aspired to be everything from a famous actor to a tech mogul to pretty much anyone who just made piles of money and bought yachts. And he'd held these aspirations loudly and in public, and in a way designed to make anyone who didn't leave Surrender the minute they turned eighteen feel like a sheep's cousin. Worse, Surrender was largely in agreement that Lance didn't seem to have the talent or the work ethic his aspirations required.

Thanks to the miracle of social media, just that afternoon Danny had learned that Lance still lived in a Santa Monica townhouse, drove a Jeep Cherokee, took lots of douchie selfies on the beach and while driving, and when he was just out of the shower and while he was eating and while he was hiking in the mountains. Not a bad life, but certainly not the one he'd bragged about having as a teenager, and his inheritance probably funded most of it.

It was damn near impossible to think of the guy as rightful owner of the Laughlin Place. He'd sold off most of the acres and all of the horses and cattle as soon as his parents died. The home and horse barn had sat empty for so long they now made up the closest things Surrender had to a haunted house. There were even rumors Lance had let the place fall to ruin because he was using it as some kind of tax shelter.

The idea that the woman of his dreams had ended up married to a full-on slime ball, as opposed to just a douche, had always pained Danny more than he cared to admit. He'd wanted her to be happy at least, even if she wasn't going to be his. Even if his feelings for her, still Jägermeister-strong after all these years, were just as Coop said: a schoolboy fantasy.

But now she was divorced. Now she was back.

Back and scared out of her mind. Buying a shovel, and not much else, it had seemed, as a monster blizzard bore down on her hometown.

"You always did ask a lot of questions, didn't you, Danny?" she'd said.

They'd been the last words she'd said to him before she excused herself and hurried from the store. But she hadn't sound irritated. Rather, there'd been a kind of longing in her voice, a longing that suggested a buried desire to tell him more. And maybe, just maybe, a bit of buried desire for him, her former student, all grown up now and carrying a badge and a gun.

When she'd brushed past him, she'd placed a hand gently on his shoulder. Did she just need him to get out of the way? Or had she just wanted to touch him? Either way, he could still feel a tingle right where her hand had come to rest on his shoulder, a tingle he wasn't willing to blame on the cold.

"All right, fine," Cooper finally said. "But I want a quick turnaround. If she's not stocked, get her out of there and bring her down here to the station so we can find a place for her 'till this blows over. What the heck is she doing back after all this time anyway?"

"I have no idea," Danny answered.

"But I'm sure you plan to find out, don't you, Danny?"

"That I do, Sheriff. That I do."

2

As soon as I dig this hole,
Eliza Brightwell thought,
I will be done with my ex-husband forever.

If someone had been able to overhear her thoughts, they might have assumed she was planning to bury her husband's body on his family's old ranch. While the idea certainly appealed to her––had appealed to her several times over the past year, in fact–– she was shoveling mud to save her ex-husband's life, not end it.

And possibly to save her own as well.

Or at least permanently extricate herself from the maelstrom of deception and crime that now surrounded Lance Laughlin wherever he went.

He'd been in such a state of breathless panic when he called the day before, she was having trouble remembering any details except the vital ones she'd forced him to repeat. The price this time was $100,000 in twenty-four hours or else the guys ––and that's all he'd been willing to call them,
the guys
–– he owed money to were going to make big trouble for him.

Worse, these
guys
had been able to find him because he'd been storing some
valuables
, valuables that apparently didn't belong to him, in the same storage unit Eliza had allowed him to keep using after their divorce. The storage unit with her name on it, the one she paid for each month on her VISA. And as a very important sidenote,
the guys
weren't exactly willing to let him out of their sight anytime soon, so Eliza had to hop on a plane, hightail it to his family's ranch in Surrender, and dig up the money he needed. Literally.

The stakes were higher than usual. Much higher. But the whole mess was vintage Lance.

A supposedly well thought out plan gone horribly wrong. A breathless late night phone call where he started explaining the situation a mile a minute,
as if she had been in on whatever his latest harebrained scheme was all along and it was her responsibility to catch up. Vague, meaningless terms like
guys
,
valuables
and her least favorite,
big trouble.

Then, at the end, the stinger, because there was
always
a stinger where Lance was concerned, the telling detail that somehow obligated her to help fix it. In this case it was her storage unit. In the past it had been her credit cards, her health insurance plan and, in the coup de grâce that had finally ended their marriage, her forged signature on some bank documents. But this time she hadn't discovered Lance's little act of forgery before anyone else had. As a result, she'd been implicated in a criminal conspiracy and her name and some of her personal information were in the hands of some very bad guys.

Only now did she have time to wonder why her ex-husband had been burying bags of cash on his parents’ old ranch. Before she'd been too busy rushing to make flight arrangements, her heart dropping every time she saw the weather report. Once the ground iced over there wouldn't be a chance in snowy hell she could actually dig up this––

Just call it what it is,
she thought.
A ransom. A ransom that will also help some very bad guys forget they ever learned your name.

She was right at the spot where Lance had told her the cash was buried, ten paces from some wind whipped pines and a tangle of chokeberry nobody had bothered to tame in years.

The hole she'd dug was three feet deep now. Not a peek of the burlap sacks he'd told her to look for.

Downhill, the house was a faint triangle of light. If she hadn't been rushing to beat the elements, she might have taken a moment to enjoy the sweeping view of the valley, a view that stretched all the way to the spot where Surrender's tiny main street was a twinkling blanket of light in the falling dark. But just looking in that direction now meant exposing her entire face to stinging wind.

My fault, my fault, my fault
. This accusation rang through her head with each strike of the shovel's blade.
If I'd just taken my name off that storage unit.

Her girlfriend Cassie's words came back to her, louder than the wind, louder than the shovel. They'd been haunting her ever since she'd boarded the flight to Kalispell at LAX.

The divorce had almost been final then. They'd been sitting at some sidewalk café in Venice when Cassie, a yoga instructor who'd read every self-help book known to man, woman, or animal, had said, "Sweetheart, you're going to be tempted to leave the door open just a crack. Just an inch. Trust me on this one. I did it myself. But with a man like Lance, you need to close that damn door all the way and put
War and Peace
in front of it."

She'd thought Cassie had been referring to how handsome Lance was and she'd resented the implication that she could be so easily seduced by looks alone. In the beginning, Lance had offered more. Affection. Big dreams. An ambition she'd found undeniably attractive. But after four years of marriage she'd come to see all of it for what it truly was. A refusal to be grateful for the blessings that did come his way. A constant desire for bigger, better, flashier. A belief that other people, including her, were always opportunities but never partners.

Now that she'd actually done what Cassie had warned her not to, left the door open a crack, she saw a different meaning in her friend's warning.

Part of her, a part she was ashamed to admit existed, had done it so that one day, they could come back together, not to give marriage another chance but to make their painful past seem like a distant memory. Some kind of fresh start, either as friends or maybe casual, infrequent lovers, that would at least water down the lies and betrayals that defined the four years they'd spent together.

And this was the result.

Another scheme. Another cry for help.

Answering this one might turn her into an ice sculpture in the middle of a Montana field.

Just keep digging,
she told herself.
Just keep digging until you can't dig anymore, and then you'll be done. With him. With all of it.

She stopped when she felt icy pricks stinging the side of her face. In different circumstances, the feel of them might have made her smile. It had been ages since she'd seen snow, much less felt it on her skin. But here, in this field, they marked another hour lost to Lance's latest doomsday countdown.

"Miss Brightwell?"

It all happened so fast she had trouble ordering the events once she found herself sitting on the ground, legs splayed, holding one bloody hand to her chest.