Never Love a Lawman Read Online Free PDF

height advantage over her even when he wasn’t standing on her porch. Just now he looked more than a little imposing, standing three-quarters turned toward her door and one-quarter in her direction. Not that he’d noticed her yet. He seemed every bit of him intent upon splitting her door from its hinges.
    “You break it, Sheriff, you’ll have to pay for it. I like my red door.”
    Wyatt Cooper pivoted on his boot heels and stared past the end of the porch at Rachel Bailey. At the angle she presented herself, she looked kind of smallish, trapped behind the vertical porch rails as if they were his jail’s iron bars. He managed to stop his fist from hitting the door again, thus saving the wood and his bare knuckles.
    He nodded once. “Miss Bailey.”
    “Sheriff Cooper.”
    This exchange was what generally passed for conversation between them, so they were on familiar ground. The silence that followed stretched long enough to give rise to discomfort, but neither was inclined to give in. Rachel felt she had offered the gambit when she commented on her door. It was incumbent upon the sheriff to make the next move. For Wyatt’s part, he thought it fell to her to extend an invitation instead of standing there as though she hadn’t just sneaked around the house to avoid opening the door.
    He couldn’t very well tell her that he knew that’s what she’d done. She’d realize before he finished accusing her that he must have looked in the window before he knocked—which he had—and that was certain to get her back up. She guarded her privacy closely, obsessively, and he mostly respected that, understood it better than he wished he did, and still he had to stand in opposition to it when it got in the way of what he had to do.
    Wyatt reached inside his vest and removed a neatly creased piece of paper. “Artie Showalter hunted me down to hand this to me a little while ago. I thought you’d want to see it.”
    Rachel didn’t move. “If it’s for me, I should have seen it first, don’t you think? Mr. Showalter knows where I live.”
    “It came to my attention.”
    “Then why—”
    “Can we go inside, Miss Bailey? I think you’ll want to read this where you can be comfortable.”
    Rachel lifted her bucket. “I was going to get water when I heard you pounding. I came back, but I still have to get water. You can go with me if you like and read it to me on the way.”
    Wyatt allowed that it was the best he could do. They were far from ideal circumstances, but she couldn’t know that. He wasn’t certain how she would accept the news anyway. He’d imagined her fainting or being moved to hysterics, but seeing her now, holding that damn bucket so tightly he feared she meant to clobber him with it, he supposed he could have exaggerated her reaction. While he didn’t relish the idea of ducking the bucket and restraining her, it was preferable to applying smelling salts or sacrificing his freshly laundered handkerchief.
    Not putting it past Rachel not to wait for him, Wyatt ignored the front steps and strode to the side of the porch instead. He’d anticipated that she would be surprised when he vaulted the rail and landed softly beside her, but he had not anticipated that she would be so afraid that she’d use the bucket against him right then and there. He was barely able to sidestep her swing before she rounded on him. The weight of the bucket spun her, and he moved quickly to catch her, throwing out his arms and stopping her just before she came full circle. He released her as soon as he halted her momentum. The bucket still swung like a pendulum at the end of her arm. They both stared at it.
    “I think I’ll take that,” he said.
    She nodded slowly and stiffly opened her clenched fingers, releasing the rope handle. The bucket dropped into his hands.
    “Thank you,” he said, drawing it to his side. He lifted his chin in the direction of the spring. “Why don’t you show me where you get your water?”
    Rachel