Page 42 of The Cowboy Comes Home

He’d heard it too, the sound of a scuffle off to the left. It took him only a moment to spot the two teenagers rolling around in the dirt, throwing punches and kicks. And in that brief moment Emily and Lobo were already moving. Not away from the fight, but toward it.

He was suddenly frozen in place. This was how it happened. This was how cops got hurt, or worse. Because it was their job to head into the danger, not away from it. And a few minutes later, when she and Lobo had skillfully separated the two and calmed the situation, he felt just as frozen. Because it easily could have gone the other way. And often did.

Something he knew better than most.

Chapter Twenty

Rodeo week wasdefinitely lingering, Emily thought as she walked past the bakery, resisting the urge to go in and get one of whatever it was that was putting out that luscious aroma. Now, on Friday, a lot of the crowd that had come for just the rodeo had departed, especially those from the more distant places. But others stayed to party, which was what made the days after so…interesting. For Last Stand PD, anyway. She, for one, was not going to miss these twelve-hour shifts.

She felt regret that because of the crowd and the work it entailed, she hadn’t been able to track Tucker down after she’d finished dealing with that fight, which had effectively ruined their plans to meet up later. And when she’d gone back over to him right after, to explain she’d have to postpone while she dealt with it—that knife she’d found in one kid’s hand had complicated things—he’d been oddly quiet, only nodding.

And it wasn’t until late that night, when she’d been trying futilely to sleep, that she had realized it was because she’d reached a conclusion. She wanted to see where this might go, if she gave it a chance. She’d sworn she wasn’t going to let Andrew ruin her life, but she had been, if she went by her reluctance to even consider another man. It hadn’t really been a problem until now, because there hadn’t been a man since who caused such a response.

Be honest. There hasn’t been a man ever who made you react that way.

She snapped out of the reverie she seemed prone to falling into lately. She had business to attend to, and she needed to pay attention.

It picked up in the evening, and by ten o’clock she and Lobo had broken up two two-man fights, one two-woman fight—which had been, in her opinion, nastier—and were now dealing with a full-on brawl when Slater Highwater had called for help ousting a party of falling-down drunks who had tried to crash the already crowded Last Stand Saloon.

It was the first time she had been to the saloon since That Night. She grimaced even as she thought it, for how it took over her mind as if it were in neon and capitalized. Fortunately she was too busy to dwell on it. And praising Lobo for his apparently instinctive herding abilities. It was amazing how even drunks paid attention when they heard that low, menacing growl and saw the fangs on the big, black dog.

“They call them shepherds for a reason,” Slater had said, smiling at the dog.

By the time she finished the booking paperwork, and escorting the now chastened half-dozen out-of-towners to the drunk tank, she was almost into the last hour of her shift. In the hallway outside the booking room she stretched, loosening up muscles that had been tense while dealing with the drunks, in case one of them took a notion to resist.

“Come on, boy,” she said to Lobo. “We’ve got time for one more cruise up and down Main Street.” She said it hoping everyone was behaving at this point.

“I’ve got a better idea.”

She spun around to see the chief coming out of his office, where the door had apparently been open enough for him to hear her. That was yet another thing she admired about the man; he never asked his people to do more than he himself would do. He’d worked as long and hard as any of them this week.

“Okay. What, sir?” she asked, wondering if he’d gotten some call or special request.

He gave her a crooked smile. “Go home.”

She blinked. “I’ve got another hour and ten.”

“No, you don’t. Go home,” he repeated, still smiling. “Oh, and before I forget, I have a message for you from Nic Baylor and Jeremy Thorpe. Your presence—you and Lobo—is required at their place on Sunday for the survival party Jackson is hosting.”

“Survival party?” she said, unable to stop a laugh from coming out with the words.

“Yep. The whole department’s invited, and we’re working out a schedule so everybody can at least stop by, but you were specifically invited by the hostess and her soon-to-be son. And you definitely have to bring him,” he finished with a nod at Lobo.

Well, that made it impossible to turn down. Doing both foot patrols all week had earned her the day off Sunday, so she could go. And who would turn down a chance to go to a party hosted bytheJackson Thorpe?

Someone who overreacts to his best friend?

She spent some time that night chewing on that. Wondering why she felt such trepidation about that reaction she had to him. What was she afraid of? Why did she feel the urge to dodge him? She’d never done that before.

Even after Andrew had broken their engagement two weeks before the wedding, she’d buried her hurt, refusing to let him think he and what he’d done had damaged her. And eventually she’d come to see that her at the time protective words, that she’d had a narrow escape, were in fact the truth. Because she later learned the woman he’d left her for had divorced him and taken just about everything he had. It should have been a sweet payback. Problem was, by then she didn’t care.

Lord, she hadn’t thought about Andrew this much in years. And he had nothing to do with now. And so she found herself on Sunday afternoon atThorpe’s Therapy Horses, ironically a bit disappointed that there were so many people there she really could hide from Tucker. If she wanted to.

I don’t hide.

Then, when she saw Jeremy and Maverick running toward her—or probably more accurately Lobo—she blew up her own thought with laughter at the idea of hiding with Lobo at her side.

The boy was so excited he could barely finish a sentence. “You gotta see the horses—say hello to Pie—I wanna show you where Mav likes to play, maybe Lobo’ll like it too—and I gotta tell Nic you’re here so she can say hi—Dad wants that too—”

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