Or maybe it was realizing Stella Turner was falling for someone else.
Steel looked over the celebration in front of him. Trees had been festooned with fairy lights. A local band played popular dance tunes. Despite the intense heat that had plagued Chance Creek all summer, it was a perfect night—
For everyone but him.
His chest tightened as Stella danced in the arms of another man. Her dark hair had been caught up in a loose bun for the occasion, tendrils coming free and curling in the heat. He wasn’t close enough to see her hazel eyes, but he had them memorized, like the sweet shape of her face and her tantalizing figure. If his life hadn’t become so damn complicated thirteen years ago, maybe he’d be the one dancing with her. Holding her close. Taking her home.
Getting married—
Steel squashed that thought—hard. He wouldn’t be marrying anyone anytime soon. Certainly not Stella, who worked at the Chance Creek county sheriff’s department fielding calls. She was smart as a whip, cool under pressure, and damned pretty to boot. Much too good for the likes of him—at least the way he was living his life now.
But a man could dream, and he’d been dreaming about Stella since the day he’d come back to town and caught sight of her walking down main street, the girl next door all grown up.
Completely out of his reach.
Since then he’d done his best to stay out of her way, but that was impossible in a small town, especially since her family’s ranch lay across one small creek from his. He saw Stella all the time.
Craved seeing her. Wanted to do a hell of a lot more.
So far he’d managed to keep himself in check, but if he had to watch her in Eric Holden’s arms much longer, he was going to lose control.
It had taken him nearly an hour to creep close enough to the festivities tonight to be able to see them clearly without being seen himself, and he’d only managed it because the hot summer days had convinced Tory and Liam to situate the party among a grove of shade trees on his family’s property. Once the sun set, he’d slipped from tree to tree from the deeper arm of forest that bounded their pastures.
If he was caught, he’d have the excuse of wanting to congratulate his sister, but it would be for the best for all concerned if he wasn’t. Everyone, including his own family, thought he’d returned to Chance Creek to help his siblings on their ranch. Thirteen years ago, when their father’s checkered past had caught up to him and Dale had landed in jail, their mother, Enid, had moved the rest of his siblings to Idaho. Steel, already eighteen, had lingered in Chance Creek just long enough to clean up Dale’s mess, then had headed even farther west, to Washington. They’d all assumed the ranch had been sold as part of their parents’ divorce settlement and hadn’t expected to ever get the chance to come home, so when Dale died three years ago, and Steel, Lance, Tory and Olivia found themselves named as owners of Thorn Hill, their surprise was absolute.
Lance and Olivia had jumped at the opportunity to go home. Tory had held off for several years but had joined them recently. Steel wouldn’t have come at all if it weren’t for the killer.
He wasn’t sure if he’d come at all if he’d known how hard it would be to live in the same town as Stella, so close and yet inexorably out of reach of her.
He’d been able to create a new life for himself in Washington, one in which the people who mattered knew who he was and why he did what he did. He’d had a tight group of friends who’d had his back—something he didn’t entirely appreciate until he gave it all up to come home.
Still, it would all be worth it if he could just finish this job and put his undercover days behind him—make the kind of life that would give him a chance with a woman like Stella. Until then he needed to keep his distance from his family. He’d made a mistake thinking he could live with them and still penetrate the seamy underside of the area. He found it ironic that all the good people of Chance Creek assumed from the start he was a criminal like his father was, while the criminals who populated Silver Falls viewed him with too much suspicion for him to make any real progress tracking down the killer.
On a night like this one, that irony got under his skin and made him wish he’d never taken the job in the first place.
He’d taken too long, and now he was losing Stella to another man.
Steel chanced another look and bit back a curse when he took in the way Eric had pulled her in tight against him. Steel knew Eric—or knew of him. He was a sheriff’s deputy here in Chance Creek county, a powerful, stocky man, fifteen years older than Stella, his dark hair going gray at the temples. He’d been a mainstay at the department for as long as Steel could remember.
Steel kept track of all the law enforcement officers from Billings to Bozeman. Not because he was a criminal, like he’d been trying to make everyone think—but because he was a deputy, too—in Silver Falls, a scruffy hill town a short distance down the highway in the next county over. Silver Falls was a little smaller—and a little wilder—than Chance Creek. He’d expected to fit in there just fine.
He took some small pride in the fact that no one attending this wedding knew what he did for a living. You could say a lot about him—and people did—but he knew how to
