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 run an undercover operation. He’d been forced to learn—fast—over a decade ago, but he’d taken to it like a duck to water.
It was a good thing Mitch Bolton, the sheriff in Silver Falls, knew how to keep a tight lid on the workings of the department. To Steel’s knowledge, no one had slipped and exposed him.
He wondered how much longer that could last. Wondered how long it would take to finish the job his father had started. Not just because he’d like to be the one out there dancing with Stella, but because he’d like to be a bigger part of everything his family did. His siblings needed his help with the ranch. The wedding he was watching was beautiful, but beneath the festive set dressing he knew Thorn Hill was barely holding together, like many ranches in Chance Creek.
Steel could see the strain in many of the celebrants’ faces. Everyone was trying to relax tonight, allowing themselves to enjoy the reception, but there was wear and fatigue behind each smile.
It had been a hard summer for everyone.
Steel ducked behind a tree as a couple wandered close to his hiding place—his sister Olivia and her husband, Noah Turner.
They spoke softly and laughed, and Steel smiled to hear them. He respected Noah, even if he had never been able to show it due to the feud that had until recently defined their families’ relationship. Noah was a parole officer who worked for the Chance Creek sheriff’s department, so Steel had been surprised when his sister, who’d had her own brushes with the law, had ended up with him.
But she seemed happy, and that was the important thing.
Olivia was working at the library now, putting away money so she could go to school, get her degree and one day take over as head librarian. Noah worked on both their families’ ranches, and his parole officer salary helped make ends meet.
Steel wondered how Noah felt about having a supposed criminal as his brother-in-law; since Noah worked for Chance Creek rather than Silver Falls, he wasn’t in the loop about Steel’s undercover activities, and as a parole officer, he probably wouldn’t have known even if they had worked in the same county, but as it was, Steel figured it had to bother the law-abiding man to think his brother-in-law was making bad choices.
But then Noah had managed to overlook Olivia’s past. Sometimes people surprised you.
Maybe Stella would overlook his past—if he could ever finish the job he was working on.
Just about everyone Steel knew would get a surprise then. If only it wasn’t taking so damn long.
The killer was a patient man. Thirteen years ago a spate of overdose deaths among young women on the fringes of Chance Creek society had alerted William Turner, Stella’s father, who had also been a sheriff’s deputy, that
